The application process for the Participatory Grantmaking Initiative is currently in full swing. Applications opened on December 10th, 2024 and will close on February 3rd, 2025 at 10 am PT. For the application launch, we held two information sessions and are hosting open office hours and one-on-one conversations to provide accessible and tailored application support. While engaged in community outreach for the grant, we have been reflecting on our process and wanted to share our thoughts on designing this initiative – the participatory approach, how we are building collective power, and why that is important in today’s world.
Redefining Participation: Building Together, Not Just Listening
Participatory Grantmaking is defined as an approach where power regarding funding decisions is ceded to communities and groups that the funding aims to support. The growing knowledge of participatory approaches for grantmaking is vast and builds on decades of practice and experiences within different communities. While acknowledging and leaning into preceding knowledge, one of the first questions we asked ourselves was “what does participation mean to us? What does it look like? And how does it [good or true participation] make you feel?”
These questions prompted deeper connections between our ongoing approach at the Refugee Livelihood Lab and the core elements of Participatory Grantmaking.
Participation can hold various meanings. From talking with people and hearing their thoughts and opinions to getting their feedback on a particular matter. Participation in of itself does not necessarily address what happens to the thoughts or feedback provided – how they are honored or adopted and how people are involved in that process afterwards.
For us, participation meant going beyond gathering insight from the community and working jointly to design a grant that centres, and is informed by, the lives we all have lived and the experiences we have had. Participation surpasses having a voice to also feeling heard; departing from one-sided sharing to a multi-directional conversation. As a result, we were able to establish a collective sense of responsibility and ownership towards what we created together.
Underpinning this particular participatory approach is one of the grounding principles of the Refugee Livelihood Lab – “Nothing about us, without us.” We aim to centre the leadership of racialized people most impacted by issues of migration, forced migration and displacement. We also believe in the inherent rights and abilities of racialized migrants to act, resist and create practices that can transform existing challenges. We see this grantmaking initiative as another opportunity to build collective power within our communities.
Therefore, our goal from the beginning was to co-create this grant initiative alongside community members where they take the lead and enact decision-making in nearly every aspect of the grant’s design and funding decisions. Accordingly, we formed a working group to regularly convene and lead this process.

How We Brought Together the Design Group
The grant design group was composed of nine community members who are leaders, organizers, and change-makers working for migrant justice in their personal and professional lives. The foremost consideration while forming the design group was the importance of having a high level of trust within the group to have deep conversations with a greater degree of openness and candor in a brief time period. The key to trust is the presence of authentic relationships, safety, and a shared understanding of the challenges faced by racialized migrants and refugees reinforced by convoluted systems that create barriers for thriving migrant lives.
However, trust and relationship-building takes time. We have learned this through the Migrant Systems Change Leadership Certificate program (MSCL), where we focus on relationality and use an equity-centered design lens. It takes time for a group of widely diverse people to come together, build a sense of community with one another, and unpack individual experiences to then develop a collective understanding of equity, systems change, and migrant justice.
With that in mind, we decided to invite community members who are alumni from past Refugee Livelihood Lab’s programs (MSCL, Beyond Borders, Trampoline) to become part of the grant design group. Due to their experiences in the programs, the alumni had a certain level of trust with each other and trusted the RLL team’s ability to host an open and safe convening space. Each person had a foundational understanding of systems change, a strive to transform power dynamics, and an aim to influence the entrenched nature of inequities faced by racialized migrants and refugees. Given the short timeline of the design phase, all of this was crucial in allowing the group to dive into the design process, iterate quickly, and make thoughtful decisions.
While one group can never completely represent a diversity of perspectives, the design group represents intersectional experiences living as racialized migrants in this country as well as a range of experience working in the migrant sector through non-profits, community mobilization, grassroots activism, advocacy, etc. We also wanted to make sure that some members of the group had strong connections with migrant and refugee communities across British Columbia, not just the Lower Mainland. In the end, our goal was to not simply think about intersectionality and representation as a checkbox but to create a space where the multifaceted identities of the people in the design group can show-up, inform and shape the grant’s design.

The Design Process
Any type of participation starts through an invitation so that people can show up and contribute. We created a two page brief to share with potential design group members. The goal of this brief was to provide context around: What were we going to embark on? What brought us to that moment in our journey as the Refugee Livelihood Lab? How were we envisioning our time together?
The overall purpose for the design group was to: make decisions on the focus of the grant (areas, regions, types of grant, monetary amounts, etc.), create an equitable and supportive application process, identify ongoing supports for applicants, layout the assessment and decision-making process, and identify what we would qualify as success and our intended impact. In addition to the brief, we held group and individual sessions online for the invitees to ask us any questions, share their thoughts on the brief itself, and discuss next steps. We found that there was general alignment on the importance of operating from a place of care and supporting each other, sharing thoughts openly, being non-performative, and leaning into our stories, truths, and expertise in order to design the grant.
Once our invitations were accepted, we began the process with the expectation to design the grant over the course of 6 weeks in a series of 4 online sessions and 1 full day session.
The design process was guided by the practice and approach of Liberatory Design. It lays out a process for building self-awareness, pointing out inequities in the world around us, changing power dynamics, and partnering and collaborating with others to create conditions for collective liberation. The process helps guide ongoing iteration with an emphasis on intentional pauses to think/rethink and centre equity in every decision and action.
Reflecting on Barriers in Grantmaking to Inform Our Grant Design
The initial sessions focused on grounding our connection in relational trust by inviting the design group to share what matters to them, creating space to reflect, express, and process thoughts and emotions, and inviting dialogue and collective sense-making. We were then able to dive into conversations to align on the need and purpose of the grant initiative. This was guided by one main question – “What is not working [in the granting space for migrant justice]?” Powerful stories were shared by the design group about their lives, work and involvement in the migrant justice space and experiences with different types of funders. We are sharing notes from these conversations below in the hopes that this can help funders and colleagues in the space reflect on where, when and how these issues show up in their own work and approach to funding.
What is not working in the granting space for migrant justice?
“There are limited opportunities to learn about funders, leading to uncertainty about potential discrimination during the grant application and selection process. Further to this we might not know the history/harms/practices of funders prior to applying.”
“The lengthy and non-communicative process of applying for a grant can be traumatic which feels similar to other processes that migrants often have to face.”
“Overwhelming and alienating process, with complex requirements, inaccessible language, and unnecessary steps.
“Funder prefers newness rather than building upon existing.”
“No flexibility in shifting projects when life circumstances change. There’s a need to prioritize people over rigid project deliverables.”
“The whole process of applying for the grant is daunting. Where do I start? How do I talk to the funder? Should I have a fully thought out plan and partners first and then apply? Sometimes, I don’t know how to budget something for the idea.”
“Funders require extensive proof of background and eligibility, often dismissing the contributions of those on the ground doing the work.”
“It’s very confusing if I understand if I even qualify for grants. They have workshops but it’s still not very clear. Workshop times are not accessible as I’m working”
“Requirements like sector-specific language and finding matching funds create barriers for new or smaller organizations. Many grants are geared toward younger leaders, leaving out older or senior applicants.”
“Assumptions that you should spend the money only on the project and not grant money to support the human doing the work. It’s a reinforcement of systemic oppression and an assumption that we shouldn’t getting paid to be doing good work”
“Funders prioritizing questions that will make it easier for them to filter the responses rather than giving space to ask important questions to organizations about who is doing the work”
You can find a more detailed list of barriers and challenges in the granting space here.
When asked – “What do we want to do differently?,” the design group reflected on wanting to “address the challenge of feeling incapable of securing grants due to a lack of grant writing expertise”, “channel feelings of anger in the space into finding productive and beneficial outcomes”, “shift the narrative from merely asking for money to creating meaningful, equitable partnerships”, and “hold their [community member/applicants] hand through the process when they arrive to apply for the grant”. To encompass all of this, the design group created a ‘Guiding Compass for Making Decisions‘. The purpose of this document was to help set some guideposts that could regularly anchor the group regarding the purpose of our work and act as reference points to guide tricky decisions or during moments where clarity was lacking.
Shaping the Focus of the Grant
Informed by these conversations, the next step was to define the overarching focus of the grant. The design group made some initial decisions to:
- Focus on community-centered, and/or community-led initiatives because folks with lived experience as racialized migrants and refugees face difficulties in accessing funding and/or launching particularly when their work is focused on systems change.
- Focus on grassroots initiatives in order to challenge systemic inequities since systems change work is often approached from a distance and detached, at best and utterly uninformed at worst, from the realities of communities and experiences of grassroots groups.
- Support individuals, groups, collectives, and organizations (nonprofits, charities, social enterprises, co-operatives, etc.) since systems change work should not be limited or dictated by organizational registration statuses.
- Welcome both new and ongoing initiatives. The design group identified that oftentimes what exists currently is not working so we need different ways of addressing the issues faced by racialized migrant communities. While also acknowledging that there are ongoing initiatives that are working towards true transformation and radical change but they do not receive the resources and support that they need.
- Center the importance of intersectional approaches in the grant narrative because racialized migrant communities are not a single monolith. Addressing the inequities they face requires that organizations, projects, or initiatives recognize and embrace the complexity of migrant and refugee lived experiences and identities.
These priorities eventually informed the development of the decision-making rubric which will be used to guide discussions on funding decisions. Subsequent conversations within the design group went deeper into the core of the grant program mechanics. We built upon the knowledge and adapted many of the insightful questions in Grantcraft’s resource on participatory grantmaking (Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resource through Participatory Grantmaking) to guide us (see table below).
Guiding Questions to Layout the Grant Mechanics and Structure
Grant Focus and Amounts
- What is our offer to potential grantees and applicants? What would we bring to the partnership?
- What kind of grants will be provided?
- How many grants should we provide and what sizes? What are different grant allocation scenarios that we should consider?
- How will we define success? What kind of reporting we should let applicants know to expect? How will we know we have made a difference or an impact?
Application Process and Support
- What advice and guidance should we provide to applicants so they can make informed decisions about applying for the grant?
- What will the application process look like? How will we make it supportive and reduce barriers to applying?
- Should we aim for a single intake or do multiple intakes? What are the positives and negatives of each?
- Should we do a multi-step application process – expression of interest and formal application – or a single step? What would make the most sense based on our capacity while keeping a low-barriers, simplified process?
- What support will we provide to applicants?
- In what ways can we make the language more accessible to applicants?
- How will we spread the word about the grant and do outreach in the community?
Decision-Making Process
- What will be the grant decision-making process? Are there stages to this? How do final decisions get made (e.g., consensus, voting, etc.)?
- What decision-making criteria will we utilize?
- Is there a conflict-of-interest process that also acknowledges and values the first-hand experiences and knowledge of the decision-making group?
- What happens if there is disagreement in the decision-making committee? How is this resolved (e.g., consensus, voting, etc.)?
Building a Low-Barrier and More Equitable Grant Process
Throughout our discussions, the underlying attention was on surfacing ways in which the grant requirements and the process could create an applicant experience that was more equitable, less burdensome, more accessible, transparent, and leaned more into compassion than judgment and competition. Some of the ways in which we did this was by:
- Designing a single stage process with a short application narrative (2-3 pages, if written) instead of an initial letter of intent or expression of interest followed by a detailed application.
- Not requiring any additional attachments (such as team & staff resumes, letters of support, strategic plans, business plans, annual reports, logic models, theories of change, financial statements or projections, etc.) from applicants.
- Actively communicating that applicants should only submit the requested information and that if the decision-making group has additional questions, they will make very specific and simple requests of information from the applicants during the decision stage
- Not having a specific format and rigid requirements for project budget.
- Providing multiple mediums of support and assistance in the application process – open office hours, one-on-one meetings, individualized application support with a dedicated staff member.
- Reaching out to key individuals in the community to support with application outreach and compensating them for their labour.
- Offering funding to organizations and groups with registrations statuses including unregistered groups, collectives, and individuals.
- Offering unrestricted funding that can be used to fund operations and programming.
- Including different methods of communicating information in the application (audio, video, online survey, email, and/or re-purposing past application)
- Sharing the detailed decision-making criteria during the application period.
Despite these steps, there are multiple ideas and processes that would have embedded deeper equity into this process. These include: providing translation support to applicants and accepting applications in different languages, creating a micro-grants stream, promising an opportunity to receive follow-on funding, accepting and assessing any past funder applications without editing to match our decision-making criteria, providing even more support to applicants around navigating digital platforms and/or allowing hand-written submission, etc.
We were unable to consider these ideas mostly due to the pilot nature of this grant program and the resulting capacity constraints such as staffing to run it and the limited capacity of the community members helping design the program and making the funding decisions. While also acknowledging that there might be ways in which we could have further advanced equity in this grant program that we might not be aware of. Over the course of this pilot program (until Summer 2026) our plan is to continually reflect, gather feedback from the community, understand, document, and openly share the exact ways in which our process could have been better, more accessible, more humane, and more equitable.

What We Learned While Facilitating the Design Process
At the Refugee Livelihood Lab, relationality is not just about creating opportunities for people to come together. It is the longer-term journey we envision alongside our community towards deepening relationships and building collective power. As such, we embed relationality within the design of all that we do. In context of the Participatory Grantmaking Initiative, it meant creating a process built on trust and relationships that honoured the time, experiences, and insights of the design group. It also meant being flexible in creating ample space and time to unpack and discuss the context of each moment we found ourselves in.
And while the design process enabled participation of the people involved, the process itself was also led forward and adapted by the people. Early on, based on the depth of conversations we realized that the one full day in-person session and four online sessions would not be enough so we added two additional online sessions and another full day session for the grant design conversations. The design sessions occurred in three phases where each phase was followed by a break of 1-2 weeks, which allowed us to digest discussions from previous sessions and naturally forced us to avoid rushed decisions. During these breaks, we concretized what was shared to paper and made edits to the plan for the following phase of design sessions.
As the RLL team, we saw our role as facilitators who would guide a series of conversations and to capture all that was shared by the grant design group with care and consent. However, taking on the role of facilitators in this process comes with its own tension of feeling that we were being too hands-on while also not wanting to drive or influence the process for the design group. To navigate this, we continuously checked in with the group to see what they preferred and what worked for them – was it having a flexible agenda? Was it having no agenda at all? Did they want us to be active participants in the conversations or did they want us to be observers? Ultimately, it came down to how we approached the participatory element of the process and what the group required from us for them to be fully engaged and present each time we convened. Overall, this experience has taught us that participatory grantmaking requires you to be nimble, flexible and adaptive to what is emerging. With spaciousness and trust came a willingness to embrace imperfection and to be honest about our pitfalls as well.
Looking Forward and Defining Success
Looking forward, we will be transitioning into the decision-making process for the grant which will be led by a decision-making group composed of 7 community members.
Success of this initiative is not only about achieving tangible outcomes but also fostering a meaningful experience for everyone involved. It means ensuring that every applicant feels valued, cared for, and respected. It also means sustaining the well-being of staff and minimizing burnout, reflecting a commitment to care at every level. We are continuing to reflect on what success means and feels like in this initiative, and will also work with each grantee to understand what it means for them.
At a systemic level, we are trying to nurture connections that create and deepen relationships that will serve as the foundation for long-term change. As one of our colleagues in the philanthropic space recently noted: “For social change to occur, it is relationships that must serve as the scaffolding for growth. This relational foundation is not a secondary feature; it is the essence of meaningful, adaptive change.”
While there is a lot to do and learn in this journey for us, we see our work as moving one step closer to reducing systemic barriers and advancing additional resources for migrant-led initiatives, while also creating a gentle disruption to the status quo of the fundraising and philanthropic space.
Thank you to our partner:
This initiative is a result of a partnership between the RADIUS Refugee Livelihood Lab (RLL) and the World Education Services Mariam Assefa Fund (WES Mariam Assefa Fund).
