A New Book Shares Evidence on Participatory Grantmaking

In the basement of the Ford Foundation’s offices, there’s a framed print of an old New Yorker cartoon that I think about a lot.

A man in a suit stands at the window of an office, tossing money into the street. Another man rushes in, saying, “Just a minute, young man. That’s not quite the way we do things here at the Ford Foundation.”

Ford is such an interesting institution because it has spent decades thinking about the how of philanthropy. The foundation has a history of being ahead of the curve on progressive giving practices, and in the 2010s they funded some of the early research that led to the creation of the PGM Community.

That included a series of research papers on the effectiveness of PGM, which have now been collected into a new book, Participatory Grantmaking in Philanthropy. I attended the book’s launch event at Ford offices in New York, where editors Cynthia M. Gibson, Chris Cardona and David Suárez spoke about their findings (another editor was Jasmine McGinnis Johnson).

The conversation started with some of the newer elements in the book. The editors shared a matrix they developed (poorly photocopied by me here) showing how PGM compares with other modes of participation in philanthropy.

It was the first time I'd seen PGM compared and contrasted with practices like giving circles, mutual aid and #ShiftThePower community philanthropy, and I think it's a genuinely useful addition to the conversation.

They also shared the results of the major new survey included in the book, asking 138 US foundations about their approach to stakeholder participation practices.

The survey, developed by Suárez alongside Emily Finchum-Mason and Kelly Husted, showed that an increasing number of private and community foundations are engaging their grantees in funding decisions, though far fewer are engaging members of the general public. (We’ll share an excerpt of that survey in Proximate in the near future).

The conversation that followed featured a number of useful insights, and I'll pull out a few of them here:

• PGM is almost always paired with another inclusion effort—racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, or environmental activism. That tracks with what I've seen over the past few years, but it's also worrying – in an era when the very concept of equity is under attack, could participation be the baby thrown out with the bathwater?

• On the other hand, when foundation leaders were asked why they practice PGM, "redistributing power" was one of the least common responses. Instead, the emphasis was on improving grantmaking. That's a good sign that it's seen as a painkiller, not a vitamin.

• The barriers that do come up seem to be largely cultural, not logistical. For instance – concerns about conflict of interest often come up, but  Gibson made the point that this issue is often misframed. Advocates for PGM have long argued that it is built on a foundation of trust and transparency. If a peer reviewer has an existing relationship or insider knowledge, that should be welcomed. During the panel, Gibson pointed to her work supporting RWJF to develop a "Managing Equity and Fairness" statement for their PGM process – it's a useful resource, that you can find on page 59 of this report.

• International funders are way ahead of the US on PGM. Diana Samarasan, who founded the Disability Rights Fund, zoomed in to point out that PGM is much more developed outside the U.S., particularly in global human rights and environmental funding. Many international funders see participation as fundamental to how they operate—not an experiment or an add-on.

I was glad that Ford Foundation hosted the event, and that they're committed to building the field of participation. That said, to the best of my knowledge they don't directly practice PGM themselves (with the exception of the grants that funded the research in this book) – so hopefully the Ford leaders in the room were listening.

I'd encourage anyone interested in participatory grantmaking – or modern philanthropy generally – to buy a copy of the book. And for another perspective on the book's useful findings, check out Hilary Pearson's positive review in The Philanthropist.