Written by Alice Coren
Typically if you want to get an idea or activity funded, you apply to a funder using a form, wait for ‘them’ to decide who gets what among the hundreds or thousands of other applications, and then get an answer. For a typical funder, ‘them’ is a few senior people, maybe the trustees, maybe someone representing the financial investment.
We’ve done it here at WBCF – the panel is invited in to make decisions on the applications, and while we’ve tried to be more creative with our invitations, it’s remained a max of 4-6 people at any one time.
Advantages of PGM:
It’s a recognised and trusted way of distributing money – people with money tend to like power and staying in control, and that means that investment into funding programmes is easier. It can be quicker (and therefore less resource heavy).
A small amount of people making decisions who are used to making that kind of call, they come in, do it and then go home without a lot of support required.
Disadvantages of PGM:
Those people can sometimes be quite privileged and homogenous – if you look at the demographics of senior leadership in the charity sector in 2017, most trustees were white, wealthy men called John or David.
It’s much easier to take the emotion out of a decision on whether someone who wants funding to increase the hours they can open their food banks, if you’ve never experienced using a food bank, or been close to the daily work involved in day to day poverty.
If the same people make the decisions about who gets what resource, where is the opportunity for other people to practice those skills, or to influence the decisions? Where is the chance for transformation within that predictable process?
Participatory grant making (PGM) is an approach that takes those decisions out of closed rooms, away from those small panels of people (who can sometimes be a very long way from the issues being challenged by the fund) and into the hands of the community.
There are lots of different methods for this – it can be people voting online on ideas, attending an event to vote on ideas presented in person, a closed group of people who’ve all applied to a fund who decide amongst themselves how the money should be distributed, a rolling collective of grant recipients who continue giving it out to the next people.
Regardless of the method, the principle is that the decision making power gets as close as possible to those who are most affected by the decision. For example, if I have ten grand to give to gardening groups in Leigh, I think the best people to decide who gets what is someone who
- Live in Leigh.
- Care about gardening.
As a person who doesn’t live in Leigh, attend or run a gardening group, why would I be the person saying yes or no to whether an allotment group would benefit from a composting toilet? It definitely makes sense to either passport the money to a local group in Leigh to distribute out to other groups around them, or at very least, give the decision making power to those who are directly impacted by gardening in Leigh.
There’s thousands of examples of places around the world, and locally, who are already practicing PGM.
Locally we have Grass Roots of Wigan (GROW) who have been giving out money to grass roots community groups for a couple of years now. In Cheetham Hill, North Manchester, young people and the youth projects applying for funding, all voted together on how to allocate 200,000. Down South 131 people living in Camden, London, decided how 220,00 was given out in one year to local community ideas.
There’s more information in the Greater Manchester Participation Playbook has lots of how to’s, and links to more examples.
Here at WBCF we are going to give it a proper go in the next 12 months or so, along with all of you from the VCFSE sector. We want to try to embed different processes and skills across the groups and organisations in the borough. It’s going to be a lot of testing ideas, as nothing is ever right the first time – if at all.
Keep an eye out on our site and socials for information about how to get involved as either a decider or an applicant, or both.