Master Participatory Grantmaking by Engaging the Right Voices

- [Ivonne] Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar, Master Participatory Grantmaking by Engaging the Right Voices. My name is Ivonne Simms Networking Engagement Manager for Candid based in Atlanta. And I'm joined by Eboney Carroll Network Engagement Assistant, also based in Atlanta. Will be supporting today's webinar behind the scenes as well as collecting questions you ask along the way, and posing them during the Q&A. For those of you joining us for the first time, we want to share with

you that we've joined forces with GuideStar to form a new single organization called Candid. Together, we have over 88 years of experience in the nonprofit sector. Every year, millions of nonprofits spend trillions of dollars around the world. Candid finds out where that money comes from, where it goes, and why it matters. We believe that an effective social sector is critical for a thriving society. And we believe in the importance of solutions for the sector by the sector. With candid nonprofi

ts, foundations, donors, and the public can all be on the same page. Through research collaboration and training, Candid connects people who want to change the world with the resources they need to do it. I would now like to turn the controls over to our speakers for today, who we're really excited to have join us. We have journalist Meg Massey, and Director of Communications at Village Capital, Ben Wrobel. And they'll tell you a little bit more about themselves. - Hi, everyone. Thank you so muc

h for joining us on this webinar today. As as Ivonne said, Well, I guess I should start by thanking the folks at Candid for having us here, we're really excited to talk about our book "Letting Go: How Philanthropists and Impact Investors Can Do More Good By Giving Up Control." For a little bit about me, I'm a journalist, I've been writing about impact investing for many years now. And I've also worked in a number of communications roles in that space, including doing my own consulting over the l

ast few years. And this, what brought me to this book was a desire to democratize the conversation about impact investing. And Ben can when I'll let Ben introduce themselves and talk a little bit more about how this idea originated. - And if you hear growling and barking, my dog just heard a vacuum outside the door, they weren't supposed to be back in the air right now. But you'll see the tail there. So Ben Wrobel, I work as Director of Communications at Village Capital. I think my career has ha

d a through line around the idea of of making sure people have a voice at the table. I worked early on at the NAACP, where I worked a lot on voting rights issues, criminal justice reform. And then I ended up working with Stacey Abrams' New Georgia Project back in 2014, around, democracy voting rights issues down there, and I joined village capital. It's an interesting organization, we're a global accelerator for social entrepreneurs. So we make investments not grants. But we have this model for

supporting startups, we let groups of entrepreneurs decide which of their peers should receive our funding. So we see decision making power to the entrepreneurs that we that we support, and we'll talk more about it, but I'm really excited. So Meg and I met at a conference, we write about it in the book, we were at a conference for Impact Investors in Amsterdam, and it was some of the wealthiest investors in the world talking about how they would solve the SDGs. And we realized that there were ve

ry few people from the communities that they were talking about in the room, it was mostly white, mostly male, mostly from the Global North. And to be fair, you know, people recognize that and the idea of the importance of lived experience came up a lot. But we realized that the way that both philanthropy and more and more impact investing work is very top down, based on , we can get into it, but the Gates Foundation models, created the 90s, very donor centric, and we sort of started to look int

o this world of participatory decision making and found a really cool history. We also found some really great best practices, which we'll get into, but maybe you can start with the history. - So as Ben said, we're going to kick things off and just give a short history of participatory grantmaking, which goes back to the 1970s. We're gonna define the term, participatory grantmaking and understand what it means in a practical sense. And then look at some examples and strategies for moving up the

ladder of participation, which is a euphemism that we'll explain later on. But to kick things off, we are going to start at an unexpected place, Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. It was here in the in the 1960s that a young man named George Pillsbury was a student and he was from the Pillsbury family of Pillsbury Doughboy fame and in fact, that ad campaign had just launched in 1964. So his family was even wealthier than they had been before. This is George Pillsbury with some amazing la

pels. As a student at Yale, George was a little uncomfortable with all of the wealth that his family that has came with being part of his family, they went back several generations, they had buildings named after them. And but that the idea that he would just sort of inherit that wealth and then decide, you know what to do with it, he was comfortable with that level of power. So there's even a famous story about how, as a Yale student, he went at the crack of dawn to the Black Panther headquarte

rs in New Haven, and left them a bag of money as an anonymous donation. He didn't, his whole approach what to philanthropy, which we'll get into, as a student in the 60s, he was obviously very motivated by the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movements, and was committed to that versus, the naming of building after after him after himself. But he also wanted to interrogate the power dynamics a little bit. So, after his graduation from Yale, George Pillsbury connected with a number of other Tr

ust Fund errs from some of the leading companies in the US at that time, who were in the same boat as him, they were young, they had made them part of activism on their respective college campuses, they were inheriting all this money and wanted to give it away, using a process that was different from the way that their parents had approached giving. And there were two pillars to their approach, which sort of forms the history of modern participatory grantmaking. This quote from George Pillsbury,

"our parents give to the symphony, we give to the symphony Tenants Organizing Project." speaks to what they funded, they wanted to fund social justice causes, they wanted to find activists who are agitating for change, which was a departure from philanthropy, which up until that point, had been mostly focused on funding institutions. The second pillar is what we'll be focusing on today which is participatory grantmaking. So they not only wanted to challenge the idea of what they should be givin

g to, but how they should be doing that giving, they didn't wanna have donors making all of the decisions. So in the 1970s, George founded the Haymarket People's Fund. It was headquartered in Boston, and it was a fund for four for change makers around New England and it was him turning over the money he was inheriting to be granted out. And this Haymarket was part of a network called the Funding Exchange, which included other funds in other US cities, including New York, Minneapolis, Los Angeles

, all over the country, by his peers who were also inheriting money from trusts. And they Haymarket people's funds still exist today, that they were at their kind of at their height, in the 70s, and 80s. So this is a little bit about how they were structured differently. And we're gonna talk more about the ladder of participation later on in the presentation. But there were eight committees made up of people from the different communities that they wanted to support. Who all gave recommendations

for grantees to Haymarket staff, who then made the grants. It was a bottom up model as opposed to a top down model, which made it very distinct. Here's a few of the other Funding Exchange members, again, many of these funds are still active today, although the Funding Exchange as a network hasn't been around since I believe the early 2000s, even though the funds have survived it. So I'm going to turn it over to Ben now to talk a little bit about about kind of where we're at how we got from this

bubble up of excitement about these new funds in the 70s to where we are today. - Thanks, Meg. And we'll finish up the story and then get into defining PGM so the Haymarket people's fund and these other Funding Exchange local funds, these were all neighborhood based at the at the most they were a city and they they did start to get a bit of attention and again, they had two pillars. Pillar one was about social justice philanthropy which was you know, pretty new at the time. Pillar two was about

participatory grantmaking that the house so the what and the how, and over the next really couple of decades, they started to George and some of his peers started to go out and argue with you know, or debate and make a case for their style of philanthropy, they would go on the Phil Donahue show, which is what you're seeing here with these incredible 70s and 80s fashion. They would write books about why they believed in doing things the way they would do. And the next slide. Yeah, they basically

said that they wanted to influence a larger, wealthier foundations. And so it's maybe worth looking at, so what happened? How did that how did that work out? And for 25 years really not much happened, these funds continue to thrive. They came out of peoples fund or the Liberty Hill Fund in Los Angeles are some of the you know, they have fun, they funded early work around LGBT rights and the AIDS epidemic, and, criminal justice reform things years before anyone else was. But as far as influencin

g larger foundations, it didn't really take on part of that is culture. Part of that is really the challenge of getting people together in a room to talk about how to make grants. And of course, what changed was the Internet. In the late 2000, to 2000s, a couple of different participatory grantmaking funds were created that took more of a national and global approach. So the Case Foundation founded by AOL, founder Steven Jean Case, they created a participatory project called Make It Your Own whe

re people around the country could use the internet to decide on where civic engagement dollars would go. A couple of years later, Wikipedia was launched and the Wikimedia Foundation, which was originally just getting grants from their offices in San Francisco, they were inspired by some of these earlier examples. And they decided to create a to really just transition their funding model their brand new foundation to a fully transparent, participatory model. And there's to this day, the largest

global participatory grant maker, you can imagine it functions a lot like Wikipedia, where anyone can create a grant by creating a page, anyone can review a grant by commenting on that page, and it's very wiki centric. So the internet really helps expand and bring back the idea of participatory grantmaking. And that brings us to today. So a decade later. There's a lot of participatory grantmaking going on in the world, I think a lot is a qualified term. This is something that is growing and you'

re seeing large foundations doing it MacArthur Foundation, experimenting with it, which we'll talk about later, for the Open Society funding a lot. So we granting to a lot of smaller community led funds. On the neighborhood level, they a lot of these funds are still around, and some newer ones like the Brooklyn Community Foundation are really pioneering new community driven models, Family Foundations, there's a new generation, next gen folks coming in and taking over boards over the next few yea

rs. And a lot of them have read winners take all by not your artist, or your villain away of his book, and he was kind enough to write the intro for our book and decide they want to maybe change the how of their of their foundations. And then we'll define this now I guess, community led foundations, it's a bit of a term of art, but foundations that were created or funds that were created for the sole purpose of being participatory. And, for instance, Red Umbrella was I think, launched by Open So

ciety. I think Disability Rights Fund was spun up by Ford Foundation, I might have that slightly off. But these are often it's a pot of money given to activists to create an activist led fund, and we can we can talk about some of those examples. So the next slide, I wanted to just give a couple more examples. These funds are working on pretty much participatory funds or participatory programs within a larger Foundation are working on all sorts of issues. Climate Justice, if any of their question

s on specific issues, we'd love to get in the weeds about some of these later on. But with climate action, a lot of participatory funds are helping make sure that the community the communities most affected by climate change are making decisions about, what they need around resilience and adaptation. On the health equity side, Disability Rights Fund is a really important voice for disability rights activists around the world, the Red Umbrella Fund is just for sex workers who you know, are strugg

ling to get funding for health work. We can go on and on, but we'll talk about some of these funds later. And I think I'm gonna pass it back to Meg right now. - Thank you, Ben. So now we wannna get into the nuts and bolts of what is participatory grantmaking? Participatory grantmaking it's an approach to funding that involves ceding decision making power about grants to the very communities impacted by funding decisions. We just traced the history of it. And I did wanna note here that what we're

describing is modern, institutional, participatory grantmaking. There's a history of participatory giving practices and a number of indigenous cultures and an African American and culture that goes way further back. That wasn't the focus of our book, we kept it as I said to modern institutions, but I encourage you to do do some reading about it if the history portion is interesting to you. So participatory grantmaking so with this approach, sometimes it can be taken as a question of staff diver

sity. And while yes, staff diversity is important, it's important to have people representing a number of different demographics and identities on staff. Really, what participatory grantmaking gets at is accountability. How are you accountable to the communities that your grants are intended to serve? And who is who is part of that conversation and who is who is part of the conversation versus who is kind of seen as a passive recipient? That's the real that's the that's the question at the heart

of participatory grantmaking. Another essential feature of this approach is how lived and learned experience are valued. Lived experience is firsthand, intimate knowledge. We all have lived experience of our gender, our race, our sexual orientation, our religion and a much lower stakes way of being part of like a sports fan community or maybe growing up in a particular neighborhood. Learned experience is knowledge that we gained through academic study, professional experience, where we're not h

aving, it's not directly happening to us, but we're studying how it happens to other people or to systems. And both types of experience are real, they are valid. What participatory grantmaking does is put learned experience and lived experience on the same level, they're both equally valuable. They're just simply representing different types of knowledge. And traditionally learned experience is where all of the all the weight, all of the gravi toss is centered. So why engage in participatory gra

ntmaking? In our book, we outline what we call the inside case and the outside case. The inside case comes from the school of strategic philanthropy, that participatory grantmaking is more effective because that engaging the community who's going to ultimately be benefiting from the grants that improves the odds of success, they have skin in the game, they've been able to share their needs and and that ultimately not not only leads to a more successful program, but creates capacity building oppo

rtunities. The outside case is more of a moral one, that it puts marginalized people and communities in charge of their own futures. Therefore, it's more equitable and more ethical. So though, and depending on who you're talking to one or more case might might end up being the more persuasive one, but those, that's where that's where those conversations fall. And I'm gonna just go through sort of the practical decision points for participation before I hand it over to Bendigo. And I'll tell you

a little more detail. So in the so throughout the grant making process, we identified four opportunities to integrate participation. The first is setting a theory of change, where we're a fund, an entire foundation or a particular pot of money, where you're defining the problem and hypothesizing about the solution who is participating in that conversation? How is the community being made part of that? The second stage is sourcing and vetting ideas. So this is how grant how potential grantees are

being considered how they're being reached, how they're being considered, and what role the community plays, maybe in setting that criteria, or bringing in organizations that may not have been top of mind into the fold. There's a lot written, as I'm sure you're aware about invite only grants and the challenges that that can create in terms of prioritizing larger, more well funded nonprofits. We won't get into that discussion here. But that's the point where that where that becomes relevant. Thi

s piece, the third decision point is making the funding decision itself. So deciding who gets the grants, whether that's part of a committee or a rating system, whatever the case may be, there's an argument to be made that this is the the purest form of participatory grantmaking that it's the community actually making that decision. And there's, again, we could we could talk a lot about that and we will we will get into a little bit later in the presentation. And then the last piece is monitorin

g evaluation. And this is this is where communities are part of defining success and identifying ways that success can be measured that are in line that are in line with what the grantmakers goals are, and just ensuring that alignment and ensuring that people are appropriately engaged and heard. So I'll turn it over to you, Ben for the ladder of participation. - Sure. So the ladder of participation is a model. It's one of many models, I'm sure some of you have seen other models. This one was cre

ated by a woman, a social scientist named Sherry Ornstein in 1969. She worked for I believe, the Johnson administration, and she was working on integrating hospitals in the south, so really had to get community behind for some pretty, pretty dramatic policy shifts. And she came up with this model that again, has been adapted to a lot of different formats of looking at how is a community in this case, she uses the word citizen. But it could be a community of a neighborhood, it could be a communit

y of a of an identity group. In the case of, for instance, the Disability Rights Fund, how much power does a community have in making a decision? So when you apply this to, to the four steps we just laid out, the very bottom is non participation. So maybe, yes, non participation, where you're simply saying, here is where folks are passive recipients of the decision. So here's what we're going to do. Moving up is the term she uses tokenism, we like to say consulting or listening, because I think

tokenism assumes not best intent. And a lot of times there is good intent. But it's a matter of listening and maybe doing a feedback session, but not having any real teeth to the rules around how community voice ultimately affects the final call. And then finally, citizen power, the highest level of participation is where stakeholders, anything from sharing in power to literally giving full control over to communities will say right off right here that most of the participatory processes that we

have seen are not at the highest level, they're at the second highest level. They are shared decision making between traditional Foundation staff, or donors and the community members, although there are some examples of that highest level. So the ladder of participation, again, non participation, consulting, listening and community power. So maybe we go to the next slide, I think we're at the poll. Oh, not quite yet. So just just to just to go over this again, I know, it's funny, there's two ax

es. But there's sort of the the chronological timeline of making decisions. And this is an abstracted view of it. But you know, these are these four general categories, you can invite community members to be part of your foundation, either conversations, when you're spinning up your foundation, or you're spinning up a new program, what is the problem we're solving? If you don't get that problem, right, you might be off course, you can involve community members in sending over applicants and maki

ng sure that the criteria are not overly restrictive, thinking about languages about about different cultural considerations, like Nagla, saying the most direct form of participatory grantmaking is to ask community members to create, for instance, the Disability Rights Fund has a board of grant making board, they actually have two levels of committees. And in both levels, people with disabilities are 50% of so activists with disabilities are 50% of the decision makers. And then finally, monitori

ng and evaluation, both setting M&A targets and also tracking them, having folks with lived experience go out in the community and make sure that the information you're gathering is proper, is this correct? I think this is where we have a poll. And I will say this, this poll is kind of tricky, because it's where do you think you sit on the ladder? And of course, there are four steps. There's the there's the chronology. So just try to answer, broadly speaking, where does your grant making process

fall? If you have any part of that process? That's, community power, great. And feel free to say that. - Yeah, there's no shame here. I mean, this is we're talking about this as a movement that's growing. So we don't really we don't expect a ton of community power just yet. Great, great. Yeah, this is, as we did research for the book, this is this is also frankly, the breakdown that we were finding that there was a lot. As Ben said, we we prefer to call that second stage consulting because we g

enuinely saw those saw those practices being done in good faith. And part of it is an awareness issue and part of it is a how to issue which we will get into. But the point is we're all learning. And we're gonna go over some of the opportunities to begin making, how to approach changes in your grantmaking process. Great, thank you how to move up the ladder? So how do how does a philanthropy move up the ladder, we are going to talk about two examples of foundations that have done this. And what I

like about the examples we've chosen here is that they represent pretty different ends of the philanthropy spectrum. We're going to start with the MacArthur Foundation, which I'm sure all of you are familiar with very well known foundation and based in Chicago, and they have a grant making program for arts organizations in Chicago, where they're based. And they discovered that the vast majority of their grants are being made to organizations in majority white parts of the city, mostly white and

wealthy. And they want to change this. And they started by contracting with a local nonprofit, who was plugged in with the art scene across the city, including in neighborhoods that they hadn't been engaging. And they worked with them to create a community board, representing that was demographically representative of the neighborhoods in Chicago where that they wanted to support. And they ran a pilot just for this particular grant program. The pilot went really well. And it ended up and one of

the ripple effects that had was that they updated some of their grids key criteria across other programs to center equity. So they took some learnings from this pilot, and were able to apply it to other programs where they weren't necessarily piloting a participatory process, but they were taking those lessons learned and applying them elsewhere. And they continue to run this, try on this process for this particular arts grantmaking program and they continue to iterate on it and improve on it.

Two of them leaders that MacArthur have written some really interesting blog posts on their experience that I would encourage you to look into if you want more detail on how they approached it. But we were really impressed with the way that they that they approach this knowing that you know, they still had a lot to learn. And and were able to not only learn but start applying that knowledge. The next fund that we're gonna talk about is Mama Cash. And this is this is a lesser known fund than MacA

rthur Mama Cash is a feminist fund that's headquartered in Amsterdam, that makes grants all over the world. They were established in the early 1980s. And they joined in 2014. They joined a donor collaborative, it was a group of other grantmakers that served women and girls. And they had a participatory way of making grants from their shared pot of money. They had a really positive experience with that collaborative. So they hired a consultant to do something similar to what MacArthur did, and te

st out a participatory grantmaking process in one of their grant programs. And when that went really well, they said, you know what we want to go all in on this idea, we want to partner, we want to do this across all of our grantmaking. So again, they partnered with the organizations in their network, Pure Funders, current and former grantees to scale this idea to all their grant making programs. And when we spoke to their leadership, they talked about how it really helped them, it reenvisioned

their roles that they said that their staff prior to this shift had been in largely kind of analytical roles, managerial roles, and this shifted to more facilitation roles. So they were able to help retrain their staff and hire new staff that had this different, this different set of skills, because they were still facilitating the process. They were helping the community members that were now part of their grant making process participate effectively. And it just it shifted their thinking on yo

u what their role was as a fund. So, I should and I should mention, you their Mama Cash is a smaller fund. I wanna say that they they are about a $10 million fund, so certainly not on the scale of MacArthur which makes that shift, a bit more straightforward, but the fact that they foundations of both the sizes have been able to pile up this is really, really encouraging. And shows that we're off to a really exciting start in spreading, spreading this model. Are we ready to get into Q&A? Yes. Oh,

okay. So let's do one more. Just one more slide, I think. Yeah, Q&A, I think I would love to do you wanna start again, maybe putting questions into the chat, I just wanted to show this last bit. There are a couple of different ways, we've given a couple examples, there's a couple of different ways to get involved in participatory grantmaking. The first is by the way to read this report, from this incredible organization that's hosting us. I think there's literally like, I've marked up this copy

. This was one of the major inspirations for our book written by Cynthia Gibson and Jen Volkoff. With a lot of support has some, it's a very practical guide on how to do participatory grantmaking. And if you go to their website there's about 10 PDFs that have like Q&A details about how the mechanisms of various participatory funds and how they work and ask the same question to all these different funds. But let's say you just wanna get started. So one thing you could do is, if you're not quite r

eady to actually do participatory grantmaking yourself but you're interested in exploring it, learning about it, you could explore a donor collaborative. One example of a donor collaborative is the with and for girls collective we- - (indistinct) said yeah. - Oh, is that getting Mama Cash was in that a couple of other participatory funds were in that but there were also some I think the fund that does the noses that Red Nose Day, it was in a comic relief was in it, and some family Foundation's t

he Malala Fund, and they all came together and some of the local participatory activists led funds created a participatory process, some of the larger funds provided the money, they hired a staff and they ran, they funded feminist activists around the world. And so the, the larger funds or the more established funds, didn't have to go there board and explain, here's the, the change our process. If you do want to go to your board, and maybe you're a board member, and want to go to your peers, and

talk about changing the how of your processes, there's a couple of things you could do to sort of get that started, you could run a participatory audit, there are some people creating a real audit tool, which is really exciting. But in the meantime you can just sort of look around at your different processes and map them out, on the on the ladder, and use that as a conversation tool for your peers, for your colleagues. And look for opportunities to move up the ladder in various points in your p

rocess. You could form a community advisory committee, I'm sure many of you already have something along this line I would imagine a lot of you already do. But I think that this would be a really interesting conversation to bring to that committee and have a conversation. And you could also just pile it, Mama Cash didn't go 100% participatory in one day, they piloted a process, and they built it out. And we just wanted to put down here again, we can get into this in the Q&A and also happy to sor

t of chat offline. But there are a couple of different models that folks use to build participatory funds in a lot of ways you're creating, you're just creating the rules of the game. And it's a game with stakes and consequences. But you are building a structure for how money gets out the door. And one way to do this is a community board where you say we have this amount of money we've decided it's going towards this purpose. And we're going to ask a series of community members with lived experi

ence how they want to give that money away. It's always a good idea to sort of have regular rolling off and rolling on of that board to ensure representation. Another option is a rolling collective. One example of this is Rita, the young feminist fund, where again, they were spun up by I believe, Ford Foundation and a couple of other foundations, they created this fund that has not an endowment, at least enough money for a few years. And it's run by so everyone involved in the fund is is a woman

or one identifying person under the age of 30, who is an activist for feminist causes around the world. And at any given point, the two President co presidents are activists, and every grant cycle, the previous grants ease, decide who should get grants the next time around. So again, the previous grantees in addition to getting funding, they also learn how to play the role of grant maker and they sort of put on the shoes of a grant maker and therefore they learn what a grant maker is looking fo

r. And of course they have the power to decide which of their fellow activists to get their funding. Close Collective is it like that, but a little complex. And there are some really great resources out there that will just lay out the different models. We can get into some of it in Q&A but just wanted to lay out a couple of different ways to approach pathways to participatory grantmaking. - So yeah, so I think now, if Ivonne we can turn to Q&A. And there's so much that's not in this presentatio

n that is in our book. So we're really eager to hear your questions and dive into some of the some of the particulars of all of these different models. - We'll do. First of all, can you repeat the name of the candidate or Foundation Center guide that you had there? - It's called Deciding Together. - [Ivonne] Deciding Together, and I'm gonna see if I can find the link, or we'll see if we can find the link on our end to put in there. So Deciding Together. That was one question people had. And then

a really good question from Delia that I wanted to start with. Delia wanted to know how can funders communicate the greater effectiveness of participatory grantmaking without overburdening grantees or PG committees with reporting requirements? - That is a really good question then I have some thoughts, and then I can hand off to you. It goes back a little bit to what we were talking about with the Mama Cash model that the idea isn't doing the equivalent of dropping a giant stack of papers in fr

ont of grantees and saying here you go fix it. You're in charge now. It's really building, it's building trust. And then it's facilitating that process in a way that grantees and community members are supported. And I'm not sure if the question is about grantees who are involved in the selection process or just in general. One thing with reporting requirements is that a lot of the participatory funds that we profiled, did try to minimize those requirements and to what was truly necessary to unde

rstand the effectiveness of the grant, but I might, Ben, do you wanna weigh in on this? - I think that's a good answer. - One other notes on that. And we didn't mention this in the presentation. But in terms of engaging community members, we talked about valuing lived and learned expertise and a practice in participatory grantmaking that is strongly, highly encouraged if not essential, is compensating community members for their time. That is, you know you are you're after all, like using their

expertise. So the same way you pay a consultant to redesign your technology systems, you should be compensating community members for offering their insights on what services would best serve their community. So that's, so that's also another piece of how you relate to grantees is just understand, valuing their time and valuing their expertise, both in terms of how the trust you've built and how that relationship works, but also in terms of fair compensation for their work. - [Ivonne] I love tha

t. I've definitely heard that. Have you seen that work? Or have you seen that in practice, the compensation of grantees? - Yeah we definitely in various how it's done, this might be a good time to plug. There's this community of practice that we're a part of called the participatory grantmaking community of practice. And you can find them participatorygrantmaking.org. It's a Slack community, Google listserv. And folks come to the community with exactly that kind of question. I'm trying to rememb

er someone asked that a couple of weeks ago and they were like 10 responses for how different people compensate their grantees. Some were doing more like $25 an hour, some of them were just going for like $75 an hour or $300 for a day because your foundation, you're just deciding how the money goes. And this is a this is a valuable part of the process. The Yeah, I mean, the 100% of the people responding did compensate. And, again, I don't have a number for you, but I think that you wanna at leas

t, provide like at you pay anyone and then consider even going higher, because again, last question were referred to you're asking folks to take time out of their day. They might be taking time off work, they might be taking time off or taking care of their family. - [Ivonne] Thanks so much. We have a question from Jerry. Jerry says we are a new organization just developing our grant making process. How can we successfully embed PGM into those processes from the outset and get the right input sl

ash insights we have, when we have no history. Hunter saying, I'd be curious just quickly, like what kind of foundation if you can get that information if they're there, like a local versus issue base. - Yeah, I'm gonna start that. Yeah, I was gonna say for if it's a place based foundation the Brooklyn Community Foundation, we do a case study of them in the book. And they're an amazing example. They were basically created after the after the financial crisis to be a community foundation for Broo

klyn. And as part of that process, they did a massive survey of the different communities in Brooklyn, which is, as most of one of the most of the most diverse, geographically concentrated it's got it's one of the most diverse populations in the world, right concentrated in this one single borough of New York City. And they asked that question of the residents what they thought their priority should be, what is what they felt were the biggest issues in Brooklyn, and they made them made the commu

nity part of the process. So I would look, I mean, we have a case study and letting go, they also have some information on their website that I would point you towards, but they've had a very, they really center the community in the way that they built their process. And they did they've also scaled their participatory grantmaking from a few programs to most if not all of their programs at this point. And they've done that over I guess it's been about 10 years since they were established. So it

was still, they've been around about a decade. But setting up that process. It took a couple of years. And I don't know where you are in that, but but it was a sort of diligence that really paid off and really built trust with the people that they were trying to serve. - [Ivonne] Thank you. Tina wants to know, do you have recommendations for resources, toolkits on engaging underrepresented communities? - To the mechanics yeah, I mean it kind of gets to I was gonna also give another example. And

I think I'll touch on this question. So Matt gave a great example of a local place based foundation, an example of a sort of a starting from scratch, issue based foundation would be the Disability Rights Fund. And the story there is that a couple 10+ years ago, the United Nations created a new treaty on disability rights. And they did this really radical thing where they saved 1/3 of the seats in the UN committee room for disability rights activists, and that actually ended up working out really

well, there were some interesting, issues with the original language that the activist caught, and that inspired a number of philanthropists to say, hey, you know, we would we want this kind of community engagement to continue, let's create a fund that is called The Disability Rights Fund, and is community driven. And so, one of the questions they had to approach early on was, well, who was going to make decisions disability, the disability community are by some metrics 15%, I think of the worl

d's can identify as being disabled. And I believe what they did was they contracted with a third party, an umbrella group called the International Disability Alliance. And they every year that they run their cycle, they asked the International Disability Alliance to nominate some board members, and again, they sort of roll roll on and off in order to make sure that it's representative. So yeah, they worked with with a third party, I know, when MacArthur went to the community, they worked with a

third party, right, a local foundation, or maybe activists leader who recommended so I think, there's definitely a risk there, if you're gonna go to sort of the activists that you already know. And that's always an issue of representation where, you know, there's always gonna be the louder activists or the community member, that's their story is always used, and there's a there's a risk of a lead capture of activists there. But I also think that if you're careful about that kind of thing, it's o

kay to partner on that kind of thing. - Yeah, and this is also a good a good time to note this is where it's that trust building is important. So it's understanding which organizations or people have already built trust with the community that you wanna serve. And then building trust with that, I guess, intermediary organization if you if it's not already there. We begin the book by talking about Mark Zuckerberg donation to the Newark school systems where he basically had a bunch of consultants

kind of parachuted into Newark, and their efforts at engaging the community consisted basically of like town halls where it was clear that they already knew what they were gonna do. And they were letting people say things but as we talked about the ladder of participation, there were no real teeth attached. And so even people just lost faith in that process overall and obviously, a whole other mess, mess unfolded, that there's another book written about, but I think what's really essential is bu

ilding that trust and identifying where you can, pinpointing Okay, these are these are the people that I'm trying to reach, who do they have faith in? And how do I build trust with that person so that it can be a bit can grow into something that really truly serves this community and make clear that this isn't just, an exercise in box ticking. This is really, we're committed to this for the long call? - [Ivonne] Thank you. Another question. We have from I wanna make sure we got this one from Dav

e, when creating a participatory grantmaking committee of local community members who will make funding decisions? What best practices did you see for identifying/recruiting the right people? Thoughts on how to D bias the selection process? - That is a really, really good question. I know that there are some insights in the deciding together report. In terms of what we saw from in, we did something like 200 interviews for this book. I know that one thing that we kept coming back to is what Ben d

escribed with the Disability Rights Fund was having sort of a rolling in rolling out of community members, especially for groups like the disabled community, which there's all different types of disabilities, there's all different identities that can intersect with disability. So having people serve like two year terms, and then cycle out or whatever the case may be setting up that process was really important. But I don't know if you have other ideas here. - Yeah, I was gonna say that, and also

the rolling collective model, the rolling collective, Friada, where each round of grantees reviews the following round. If you're starting from scratch, then that would involve having one round of grantees that you are selecting, and then that group has been vetted, that group is hopefully diverse, and there might be a case to be made that in that case, you wanna do smaller grants to more people so that you're, these will get to know your grants and you're able to make some mistakes, or just bu

ild relationships and figure it out as you go along. And then that group could ultimately become or a subset of that group of grant grantees, presumably activists or community leaders in the community, that group could then decide on the next round. - [Ivonne] Okay, thank you. Thomas wants to know, how do you conduct a participatory audit? - So she might be here, Diana Samar asks, and she so the former head of Disability Rights Fund and the former head of the Wikimedia Foundation are building a

model, like an actual tool, which we're really excited about. But I don't think it's ready. But yeah, I mean, I would say, we've done this with some folks, we've pretended some board meetings and just given a similar presentation, and then just done a board meeting is a good time to do it. But really any all staff meetings, a good time to do it. We would literally say let's look at your grantmaking process related, like, maybe the pre work for this meeting is to, if you run a grant making proces

s, write down what are the steps in that process or, bring whatever document you have and then review this latter participation and just do something like we did today where you say, well, where are we? And again, we've learned by doing this a couple times, you probably want to do some prep work and have one really good example of like one program where you do a good job, one program, or maybe you don't do a great job, one program where you've improved and use that conversation to educate your b

ecause, again, you're you're doing the audit, you're educating your staff, I think it's all part of the process. - [Ivonne] Thank you. We know that a lot of our funders aren't these, you know, huge places. So, Candace's question speaks to that. Candace says, do you have any examples of participatory grantmaking where there are a high volume of applications with only one or two staff to facilitate? - I'm trying to think of that I'm thinking through the different processes that we profiled and tha

t that none of the conversations we had that that concern didn't come up that I can recall. I do know that in Red Umbrella Fund and a few others the staff was playing the role that staff was playing where they have like a rolling collective model, similar to Frieda staff often played the role of they were all they were screening for eligibility, if they are restricted to a certain geographic area, or certain organizations of a certain size or budget, the staff would do screening just based on th

ose kind of baseline qualifications and then the community and then bring in the community members for the rest of the process. But I'm like, I'm kind of rolling through the examples in my head, and I don't think we had anyone talk about, our staff was completely overwhelmed in this way, it was definitely a transition to working, as we said, in more of a facilitator role versus an analytical one. But that was something, that was a very, just something that worked itself out. Thank you. So anythi

ng to add. - You can look at that as an opportunity, I mean, certainly a challenging one, but an opportunity. If you work at a bid size or larger Foundation, especially a larger foundation, it's gonna you're gonna have to involve a lot of stakeholders and educate a lot of stakeholders and share this wonderful report with them and potentially change the way you do things. If you are smaller, if you are more, you're more flexible, then that's, it's easier right to create this, I think that it sort

of depends on what problem you're solving for. If you know that you're very small and you know that you have more grantees than you can give real authentic, feedback to and do more than just say no, and really make sure you're engaging them and encouraging them to apply again the following year, if you recognize that these are problems I mean, you need more people. And if you don't have the money for that, I do think that thinking about community members as again, not not just taking advantage

of the community members, but saying, this is just gonna be this extra step we take and who's going to review all of these extra grants, we're going to ask folks with lived experience to do it. And on the front end yeah, it's more work. It is educating folks, it is creating these processes. But you know, compared to where we were five years ago, there are so many more practice best practices, so many more resources. You're not creating a whole model from scratch you can you can sort of copy past

e a lot of what's been done elsewhere, and I would look at it in some ways as an opportunity. - [Ivonne] Wonderful. Bridgette wanted to help us out as a follow up to the previous question comments, supporting the committee with participatory decision making is important. And Bridgette points out the book by Sam Caner, "Facilitators Guide to Participating" participatory decision making. So if people wanna look that up and Evan may have the link. - Yeah is that a resource you're familiar with as w

ell. Maybe Meg heard of it? That's great. - Actually yeah, I've heard of it. It's a great resource. So I don't know if my screen is visible. But I have, we have links in the slide deck to some of these to some of the resources that we've mentioned. - Okay, perfect. So that'll be something they can click on in when they get time perfect. - A question from Joanie. We are an intermediary that provides grants to nonprofits who provide services to their communities. How would PGM work for us? - So yo

u could, like we were talking about with the coop rolling collective model, you could have nonprofit leaders. It's an interesting question about whether it'd be the CEO or some other point of contact there, but you could have nonprofit leaders be part of the decision making process. Yeah- - I know, sorry, go ahead. - I'm curious what you're gonna say. - I was just gonna say that, if it's service provision, involving the people that they are providing services to, like, for example, if you know,

one of the services is shelters for people experiencing homelessness, then having an enhanced person on the committee that decides that that make helps does that make those decisions? Things like that, any independent and again, the sort of depends on the types of services provided. We do say in letting go that like with things like medical research, that's one where yeah, you the community that you want, deciding that as a community of doctors and scientists, but in general when it comes to whe

n it comes to social services that you do, you do want people who would ultimately be receiving those services to be involved along with the social workers or medical professionals or whoever is serving them because they are both there. We're going to both of those communities are going to have a lot of insights into how the how their processes working and how they're able to serve people, and what else might have an impact in that area. - [Ivonne] Thank you. So Laurie probably represent a few p

eople in our audience who are with nonprofits. Lori says, how can an established 501C3 obtain grants from an established PGM? Or can a nonprofit pilot a PGM locally and obtain funding from the PGM for a particular project? - So that I was I was almost answering the first part of the question a minute ago, where when you think about nonprofits using participatory practices in their community, I think a lot of the same logic applies, it's just less about necessarily money going out the door and mo

re about setting a theory of change and setting. I mean there's setting just general day to day policies. So I think it would be fascinating, and we're talking about participatory grantmaking a bit of a formal sense, and as defined by large foundations like MacArthur, but mutual aid is a part of a type of partisan programming thing. And there are some more maybe independent, sort of organizations, like the International Trans Fund, I believe, is they just totally operate off of like PayPal, and

they're very loose, how they do things, and that's kind of part of their whole thing. And they're like if we brought the lawyers in, it would just be it would just be too complicated. So I'm not suggesting you, but if you're a nonprofit, if you don't have like, granting capacities, if you literally want to just get one of these off the ground and use PayPal, start a listserv and do a small amount of money and test it out. I think that that's really exciting. That idea that it across our economy,

across philanthropy, and across sort of the social sector, there's this democratization of decisions. And I would say, just trust that with a small amount of money and see what works. - Yeah. And in terms of receiving money from participatory process there's still, depending on what community you serve, and what types of grants you typically get. There's there's been I'm not blanking on the number, there's a lot of participatory funds out there. And that most likely there is one that is designe

d to serve your issue or your geographic area. And so it's worth when you apply for that process, depending on how they're set up, you need then, become really intimately involved, which can open up a lot of different doors. - [Ivonne] Yeah, Jerry wants you to talk more about DCT/ guaranteed income overlay with participatory grantmaking. Sites Up Together is one organization we're beginning to work alongside. - Will that be a universal basic income or direct transfer is that it's, it says DCT. I

'm not sure Jerry might have to elaborate for us. - Oh conditional cash transfers. Yeah, I believe that is. You have conditional cash transfers, which is a form of universal basic income. Yeah so one. So the fun that Ben was talking about, as a really interesting example of this, I believe it's the Trans Justice Funding project, not international trans fund, although perhaps they do it too. But basically, what Trans Justice Funding Project does is, they're incorporated as a trust fund instead of

as a 501C3, or even as a for profit for because what they the role that they serve is, they take in funding from donors, and they also have like a benefactor who's kind of a modern day George Pillsbury, but they get requests from trans led organizations around the country and when we interviewed one of their leaders, she made the point that like sometimes it's like, Hey, we are like a support group for trans people in Kansas. And really, what we need is like, a few $100 to rent the space for ou

r weekly meetings, which until they're like, why would we put them through a whole application process for that as soon as we know that like it's a legit ask, we can just send the money via PayPal? And you could argue that's a form of conditional cash transfer there I will say their setup is pretty unique. I don't think in our research we found any other any others with that with that were incorporated as as trust funds I now I'm trying to think if any of the participant Pretoria funds also do s

ome form of universal basic income and yeah, I'm no specific examples are coming to mind. I know that funding specific activists has come up, but it's usually that activist it's usually backed by like an organization of some type, even if it's a small one. So it's still the entity that would be making the ask. I don't know if that answers your question. - [Ivonne] Gotcha. We'll see if Jerry pops back in and asks something additional. And speaking of examples, Eve wanted earlier on when you were

talking, Eve said can the host make real world examples how this process works in charities that help children? - Sure, yeah, youth led participatory grantmaking there's a whole bunch of passionate advocates for youth led participatory groundbreaking. I don't know if we featured any in the book specifically, but I do know we talked early inspirations for this book was Frieda. Yeah, yeah, I guess. Yeah, sure Frieda. Frieda is young, young women and youth. One example from the book was a participa

tory budgeting process. It's widely regarded, it's pretty successful. The Boston climate blanking the Boston was in Boston, it was for school children. It was for teenagers who go to Boston Public Schools, and they had a barbecue, they had the students come, they discussed different. What do you need in your school system? Let's let's I was like, $100,000 of the school budget, and what do you wanna do? And they, again, they educated the students, they fed the students, they narrowed down some re

ally complex ideas into simpler ideas. And ultimately the students chose. You expect them to choose like sports facilities and things like that. But they chose like air conditioning and heating, because Boston City Schools are like old buildings, and it's really hard to focus on learning if you're cold or if you're hot. So like, that was a really cool example. I personally never gonna I don't know a ton, but I know there's a lot written about participatory grantmaking roundbreaking and people to

do it. Absolutely love it. - Yeah, yeah. Frieda is the one that comes immediately to mind. And they're not strictly youth. I think it's I think it's on women and women and non binary people under 30. But still falls in the youth led bucket. There's an I think that participatory grantmaking community website actually lists some of the youth led ones. But yeah, there is a whole movement there. And yeah there's a lot more to be learned. Think when you're talking about like, young children, then th

e community, you wanna involve as their caregivers and their teachers versus like for adding four year olds on a committee. But I don't think that's what you were suggesting. - [Ivonne] Tina says as a former Fed, I'm interested to know if you know if any part of the federal government is considering or interested in PGM, or piloting any PGM initiatives? - I too, am a former Fed so I can give a teeny bit of an answer and then handed off to Ben, who might also have ideas. I worked for the Office o

f Management and Budget under President Obama, I'm actually working on on paper Success projects, which is a way of tying tying payments to outcomes. What we did see, at the federal level, I saw a lot of and continue to see a lot of stuff on the consulting rung of the ladder, which which makes sense it is a democracy there, opportunities to weigh in at different points. With some of the specific initiatives in the Domestic Policy Council there were they did have a youth advisory panel that would

make proposals that I think on most part were accepted. There's obviously different considerations in government because you're ultimately implementing what Congress has legalized and I'm talking about the federal level on with state and local governments. There's other other complicating factors, but at the federal level, there, I've seen that happen. Didn't see a whole lot of it under the previous administration. I don't know enough about what the Biden administration is doing at the moment,

but I've seen a lot at the at the consulting level less so at the at the community or citizens power level, um, in terms of in terms of new initiatives. Yeah, and I'll just I'll add to that. - I mean the phrase maybe next setup of participatory budgeting there are hundreds of examples of participatory budgeting around the world. And in a couple of dozen cities in the US, including New York, have participatory budgeting processes. I know that the folks who run the participatory budgeting process

definitely met with the Obama team. And they talked about it and there was like, Oh, that's interesting. I don't think that's where they are yet to define this black lives matter policy paper about how federal government can put money towards participatory human rights budgeting processes, so encouraging the federal government to have fun, like we were talking about it fun and intermediary which is, I think, a great way to approach this. But yeah, I mean, that's a great question. - [Ivonne] Lind

a says- - (indistinct) we have a we wrote our the epilogue about participatory budgeting and some of these questions about governments and participation. So what's the name of Josh learners organization, because that's definitely a great resource for. - Just change their name, the participatory budgeting, local hub for participatory democracy, the global people powered the global hub for participatory democracy. So People Power it is the name. Okay All right. - [Ivonne] Linda says I'm a grant wr

iter for a small local nonprofit. We're trying to come at this from the perspective of including recipients of services in the CQI process for our programs. Do you have any thoughts on this? - CQI - CQI yeah. (indistinct chattering) - [Ivonne] I don't know we're all speaking in acronyms now. But I guess, until we get what CQI is exactly. But being a grant writer for a small local nonprofit, and trying to come from the perspective of including recipients do you have any thoughts on that the recip

ients of the services, grant writing? - So it looks like it's maybe continuous quality improvement? Or just, how do you effectively? Yeah, how do you perform social services. So I mean, our book was definitely not focused on providing social services. I mean, I think that starts to be a whole different , I don't know, and I don't, maybe a lot of the principles would apply. I do know we've spoken in the process of, promoting the book, I spoke with a woman who is a doctor, she works with a young a

utistic children, and they see the Children's Hospital, and they work with a lot of my colleagues and they a internal advisory board, or rather family over like a task, a team, that is figuring out how they can build a more how they can be more culturally sensitive to this community of their patients. And their idea now, we talked about it with her was to create a community advisory board of parents of these children from these communities. Again, this is not a radical idea to have community adv

isory board. But I mean, that's in general, if you can bring community members, and that's great. I think a lot of these advisory boards end up being more on the consulting or listening side of the ladder of participation and any way that you can say we're going to let this advisory board we're gonna allow this advisory board to have a real decision with teeth. It's going to be case dependent, but I think that's sort of what you should be looking for. - [Ivonne] Great. And that's what Linda clar

ified, yeah, getting feedback on the services we provide, and continuous quality improvement. So yeah that that is the answer they're looking for. Okay, and then you mentioned the barbecue. So this may be sort of an answer to this but Vanessa says, what is a good way to introduce philanthropy, including the current challenges to community members on a participatory grantmaking committee? - Introduce the so get the community involved. I mean, make it fun. I met Greg What's that book? The about in

tentional gatherings- - Priya Parker's book? I think it actually I think the subtitle is "The art of Intentional Gathering. barbecues are a great opportunity meeting people rather than sometimes rather than setting up a separate meeting, joining one that's already in progress. Again, offering things child making childcare available if you're trying to involve people who might be parents or caregivers, so make it making it fair making their participation very easy and and I think really the putti

ng yourself in listening mode as as you start that engagement and also, as that relationship progresses, just making, making it clear that you're not seeking their input, again, in more of a consulting way, like you really you want to find you wanna find a role for them, you want them to be playing a role in this, you want them to have decisions that they make, and that this isn't just, this isn't just a one and done thing that this is a long term relationship. So yeah, make it fun. See it as an

opportunity to build relationships and just, be sensitive to things like childcare of what people's working hours might be, if there's a lot of people working in the service industry, for instance, then evenings might not be a great time for a meeting, stuff like that. - Just to kind of build on that theme, I think, a lot. I mean just getting back to the heart of what our book is about, there's a lot of mechanics of participatory grantmaking. But at the end of the day, it's about sort of treati

ng members of the community you're trying to serve with respect and sort of as equals, so much of philanthropy, implicitly is, it's not us versus them, but it's us. And then it's sort of, there's this artificial distinction between the people who are paid to hand money out, and just the people are just living their life. And I think that the, what I think is beautiful about participatory grantmaking is, you're inviting folks who you didn't hire them like that they haven't gone through all the ga

tekeeping of all the university systems that, really is what it usually takes to get a job in philanthropy. But you're inviting folks into your office and saying, you know, I respect your opinion, I wanna know what you have to say. And maybe don't wear a suit that day, right, like maybe make it a little more informal, I think that there are these barriers that climb to be continued, can be intimidating. And the idea of a foundation can be intimidating. And some people don't trust Bill Gates and

might apply that to all philanthropies. So go out of your way. So bring your whole self and to be authentic, and to remember that the people might want might appreciate that. - [Ivonne] I love that. when we teach about grant writing, we talked about the asset framing approach and understanding that people had value before you got there. So I really like that idea that just meet people where they are have a conversation and involve them, this is about you. So why not? Ryan wanted to let us know,

exponent philanthropy has had some sessions on participatory grantmaking engaging community voices as a lean, small stuffed funder. So we'll see we can find that and included in the email, if not in the chat right now. So exponent philanthropy. And then I think that's it that we have for questions now people like to pop them in, so I'll keep my eye on on on that. But what are your kind of final thoughts on? I would imagine people want to know, how to get started or how to move up the ladder? Rig

ht after this call? What can they do? So what are your kind of final thoughts on that? - Yeah Well, you can start letting go. book.org is the website for the book, you could order it there, we also have some resources listed there. We also use the promo code candidate you can get 10% off the book, just plugging that real quick, participatory grantmaking.org the community that, that Ben mentioned the deciding together guide, then there's more. - I mean, the number one thing is over even buying ou

r book, I would say is participatory grantmaking.org. Go to participatory grantmaking.org. site, there's a there's a forum, I think I've made the forum made it like literally, it's all volunteer led, but send us your information. And then we will invite you to a Slack channel, you can be on it tomorrow. And then Slack us and say hi. But you'll see I mean, there's all of these chats, there's these channels, one channels that mean there one is about there are all these different questions that peo

ple ask, you know, one is around collaboration. One is around monitoring and evaluation. One is the call of meeting room and it's just interesting, interesting readings on the topic. So the website participatory grantmaking.org has best practices and resources. But it's a small team not hugely updated. I would say the Slack channel you can be on this, you can start talking to people tomorrow. - [Ivonne] Wonderful. So that's pretty much a way to just, you know, ask questions right now and say, He

y, how does this work? What are you doing, and get that instant feedback. Wonderful. And I want to say how many members are there at this point is something like 600? Yeah, I started off as 20 About a year and a half ago and now it's So 800 and on Slack, there's like 450 and it's, I mean, I've been on a lot of Slack channels, Slack communities that are not great. This one actually is pretty, pretty special. - [Ivonne] Awesome. And I just because we use Slack here, I candid all the time. So there

are different groups within slack, I would imagine? - Different. (indistinct chattering) - Yep. - [Ivonne] Okay you know what we have a lot of groups, like channel would just make me a little crazy. So it's good to know if they saying, Hey, we're in this part of the country, or we do this kind of work. That would be really helpful. So wonderful. So I think we're good in terms of giving people a little bit more time. I just want to thank you, Meg and Ben for coming on today and talking to us and

giving us all of these great resources. I also want to thank everyone who attended today. We appreciate you taking time out of your day. If you liked this webinar, please join us for our future webinars, and have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much, guys.