How can you fund other organisations to do participatory grantmaking?

There’s a wealth of incredible funders out there who are delivering PGM, they are set up with the skills, experience and governance structures that makes this work their bread and butter. Rather than traditional funders trying to reinvent the wheel there are some really exciting opportunities to support these smaller, often more nibble, flexible and responsive funders to take the lead.

NoVo Foundation is doing just that. I was able to meet with Jody Myrum who talked me through how they work using collaborative and trust-based methods to fund organisations to devolve their grants out into communities. As a bigger funder they use this model to be able to reach and support grass roots, smaller and/or place based organisations across the world to deliver their work without NoVo having to have high staff numbers.

NoVo Foundation uses PGM to support a range of issues impacting and affecting women and girls. They do this in several ways, for example:

• Funding an intermediary who distributes grants through PGM. For example, the Girls First Fund who support those working to stop child marriage or With and For Girls who fund girl led work across the globe.
• Partnering with well-established PGM funders such as FRIDA Fund, providing them with money to redistribute to communities.
• Developing partnerships in order to set up a local grant giving organisation when there isn’t one. For example, the Southern Black Girls & Women’s Consortium — a new collective of funders, activists and community leaders working to advance the movements for Black girls and women in the south-east of the US. The consortium will co-create an infrastructure for regional grantmaking and movement building, providing resources to local organisations that work directly with Black girls, including those outside of traditional non-profit organisations.
• Providing endowments that allow organisations to get on and deliver the work — funding based on trust allows them to move money closer to communities without any monitoring or reporting. NoVo develop this trust with their grant holders funding them for a year or two, getting to know them and then once trust is built leave them to deliver.

For some funders this might be a really good way of supporting PGM. If your governance allows you to work like this, it offers the opportunity to be quicker and easier as you can rely on community-led organisations to provide the infrastructure and set up. Working in this way can also provide some in-depth insights and learning about communities, delivered by members of those communities rather than a funder parachuting in.

For other funders this might be trickier as it might involve a different process in order to devolve grant decisions out to another body. Instead it might be that working closely with PGM funders could help improve learning and practice of a larger funder, enabling you to use this learning and embed it into your own processes/decision making. It’s important, however, to pay for this time and knowledge — many of the smaller PGM funders I met with were working on a shoestring with the Edge Fund being nearly entirely volunteer run. I am not sure it is fair to utilise a smaller grant maker’s time and knowledge and then replicate these approaches without financially supporting them.

On that note, there are a wide range of amazing PGM funders out there you might want to look to support, although this list is by no means extensive and I welcome more recommendations!

• Edge Fund — supporting movement building and campaigning in the UK
• Camden Giving — funding community projects in Camden London
• Pawanka Foundation — supporting indigenous communities around the world
• Global Greengrants — a UK funder supporting worldwide projects that protect the planet
• International Trans Fund — supporting Trans rights across the world
• RAWA Creative Palestine communities Fund — community development in Palestine
• The Other Foundation — supporting the rights of LGBTQI people across southern Africa
• Red Umbrella — supporting sex workers across the world
• FRIDA The Young Feminist Fund- Supporting young feminists across the globe
• With and For Girls — supporting girls across the globe
• UHAI — supporting the struggle for equality, justice and dignity for East Africa’s sex workers and sexual and gender minorities