Ingest Participatory Grantmaking During Polycrisis

astro.config.mjs

@@ -70,6 +70,7 @@ export default defineConfig({
             { slug: 'concepts/cargo-cult-democracy' },
             { slug: 'concepts/tech-place-is-education' },
             { slug: 'concepts/funding-the-commons' },
+            { slug: 'concepts/participatory-grantmaking' },
             { slug: 'concepts/plural-mechanisms' },
             { slug: 'concepts/network-societies' },
             { slug: 'concepts/movements-not-arguments' },

docs/source-queue.md

@@ -93,7 +93,7 @@ move it to **Processed** with its date and issue number. 127 queued, ~39 remaini
 - [ ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqDyGfjJZJI — #6- Distributed/Decentralized/Polycentric - Primavera De Filippi, Michel Bauwens, Weaver Weinbaum (60m)
 - [ ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqOsCgSs0e8 — P2P Ecosystems Where they’ve been, and where they're going with Michel Bauwens (72m)
 - [ ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQLWBnQYd4M — Commoning as a Constructive Disruption of the Climate Impasse with Dr. David Bollier (65m)
-- [ ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OS0knZwh28 — Participatory Grantmaking During Polycrisis (47m)
+- [x] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OS0knZwh28 — Participatory Grantmaking During Polycrisis (47m) — Nino Ugrekhelidze (Dalan Fund), Yara Dowani (Rawa), Ruby Johnson (Global Resilience Fund), moderated by Coco Jervis (Mama Cash) → concepts/participatory-grantmaking (NEW), ecosystem +8 (Rawa, Dalan Fund, Global Resilience Fund, Purposeful, Women Win, MADRE, Mama Cash, PGM Community), library. Backlog = issue #37. [Tier 2] (2026-08-07)
 - [ ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSFCmLOBG9g — Civic Community Fund and Ecosystem, Korea & Japan (Fireside Chat) - Tokyo 2024 (20m)
 - [ ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kURvQJQpt8M — Tackling East Asia’s Population Decline Issues with Local Coop’s Subsystem - Tokyo 2024 (24m)
 

src/content/docs/concepts/overview.mdx

@@ -64,6 +64,7 @@ It's a living reference that grows over time. Where a concept has real-world exa
   <LinkCard title="Cargo cult democracy" href="/concepts/cargo-cult-democracy/" description="Build the people, not just the democratic “artifact”." />
   <LinkCard title="Technology's place is education" href="/concepts/tech-place-is-education/" description="Why literacy, not tooling, is the bottleneck." />
   <LinkCard title="Funding the commons" href="/concepts/funding-the-commons/" description="How citizen infrastructure gets paid for without being captured." />
+  <LinkCard title="Participatory grantmaking" href="/concepts/participatory-grantmaking/" description="When the communities a fund serves decide where its money goes — and what that does under crisis." />
   <LinkCard title="Plural mechanisms: quadratic voting, funding & Harberger taxes" href="/concepts/plural-mechanisms/" description="Market-inspired tools that capture how strongly people care, and share property more fairly." />
   <LinkCard title="Network societies (not network states)" href="/concepts/network-societies/" description="Keeping communities connected, instead of exiting to found new ones." />
   <LinkCard title="Movements, not arguments" href="/concepts/movements-not-arguments/" description="Why power is shared under pressure, not persuasion, and what that means for democratic innovation." />

src/content/docs/concepts/participatory-grantmaking.md

@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+---
+title: Participatory grantmaking
+description: Grant funds where the people closest to the work — activists and community members, not programme officers — decide where the money goes, and what that model does under crisis.
+---
+
+Most grants are decided far from the work: a foundation's staff read applications, score them, and pick the winners. **Participatory grantmaking (PGM)** hands those decisions to the communities the money is meant to serve. The activists who will live with the consequences — who know which local group is real and which is paperwork — are the ones who discuss and decide. The fund's staff handle the plumbing: due diligence, moving the money, care.
+
+## How it works
+
+The mechanics vary, but the shared core is a panel of community members and activists holding real decision-making power over a fund's grants:
+
+- **Rawa**, a Palestinian fund piloting since 2018, runs no open application round at all. Community activists across historic Palestine — Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, '48 — are organised in "clusters" that nominate grassroots initiatives they know first-hand, and a community committee discusses the nominations and decides. Funding is unconditional and reporting deliberately light, on the premise that the community knows best what it needs.
+- The **Dalan Fund**, covering 16 countries across Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central and North Asia, puts decision power in a **Resource Distribution Committee** of fifteen regional activists — a rotational role, so nobody settles into gatekeeper status. The committee doesn't just pick grantees; it co-designs the fund's whole strategy.
+- The **Global Resilience Fund**, a collaborative feminist fund for girls and young feminists in crisis, launched in 2020 by twenty founding partners at the height of COVID-19. Its activist advisory — global but regionally grounded — decides by consensus: over video calls when there's time, over Signal chats when there isn't. Applications run in whatever language activists already speak, from Ukrainian to Swahili, and outreach is tailored — groups are only invited to apply when there's a realistic chance of funding, so activists' time isn't spent decorating a rejection.
+
+## What crisis does to it
+
+PGM is built on time: time to talk, to visit, to reflect, to decide together. Crisis takes the time away. When the genocide in Gaza began, Rawa's planned year of reflection and learning became an emergency — grant reports extended by a year, contact with Gazan partners reduced to phone calls, voice notes and text messages, vetting done through community trust rather than paperwork. As Rawa's Yara Dowani puts it, you trust that money sent to Gaza is going to basics — water, food, hygiene — and you stay responsive.
+
+Speed turns out to be a property of *prepared trust*, not of skipping participation. The Dalan Fund had intended a slow, careful start to grantmaking when Georgia's 2024 foreign-agents-law crisis hit its home region; because its activist advisory already existed, applications were approved within 24 hours and money moved within two weeks. "We are not a rapid-response grant maker," says Dalan's Nino Ugrekhelidze, "but we happened to turn into one."
+
+Crisis also reshapes *how money physically moves*. Under rising authoritarianism, governments freeze bank accounts and windows for moving money close fast. The practitioners' answers:
+
+- **Smaller money is safer money.** Modest grants move under the radar, and if priorities shift or resources vanish, less is lost — and, as Dalan notes, moving smaller money can make bigger impact.
+- **Fiscal hosts are alternative infrastructure.** An established organisation in a safer jurisdiction holds the legal entity and banking rails so a young fund can receive and move money at all. Dalan credits its fiscal host, the women's fund Women Win, with making its two-week turnaround possible — and Dalan's own due diligence then served as the reference for two further funders to move money to the same groups.
+- **Think in four phases, not one.** Dalan frames crisis work as prevention, preparedness, response *and* recovery — movements are actors in all four, not just first responders.
+- **Not every funder has to do everything.** Funds coordinate as an ecosystem, playing different roles at different stages. When MADRE is already funding in a context like Afghanistan, the Global Resilience Fund moves money *to MADRE* rather than duplicating it; when GRF funded in Libya and Turkey, MADRE moved money to it. Shared due diligence and honest role-splitting get the money where it needs to go with less burden on activists.
+
+And the people are not separate from the crisis. Advisors and staff are often living through the same events they're funding — fleeing, in exile, in deep response — so the work includes care: checking in by phone, holding space for grantee partners to connect, supporting documentation and storytelling so communities can archive what they're living through and reclaim the narrative. Yara's closing advice is the shortest: *don't forget your team*.
+
+## The political point
+
+Practitioners insist PGM is a redistribution of power, not a technique — and that it dies when it becomes one.
+
+:::caution[The test that keeps it political]
+If a fund's "participation" is a fixed series of steps rather than a real handover of decision power, it has been depoliticised — and sometimes the honest participatory move in a crisis is to skip the process and just get the money out.
+:::
+
+Two corollaries run through the practice. First, **the community defines the crisis**: there is no single correct definition, and the definition activists offer determines how the response — and its participatory component — is built. Second, **philanthropy's silos are its own problem**: funding streams are carved up in ways movements on the ground are not, which is why flexible, cross-crisis pots (like GRF's negotiated overhead that it reallocates between crises, including ones funders ignore) matter as much as any single mechanism.
+
+## Why it's here
+
+Citizen infrastructure runs on money, and who decides over money is a governance question. Participatory grantmaking is the philanthropic expression of the same claim this wiki tracks elsewhere — that the people affected should hold the pen: it is the funder-side cousin of [democratising finance](/concepts/democratising-finance/)'s sortition mandates for public banks, of [quadratic funding](/concepts/plural-mechanisms/)'s algorithmic sharing of decision power, and of the fiscal-host model inside [funding the commons](/concepts/funding-the-commons/). Its crisis lessons echo [movements, not arguments](/concepts/movements-not-arguments/): what moves resources is organised trust built *before* the emergency. For the overlapping-crises backdrop, see [the metacrisis](/concepts/metacrisis/); for a citizen-usable fiscal host, see [fund collective work](/toolkit/fund-collective-work/) in the toolkit.
+
+## Sources
+
+- **Participatory Grantmaking During Polycrisis** — Participatory Grantmaking Community webinar with Nino Ugrekhelidze (Dalan Fund), Yara Dowani (Rawa) and Ruby Johnson (Global Resilience Fund), moderated by Coco Jervis (Mama Cash), 2024: [youtube.com/watch?v=8OS0knZwh28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OS0knZwh28)
+- **Dalan Fund** — Our Story and How We Fund: [dalan.fund](https://dalan.fund/our-story/)
+- **Rawa**: [rawa.ps](https://www.rawa.ps/en-home)
+- **Global Resilience Fund** — About: [theglobalresiliencefund.org](https://www.theglobalresiliencefund.org/about)
+- **Women Win** — Democratisation of Philanthropy (pooled funding, shared governance, fiscal hosting): [womenwin.org](https://www.womenwin.org/what-we-do/democratisation-of-philanthropy/)
+- **Participatory Grantmaking Community**: [participatorygrantmaking.org](https://participatorygrantmaking.org/)

src/content/docs/ecosystem/overview.md

@@ -13,6 +13,13 @@ Citizen infrastructure isn't built by one group. It's a growing movement of orga
 - **[SPRIND — Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation](https://www.sprind.org/en/)** — Germany's federal agency for "leap" innovations (Bundesagentur für Sprunginnovationen); its **SPRIND.Society** vertical, led by Social Innovation Commissioner Zarah Bruhn (founder of socialbee), brings disruptive investment to societal and state innovation, including a Taiwan-inspired "presidential hackathon" challenge.
 - **[Mozilla Foundation](https://foundation.mozilla.org/)** — the non-profit behind Firefox and a long-standing voice for a healthy, open internet; its **Democracy & AI incubator** backs a cohort of around ten projects building AI deliberately designed to *strengthen* democratic ecosystems rather than undermine them.
 - **[UN Democracy Fund (UNDEF)](https://www.un.org/democracyfund/)** — a UN fund supporting civil-society-led democracy and participation projects; co-publisher (with newDemocracy) of the *Democracy Beyond Elections* handbook and a backer of deliberative pilots in Brazil, Malawi and Uruguay.
+- **[Rawa](https://www.rawa.ps/en-home)** — a Palestinian fund, piloting since 2018, that runs no open application round at all: community activists organised in clusters across Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and '48 nominate grassroots initiatives they know first-hand, and a community committee decides. Support is unconditional and reporting deliberately light. See [participatory grantmaking](/concepts/participatory-grantmaking/).
+- **[Dalan Fund](https://dalan.fund/our-story/)** — the first regional fund practising participatory grantmaking across Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central and North Asia (16 countries). A rotating 15-member Resource Distribution Committee of regional activists holds decision power and co-designs strategy; its Shield Fund handles crisis response.
+- **[Global Resilience Fund](https://www.theglobalresiliencefund.org/about)** — a collaborative feminist fund for girls and young feminists in crisis, launched in 2020 by twenty founding partners and sustained by Purposeful. Its regionally grounded activist advisory decides by consensus, and applications are accepted in whatever language activists already speak.
+- **[Purposeful](https://wearepurposeful.org/)** — a feminist movement-building hub rooted in Africa, working with and for adolescent girls; it sparked and houses the Global Resilience Fund.
+- **[Women Win](https://www.womenwin.org/what-we-do/democratisation-of-philanthropy/)** — a global fund working on the democratisation of philanthropy through pooled funding, shared governance and **fiscal hosting** — the arrangement that lets a young fund receive and move money under legal and banking constraints it could not meet alone.
+- **[MADRE](https://www.madre.org/)** — an international women's rights organisation and grantmaker; an example of funder symbiosis in practice, moving money to and receiving it from other feminist funds so that resources reach a context through whoever is already trusted there.
+- **[Mama Cash](https://www.mamacash.org/)** — one of the oldest international women's funds, and a long-standing practitioner of participant-led grantmaking.
 
 ## Research & governance
 
@@ -89,6 +96,7 @@ Citizen infrastructure isn't built by one group. It's a growing movement of orga
 - **[Democracy R&D](https://democracyrd.org/)** — a global network of organisations and practitioners advancing deliberative democracy and citizens' assemblies (co-founded by sortition advocate Terry Bouricius); publishes the annual *Year in Deliberation* review and "living guidebooks" on institutionalisation, the Global South, and difficult issues.
 - **[Mehr Demokratie](https://www.mehr-demokratie.de/en/)** — Germany's leading direct- and participatory-democracy NGO; its LOSLAND project (with the RIFS sustainability institute) brings citizens' assemblies to municipalities, and it curates a public catalogue of good-example assemblies and their real policy outcomes.
 - **[OpenCivics](https://www.opencivics.co/)** — a community of practice and solidarity for open civic innovation, providing scaffolding for civic innovators to coordinate, align, and find funding. Its **Civic Innovator Sessions** spotlight emerging projects across the open-civic ecosystem.
+- **[Participatory Grantmaking Community](https://participatorygrantmaking.org/)** — a global community of practice for funders and activists shifting decision power over money to the communities it is meant to serve. Founded in March 2020 as an informal group of about a dozen people, and now a membership spanning dozens of countries; it governs itself participatorily through a nominated Accountability Circle drawn largely from the global majority. See [participatory grantmaking](/concepts/participatory-grantmaking/).
 - **[Newspeak House](https://newspeak.house/)** — the London College of Political Technologists: a community and residency supporting civic technologists and the tech-and-politics community in London.
 - **[Civic Tech Field Guide](https://civictech.guide/)** — the largest open, crowdsourced directory of democracy-tech tools, organisations, and programmes (11,000+ entries, open data), mapping civic tech and civic AI so practitioners can find and learn from one another. Founded in 2016 by Micah Sifry, Erin Simpson, and Matt Stempeck at Civic Hall in New York; it organises the field into "the tech" (tools and data) and "the people" (fellowships, research, jobs, funders), and runs a trend-spotting newsletter.
 - **[Association Civic Tech Europe (ACTE)](https://acte-europe.org/)** — a Brussels-based trade association of civic-tech and gov-tech companies (founded 2019) representing participation platforms at the EU level — a sign of a maturing sector.

src/content/docs/library/reading-and-sources.md

@@ -64,6 +64,7 @@ A growing, annotated shelf of the talks, research, and writing we've found usefu
 - **[Council of Europe — Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture](https://www.coe.int/en/web/reference-framework-of-competences-for-democratic-culture)** — an official European framework of the values, attitudes, skills, and knowledge people need to take part in a democratic culture.
 - **[US Army — ADP 6-22, *Army Leadership and the Profession*](https://www.eiu.edu/armyrotc/docs/adp6_22.pdf)** — the "be, know, do" leadership doctrine; a striking example of an institution treating leadership as something to teach everyone, not just those at the top.
 - **[David Bollier on the commons — Team Human w/ Douglas Rushkoff (2025)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NrkkC8tQGQ)** — a clear, wide-ranging conversation on what the commons really is, why the "tragedy" was a myth, enclosure, and the OntoShift. The source behind our [commons](/concepts/the-commons/) concepts and two Stories.
+- **[Participatory Grantmaking During Polycrisis — Participatory Grantmaking Community (2024)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OS0knZwh28)** — three funds that hand grant decisions to the communities they serve, on what happens to that practice when crisis removes the time it depends on. With Nino Ugrekhelidze (Dalan Fund), Yara Dowani (Rawa) and Ruby Johnson (Global Resilience Fund), moderated by Coco Jervis (Mama Cash). The source behind our [participatory grantmaking](/concepts/participatory-grantmaking/) page.
 - **David Bollier, *Think Like a Commoner* (2nd ed.)** — a short, accessible introduction to commons thinking and practice.
 - **David Bollier & Silke Helfrich, *Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons*** (2019, open access) — the fuller treatment; source of "relationalised property" and the OntoShift.
 - **Robert C. Ellickson, *Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes*** (Harvard, 1991) — how Shasta County cattle ranchers resolve disputes by informal social norms rather than the law: self-governance in the wild.