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Moving Beyond Participation

September 21, 2026

What Happens When We Share the Power Behind Philanthropy?

Philanthropy is often described as the effort and desire to promote the welfare of others and improve humanity. One way most of us are familiar with in our field is through the allocation of grant dollars. But there is a question we don’t always ask: Who gets to decide where the dollars go?

Traditional philanthropy tends to place those with access to capital in the position of deciding what communities need, which solutions deserve investment, and how success should be measured. Even when the intention is to address inequity, the underlying relationship can remain the same: Funders hold the resources and communities must make the case for receiving them. Participatory philanthropy offers another possibility. It asks us to consider what happens when the people closest to the issues have meaningful authority over the resources intended to address them.

Sow Joy Peoples Fund was built around that question. Our strategic vision and all funding decisions are led by a board of environmental justice leaders and residents—all people of color, with lived experience and deep relationships to the communities and movements they serve. This means that the people deciding where philanthropic dollars go aren’t simply advising funders. They are the decision-makers and that distinction matters.

Moving beyond participation

There is an important difference between asking communities for input and sharing actual decision-making power. A funder can conduct listening sessions, invite community members onto an advisory committee, or ask residents to help shape a grantmaking strategy. These practices can be meaningful. But if the funder ultimately retains control over the money, the priorities, and the terms of the relationship, the fundamental power dynamic may remain largely unchanged.

At Sow Joy, community leadership sits at the center of the fund. Our board determines the strategic vision. Our board makes the funding decisions. Our approach to grantmaking is designed to trust organizations with the resources they need to do their work. That includes multi-year operating grants ranging from $20,000 to $150,000, grantee designed capacity building offerings, ecosystem convening, fund staff reporting, and board presence and participation in ecosystem and community activities. These are meaningful investments in organizations and movements, providing flexible operating support that can help communities build capacity, sustain relationships, respond to emerging needs, and pursue long-term change.

But there is an important tension we have to acknowledge: Any alternative model can eventually fall victim to the very practices it was created to challenge. Participatory philanthropy is not automatically equitable simply because it involves participation. Power can accumulate within a community. Institutions can recreate gatekeeping through new structures. Decision-making can become concentrated among the people who have the most time, resources, institutional knowledge, or access. Even well-intentioned models can begin to resemble the systems they set out to change.

For Sow Joy, this means that participatory grantmaking is not a destination. It is an ongoing practice of examining who has power, how decisions are made, and who is accountable to whom. We are exploring what it would mean to deepen that practice through more democratic processes like a membership model and expanded convenings—creating more opportunities for the environmental justice ecosystem and communities directly impacted by environmental hazards to shape strategic direction and make funding decisions.

The question isn’t simply, How can we make philanthropy more participatory?

It is:

• How can we continually expand the circle of people who have meaningful power over philanthropic resources?
• How do we ensure private wealth controlled by a few does not override public democratic processes?
• How can we address the historical accumulation of wealth and the inequities it has produced?
• How can we support foundations and wealth holders in asking what is enough and what constitutes surplus?

These are not questions with simple answers. These are questions about the kind of relationship philanthropy wants to have in communities and about what it means to use wealth responsibly in a democratic society.

Sow Joy Peoples Fund is one example of what it can look like to approach philanthropy differently: move meaningful resources, share decision-making power, trust community expertise, and reduce the administrative burden placed on the people doing the work. We don’t pretend that a participatory fund alone can transform the larger structures that produced economic and racial inequity. But we do believe philanthropy can begin practicing the change it seeks.

An invitation to funders

For foundations and philanthropic institutions, investing in Sow Joy Peoples Fund is an opportunity to do more than support another grantmaking program. It is an opportunity to invest in a different relationship between wealth and community. At Sow Joy, we believe communities already hold much of the knowledge, leadership, and vision needed to create a more just future. Our job is to move resources—and make room for their leadership. We invite funders who share that belief to invest with us. Schedule a call with our team to learn more about our model and wrestle with these questions with us.

What Shared Power Looks Like in Practice

When it came to crafting the grants process for Sow Joy, the decision about grant amounts, structure, requirements was not made by a funder looking at the community from the outside. It was shaped and decided by people who lead the nonprofits, serve their communities,  and live in the neighborhoods most impacted.

The board decided:

• Grants would be operating support rather than be project based recognizing most grants our board, grantees and ecosystem encountered were restricted to specific projects leaving no room to cover day-to-day administrative/overhead costs that make the work possible;
• Reporting burden would be carried by fund staff rather than nonprofit leaders recognizing nonprofit leaders spend much of their time managing and implementing programming and the data we seek is publicly available.

The significance wasn’t simply that community members were consulted. They had the authority to decide where resources went and what support would be most useful. That shift can change not only the outcomes of an organization, but the relationship between philanthropy and the people it is intended to serve.