For thirty years, Global Fund for Children, or GFC, has made small grants to community-based organizations that support children. They’re quite global: they've facilitated $63 million to more than 1,000 organizations across 90 countries.
Three years ago, GFC launched their first-ever participatory grantmaking program. The Spark Fund is an initiative that provides flexible grants to organizations selected by youth panelists, according to criteria that the youth themselves define.
Over the last three years GFC convened more than five panels of young activists for these participatory pilots. The first panels were global with geographic and issue areas determined by the participants, followed by a participatory climate action fund in Southeast Asia, and another centered around the mental health of young Black men and boys in Atlanta in the United States.
GFC has considered this participatory grantmaking work a marked success, and has plans to expand it – extending the climate action work further into Southeast Asia, and building out the mental health work to South Africa and the United Kingdom.
We spoke with John Hecklinger, GFC’s co-CEO, about this journey and how it’s affected their work overall. The conversation has been edited for clarity.
Global Fund for Children has been in operation for 30 years. What problem were you “solving for” when you decided to launch a participatory grantmaking program?
The same problem that we’re trying to solve in all of our grant making, which is: How do you link groups that have been excluded from philanthropic resources for all kinds of reasons – organizations with strong track records and results, but still considered too nascent, too informally registered, too small financially, or without audited financials.
We saw participatory grantmaking as an opportunity to operate in a different way that's more in sync with our mission and values. We wanted to listen to what was important to youth in different parts of the world. I also think, in my mind, the curiosity we were trying to satisfy was: How different are the decisions that youth would make from the decisions that we would make as a team?
So what did you find in that regard?
In the first pilot round in Asia, we convened an internal staff group and went through the same kind of evaluation process using the same system that the youth participants used, and our decisions were very different. Out of the twelve finalists both groups picked, only three were the same.
It was striking how consistent the signals were from the young people about what themes resonated across regions: climate change and mental health.
We also noticed some patterns. The young people were very conscious of being a regional group, and made an effort to be very geographically balanced in the organizations they chose. We also noticed that our team picked more nascent organizations than the youth panel.
There have been increasing conversations and resources around how foundations can evolve to be more participatory, in ways beyond grantmaking. How do you think about that?
Our participatory grantmaking programs have had a big influence on all our work at Global Fund for Children. Yes, it's another mode of grantmaking that we do, and it is here to stay – but it's also shaped how our more traditional modes of grantmaking take place.
For example – when we launch an initiative – a cohort of organizations working on a particular issue in a particular part of the world – we start by going scouting to identify community-based organizations having a unique impact in their communities. Typically it was somebody on the Programs team who would do some desk research, consult with existing partners and organizations that they trust, and visit the potential new partners in-person. It was a very GFC-centered process of decision-making.
We’ve gone from that, to inviting partners to join us on those scouting missions and being part of the selection process, to actually saying, “You know what, let's do this in an even more participatory way.”
We now convene groups of community leaders in the region to do the scouting with us. The process we used to spin up one of our recent initiatives – U muuk´il xch’ ́uupalo’ob, or Strength of Girls, based in Yucatan, Mexico – was dramatically more participatory in the selection of organizations than anything we've done in the past.
The experience is also affecting how we think about our internal structures and leadership – how we integrate our Youth Leadership Council more fully in what we do; how we've recruited for the next round of board members. We’ve seen a lot of strength, and we're letting those experiences in more.
There’s also been criticism that participatory grantmaking itself is not a silver bullet. Any big innovation in philanthropy is going to lose some of the magic as it becomes standardized. And there are unexpected consequences, like the nuance you mentioned about some young grant reviewers selecting fewer nascent organizations.
There’s been a push to move beyond “shifting power” to broader structural reform – for example, as Laura Vergara argued in a recent Proximate interview, foundations transferring endowment ownership directly to proximate institutions. How do you think about that?
There are problematic things about the practice of philanthropy, no matter how you slice it. The money is often coming from the Global North, going to other places. And ultimately, somebody is making decisions about money for somebody else.
When I think about participatory grantmaking, I believe there is definitively a moral imperative. It feels like the right thing to do. And we now know it produces different results. On the other hand, participatory grantmaking must be well-resourced with time and funding, especially to work with young people to robustly and meaningfully facilitate decision-making processes.
So, is it all worth it? Can we achieve some sort of efficiency at scale? We’re doing everything we can to make it generative for everybody in the process as we go along. And if we are continuing to fund organizations that we otherwise would not have discovered and funded, then that's on mission for us.
[One thing I wonder] is if we can help more proximate organizations by lending some of our infrastructure. How do we avoid duplication of efforts? Is there something about our history and credibility and such that could help unlock more resources for emerging funds? We have growing experience providing fiscal sponsor and grant management support to peers in the US and the UK. What elements of our infrastructure could be helpful in helping new initiatives spin up more easily to gather more funding and move resources where they are needed?
One last topic – there’s a term that’s popped up in the participatory grantmaking space, including during a few sessions at Climate Week: accompaniment.
It’s described as a way to walk alongside grantees, and build their capacity and agency over time. But some worry that it can also be perceived as paternalistic, especially when dealing with young people. How do you interpret this term?
I like that term because it works better for what we do than “capacity development”. “Accompaniment” leaves open the possibilities that you know they're on a journey, and you're walking with them. You don't always know where that journey is going to end up, but you know you're walking together.
So to me the term has more of a sense of solidarity and less of a power dynamic than “capacity strengthening” or “organizational development” which have too often been about: How do we make you better grantees in our system? How can we fortify your organization so you can be yet another implementer of the system's wishes?
Interestingly, it was our Americas team at Global Fund for Children that first started using the term internally. There’s an interesting difference between how [social impact] organizations start and grow in different regions of the world. In Latin America, there is often community rootedness and solidarity at the birth of new organizations – compared to other places that have been more awash in development funding and aid.
Meanwhile, in communities with long histories of funding from USAID and INGO presence, you’ll sometimes see [a grassroots leader] ask the funder: “What would you like me to do with your flexible funding?” That’s where the conversation starts.
That’s where I think accompaniment can be helpful. We can help our partners think through how to deploy funding in a way that isn’t about “Great, now I can do the things I need to do to get more money from the system.” It’s really about the vision for change they are creating with their communities.
The song reflects a past era of development that led to decades of error
Vincent Mwangi