A Deeper Inquiry #16: Journeying Through Participatory Grantmaking A Deeper Inquiry

Increasing participation has become a mainstay of philanthropic discourse in the past years. At the Guerrilla Foundation, our journey towards participatory grantmaking (PGM) is part of a broader effort to shift power dynamics within the organisation. But how participatory is our current grantmaking approach? And what can meaningful participation actually look like when you are funding across Europe with an intersectional lens over a large range of issues?

In this Deeper Inquiry session we hear from the Guerrilla team about how we’ve implemented and evolved our participatory grantmaking strategy. We’ll be sharing the changes & challenges we’ve been through when implementing PGM, based on the evaluation we conducted in 2024 after a two-year trial period using this model. We’ll be diving into into our lived experience of power-sharing, the structural shifts we made to decentralize governance, and how we’re navigating team culture and collective upskilling for grant decision-making.

Exchanging insights, ideas and failures so that we can cross-pollinate learnings and push participatory grantmaking as the default modus operandi in philanthropy.

Resources

Why Participation in Philanthropy Matters: https://guerrillafoundation.org/why-participation-matters/

How Participatory is our Grantmaking: https://guerrillafoundation.org/how-participatory-is-our-grantmaking/

What Does Real Redistribution Really Mean? https://guerrillafoundation.org/what-does-real-redistribution-really-mean/