“We Set the Priorities Ourselves.” Sex Workers Lead This Participatory Grantmaker's Global Giving

Not long ago, I spoke with Village Capital Communications Director Ben Wrobel and Social Sector Strategist Meg Massey about their new book, “Letting Go: How Philanthropists and Impact Investors Can Do More Good by Giving Up Control.” The topic at hand: participatory grantmaking, which finds foundation leaders handing off decision-making to community members, and can lead to more equitable funding outcomes.

While participatory grantmaking had gained some traction pre-2020, it didn’t reach anything resembling critical mass for the simple reason that many leaders were reluctant to abdicate their primary activity—deciding who gets the money—to outside parties.

But that was then. The global pandemic and calls for racial justice in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder have forced leaders to look at how their grantmaking processes may unwittingly foment funding inequities. Many are now giving participatory grantmaking a second look, drawn to its ability to build trust with historically underserved demographics, demystify philanthropy and rebalance longstanding power dynamics.

I encourage leaders who may be considering a participatory grantmaking to give “Letting Go” a read, as it profiles a handful of trailblazers in a field where the models are “still evolving,” according to Wrobel.

He put me in touch with leaders from two early adopters, both of which are based in Amsterdam—the Red Umbrella Fund, the first global fund guided by and for sex workers, and Mama Cash, the international women’s fund—to talk about how their practices evolved, challenges along the way, and advice for leaders who are considering taking the leap.

Below, I’ve included some highlights from my discussion with Paul-Gilbert Colletaz, a coordinator at Red Umbrella. A follow-up piece will explore issues from a separate chat with Coco Jervis, the grants manager at Mama Cash.

An underfunded field

Back in 2019, my colleague Julia Travers wrote an extensive piece on the state of philanthropic support for sex workers. She noted that funders have traditionally shied away from supporting sex work organizations due to persistent stigma and stereotyping. There’s also the fact that sex work is illegal in most countries, as well as a tendency to conflate voluntary sex work with sex trafficking, which, according to the United Nations Development Program, involves “lack of consent due to coercion or deception, or involvement of minors.”

Thanks to support from the Open Society Foundations (OSF), Ford Foundation, American Jewish World Service and other funders, sex worker organizations have made strides in recent years. But advocates believe grantmakers can do a lot more. As Carol Leigh, director of the Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network, told Travers, “The philanthropic community should reach out to sex workers, who are brave people and strongly need respect and assistance.”

Colletaz joined the Red Umbrella Fund in 2020 after serving as program manager for the Global Network of Sex Workers, as a program coordinator for the Paris-based Solidarité Sida, and as civil society member on the International Steering Committee of the Amsterdam-based Robert Carr Network Fund.

Having been involved in the sex workers’ rights movement for many years, Colletaz saw first-hand how funders shied away from supporting what he called “criminalized populations.” He cited data from the Human Rights Funding Network showing that support for sex workers’ rights represented less than 1% of foundation funding for human rights in 2018. In addition, a Resource Tracking Report found that sex workers experienced an 11% decline in HIV-related philanthropic funding in 2019 compared to 2018.

These figures are all the more frustrating for advocates who argue that sex work frequently aligns with key funder priorities. “Some of [the funders] will say that they don’t have a position on sex work, but they have a position on human rights, they have a position on labor rights,” Colletaz told Wrobel and Massey. “And I think most of the game is making them see that sex workers are humans, and that makes them part of human rights. If you work on human rights or labor rights, you need to work with sex-worker-led organizations.”

How it came together

The roots of the Red Umbrella Fund date back to a 2006 report by OSF’s Sexual Health and Rights Programme that showed a lack of funding for sex workers’ organizations around the world. In response, advocates began discussing ways to best support the field, including how to most effectively engage donors.

In 2011, an interim international steering committee was created to set up the governance and administrative structures and select a host organization. To host the new fund, the committee selected Mama Cash, which had an extensive track record of funding sex worker rights groups.

This was a significant—and somewhat controversial—development. On one hand, the involvement of an esteemed international funder like Mama Cash gave the project immediate credibility. But some members of the larger donor community questioned the overall decision to focus on sex workers. As we’ll see, it wasn’t the last time that the fund would have to contend with reluctant or disapproving donors.

In 2010, consultants proposed the establishment of a pooled fund. Unlike traditional pooled funds, the proposal stipulated that the funding mechanism would be a participatory model led by sex workers. This approach empowered workers “to have decision-making power and control over how the money flows,” said consultant Sam Avrett.

The Red Umbrella Fund was officially launched in April 2012 at the Association for Women’s Rights in Development Forum in Istanbul, Turkey. Its first strategic plan stipulated that at least 70% of its annual budget would be spent directly on grants to sex-worker-led organizations and networks.

Building trust

One of the big takeaways from participatory grantmaking early adopters is that setting up the operational grantmaking process is only half the battle. Leaders also have to generate buy-in from their donor community.

In the case of the Red Umbrella fund, leaders had to convince donors to give to a fund that supported sex workers—a pretty big ask, given the stigma surrounding the field 10 years ago. As the fund’s white paper on the formation of its participatory model noted, “The reality is that many donors do not understand the community’s needs, see sex trade as violence, and often treat sex worker issues as anti-trafficking issues.”

Compounding matters, the white paper stated, was the fact that “many sex worker activists had negative previous experiences with donors, feeling they had been treated with some level of concern, disdain, or even antagonism due to personal or organizational positions on sex work.” If this was the case, how could the fund’s leaders expect donors to trust sex workers to allocate their money?

To bridge the divide, leaders educated donors on relevant language and key concepts, including the differences between “sex trafficking” and voluntary “sex work,” “exploitation” versus “choice,” and the framing of sex work as a labor rights issue. They also set up meetings between donors and sex workers to build trust and mutual understanding.

Their efforts paid off. “It took some time for donors to recognize that sex workers needed to be central in the decision-making process to set up a funding mechanism to support sex worker rights, instead of just being consulted in the process,” read the fund’s white paper.

How it works

Now, let’s look briefly at the mechanics of Red Umbrella’s participatory grantmaking model. Its decision-making structure consists of an International Steering Committee (ISC), which is responsible for making strategic decisions, and an 11-person Program Advisory Committee (PAC) that selects groups to fund. Sex workers constitute a majority of representation in both committees.

The fund frequently issues calls for new PAC members, with an emphasis on geographic diversity. For example, in its May 2021 call for members, the fund sought out sex workers in North America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. More than 70% of PAC members come from the Global South.

“We are lucky to have many committed individuals on our PAC who speak other languages and are able to review applications in their first language,” Colletaz said. He told me his team also prioritizes “gender diversity within our PAC, intersectionality and life experiences.”

Once a year, the fund issues a call for applications. A small clerical staff responsible for daily operations and financial management reviews applications before sending them to PAC members who score them. PAC members then convene at their annual meeting to review applications and select organizations for support. The winning applications are forwarded to the ISC, which validates the selections. In 2020, Red Umbrella Fund received 222 applications and awarded 29 two-year core support grants.

“Making better grant decisions”

Foundation leaders may not come out and say it, but many of them worry that by outsourcing the grant selection process, they’ll be innovating themselves out of existence. As Hannah Patterson, who oversees a participatory grantmaking practice on behalf of the U.K.’s National Lottery Community Fund, told Wrobel and Massey for their book, “What are funders here for if they aren’t here to make decisions about funding or strategy? Is our role null and void?”

Colletaz didn’t attempt to invalidate these concerns. By definition, participatory grantmaking is about giving up control. But handing off the reins to individuals with a unique lived experience serves a higher aim. “It is about making better grant decisions,” he said. “In 2021, it is unacceptable to continue making decisions impacting the lives of communities that have not been consulted.”

It’s also worth remembering that there are many kinds of participatory grantmaking models for funders to adopt. For instance, the Red Umbrella Fund’s two committees aren’t entirely composed of sex workers. Rather, sex workers constitute a majority of members—an important distinction. As “Letting Go” co-author Massey told me, “there’s no single best practice on this yet.”

Colletaz encourages funders interested in adopting participatory practices to access GrantCraft’s online resource center and the Participatory Grantmakers Community of Practice (PGCP), a site where practitioners can share tips and best practices.

The PGCP emerged from a smaller community of practice led by Ariadne Network, a European peer-to-peer network of more than 600 funders focused on social change and human rights. “Letting Go” author Ben Wrobel told me its membership currently stands at approximately 325 members, about 65% of whom are program officers or executive directors. Three-quarters of members deploy participatory grantmaking practices in some capacity in their work.

Looking ahead

While the Red Umbrella Fund has come a long way since 2012, significant challenges remain. “As a sex-worker-led fund, stigma and discrimination, including in philanthropy, continue to exist,” Colletaz said. Many labor funders, women’s rights funders and LGBTQ funders “will not start conversations with us or will refuse to fund sex-worker-led organizations and networks under the pretense of not having a policy on sex work or refusing to deal with ‘difficult topics.’”

As a result, sex workers and their organizations “were excluded from government and philanthropic funding made available for economic justice or to support those most affected by the pandemic and the challenges it exacerbated,” Colletaz said. He told me that donors who are interested in supporting sex-worker-led organizations can contact the fund or consider joining the Sex Work Donor Collaborative.

At a more operational level, Colletaz told me that many of the fund’s donors remain wedded to geographically restricted funding, which can complicate its community-led selection process. Additionally, many funders provide just one- or two-year grants. This can lead to challenges around long-term planning, he said. Colletaz hopes more funders will provide funding that is “accessible, unrestricted, flexible, multi-year, and human-rights-based” and develop an understanding of how sex workers’ rights intersect with other social justice issues.

Eleven years since its inception, the Red Umbrella Fund’s “core principles of being self-led remain,” Colletaz said. “If funders are truly interested in supporting sex workers’ rights, they should support a fund where we set the priorities ourselves.”

Featured