What is Participatory Grantmaking and Why It Matters
Participatory grantmaking represents a fundamental shift in how foundations distribute resources. Rather than relying exclusively on foundation staff and boards to decide which organizations receive funding, participatory models bring community members—particularly those with lived experience of the issues being addressed—directly into the decision-making process.
At its core, participatory grantmaking asks a simple but powerful question: Who should decide how money is spent on community problems? Traditional grantmaking assumes foundation professionals possess the expertise to make these decisions. Participatory approaches challenge this assumption, recognizing that communities themselves often hold crucial knowledge about what works, what's needed, and what's missing.
The significance of this shift cannot be overstated. When community members participate in grantmaking decisions, several things happen simultaneously: grant decisions become more responsive to actual community needs; organizations serving those communities feel validated and invested in the process; and foundations gain credibility and trust within the communities they serve.
The Evolution of Democratic Grantmaking
The participatory grantmaking movement didn't emerge in a vacuum. It developed alongside broader conversations about foundation accountability, equity, and the recognition that traditional philanthropy often perpetuates the very power imbalances it claims to address. When wealthy donors unilaterally decide how to solve problems they don't directly experience, something is lost—both in terms of decision quality and in terms of democratic values.
Over the past several decades, pioneering foundations recognized this limitation and began experimenting with new models. They discovered that when you genuinely invite community voice into grantmaking, you don't just improve decisions—you transform the relationship between foundations and the communities they serve. Trust deepens. Ownership increases. Sustainability improves.
Today, participatory grantmaking is no longer experimental. It's increasingly recognized as a best practice, with networks like Participatory Grantmakers bringing together foundations committed to these approaches.
The Haymarket People's Fund: 50+ Years of Community Power
Few organizations exemplify the power of participatory grantmaking more completely than the Haymarket People's Fund, based in Boston. Founded in 1974, Haymarket has spent over five decades proving that community members can effectively and thoughtfully allocate philanthropic resources.
Haymarket operates as a donor-organized fund where members—many of whom are activists and community members—directly control grantmaking. Their model has distributed millions to grassroots organizing groups, with community members on every decision-making committee.
How Their Model Works
- Governance: Community activists serve on the board and all major committees
- Grant Review: Community members participate in every step of grant evaluation and decision-making
- Funding Philosophy: Prioritizes grassroots power-building, community organizing, and social movements
- Transparency: All funding decisions and rationales are shared publicly
- Capacity Building: Provides technical assistance to help grassroots groups improve proposals and operations
Outcome Impact: Over 50 years, Haymarket has funded thousands of organizations while maintaining high member satisfaction and demonstrating that community-controlled grantmaking produces grants that create lasting social change.
What makes Haymarket's model particularly instructive is its longevity and scale. They've proven that participatory approaches aren't limited to small experimental initiatives—they can work at meaningful scale across decades. Their experience shows that:
- Community members consistently make thoughtful, strategic funding decisions when given the right information and process
- Participatory grantmaking attracts engaged donors and members who feel ownership of the mission
- Organizations funded through participatory processes report stronger relationships and more effective support
- The model can include both donor and community decision-making, creating multiple entry points for participation
Degrees of Participation: From Advisory to Full Authority
Participatory grantmaking exists on a spectrum. Not every foundation needs to embrace full community control to benefit from participatory approaches. Understanding the degrees of participation helps foundation leaders determine what fits their context, capacity, and commitment.
Level 1: Advisory Participation
Advisory participation is the gentlest entry point. A foundation might convene community members to share their perspectives on issues, challenges, and potential solutions. This input informs foundation strategy and grantmaking priorities, but ultimate decision-making authority remains with foundation staff and board.
Example: A health foundation hosts quarterly listening sessions with residents in underserved neighborhoods to learn about health priorities. This community input directly shapes the foundation's next strategic plan.
Advantages: Low operational complexity, manageable time commitment, builds relationships and trust
Limitations: No guarantee community input is actually incorporated; can feel tokenistic to participants
Level 2: Consultative Participation
In consultative models, community members aren't just providing input—they're actively involved in analyzing issues and developing recommendations. However, foundation staff or boards retain final decision-making authority and can overrule community recommendations.
Example: A community development foundation creates a grantmaking committee with equal representation from foundation staff, community leaders, and nonprofit executives. This committee reviews all grant applications, discusses merits, and makes recommendations—but the foundation board votes on final approval.
Advantages: Deeper community engagement than advisory; community members see their recommendations shape outcomes; foundation retains oversight capability
Limitations: Still leaves community with secondary power; potential for staff/board to override community preferences
Level 3: Collaborative Participation
Collaborative models create genuine co-decision-making authority. Community members and foundation representatives jointly make decisions about grants, with each group's input weighted equally. There are established processes for resolving disagreement, but neither party can unilaterally override the other.
Example: An environmental justice foundation establishes a five-person grantmaking council: two community representatives from impacted neighborhoods, two foundation trustees, and one community leader respected by both constituencies. All five must agree (or achieve consensus) on grants above a certain size.
Advantages: Genuinely shared power; decisions reflect both professional expertise and community knowledge; demonstrates real commitment to community voice
Limitations: More complex governance; potential for deadlock; requires strong process design
Level 4: Delegated Participation
In delegated models, a foundation grants actual decision-making authority to a community-led group, with oversight mechanisms to ensure accountability. The foundation retains ultimate authority but exercises it lightly, primarily to ensure legal/fiduciary compliance.
Example: A community foundation creates a neighborhood giving circle where residents decide how $500,000 annually is distributed to local causes. The foundation provides administrative support, ensures grant recipients meet legal requirements, and can only override a grant decision in extreme circumstances.
Advantages: Community experiences real power and ownership; foundation staff can focus on capacity support rather than gatekeeping; often produces most energized participation
Limitations: Requires significant trust and infrastructure; foundation retains reputational risk; community may need substantial capacity support initially
Level 5: Community-Led Participation
At the far end of the spectrum, community members hold full decision-making authority with no foundation veto. This is the Haymarket model—the foundation serves the community's vision, not vice versa.
Example: A donor-organized fund where community members and activists serve on the board and all committees, make all funding decisions, and determine strategic direction
Advantages: Maximum community empowerment and ownership; decisions deeply rooted in community knowledge and priorities; strongest demonstration of commitment to equity
Limitations: Significant governance restructuring required; foundation staff must adapt to advisory role; largest shift in power dynamics
Designing a Participatory Grantmaking Process
Choosing your level of participation is important, but execution is everything. A poorly designed participatory process can create frustration, tokenism, and wasted effort. Here's how to design a grantmaking process that genuinely centers community voice.
Step 1: Define Participation Scope and Authority
Be explicit about what community members are actually deciding. Are they advising on strategy? Selecting grant recipients? Setting funding priorities? Determining the foundation's mission? The more specific and concrete, the better. Vague participation invitations feel like tokenism.
Equally important: Be clear about the constraints and non-negotiables. If community members cannot recommend funding in specific policy areas due to the foundation's donor restrictions, say so upfront. If there are budget limits they must work within, specify them clearly.
Step 2: Recruit Strategically for Representation
Participatory grantmaking should bring in people with actual lived experience of the issues being addressed—not just "community leaders" or nonprofit professionals (who often form an insular circle). This means actively recruiting from populations most affected by the issues.
It also means recruiting people who would never join a board or formal committee. Pay honorariums. Provide childcare and meals. Offer multiple participation formats (in-person, virtual, asynchronous). Remove barriers that make participation accessible only to those with flexible schedules and disposable time.
Step 3: Build Capacity and Process Support
Community members reviewing grant applications may encounter jargon, complex financial documents, and unfamiliar evaluation frameworks. Successful participatory processes provide substantial capacity support: training on evaluation criteria, sample grant applications to practice with, opportunities to ask questions, and clear explanations of processes and jargon.
Think of this as removing barriers to informed participation. The goal isn't to make community members think like foundation professionals—it's to provide enough information that their community knowledge can be effectively brought to bear on grantmaking decisions.
Step 4: Design Deliberation Processes That Honor Different Perspectives
How groups make decisions matters enormously. Don't just ask people to vote on grant applications in a vacuum. Create space for discussion, storytelling, and relationship-building. Ask people why they're excited or concerned about particular grant applicants. Listen to who speaks up and who doesn't—and create processes that help quieter voices emerge.
Some communities benefit from structured deliberation protocols. Others prefer more conversational approaches. There's no one-size-fits-all process. Test different formats and iterate based on feedback from participants.
Step 5: Integrate Feedback Loops and Learning
Participatory grantmaking isn't a one-time process. Build in feedback from community participants about how the process itself is working. Is it honoring community knowledge? Are people feeling heard? Are decisions actually reflecting what was discussed? Use this feedback to continuously improve the process.
Also close the loop with grantee organizations. Have community members participate in grantee check-ins and learning. Show how their decisions are playing out in the field. This deepens learning and builds the case that participation matters.
Addressing Board and Staff Concerns
If you're proposing participatory grantmaking to your board and staff, expect questions and concerns. These are legitimate—not obstacles to overcome but important considerations to address thoughtfully.
This assumes that foundation professionals necessarily make more informed decisions. In reality, both community members and foundation staff have knowledge gaps. The difference is that community members bring lived expertise about actual impacts and needs—knowledge foundation professionals often lack. Participatory processes with good capacity support and deliberation frameworks produce thoughtful decisions equal to (or better than) foundation-only processes.
Invest in helping community participants understand your grantmaking criteria, review financial documents, ask clarifying questions of applicants, and deliberate thoughtfully. Strong processes produce strong decisions.
This concern assumes that foundation staff don't also have biases, relationships, and friends applying for grants. Everyone brings relationships into decision-making. The advantage of participatory processes is transparency—decisions are made collectively and discussed openly, making bias easier to identify and address than when one or two people make decisions behind closed doors.
Have community grantmakers identify and disclose potential conflicts of interest. Use deliberation processes where decisions are discussed openly and rationales are documented. This transparency actually reduces bias—much more than foundation staff decisions made behind closed doors.
If your foundation has specific donor restrictions (funding only medical research, only in specific geographies), those constraints shape any participatory process. But that's true of non-participatory processes too. What matters is being transparent about constraints upfront so community members understand what they're actually deciding about.
Explain donor intent clearly. Work with community members to maximize flexibility within constraints. Sometimes revisiting donor intent through a participatory lens reveals opportunities you hadn't considered. Transparency about constraints removes frustration down the road.
Yes, participatory processes require resources—staff time for coordination, participant stipends, meeting space and logistics, capacity building, etc. But traditional grantmaking also requires resources. The question isn't whether you can afford to do this—it's whether you're willing to reallocate resources from other functions to support participation.
Allocate 10-15% of operating budget for participatory grantmaking infrastructure: staff coordination, participant stipends, meeting costs, training, capacity building. Think of this as investment in decision quality and community relationships, not as cost.
Foundations retain fiduciary responsibility regardless of who participates in grantmaking. But boards can delegate decision-making authority to committees (including community-led committees) while retaining oversight. Working with legal counsel, establish clear governance structures, documentation of decision-making processes, and oversight mechanisms that satisfy fiduciary requirements while enabling meaningful community participation.
Work with legal counsel to clarify how participatory committees fit into your governance structure. Document decision-making authority, oversight mechanisms, and how conflicts are resolved. Good governance actually reduces liability, not increases it.
Navigating Power Dynamics and Barriers to Participation
Participatory grantmaking, for all its promise, operates within existing power structures. Designing genuinely inclusive processes requires acknowledging and actively addressing the barriers that keep some people from participating.
Key Power Dynamics to Address
Foundation staff have legitimacy; nonprofit leaders have institutional platforms; community members often lack either, yet their knowledge is essential
Foundations control information flow. Without deliberate sharing, community participants can't make informed decisions
Who gets heard? Organizational credentials and foundation positions still carry more weight than lived experience
Concrete Strategies for Inclusive Participation
Pay for Time: Compensate community participants for meeting attendance, preparation, and decision-making work. This signals that their time is valued and removes the economic barrier that prevents low-income people from participating.
Provide Logistical Access: Meetings at times/locations accessible to working people. Childcare and meal provision. Virtual participation options. Accessible facilities. These aren't "nice to have"—they're prerequisites for genuine inclusion.
Flatten Information Hierarchy: Provide grant applications in plain language. Explain evaluation criteria in accessible terms. Offer one-on-one conversations with applicants so community members can ask questions directly. Remove the need to decode foundation jargon.
Create Deliberation Norms That Center Community Voice: Some people naturally speak more in meetings. Create structured time for everyone to contribute—round-robin sharing, written reflection, small group discussion. Make silence not mean disagreement. Explicitly invite quieter voices.
Address Conflict Respectfully: Disagreement is good—it means people feel safe enough to speak up. But conflict within participatory processes can make people uncomfortable, especially those from marginalized communities. Build explicit processes for addressing disagreement, including mediation if needed.
Build Relationships Beyond Grantmaking: Community members shouldn't only interact with the foundation during grant meetings. Host social events, learning sessions, and check-ins. These relationships build trust and help navigate different communication styles and perspectives.
Evidence on Outcomes and Impact
Participatory grantmaking sounds good in theory. What does the evidence actually show about how it affects grant outcomes, community relationships, and organizational impact?
What Research Shows About Decision Quality
Studies of participatory grantmaking processes find that community members consistently make funding decisions aligned with foundation strategy and impact goals—when those goals are clearly explained. Research from Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy shows that:
- Community-selected grantees report more engaged funder relationships and more useful feedback
- Organizations funded through participatory processes are more likely to address issues community members identified as priorities
- Grantees report that participatory selection processes forced them to more clearly articulate their theory of change and impact strategy
- Community members identify funding opportunities that foundation staff missed—particularly grassroots organizations not in traditional nonprofit networks
Impact on Community Relationships
Beyond grantmaking quality, participatory approaches shift foundation-community relationships:
- Trust Increases: Communities experience foundations as more responsive and accountable
- Legitimacy Grows: Foundations' claims about supporting community priorities become credible through actual community participation in decisions
- Knowledge Deepens: Foundations develop richer understanding of community landscape, assets, and barriers
- Network Strengthens: Community members who participate often become ambassadors for the foundation and connect it to new constituencies
Challenges and Realistic Expectations
Evidence also shows real challenges in implementing participatory grantmaking:
- Participation is often lower than hoped, particularly among most marginalized community members, unless deliberate accessibility efforts are made
- Staff turnover can undermine participatory approaches if new staff aren't trained in participatory philosophy and practices
- Participatory processes take longer than traditional decision-making—this isn't inefficiency, it's the cost of genuine inclusion
- Tensions sometimes arise when community recommendations conflict with foundation strategy or donor intent
Implementation Roadmap for Your Foundation
Ready to move toward more participatory grantmaking? Here's a realistic roadmap for building participatory processes at your foundation.
Key Success Factors
Leadership Commitment: Participatory grantmaking requires genuine commitment from executive director and board chair. Without this, initiatives stall when they encounter resistance or complexity. Build the case for participation at leadership level first.
Adequate Resourcing: Budget for staff time, participant compensation, logistical costs, and learning/evaluation. Participatory grantmaking isn't cheaper than traditional approaches—it's an investment in decision quality and community relationships.
Long-Term Perspective: This work takes years, not quarters. Relationships take time to build. Trust deepens gradually. Expect 18-24 months before you see meaningful culture shift. Stay committed through the uncomfortable middle.
Transparency and Accountability: Be honest about constraints. Explain decisions. Share outcomes. If community recommendations don't get funded, explain why. This transparency maintains trust when you need to say no.
Humility About What You Don't Know: Foundation professionals don't have all the answers. Community members have essential knowledge about what works, what's needed, and what matters. Approach participation with genuine curiosity, not just as a checkbox.