There’s a growing movement in the UK around Participatory Grantmaking. The basic principle of which recognises that grantmakers don’t hold all the answers, the community does. We just need to help them get there…
People living in and working in a place often have the best understanding of what that place needs to thrive. Yet, all too often they are left out of the decision-making process.
We worked with Camden Giving, who have been doing Participatory Grantmaking for several years, to help us design and deliver a 6-week long programme of workshops. We recruited professionals from local organisations and asked them to invite along a person with lived experience, so the panel included a mix of experiences from the Gosport area.
Our Participatory Grantmaking project gave people in Gosport the opportunity to shape a physical activity grant that would increase activity levels and help local people feel able to take part.
Across the sessions, the panel explored what grantmaking is, local barriers to physical activity, and how insight could be turned into priorities for funding. This then helped them to design the application questions, the fund’s the priorities, who received funding and how much people could apply for.
If you always do things in the same way, you often get the same results. We were finding that we were hearing from similar organisations and supporting similar types of ideas. We hoped that by changing the process, we might reach new people, hear different perspectives, and support ideas that were more closely shaped by the community itself.
Learn more about Participatory Grantmaking on the Camden Giving website.
Participatory grantmaking does take longer to design. It was also more expensive than a traditional grant process because we paid panel members, worked with Camden Giving, hired a venue, and made sure there were refreshments.
But the value created because of that additional resource was huge. By the time we launched the fund, we knew more about Gosport: where people went, where posters should go, who we needed to speak to, and what mattered locally. We built relationships, met people, and understood the town and borough in a way we never could have from reading reports or sitting at our desks.
Helping us tackle inactivity to boost health and happiness
