Summary
Candid Learning for Funders—formerly known as GrantCraft—is a Candid initiative that blends funders’ practical experience with expert insights to strengthen philanthropic practice. One of its resources is Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resources Through Participatory Grantmaking, which explores how participatory approaches can transform funding decisions and impacts.
This Guide examines participatory grantmaking – an approach that involves the communities being served in decisions about funding. It explains why participatory grantmaking matters, how it operates in practice, and which values and structures sustain its success.
Policy & Practice Implications
- The guide can support a shift among grant funders towards valuing lived experience as expertise and ceding decision making authority to those most affected by funding decisions.
- Funders can adopt participatory grantmaking by learning from real-world examples, adapting practices to address challenges, and embedding participation internally.
- By using this guide, community organizations can involve peers in grant decisions and demonstrate how community-led input enhances program relevance and effectiveness.
- Funders can draw on the “Evaluation” and “Walking the Talk” sections to craft funding guidelines that reward transparency and community leadership, recognizing that the participatory process itself is an outcome.
Image source: https://www.issuelab.org/resources/32988/32988.pdf
