We are excited to announce the launch of the participatory grantmaking initiative to support racialized migrants. 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).
RLL will engage community members to direct funding toward supporting racialized migrant youth, adults, and elders in BC who have an innovative idea for a collective, business, non-profit, campaign, or initiative that will address systemic challenges faced by racialized refugee and migrant communities. The initiative is currently being designed and will launch for applications later this year.
Staying true to the participatory and collaborative spirit of this initiative, the WES Mariam Assefa Fund and RLL have come together in this announcement to share perspectives on participatory grantmaking and its transformative potential among impacted communities.
Embracing Participatory Grantmaking to Shift Power for Greater Impact in Philanthropy
WES Mariam Assefa Fund’s perspective
What is participatory grantmaking? And why is the WES Mariam Assefa Fund utilizing this as part of the funding toolkit?
Participatory grantmaking (PGM) involves engaging community members in funding decisions to ensure resources address their most pressing needs. The WES Mariam Assefa Fund adopted this approach for the first time in 2021, realizing that traditional grantmaking often perpetuates systemic inequities. By ceding decision-making power to the communities it aims to support, the WES Mariam Assefa Fund has found that this method leads to better outcomes, shifts power to communities, and better aligns with its mission to advance equity and inclusion, particularly for refugee and migrant communities.
How is PGM different from other ways of grantmaking – how can it be challenging and rewarding?
Ceding decision-making power to impacted communities to determine where funding goes is the key difference between participatory grantmaking and traditional approaches. Participatory approaches present challenges, such as being resource-intensive, time-consuming, and potentially prone to conflicts of interests. Funders also have to grapple with organizational structures and board cultures to ensure leaders are knowledgeable and supportive of relinquishing control and trusting the community. Despite these challenges, participatory grantmaking is rewarding as it leads to more legitimate and impactful outcomes, shifts power meaningfully to communities, and uncovers funding opportunities that might otherwise be missed, or require more time to be identified by funders. This approach contrasts with traditional, top-down grantmaking by emphasizing inclusivity, equity, and responsiveness to changing community needs, resulting in more sustainable and meaningful impact.
Why aren’t we seeing more of this type of funding out there?
Participatory grantmaking is not yet widely practiced despite being a common topic among funders. Participatory practices challenge traditional, capitalist, top-down philanthropic structures and require major shifts in control, decision-making, and resources. Many funders, especially those with significant assets and power, are hesitant to adopt this approach due to concerns about losing influence, inefficiency, and the complexity of participatory resources. However, successful examples in Canada demonstrate its effectiveness. To encourage broader adoption, there is a need for more knowledge sharing and expertise from those who have successfully implemented participatory grantmaking, such as the experts the WES Mariam Assefa Fund has been working with, to address these concerns and promote more equitable and community-centered philanthropy.
Shifting Narratives and Redistributing Power: A Grantmaking Approach for Racialized Migrants
RADIUS Refugee Livelihood Lab’s perspective
Why is the PGM approach important in the context of your work with racialized migrant communities?
Over the last year, the RLL team has taken an intentional pause in our direct programming to really lean into the wisdom and words of our communities. In that time, we reflected on ways the Lab can amplify community initiatives, recognizing a serious need for more tangible financial support. The community feedback we received led us into a series of conversations with the WES Mariam Assefa Fund, who opened an exciting pathway for us to design and disburse this new grant specifically by and for racialized migrant communities.
Racialized migrants are often positioned as recipients of services, and seldom seen or uplifted as leaders, decision-makers, and changemakers. Through this initiative, we wish to challenge this narrative and are developing a grant initiative, by and for racialized migrant communities, that will disburse over $500,000 in grant-based funding.
What do we hope to accomplish with this initiative?
We aim to support community-centered and community-driven projects and initiatives that are focused on shifting narratives and systems to create long lasting change for our communities. By designing and running a grant program built for and by racialized migrants, we also hope to strengthen long-term engagement and capacity within our communities when it comes to allocating capital. All the while, we aim to foster self-belief in our communities’ existing expertise to make informed funding decisions and run programs that prioritize the community’s knowledge and lived experiences.
What will be your approach to designing this grant?
This initiative is designed by a working group of racialized migrant community members, leaders, changemakers, and organizers. All working group members are alums from RLL programs such as Beyond Borders, Migrant Systems Change Leadership Certificate, and Trampoline. They represent different lived experiences as racialized migrants across British Columbia and a variety of experiences around enabling change in the migrant sector through non-profits, community mobilization, activism, advocacy, etc. Together with our team, the members will strengthen each other’s capacity to design community-centered funding programs, become decision-makers, and lead this type of work in the future.
We are utilizing the Liberatory Design framework to guide the design process. This approach emphasizes building self-awareness to challenge inequities, shifting power dynamics to center affected voices, and fostering learning and agency in decision-making. The participatory grantmaking initiative will unfold in four phases: the Design Phase (Summer-Fall 2024) where the grant focus and criteria are established by the working group; the Application Phase (Fall-Winter 2024/25) focusing on outreach and applications; the Decision Phase (Winter-Spring 2025) for reviewing applications and disbursing grants; and the Post-Grant Phase (Summer 2025-Winter 2026) providing ongoing support, community building, and impact tracking.
Join Us in Shaping a More Inclusive Future
We encourage other funders to consider this approach, as it promotes a more equitable distribution of resources and shifts power to those who are best positioned to create meaningful change. You can refer to additional resources at the end of this announcement to learn more about this type of grantmaking.
We welcome interest from other funders who would like to learn more about this initiative and explore potential partnerships. You can learn more about our participatory grantmaking initiative by visiting our website.
For updates on the grant application process and the opening of grant applications, sign up to receive timely notifications.
Please reach out to Yara Younis (yyounis@radiussfu.com) and Shikhank Sharma (ssharma@radiussfu.com) with any questions or to learn more about this initiative.
Resources to learn more about Participatory Grantmaking
- How one foundation is using Black community members’ expertise to improve charitable programs
- GrantCraft’s Participatory Grantmaking resource hub for Funders
- A Primer for Participatory Grantmaking
- Deciding Together – Shifting Power and Resources through Participatory Grantmaking
- Tamarack Institute’s case studies on a Participatory Grantmaking Project in the Peel region
Thank you to our partner:
