Three Lessons for Funders Exploring Participatory Decision-Making

We are two former educators now working for organizations that support efforts to reimagine learning and improve education for each and every young person. Knowing and understanding the assets and needs of the communities we serve is critical for the success of our work, especially in this moment.

That’s why our respective organizations—The Reinvention Lab, powered by Teach For America and NewSchools Venture Fund—piloted a program earlier this year to test what happens when funding decisions are made by people from the communities we serve. NewSchools Venture Fund as a funder and Teach For America as a leadership development organization are two education institutions that make consequential decisions on behalf of young people every day. The questions we continue to ask ourselves are: What if young people and communities co-created those decisions? How might outcomes be radically different?

Inspired by participatory decision-making knowledge that came before us, we partnered to launch Fund the Future of Learning and involved 45 racially diverse participants—nearly half of them under the age of 20. It built upon work both our organizations have done through the Enduring Ideas Awards and the Racial Equity Council. In Fund the Future, we also invited education philanthropists to participate and learn alongside us.

For many who had never done participatory grantmaking, the experience was illuminating. It challenged participants—ourselves included—to think more critically about how philanthropy and education can and should change, and how more education funders can benefit from using community-centered practices.

These are three lessons we learned that will inform how we approach participatory decision-making in the future:

1: Building authentic intergenerational partnerships is critical

To reimagine learning, young people must have a seat at the table along with adults. But as we discovered, trust is foundational for intergenerational partnerships to work.

In our pilot program, we could have dived straight into the agenda and the selection protocol. Instead, we spent time getting to know each other first. We shared our stories and identities, using a modified Paseo Protocol. We took time to form deep connections. With that foundation, decision-making teams could debate ideas instead of people, and grapple with the tensions and disagreements. There were moments when adults would simply defer to a young person’s judgment rather than engage in a rigorous debate. Younger participants didn’t want to be treated this way and insisted on more meaningful dialogue.

With participatory decision-making, it’s not just that the outcomes are different and potentially better—the process itself is just as important. When you bring very different people together in a room to make tough choices and find consensus, it requires the creation of a healthy working culture. Trust is the foundation upon which participatory decision-making is built. Make community-building a priority.

2: You have to tolerate a little mess to get to the gold

When you first step into a learning environment where students are owning their learning, it can seem a bit chaotic to the untrained eye. Students are working on multiple projects, testing their own ideas and driving the conversation. It’s sometimes hard to pick out the teacher in the room.

Similarly, participatory decision-making can look and feel quite messy.

As the designers of this experience, we needed to provide just enough structure but also give teams considerable autonomy to make decisions and not simply recommendations. And when teams deviated from our guidelines, we needed to be ready to pivot and trust that they would make informed choices and identify the best applicants. That’s what is at the heart of participatory decision-making.

In one instance, a team proposed lowering the minimum grant amount so that more organizations could get funding, while another group asked to give their entire “pot” of funding to a single organization. They made compelling arguments and we honored their decisions. The end result, while different than what we anticipated, led us to outcomes that satisfied both decision-makers and grantees.

3: Move beyond scoring rubrics and include collaborative discussion

Some funders lean heavily on quantitative scoring systems to make the decision-making process more efficient. When applications are screened this way, average scores determine who gets funding.

In contrast, our participants had the opportunity to review and score applications individually and as a group to determine which applicants to move forward after thoughtfully deliberating the merits of each one. The process intentionally balanced quantitative assessment with qualitative discussion as well as the varied perspectives of the decision-makers at the table. These discussions brought more depth, nuance and dimension to the grantee selection process.

This experience, more than anything, helped philanthropists in our group to think differently about how their organizations could approach participatory decision-making. Many were doing their core job with an entirely new group of people and without their institution’s definitions and measures for impact. Some were engaging in decision-making with young people for the first time. They experienced a different way of “doing philanthropy.”

To date, philanthropic institutions that support education have almost exclusively focused on diversity efforts such as investing in and hiring more leaders of color: who is funded. With participatory decision-making, funders are also considering how decisions are made. Until we make this dual shift, we won’t get to more equitable outcomes. To get a system by and for a broader group of people, we need to redesign the system. We think this experience will shift philanthropists’ mindsets about what is possible at their respective organizations.

In the end, the decision-makers decided collectively to fund seven organizations led by people of color pioneering exciting efforts to radically reimagine education and shape the future of learning. Our respective organizations will continue to engage in participatory decision-making as a way to increase transparency, fairness and collaboration in funding decisions. We see this also as a blueprint for other types of decisions made by educational institutions on behalf of young people—from the classroom, to the board room, to the legislative body. We will continue to learn and share lessons along the way. And we hope to learn from others in the field, too, so that collectively, and in partnership with the communities we serve, we can create solutions that have a lasting impact and improve outcomes for each and every young person.

Sunanna Chand is vice president of systems reinvention for The Reinvention Lab at Teach for America. You can learn more about The Reinvention Lab here.

Miho Kubagawa is a partner on the Innovative Schools team at NewSchools Venture Fund. You can learn more about NewSchools Venture Fund here.

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