Shifting power and increasing participation of those impacted has become a mainstay of philanthropic discourse in the past years. Standing on the shoulders of inspiring trailblazers like Red Umbrella Fund, Disability Rights Fund, or Frida Fund, the Guerrilla Foundation provided funding and assistance for the set-up of FundAction and has been an active advocate for participatory grantmaking ever since. Through Leap Collective and Collective Abundance, we are further pushing radical philanthropic experiments. But internally, how are we walking the talk?
At Guerrilla Foundation, our journey towards participatory grantmaking 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 the spirit of ‘going with the flaw’ and open learning (shoutout to our friends at Systemic Justice and their great organisational culture case study) we want to contribute to the PGM conversation by sharing a couple of reflections.
Why did we embark on this journey?
Our journey into participatory grantmaking began with a desire to decouple wealth from decision-making power as a basis for inviting more funders into the foundation to grow our budget (more on that here and here). Traditionally, funders who contribute to pooled funds often hold significant influence over where that money goes, typically by sitting on boards or directly making grants. We wanted to challenge this model, aiming instead to be more accountable to the European grassroots activists we seek to support. This is how our move to participatory grantmaking is embedded in a wider and ongoing effort to overhaul our governance, making it more horizontal and accountable.
On top of that we hoped that introducing more participation in our grantmaking specifically would help us to:
- increase our accountability to the ecosystem of European grassroots activists that we are supporting with our funding,
- Reach into untapped issues and geographies, and
- Make better grant decisions through more regional and issue knowledge and a better understanding of activist realities.
Our current grantmaking model
Over two thirds of our grantmaking budget are spent on Action grants which are decided by our 12-people Activist Council (AC). Individuals who join our council are deeply involved in European grassroots activism and have a broad regional and issue experience. Many of them have received Guerrilla funding and all of them are members of groups and organisations that would be eligible to apply with us.
In the most authentic form of participatory grantmaking (PGM), decisions are made by those directly affected by the outcomes – often within a specific community, defined by geography or issue. There are different models: from some representation on decision boards to full community boards (e.g. Frida Fund), closed (e.g. FundAction) or open collectives distributing funding in their defined communities, or rolling decision-making where previous grantees decide about the next generation.
If you are a PGM expert, you might ask yourself whether our decision-making really actually should be called participatory grantmaking at all. Having twelve activists take decisions about applications from groups with a range of intersecting angles to approach systems change (e.g. climate, migrant, and environmental justice, LGBTQI+, right to housing and the city, anti-racism) hailing from all over Europe might feel far away from the pure approach above. Are these truly peers, or have we just delegated our decisions to a new kind of board? Moreover, is a 2-3 year tenure on the AC an obstacle to their accountability to the ecosystem because of a too deep embeddedness into our organisation?
If you are coming from a more traditional philanthropy background, where it is usually boards of family members or philanthropy professionals with unlimited tenure who make grant decisions, our approach to grantmaking might already sound impressive. Participation is a continuum and should not be an end goal in itself hampering the achievement of other strategic goals. For us it is one element and a crucial step towards becoming more integrated inwith the ecosystem we’re supporting.
Participation in the context of other strategic considerations
When we designed the first iteration of our new grantmaking model we wanted to stay true to our funding strategy: we want to contribute to intersectional movement building and refuse to restrict our applicant base through offering grants in identity or issue silos. We also hope to contribute to translocal movement building and activist networks by funding and connecting collectives doing related work across Europe. We want to react to short term funding needs with small, flexible grants, be approachable and offer all grants on a rolling basis.
We decided to set up our first Activist Council as a ‘community board’ of people who as best as possible represented the issues, geographies and identities of the European grassroots activist ecosystem we want to resource. We were aware that these people would not be real ‘peers’ in the participatory grantmaking sense for many of our applicants because they were not affected themselves by the impact of the grantmaking decisions and would sometimes lack issue and/or regional experience. “It is very possible that a right to the city activist from Serbia is involved in reviewing a French climate justice group’s application” as our evaluator Rose Longhurst pointed out during the recent evaluation of our grantmaking program.
We believe that there is a big benefit to having removed people with wealth from grant decision-making positions and having a group of ‘European grassroots activist peers’ as decision-makers. Sure, we took the definition of ‘peers’ relatively widely but given the breadth of our topical and geographical reach and our goal to offer rolling applications, it is currently hard to create a decision-making board that would be closer to our applicants than our Activist Council. Our AC consists of activist peers who are working on systemic change from the grassroots, who understand activist realities, can see the potential in the past achievements and formulated strategy of another group, and who have big networks and experience across Europe to lean on when considering an application. This allows them to contextualise and evaluate applications in a way that is very hard for non-activists. In many cases, we also have at least one reviewer who has lived experience with their issue and/or the same geography as the applicant. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start and a conclusion that fellow grantmakers with similar models (e.g. Global Greengrants Fund) also have reached.
Another aspect that is often hard to achieve with more community based decision-making models, and especially with having co-applicants reviewing each others’ applications, is fair compensation. These community based models expect applicants to spend considerable time and effort on reviewing applications. We departed from the idea that our participatory grantmaking model should fairly compensate for such efforts, paying for every hour spent on our processes. We see our AC compensation as a way to provide some financial breathing space for European activists, who usually operate on a shoestring personal budget. Regularly compensating larger numbers of people is an administrative effort that quickly can become a burden for a small organisation such as ours. We can only take bites we can actually swallow as we are thinking about how to expand participation with fair compensation in place.
What do grantees think?
From our evaluation we learned that our grantees do see a benefit of having people with actual activist experience review their applications because they understand the context on the ground. But grantees also repeatedly pointed to the importance of a transparent and clear process in terms of communication and application of selection criteria as well as swift communication with good feedback.
I feel like a lot of foundations are actually not able to understand strategic decisions, because they are not involved enough in the context. So I like the idea of having activists checking them too. At the same time, I wouldn’t like to take too much time away from them. Most important to me is, that the process is fair, the criteria that leads to decisions is transparent and that the people who review understand the context” – [GF grantee]
“We very much like that it is activists being involved in the decision making process. They know the conditions on the ground and it feels more fair and real to be reviewed by people who have experience in activism” – [GF grantee]
Adding the Activist Council on top of a team that already has a good understanding of activist realities definitely helped us be more attuned to the ecosystem we are trying to serve. The ability to rotate into the collective decision-making more and more diverse individuals with relevant experience than we have on staff was also recognised.
Other benefits
We also learned from the evaluation that being on our Activist Council supports council members in more ways than just the financial benefits. Some AC members reported that they were able to expand their networks and horizon in terms of understanding different contexts and approaches to social change, and that this has influences in their own work. They also become advocates for participatory methods in philanthropy and are already able to share their expertise in other initiatives (e.g. by bringing their experience to the table as they join other foundations’ decision-making bodies or being invited into strategic consultations for new ways of funding in their home country).
Going forward
It should have become clear that we are very aware that the Guerrilla grantmaking process is not bringing participation to perfection. Our current model represents a relevant first step and the best possible solution for our funding strategy and budget size. With a bigger budget we could also begin experimenting with adding issue and/or regionally focused open calls to select grantees via peer evaluation. This would help us to better resource specific ecosystems in a participatory manner while still remaining open to applications from groups with more issue and regional diversity into a parallel rolling application process and using an improved version of our current grantmaking model.
If you are interested in a deep-dive into how we will update our grantmaking process following the evaluation, we will publish a separate post on that soon.
We also acknowledge that we might have put too much onto a relatively small council of activists by involving them in the Action grant decision-making as well as having them participate in our wider effort towards creating more participation in our governance. Going ahead, we could imagine splitting these roles or designing two levels of activist involvement in the Guerrilla Foundation’s operations: First, a large pool of vetted current and past grantees who are entirely focused on grantmaking and who self-assign to review applications based on their regional and issue expertise, thus resulting in more meaningful levels of participatory grantmaking. Second, a smaller circle of activists with a longer tenure who are more deeply involved in our governance, help us shape our strategy and hold us accountable to the ecosystem we intend to serve.
We will soon follow up with a post on how we are trying to achieve more participation outside of the grantmaking field and how we work with our Activist Council, Funders Circle, and team in our new sociocratic governance structure. If you are interested in the thoughts of our evaluator about what our current effort means in the wider philanthropic context, you can find her blog post here. Stay tuned for more and let us know what you think at romy[at]guerrillafoundation.org.
