Collaborative Grantmaking Fund

Participatory Grantmaking by Shift Health Accelerator

Shift established the Collaborative Fund, a participatory grantmaking model designed and led by an Investment Committee made up of community-based organizations and community leaders in California, including California Black Women’s Health Project, Insight Garden Program, Transformative In-Prison Workgroup, Conscious Cultura, Metropolitan Transportation Commission and UPAASF Foundation, Del Paso Heights Growers Alliance, Back to the Start, and East Los Angeles Community Foundation.

Project Overview

In 2022, the Collaborative Fund used a participatory process to disburse $200K, seeded by Blue Shield of California Foundation, to community leaders across California. Through this model, every step of the “traditional” funding process, from vision setting, to the application, to key grant decisions, to defining what success would look like, was led by community leaders. Shift’s participatory model was subsequently replicated to disburse over $21M in participatory grantmaking stemming from this project.

Shift Health Approach

Shift played both a design and facilitation role throughout the process, engaging with relationships that existed through our organizational network to initially recruit and co-design with community-based organizations across California. The goals for this project were several-fold:

fully engage with community leaders to understand what they would want from a participatory grantmaking model, particularly when it comes to addressing existing challenges and dynamics within philanthropy;
ensuring funding successfully reaches a diversity of community-based organizations through this participatory process — and documenting learnings, tensions, and successes along the way;
demonstrating to funders and healthcare institutions that participatory resourcing is not only doable but maximally impactful when it comes to getting resources to organizations that have the greatest potential to impact community-level health outcomes.

While participatory grantmaking was not a novel concept in 2022, it was still very rarely operationalized, particularly in health and healthcare settings. This model was Shift’s proof point to the sector regarding shared power and decision-making.

Implementation

Shift’s stewardship of the model and Investment Committee took place over several phases. First, the Investment Committee members were convened and initial container design took place, taking into account the questions and insights raised by Committee members. Committee Members also received education and examples related to participatory decision-making and grantmaking specifically. Subsequently, the Investment Committee began shaping other parts of a soup-to-nuts grantmaking process: they created an alternative application process that was allowed prospective grantees to apply via written form, video, or interview. The Committee also developed selection criteria grounded in shared values, and determined how they would establish grant size and overall number of grantees. Throughout this work, Shift facilitated relationship-building and reflection across the Committee. The process of grant selection itself took place over several rounds, and saw Committee Members navigating their stated criteria and relationships with one another to come to final decisions.

1200

people reached through listening and engagement

3

Equity Action Lab projects selected

4

webinar sessions developed for EAL sites and applicants

Results & Impact

Shift’s facilitation of the participatory grantmaking model ensured that the challenging aspects of a fully collaborative process were identified and discussed. Investment Committee participants cited significant value in having direct say over how financial resources were distributed, and also were enthusiastic about the actual health activities and outcomes that the Fund enabled. Examples of Collaborative Fund grantee progress can be found here.

Additionally, Shift documented the learnings and insights from this pilot process, capturing the nuances of designing participatory processes related to health capital. Our work led to:

A community-led, values-based vision for grantmaking that identified — and worked to solve for — structural barriers and power dynamics that typically impact funding;
Tools, templates, and process documentation for collaborative grantmaking shared between multiple organizations with a diversity of perspectives, sector expertise, budget size, etc.
Successful deployment of $200K, leading to impactful work on the ground related to food systems, criminal justice and reentry, housing, Black women’s health, and more
Subsequent interest in and adoption of participatory grantmaking principles into capital overseen by Investment Committee members’ own organizations