“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
Philanthropy and wider civil society are being urged to change. Calls to #ShiftThePower and to embrace localisation and decolonisation grow louder across the international development sphere. In the UK, funders are urged to act urgently on diversity, equity and inclusion and funding practices to tackle systemic and structural inequalities.
In parallel, many funders – and the civil society groups they fund – confront how their resources have enabled harm and abuse. Survivors have called for redress and action on safeguarding. They have helped others recognise the harms which can be caused by civil society groups and by funders themselves.
The need to rebalance power within our sector connects these two drivers of change: to shift decision-making and to ensure that those so often marginalised, excluded and abused are included in decisions which affect them.
The growth in participatory grant-making is helping to turn this into reality. Advocates for change and practitioners from within and beyond funders have been pushing forward these shifts by sharing lessons learnt, offering peer support and forging new ways of working. Looking beyond the hashtags and the call for change, many are creating new processes and implementing programmes which seek to turn rhetoric into reality.
Practitioners involved in this work of culture change are organised through diverse groups – such as the Funder Safeguarding Collaborative and the Participatory Grantmaking Community – to collaborate and share learning on how to make this power shift happen safely.
We can only replace outmoded working methods when we show that new methods are better, more effective and safer.
These experiences have been captured in a recently published guide: Safeguarding and participatory grant-making: an essential guide for funders. This offers guidance on how to consider safeguarding in planning, delivering, and reviewing participatory grant-making processes so everyone involved in participatory grant-making is kept safe from harm.
The content of the guide is not necessarily innovative in and of itself. Tried and tested practices familiar to experienced practitioners in community development and associated fields are applied to current participatory grant-making processes.
The guide gives an overview of safeguarding and participatory grant-making, explaining key terms and getting the basics right. It offers advice on identifying and managing risks relevant to specific participatory grant-making and suitable arrangements for safeguarding. It then guides organisations through practical issues of recruiting safely, offering ongoing support and closing relationships with those involved. The guide also includes questions for those involved to ask funders themselves, so they can be assured their safety is front of funders' minds.
To create change in our sector about how power is held and used, we must continue to advocate for change. Yet we must also put it into practice and learn from it. We can only replace outmoded working methods when we show that new methods are better, more effective and safer. Guides such as this won’t shift power in themselves, but they are tools to build a better model.
Share your learning
Have you collaborated with other funders on some learning or resources that you'd like to share more widely? Get in touch to let us know.
