Who Decides? Foundation Staff Look to Outsiders to Steer Grants

Last November, when the Spark Fund awarded grants to five efforts in Atlanta, the recipients got a call — not from a program officer at a deep-pocketed philanthropy — but from a committee of 10 young Black men. The men, who were each navigating mental health issues related to poverty and racism, represented the very people the nonprofits aimed to help.

Some grantees thought they’d been “punked,” said Ade Oguntoye, co-founder of the Imperative, an Atlanta nonprofit that manages the Spark Fund. The calls upended the usual relationship between funders and grantees in a positive way, he explained. A typical response from the recipients was: “How are these young men calling to give us money? We’re supposed to be serving them.”

The young men not only gave grantees the good news, they also helped sort through applications to pick the five recipients: the Black Male Initiative Georgia, Close Ties Leadership Program, Creative Connections (Black Boys Better), Silence the Shame, and the Counseling Brothers of Atlanta. Each grantee received $40,000, and the fund, which has run youth-led grant-making projects worldwide, is raising money for another round of grants.

The Spark Fund is a recent example of “participatory grant making.” Rather than assign grants after program officers and other foundation staff vet grant proposals and send them to the board of trustees for review, grant decisions are made by members of a community, who are given the responsibility of sourcing, reviewing, and ultimately assigning grants.

The $200,000 Spark Fund was created by the Imperative and Global Fund for Children, with money it received from a $10 million gift from MacKenzie Scott in 2022. The effort also received support from the Fund for Southern Communities, TOMS, and the Jessie Parker Williams and Texel foundations.

Participatory Grant Making in Vogue

The effort is part of a much larger body of participatory grant-making work. Currently, it’s not clear how many grant makers use a participatory model, or what proportion of foundation funds are directed by the approach, said Kelley Buhles, a consultant who advises a network called the Participating Grantmakers Community. Since forming in 2020, the group has grown to include 2,000 people interested in the practice.

In addition to smaller grant-making pools, like the ones managed by Deaconess and the Spark Fund, the practice has generated interest among larger grant makers that employ hundreds of staff. In 2021, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation devoted $5 million to its Building Local Alignment Initiative, which used a participatory approach.

Still, taken together, participatory approaches account for a small amount of grant making as a whole. If community members are invited to participate in grant-making decisions, foundations lose credibility if they set aside only small amounts of money and pilot programs while retaining their core staff-driven grant-making strategies, said Katy Love, a grant-making consultant.

One factor driving participatory grant making is the idea that members of a community can identify promising new efforts that suit the needs of people — be it a disability or a neighborhood or socioeconomic issue — better than a professional grant maker.

Putting young Black men in charge of grant making also helped the participants who made the decisions themselves, Oguntoye said. As part of the grant-making training, the young men traveled to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Ala., where they learned more about the violence perpetrated against Black people in America, followed by visits with counselors to process that pain and start to heal. By delving into the broad history of racism, and talking about it later, participants were able to process some of the hurt they experienced, which factored into the decision-making process.

“They were focused on healing before we ever got to the grant making,” Oguntoye said, adding that the participants making the money decisions were helped as much as the nonprofits they funded.

“You have two constituencies to think about, but you also have impact in two places,” he said.

Involving Young People

The Spark Fund’s Atlanta grants were its first U.S.-based participatory effort. In 2022, the fund tested the concept when it made a total of $1.1 million in grants to groups in 56 countries based on decisions made by youth advisers. During that round of funding, participants highlighted mental health as a key issue among younger people.

Another philanthropic effort that’s experimenting with participatory grant making is the Deaconess Foundation’s NextGen Grantmakers Initiative. Previously, the foundation managed two participatory funds, one created after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and another started in 2023, where grant decisions were made by older residents of the St. Louis, Mo., area.

For NextGen, Deaconess tapped Vision for Children at Risk, a nonprofit that last year received a $1 million grant from MacKenzie Scott, to assemble a council of youth advisers. The group plans to announce grantees that will receive a total of $100,000 at the end of November.

The broader goal is to combine the work of the youth-led fund with the elderly effort so the community-led grants have an intergenerational component, said Constance Harper, Deaconess’s vice president of vice president of strategic impact and innovation. The younger cohort, she said, often doesn’t feel respected by their elders, while the older members can feel invisible to others.

“Seniors feel this generational disconnect, and they have this deep desire to be in community with young people, but it’s hard to find an entry point,” she said.

Both the Deaconess Foundation and the Global Fund for Children say that their experience with participatory grant making has prompted them to include youth input in other areas of their work, but that the bulk of their grant making will still be designed by staff.

Participatory grant makers have long invited young people to make decisions, with efforts like the Youth Power Fund, Black Girls Freedom Fund, Third Wave Fund, and Youth Engagement Fund paying special attention to the role of young people.

For the Global Fund for Children’s co-CEO John Hecklinger, relying on young people in their teens is a way of proving one of the core tenets of his organization: That children and young adults are capable decision makers with a vision for the future that their elders often miss.

“We have got to support them, understand their leadership, and integrate them into all decision making because they are capable of disrupting things in really amazing ways,” he said. “If we don’t do that, they’re capable of disrupting things in not so great ways as well.”