To the Editor:
The Covid-19 pandemic shines a spotlight on the precariousness of societies that value the lives of the wealthy (as well as those perceived as healthy) more than the lives of those without. Systems that have ignored unequal access to basic services and income are now hurting everyone. It is becoming clearer that when some are marginalized, everyone is at risk.
Philanthropy — where the wealthy and “healthy” are traditionally the decision makers — is reeling in this pandemic. Many institutions are rightly considering how to make changes. Some leaders have abandoned inflexible, bureaucratic, and project-focused approaches. Kathy Reich, who directs the Build program at the Ford Foundation, has urged philanthropy to use this opportunity to disrupt “business as usual.” In her opinion piece in the Chronicle (March 31), Reich writes that “when it comes down to it, the real problem at hand is that many grant makers struggle to truly trust our nonprofit partners. We don’t want to give up our control over their work.”
To meaningfully support the nonprofit sector at this time, she argues that funders must transform their practices to be more flexible and less bureaucratic. She also says that they should offer unrestricted and easy access to grant money and provide long-term support. We agree heartily and have watched Ford ”walk the talk,” as an institution that has been leading many institutional donors in implementing good practice.
We greatly appreciate funders who practice greater flexibility, and we challenge funders to go further.
Just as our societies need to take a hard look at the dangers of excluding and devaluing people, philanthropy also needs to examine its own power dynamics and their impact on change.
Who is sitting at funder decision-making tables? Who has the power to decide on resource allocation? And why does it take a crisis for funders to understand the pressure that the have-nots are under and to reconsider how funding is done?
We strongly believe donors should take the next, hard step to reconsider who develops their strategies, who makes their decisions, and who structures their funding in the first place. People have a right to be involved in the decisions that affect their lives. Now is the time for foundations to be in solidarity with the people they serve, and they can do this by increasing their involvement in philanthropic decisions.
Participatory grant making — a practice that moves decision making from institutions and puts it in the hands of people affected by the grants themselves — does just this. This approach centers itself on the people who have experienced the injustice funders seek to address. Now more than ever, funders must not presume they know the solutions for people affected by Covid-19. They must not only ask people who are affected, but they must also cede money and power to those who are.
Most grant making in the time of Covid-19 requires adjustments, and certainly, this is also true of participatory grant making, where decision making is often done face-to-face. These are challenges that can be overcome, including with technology. For instance, the Young Feminist Fund at FRIDA (which stands for flexibility, resources, inclusivity, diversity, action) enables grant applicants themselves to serve as the grant decision makers, by ranking or scoring applications online. At the Disability Rights Fund, grant-making committee members can determine grants via online surveys and meet virtually to discuss strategy. And the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia, runs several of its participatory grant programs entirely virtually. Many participatory grant makers have experience operating virtually.
The challenges for groups to make decisions together (while apart) are real. But, worse than that challenge, is the challenge of a funder from a privileged background making guesses about what other people need and want. There is no better way to do that than to ask, and indeed trust, the people that funders seek to serve by offering them real decision-making power about how to spend money intended for their own benefit.
As Gara LaMarche, former head of Atlantic Philanthropies, wrote in the Nation last week, “In my view, more than benevolence is needed. What is needed is a shift in power. The best hope in the near term is to build on some encouraging signs of innovation and democratization we’re seeing from within philanthropy itself, with funding decisions increasingly being influenced, and even made, by those closest to the ground.”
In the next several months and years, funders will roll out well-intentioned funding to affected communities. As they do so, we urge them to upend grant making by trusting the communities they seek to serve to know best where to put the money in their movements. We are firm believers in the motto of the disability rights movement: “Nothing about us without us.”
As funders make changes, we believe they must ask the people they seek to serve to join as decision makers about how, where, and on what to spend philanthropic funds. In the words of Moukhtar Kocache, co-founder Rawa: Creative Palestinian Communities Fund, “More than ever, the work [of] expanding participation and shifting power through access to resources and decision making — is more meaningful and urgent.”
Diana Samarasan
Executive Director
Disability Rights Fund
Boston
Katy Love
Philanthropy consultant and former director of grant making at the Wikimedia Foundation
San Francisco Bay Area