Some funders may not have the infrastructure or capacity to hold grant funds and process payments directly to grantees. Camden Giving has the experience and systems to manage this on your behalf, ensuring funds are administered smoothly and responsibly. We support by: 

• Acting as a banker for participatory funds, including managing reporting requirements and processing grant payments. 

• Awarding grants to un-constituted groups or working with fiscal hosts where needed. 

If employing participants, managing HR processes or running payroll is a barrier for your organisation, we can provide the infrastructure and support to make this possible. Camden Giving can act as the employer lead, ensuring community panellists are properly supported with contracts, remuneration and HR processes. Our approach is flexible to individual circumstances, enabling residents to benefit from economic participation and wellbeing support. We support by: 

• Acting as the employer for participants, providing payroll services and paying participants flexibly, holding payments in trust for those unable to be paid. 

• Onboarding panellists as casual workers with full HR support and contracts, ensuring compliance with employment legislation. 

• Capturing attendance and gathering pre- and post-surveys to understand participant experiences of PGM.  

The very nature of PGM can often mirror that of a frontline service, so safeguarding needs to be built into every stage the process. Our team - drawing on backgrounds in youth work, social work and governance - can act as your safeguarding lead. Our approach is grounded in trust: relational, justice-centred and flexible to individual circumstances, reducing barriers to participation while upholding a strong duty of care. We support by:  

• Designing anti-oppression safeguarding plans that ensure participants are safe and that risks are minimised. 

• Managing serious safeguarding issues. 

• Embedding emotional safety practices and reflective spaces, alongside one-to-one wraparound pastoral support, so that panellists feel safe, supported and able to engage fully.  

Drawing on our deep, cross sector networks beyond London, community-based referral partners and our wider influential presence, we utilise our resources and expertise to benefit communities on a wider scale. We’ll help you design inclusive recruitment processes and carry out targeted outreach to engage the communities you want represented in your PGM. Our approach focuses on equitable, low-barrier processes that value lived experience and ensure participants are fully supported by: 

• Designing recruitment, application and outreach processes for panellists. 

• Promoting opportunities and working with referral partners to get a diverse candidate pool. 

• Sifting and interviewing candidates. 

• Involving our Camden Giving Alumni in interviews, bringing in relavant experience to the process.  

We can act as a knowledge partner and facilitator, drawing on eight years of best practice and our wider sector expertise in PGM to design tailored programmes across the PGM cycle, relevant to your context and needs. We support by:

• Designing and facilitating training sessions and grantmaking meetings.

• Supporting participants to build confidence in the grant process, including interpreting data and budgets, managing bias and conflicts of interest, and understanding impact.

• Developing tailored sessions such as co-designing funding criteria, evaluation and impact reviews, or assessment site visits.

Elevate is Camden Giving’s community-owned Participatory Grantmaking platform, designed to make funding decisions transparent, equitable and rooted in community priorities. Each panellist has their own profile and voting history, while facilitators can track trends, consensus-building and equity in real time. Co-designed with a diverse group of Camden Giving panellists, Elevate reinvests its profits into local capital projects. We support by: 

• Enabling panellists to vote, comment on and prioritise applications. 

• Analysing application patterns (e.g. demographics, geography, funding outcomes). 

• Tracking panel outcomes in real time, including funds allocated and remaining in the pot. 

• Allowing abstentions to manage conflicts of interest without skewing results. 

• Using custom tags and live comments to reveal equity gaps and prompt inclusive reflection during meetings.

We provide thought-leadership sessions tailored for boards, staff and donors to build the confidence, tools and practices needed to embed participatory approaches more equitably. We support by offering:

• Tailored sessions to help boards and staff interrogate where power lies within the organisation, exploring which power may feel difficult to give up and steps to share power more effectively.

• Co-created guidance to support and empower staff and trustees on how they want to work with participants.

• Sessions with boards and donors to understand the potential of participatory approaches.

We’ll help you design Participatory Grantmaking programmes end-to-end, or focus on specific areas of the grant cycle - whether embedding PGM into a single fund, developing an organisational strategy, or running one-off or a series of workshops. Our support combines sector insight with practical guidance, tailored to your context we can walk that journey with you. We support by:

• Providing support to develop a strategy and ongoing advice for delivering PGM.

• Sharing insight into different models and approaches to PGM, exploring options relevant to your goals, reflecting on the practicalities of implementation.

• Delivering standalone workshops tailored to specific areas of PGM - for example youth empowerment in panels, equity in decision-making, or rethinking governance processes.

• Inviting Alumni members - who have been part of our grantmaking and the experts on good participatory practices - to join these sessions, to provide advice on participation and talk about their experience relevant to your vision.