As the UK’s largest community funder, we constantly seek ways to adapt and improve our grant-making practices to keep up with the changing times. Over the past few years, we’ve been working in partnership with community organisations across Scotland to deliver Participatory Grant-making projects and we thought we’d start a blog series dedicated to Participatory Grant-Making (PGM).

We want to take you on a journey, where we’ll explain what Participatory Grant-Making is, where it originated, how it’s practiced and how it relates to our work in Scotland.

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In today’s post, we’ll outline the foundations and fundamentals of PGM, but let’s start with a definition.

Though it might be challenging to agree on one universal definition of PGM, those involved in this form of grant-making activity tend to settle on the following:  

‘Participatory grant-making cedes [gives] decision-making power about funding – including the strategy and power behind those decisions – to the very communities that the funders aim to serve.’  

This definition helps us understand the process better. When we break down the term “Participatory Grant-Making,” it means ensuring genuine community participation and engagement at every stage of the grant-making process, particularly in decision-making. In traditional philanthropy or funding structures, there is often a power imbalance where the grant-maker determines funding distribution based on specific criteria, sometimes with little input from the community.

PGM reverses this process and empowers communities to make decisions based on their knowledge and experience. Instead of an informational or consultative approach, PGM involves a more relational process between applicants and funders, with community members taking a lead role in funding decisions. In practice, it provides communities with the opportunity to shape the funding and its impact.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to PGM; several models exist. Let’s explore them:

Community Board Model: A decision-making board consists solely of community members, or individuals with lived experience.

Representative Participation: Similar to the Community Board Model, this model involves community members serving on the board alongside funders, grant-makers, and other experts.

Open Collective Model: All interested parties, including applicants, participate in decision-making either in person or online.

Closed Collective Model: Relevant organizations come together to collectively understand community needs and decide how to use funding through consensus decision-making.

Rolling Collective Model: All grant recipients are involved in the process of both giving and receiving funding.

Direct Transfer: This model aims to alleviate poverty by bypassing intermediaries, with funds going directly from a funder to an individual without the need for applications, monitoring, or reporting. It’s often referred to as a “cash-first” model.

Crowdfunding: Communities come together to fundraise and allocate funds to address important issues.

Different models suit different communities and the key is ensuring genuine participation is central to the process. In future blog posts, we’ll delve into PGM in practice, share examples of PGM at the Fund, discuss its pros and cons, and outline our plans for further progress in this form of grant-making.

Join us next week as we delve into some of the ways we’ve carried out PGM.