Less Power to You

By surrendering some control, philanthropists can do even more good

by Meg Massey and Ben Wrobel

When the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves launched in 2010, it attracted the attention of deep-pocketed donors due to its audacious, headline-grabbing goal of distributing 100 million clean-burning cookstoves to underprivileged households and rural villages around the globe. The New Yorker called the movement to design such appliances "the quest for a stove that can save the world."

But after 8 years and $75 million, it had become apparent that the alliance had fallen well short of its goals. It had built and distributed the stoves on schedule, but there was an unexpected hitch: People didn't want to use them. One woman told a journalist that the "clean" stove simply didn't cook food as she wanted it to; another thought it cooked too slowly.

This is an all-too-common story in philanthropy. An ambitious, well-meaning plan has one fatal flaw: The people at the center of the problem were not sufficiently consulted. However, a growing number of philanthropists are starting to do things differently, using a model called participatory grantmaking.

Participatory grantmaking is the process of shifting decision-making power over grantmaking to the very communities most affected by the grants. It's a structural fix to the broken power dynamics in traditional funding — a way to change philanthropy from closed, opaque, and expert-driven to open, transparent, and community-driven.

Putting participation into practice

The key element behind any participatory grantmaking process is that the funder gives a voice to people who don't usually get a say in the decision. Any grantmaking process, at its most basic, has three broad decision points: creating an overarching theory of change, building a pipeline of ideas, and deciding which of those ideas should get funded. Participatory grantmaking boils down to a series of choices that funders can make at each of those decision points to systematically incorporate community voices.

Creating an overarching theory of change, whether for a single grantmaking program or an entire institution, must start with the needs of the community. Rotary's needs assessment tools include many best practices for empowering communities to define their priorities. Clear communication about how a person's or group's involvement will meaningfully affect the assessment is essential to building the trust required for any participatory practice to be successful.

Brooklyn Community Foundation offers another example. Representatives literally went door-to-door in every neighborhood in the New York City borough, asking residents what they wanted the fund to focus on. Then, they presented what they heard at a series of events and invited debate and discussion, ultimately leading to a vote by community members.

The next decision point: building a pipeline of ideas. Grant funding disproportionately goes to nonprofits with the staff and resources to woo potential funders, while criteria often reflect the institution instead of the community. We've seen funders successfully shift power to communities at this stage by inviting community members to develop the criteria used to determine grant funding and deputizing community members to source applications from smaller or newer organizations.

FRIDA: The Young Feminist Fund, which supports feminist activism by young people in the Global South, keeps its pipeline fresh by connecting the activists in their region who apply. Applicants are invited to vote on the other applications, generating insights that allow FRIDA to more intentionally source future grant applications. In other words, its process honors the expertise that other grantees have on their own community.

Inviting community members to decide which ideas should get funded is considered by some to be the "purest" form of participatory grantmaking. Community members can take part in the entire process, up to and including the final vote, or some of its components, such as the application review process to generate a recommended final slate.

The Disability Rights Fund (DRF)is one useful example. Like Rotary, its community is diverse. DRF operates in 38 countries and "disability" can refer to hundreds of different challenges. And that's before we get into the intersecting identities of race/ethnicity, class, gender, religion, and more.

To ensure representation, half of DRF's grantmaking committee is made up of disability rights activists who serve fixed terms before rotating out. The remaining 50 percent are funders and DRF staff. To select the activists, DRF partners with an international membership organization for disability rights groups. DRF is quick to acknowledge that it's an iterative process; the organization is constantly tweaking things to maximize participation from its members. But with participation, the process is the point.

What would it take to reach the point where 10 percent of philanthropic dollars are allocated by activists, nonprofit leaders, and community members, rather than philanthropy professionals?

It starts with making an effort to "let go." Above all, it requires a deep dose of humility — an acknowledgment by the funder that it does not have all the answers.

Find Rotary’s community assessment tools.

• This story originally appeared in the April 2022 issue of Rotary magazine.