Across Australia and around the world, there is a movement towards decision-making processes becoming more distributed, more local, and led by the people that they affect. In these processes futures are being shaped by the diverse voices who are traditionally left out of planning and strategy processes.
With the rise in community foundations and the growth of trust-based philanthropy practices to deliberative democracy and community-led action, we are seeing shifts in how resources move and who gets to decide where they go. Within this movement, participatory granting places decision-making about funding in the hands of those closest to the work. It shifts not just who allocates resources, but how those decisions are made, why they are made, and what accountability looks like. It offers communities and groups more say over where funds go, and offers funders a way of working with communities that centres trust, transparency, and shared responsibility.
Participatory granting creates granting processes, strengthens relationships and capabilities, surfaces new ideas, builds collective leadership, and nurtures more resilient and connected communities.
Some examples from around the world
We recently showcased some of the best examples of participatory granting in Australia and beyond in our LinkedIn newsletter.
Here are a few highlights:
Plymouth Octopus Project (POP) UK. POP has been testing participative decision making, open accountability, collaboration and learning for over 10 years. They have raised over £10.1 million from 335 successful funding applications from over 60 different funders from 2014-2025.
FRIDA The Young Feminist Fund (Global South). FRIDA is internationally recognised for its participatory granting model, where young feminist collectives, grantee partners, and those applying for funding, as well as young feminist activist members of the FRIDA Global Advisory Committee are engaged in decision making about its grantmaking process and about where funding goes.
Good Death Impact Network (GDIN) Australia. Since 2020, GDIN has invested more than $165,000 into network-led ideas that align with systems levers for change spanning death festivals (Adelaide and Good2Go), a grief literacy program, a bereavement companioning pilot, and grassroots-based death care workshops.
Is participatory granting for me?
Participatory granting will be of particular interest to:
Funders aiming to shift inequities by strengthening participation, and supporting community-led change
Governments and local councils interested in testing community-driven commissioning
Resilience committees interested in going beyond planning to collectively granting projects
Place based and community-led initiatives interested in strengthening self-determination
Social movements including community fundraisers and gifting circles interested in working with shared resources in meaningful ways.
What it looks like in practice
Whilst participatory granting needs to be designed to suit each context, in general participatory granting:
Builds a core group of community decision makers, with links to a wider network of community voices and partners
Includes community-defined vision and funding criteria
Uses collective, deliberative decision making that prioritises learning, relationships and collaboration
Funds a portfolio of connected ideas that work together to create holistic change
Designs accessible granting processes that meets communities where they’re at
Supports applicants to develop project ideas or step through the granting process
Works with specific project ideas (differing from participatory budgeting that worked with broad allocations)
Works on shifting the deeper funding systems, power structures and resource flows
Why choose participatory granting?
Participatory granting can create outcomes beyond those typically created by traditional funding processes
Building collaboration: Traditional granting often puts grant seekers in competition with one another, which can fracture relationships, erode trust, and limit collaboration. Participatory granting flips this by cultivating relationships and bringing community together to align on shared purpose, form partnerships and make collective decisions around shared resources.
Involving community in decisions that affect them: With the growing movement of community-led place-based change, communities increasingly expect to be involved in decisions that affect them. Excluding them perpetuates the myth that communities lack the capabilities to make decisions for themselves when in fact they bring deep contextual knowledge.
Sharing power for more equitable outcomes: Participatory granting redistributes power and creates conditions for recognising inherent capability, collective ownership, and more resilient change efforts.
Matching global shifts towards trust based funding: The global trend amongst funders to transparency, reciprocity, trust, and relational practices is strongly underway. Participatory granting is a practical way to put these values into practice.
What value can it bring for funders and communities?
Participatory granting is a strategically effective and ethical choice for funders working to shift entrenched inequity. Based on TACSI’s experiences and global evidence, participatory granting helps:
Improve the quality, relevance and diversity of ideas.
Strengthen social cohesion, relationships and trust, building connections between communities, networks, services and funders in shared partnership.
Deliver on existing objectives such as equity, self-determination, community-led change, resilience, and trust-based funding.
Improve the quality of decisions and distribute risk by drawing on local collective intelligence to reduce unseen challenges.
Strengthens capabilities that remain long after the funding – in practices like shared decision making, community governance, as well as developing and implementing innovation projects.
While it is not a magic fix on its own, participatory granting can create conditions that offer a more effective pathway to equitable funding that is led by community.