Not Sure Where to Start With Participatory Philanthropy? There’s a New Tool to Help

Diana Samarasan and Katy Love

As longtime proponents of participatory philanthropy, consultants Katy Love and Diana Samarasan encourage foundations to give organizations and community members a greater voice in their work in order to shift power and make giving more equitable. And while the field has made some progress in the aftermath of the pandemic and 2020 racial justice protests, on the whole, Love and Samarasan believe grantmakers could be doing a lot more.

“We admit to feeling some impatience, as we have been advocating for these practices for over a decade,” they said in a joint email. Larger foundations, in particular, “are still apparently reticent” when it comes to adopting a more participatory posture.

The good news is that not all funders are resistant to the idea. Love and Samarasan’s extensive research over the years underscored two promising and under-leveraged demographics in the grantmaking ecosystem — foundations that want to expand on existing participatory practices, and those that are amenable toward a more participatory approach, but lack the tools to proceed in a thoughtful manner. 

The team developed the Advancing Participation in Philanthropy Tool to serve these audiences. The interactive self-assessment lets funders gauge their level of participatory practice in all facets of their operations, such as grantmaking, governance and leadership, and communication, and lays out a series of questions to facilitate goal-setting so leaders can take that next step.

“Our hope,” they said, “is that our tool eliminates at least one barrier — the question we often heard from funders was ‘How will I know if I’m doing it?’ or ‘Where do I even get started?’ Now, there’s a tool for that.”

Due diligence

Before working as an independent consultant, Love was the director of the grantmaking team at the Wikimedia Foundation. She has also held roles at the Global Fund for Children and CARE International. Samarasan is the founder and former executive director of two participatory grantmakers, the Disability Rights Fund and the Disability Rights Advocacy Fund.

The pair collectively advocated for participatory practices throughout the 2010s, drawing inspiration from a motto within the disability rights movement: “Nothing about us without us.” “These words,” Love and Samarasan said, “fit so perfectly with the change we think makes sense in philanthropy, to shift power over resource decisions and institutions to people and communities impacted by funding and by inequality.”

In 2018, a partnership with the Human Rights Funders Network led to the development of Foundation Center’s (now Candid) “Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resources Through Participatory Grantmaking,” which explores the benefits, challenges and models of participatory grantmaking. While the guide has become an invaluable resource for funders, it doesn’t meet every need in this growing field, they said.

It was around this time that Love and Samarasan, frustrated with philanthropy’s participatory foot-dragging and inspired by other “social audits” in the field, like equity or green audits, considered having community members audit funders’ participatory work. Their efforts to gauge the feasibility of a “participatory audit” began in earnest in 2021 with funding from the Amsterdam-based Porticus Foundation. An extensive due diligence process, which included a review of 18 social audits and interviews with experts in the field, generated a set of compelling takeaways.

Most notably, they determined an audit wasn’t realistic because the participatory practices hadn’t yet reached critical mass. There were, however, an encouraging number of practitioners in the field, and Love and Samarasan sensed they would appreciate a way to gauge how far along they were in the process of becoming more participatory. They felt such a resource would be especially useful for family foundations and large grantmakers, as these two entities have historically been laggards in the space. The pair decided to pause the development of an audit, which could make funders feel like they were being judged, and ultimately decided to pursue a self-assessment tool.

How it works

Rather than reinvent the wheel, Love and Samarasana took a closer look at other self-assessment tools in the space, like Vu Le’s Equitable Grantmaking Continuum and Justice Funders’ Resonance Framework. Then they had to build it, which turned out to be a challenging process.

The pair turned a corner once they stopped trying to separate out topic-specific components like “feminist philanthropy” and “DEI,” and instead embraced what they called “the overlapping and complementary ideas, all fueled by power-shifting.” Galvanized by the idea that participatory practices can’t be viewed in a vacuum, they began building out a “spectrum of participation.”

They ran their work by individuals in the participatory grantmaking community through workshops and interviews before pivoting to foundations. Love and Samarasan were thrilled (and overwhelmed) to discover that nearly 40 foundations wanted to test the tool. They narrowed the field down to 19 funders, varying in asset size, from the U.S., Europe, South Africa and Mexico, to pilot the tool over several months beginning in early 2023.

Some foundations had advanced participatory practices in place, while others were just beginning the journey. They all provided a wealth of informative feedback through the pilot phase, which Love and Samarasan collected and published in a series of case studies. The pair made some tweaks to the self-assessment and partnered with a designer, Claire le Noble, who designed the website, which includes an interactive tool, a downloadable PDF tool and an accessible Word document. They launched the APPT in 2023 with what they described as “a little (virtual) party with our friends, complete with some air horns and party tiaras.”

Key steps in the APPT self-assessment process include identifying a lead facilitator, determining where the funder can increase levels of participation and deciding how stakeholders will measure progress. I encourage readers to give it a test drive. Those who click on Grantmaking answer a series of questions gauging the level of outside participation in areas like strategic planning and decision-making. Other questions, like “How would grantees describe the foundation as a partner?” ask the user to do some constructive soul-searching. At the conclusion of the process, the tool generates a summary that provides users with jumping-off points to formulate a strategy.

“Part of that larger shift”

The APPT helps funders benchmark and build out their levels of participation. But what about funders who aren’t even conceptually interested in adopting a more participatory posture? Love and Samarasan have been grappling with this question for years, and as someone who has some theories as to why funders aren’t embracing participatory or trust-based practices, I was eager to get their perspective.

“If we only knew what foundations specifically need to make changes, we’d be singing it from the rooftops,” Love and Samarasan said. “We did a lot of research about that and everyone has different theories about what brings about change. If we zoom out, we can point to change within specific parts of philanthropy, but it happens across the sector at a glacial pace.”

When this glacial change does occur, it’s usually the byproduct of a confluence of factors, including amplified calls across the sector for funders to abdicate some power, advocacy from what Love and Samarasan call “internal champions,” and the ability for curious funders to learn more about participatory practices and all of their nuances. By speaking to this latter need, the APPT is an enormously valuable contribution to the field. While we may not like to admit it, some funders have no interest in relinquishing even one iota of power. But that still leaves a vast ecosystem of grantmaking leaders amenable to experimenting with participatory practices in whatever manner aligns with their risk tolerance.

Love and Samarasan said its analytics suggest that interest in the ATTP is strong. They’re currently creating different guides for using the tool, developing a newsletter to share updates (readers can sign up here) and plan to make adjustments based on feedback they receive from users. And as self-described “optimists at heart,” they pointed to funders on the leading edge of participatory practices, such as Borealis Philanthropy, Canada’s Equality Fund and South Africa’s Other Foundation, while noting that the Participatory Grantmaking Community, a global knowledge sharing network, has grown to 1,400 members.

“We want this tool to be a part of that larger shift, and to enable and support especially family foundations (notoriously opaque and inaccessible) and institutional foundations (with a huge portion of the resources in philanthropy) to embrace these changes,” they said. “They can start by seeing where they are now — using the APPT self-assessment.”