Hamilton Community Foundation launches $500,000 participatory granting pilot

A pilot program that shares decision-making power with local charities is one way that Hamilton Community Foundation is addressing historical underfunding for marginalized communities.

The pilot employs “participatory granting” — a trust-based, community-engaged approach to granting that shifts decision-making power to those most impacted by the funding.

It was launched late last year with the goal of enhancing equitable resource distribution and community empowerment among local equity-deserving community-led charitable organizations. According to Queen’s University, equity deserving communities are groups that experience significant collective barriers participating in society. In the charitable sector, this also includes groups that are historically underfunded. HCF’s pilot focuses on six priority groups: Black, racialized, Indigenous, Deaf persons/persons with disabilities, women and gender diverse and 2SLGBTQ+.

The pilot ran from November 2023 to June 2024. It started with the establishment of a Community Panel that provided a structure based on addressing community needs, created eligibility criteria and developed the call for expressions of interest. The panel ultimately selected ten local organizations who applied to participate in a “Granting Circle” which convened several times to share organizational needs.

HCF provided $500,000 that this group could distribute among themselves. This past summer the group decided to distribute the funds evenly, with each charity receiving $50,000. The funds came through the Community Fund which supports the foundation’s leadership work.

The ten charitable groups in the Granting Circle are: African Caribbean Cultural Potpourri Inc., BLK OWNED, Disability Justice Network of Ontario, Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion, Mishka Social Services, Mizizi Inc., Refuge: Hamilton Centre for Newcomer Health, Sexual Assault Centre (Hamilton and Area), Sisters in Sync and Somali Community in Hamilton. The group will meet again annually for the next two years to decide on additional distributions depending on community need.

The pilot is a new approach for HCF and follows a movement in the community foundation sector towards participatory funding instead of traditional hierarchical approaches which are seen as exclusive and insufficiently responsive to the needs of equity-deserving communities.

Research suggests that traditional philanthropy has underfunded historically marginalized communities. For example, a report called Unfunded: Black Communities Overlooked by Canadian Philanthropy found that Black-serving organizations received only 0.7 percent of all grants distributed by community foundations in Canada in 2017 and 2018. Locally, HCF also identified a gap with fewer than 100 donor advised grants directed to equity-deserving communities out of nearly 1,000 total grants in 2022-23.

“Sharing power takes time,” says Rudi Wallace, who was recently appointed as the foundation’s new President and CEO. “When we trust in our community, we strengthen relationships. When we shift power, we move towards greater inclusion. That’s the positive change we’re looking for.”

Read the full report on the participatory granting pilot here.