Transforming our grantmaking through participatory decision-making
DFF is undertaking a pilot of participatory decision-making for our grantmaking. We are seeking expressions of interest from people who would like to be part of the “peer group” (Peer Group) that will review grant applications in this pilot and decide where our funding should go. The call for expressions of interest is open from 8 October-23 October. Please apply here with a copy of your CV and a short paragraph about why you would like to take part.
We will run “Ask us Anything” calls on the following dates for anyone that wants to know more about the upcoming pilot of participatory decision-making:
- Wednesday 16 October, 11:00 CEST
- Tuesday 22 October, 12:00 CEST
Please write to us to say if you would like to join one of these calls. Also let us know if you would like to join a call later at a different time. Depending on demand we can arrange further call slots.
Background
Since 2018, DFF has provided funding support for litigation activities to advance digital rights across Council of Europe countries. By the end of 2024, we expect to have approved around 120 grants worth roughly EUR 4.5 million in total, supporting over 70 organisations and individuals in nearly 30 countries.
Over the years, based on feedback from grantees and the community, we’ve made some changes to our grantmaking, including the introduction of funding to cover long-term projects over multiple court instances and post-litigation costs; adding resources like guides, toolkits, impact monitoring lessons, and case study pages to our website; and reducing the size of our application forms and reporting requirements. However, we have a responsibility to do more to decrease power inequalities, reduce the burden on applicants and grantees, and increase the accessibility of grants to all actors in the digital rights community, including smaller organisations and those outside the traditional digital rights space.
In 2022, alongside beginning a process of wider change within our own organisation, we started working with two consultants, first Kamardip Singh then Fabiola Mizero, to review our practices, talk to other funders and others in our network to identify areas where we could make changes to our grantmaking. You can read more about the process so far and our motivations here. One of the key sections of this review was around decision-making, with a recommendation to explore participatory grantmaking and to invest in infrastructures that support the possibility of collective decision-making.
We are committed to making changes to help mitigate the extractivism in our grantmaking and support the organisations working on digital rights issues in their efforts do to transformative work, shifting power towards those most negatively affected by technological harm. We believe that one way of achieving this change is by moving decision-making about our grants from the DFF team to the community.
Participatory grantmaking pilot
There is no one definition of participatory grantmaking, but the Participatory Grantmaking Community state that “participatory grantmaking cedes decision-making power about funding — including the strategy and criteria behind those decisions — to the very communities that funders aim to serve.”
We want to move towards more participatory grantmaking because then people with lived experience of digital rights violations will decide who and which activities receive funding. It increases participants’ sense of agency, power, and leadership. It centres around an ethos that the people who are being most affected by decisions have a right to make those decisions. Heading in this direction also aligns with other changes we have made internally, including our more participatory salary structure, and distributed leadership and decision-making approaches.
We’d like to acknowledge the work of groups already doing participatory grantmaking that we have talked to directly to learn from their experiences, including the International Trans Fund, Disability Rights Fund, Thousand Currents, Black Feminist Fund, Mama Cash, Legal Empowerment Fund, Red Umbrella Fund and Share-Net International.
Key points mentioned repeatedly are that there is no one correct way to do participatory grantmaking and it requires experimentation to get it right for your particular needs. With this in mind, rather than trying to develop a perfect system from the beginning, we plan to make step-by-step changes, gradually changing each stage of our grantmaking process, making improvements based on experience and feedback along the way.
In the pilot, we are not changing everything. Of our two grant types, the process for approving our litigation support track grant, which currently makes up about 80% of our funding, will continue in the same way for now. The pilot will only affect our pre-litigation grant type, which currently uses about 20% of our funding.
The main change to the process will be at the review and recommendation stages. In the pilot, instead of the Panel of Experts we have been using since 2018, a community peer group (Peer Group) will review the applications then come together in an online meeting to collectively decide which applications they recommend be supported – in summary, taking away decision-making power from the DFF grants team.
The initial Peer Group will be a mix of people and could include some from our current Panel of Experts, current and former grantees or applicants, and others from our wider network and beyond. Not all members of the group need to have litigation expertise. A key goal is to have a diverse group of people with the knowledge to speak to the range of intersecting issues that come up in our applications, and the experiences to look at applications from the perspective of those communities that are most harmed by digital rights violations. We also want the Peer Group to be representative of the different regions within the Council of Europe.
Due to the time and responsibility involved, all members of the Peer Group will be compensated. As with our current Panel of Experts, all members of the Peer Group will sign a confidentiality policy and conflict of interest policy.
The pilot will run as part of our next regular call for applications. The call for applications will be open from December 2024 until February 2025, after which the review stage involving the Peer Group will run from March to May 2025, with decisions announced around June 2025.
Future steps
Based on lessons from the pilot it is our intention to gradually role out participatory grantmaking across all our processes, including the stages around developing strategy and criteria and selecting future members of the Peer Group.
We realise that integrating participatory grantmaking into our decision-making isn’t on its own a fix to unequal power dynamics. Transforming our grantmaking is an iterative process that will take time. We will continue to work on testing other recommendations like changing our grant types and rethinking language. There is also a wider movement to decolonise the digital rights field that we must both play a role in and learn from. Check out the work of Weaving Liberation to learn more about that. Laurence Meyer, now Co-Director of Weaving Liberation, was also instrumental in her contribution to our transforming grantmaking process while she was the Racial and Social Justice Lead at Digital Freedom Fund.
We look forward to your feedback so please get in touch if you have questions or suggestions.