Participatory grantmaking

Most grants are decided far from the work: a foundation’s staff read applications, score them, and pick the winners. Participatory grantmaking (PGM) hands those decisions to the communities the money is meant to serve. The activists who will live with the consequences — who know which local group is real and which is paperwork — are the ones who discuss and decide. The fund’s staff handle the plumbing: due diligence, moving the money, care.

How it works

The mechanics vary, but the shared core is a panel of community members and activists holding real decision-making power over a fund’s grants:

• Rawa, a Palestinian fund piloting since 2018, runs no open application round at all. Community activists across historic Palestine — Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, ‘48 — are organised in “clusters” that nominate grassroots initiatives they know first-hand, and a community committee discusses the nominations and decides. Funding is unconditional and reporting deliberately light, on the premise that the community knows best what it needs.
• The Dalan Fund, covering 16 countries across Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central and North Asia, puts decision power in a Resource Distribution Committee of fifteen regional activists — a rotational role, so nobody settles into gatekeeper status. The committee doesn’t just pick grantees; it co-designs the fund’s whole strategy.
• The Global Resilience Fund, a collaborative feminist fund for girls and young feminists in crisis, launched in 2020 by twenty founding partners at the height of COVID-19. Its activist advisory — global but regionally grounded — decides by consensus: over video calls when there’s time, over Signal chats when there isn’t. Applications run in whatever language activists already speak, from Ukrainian to Swahili, and outreach is tailored — groups are only invited to apply when there’s a realistic chance of funding, so activists’ time isn’t spent decorating a rejection.

What crisis does to it

PGM is built on time: time to talk, to visit, to reflect, to decide together. Crisis takes the time away. When the genocide in Gaza began, Rawa’s planned year of reflection and learning became an emergency — grant reports extended by a year, contact with Gazan partners reduced to phone calls, voice notes and text messages, vetting done through community trust rather than paperwork. As Rawa’s Yara Dowani puts it, you trust that money sent to Gaza is going to basics — water, food, hygiene — and you stay responsive.

Speed turns out to be a property of prepared trust, not of skipping participation. The Dalan Fund had intended a slow, careful start to grantmaking when Georgia’s 2024 foreign-agents-law crisis hit its home region; because its activist advisory already existed, applications were approved within 24 hours and money moved within two weeks. “We are not a rapid-response grant maker,” says Dalan’s Nino Ugrekhelidze, “but we happened to turn into one.”

Crisis also reshapes how money physically moves. Under rising authoritarianism, governments freeze bank accounts and windows for moving money close fast. The practitioners’ answers:

• Smaller money is safer money. Modest grants move under the radar, and if priorities shift or resources vanish, less is lost — and, as Dalan notes, moving smaller money can make bigger impact.
• Fiscal hosts are alternative infrastructure. An established organisation in a safer jurisdiction holds the legal entity and banking rails so a young fund can receive and move money at all. Dalan credits its fiscal host, the women’s fund Women Win, with making its two-week turnaround possible — and Dalan’s own due diligence then served as the reference for two further funders to move money to the same groups.
• Think in four phases, not one. Dalan frames crisis work as prevention, preparedness, response and recovery — movements are actors in all four, not just first responders.
• Not every funder has to do everything. Funds coordinate as an ecosystem, playing different roles at different stages. When MADRE is already funding in a context like Afghanistan, the Global Resilience Fund moves money to MADRE rather than duplicating it; when GRF funded in Libya and Turkey, MADRE moved money to it. Shared due diligence and honest role-splitting get the money where it needs to go with less burden on activists.

And the people are not separate from the crisis. Advisors and staff are often living through the same events they’re funding — fleeing, in exile, in deep response — so the work includes care: checking in by phone, holding space for grantee partners to connect, supporting documentation and storytelling so communities can archive what they’re living through and reclaim the narrative. Yara’s closing advice is the shortest: don’t forget your team.

The political point

Practitioners insist PGM is a redistribution of power, not a technique — and that it dies when it becomes one.

The test that keeps it political

If a fund’s “participation” is a fixed series of steps rather than a real handover of decision power, it has been depoliticised — and sometimes the honest participatory move in a crisis is to skip the process and just get the money out.

Two corollaries run through the practice. First, the community defines the crisis: there is no single correct definition, and the definition activists offer determines how the response — and its participatory component — is built. Second, philanthropy’s silos are its own problem: funding streams are carved up in ways movements on the ground are not, which is why flexible, cross-crisis pots (like GRF’s negotiated overhead that it reallocates between crises, including ones funders ignore) matter as much as any single mechanism.

Why it’s here

Citizen infrastructure runs on money, and who decides over money is a governance question. Participatory grantmaking is the philanthropic expression of the same claim this wiki tracks elsewhere — that the people affected should hold the pen: it is the funder-side cousin of democratising finance’s sortition mandates for public banks, of quadratic funding’s algorithmic sharing of decision power, and of the fiscal-host model inside funding the commons. Its crisis lessons echo movements, not arguments: what moves resources is organised trust built before the emergency. For the overlapping-crises backdrop, see the metacrisis; for a citizen-usable fiscal host, see fund collective work in the toolkit.

Sources

• Participatory Grantmaking During Polycrisis — Participatory Grantmaking Community webinar with Nino Ugrekhelidze (Dalan Fund), Yara Dowani (Rawa) and Ruby Johnson (Global Resilience Fund), moderated by Coco Jervis (Mama Cash), 2024: youtube.com/watch?v=8OS0knZwh28
• Dalan Fund — Our Story and How We Fund: dalan.fund
• Rawa: rawa.ps
• Global Resilience Fund — About: theglobalresiliencefund.org
• Women Win — Democratisation of Philanthropy (pooled funding, shared governance, fiscal hosting): womenwin.org
• Participatory Grantmaking Community: participatorygrantmaking.org