Participatory Grantmaking with the Survey Of Londoners
The Survey Of Londoners has become an increasingly important part of our work at Camden Giving and it’s enabling us to become better at Participatory Grantmaking. Here’s how we’re using it.
Hold up, what’s Participatory Grantmaking?
Participatory Grantmaking takes many forms, for us at Camden Giving, it means that we think that people with lived experience of the social issues we are addressing should be the ones who identify solutions. In practice, we recruit, train and financially compensate around 50 people a year to join 3-4 community panels who work as teams to award grants to local charitable work.
Most of our funding comes from local businesses and we think it’s the only right of citizens who are impacted by local issues should decide how that money is spent. We also see that their insight leads to more effective solutions and greater diversity amongst the leaders we fund.
And what’s the Survey Of Londoners?
The survey was answered by over 8000 Londoners and gives insights into experiences across 47 different themes. It gives unusually detailed breakdown of different groups of people in London (but it would be even more useful if areas and ethnicities were broken down further).
The survey is openly available to anyone here and includes Londoners answers on everything from how often they borrow something from a neighbour to job satisfaction.
4 ways to use the survey for Participatory Grantmaking
Targeting participation
The survey tells us which Londoners are most likely to feel they can personally influence decisions about their local area. Whilst some things have improved for Londoners over the last 4 years, this isn’t one of them. Only 22% of 16-24 Yr old Londoners feel they have influence, a drop from 33% 4 years ago. The drop in perceived ability to change things amongst the next generation of Londoners is worrying. Feeling helpless isn’t a nice feeling, it’s also bad for our political systems.
Thinking you can’t influence decisions and genuinely not being able to influence decisions are different issues, but they contribute to each other and create unequal systems where some people have far more control of this city than others.
At Camden Giving we know that our Participatory Grantmaking consistently changes the way that people view their role within their community. Our data tells us that people see themselves as more powerful after they have awarded grants.
The Survey Of Londoners allows us to target these opportunities at Londoners who feel the least ability to influence, overwhelmingly that’s young Londoners, but it’s also Londoners without children and Londoners with no religion. Participatory Grantmaing isn’t just about who decides how grants are spent, it’s creating a different sort of city where everyone has some influence.
Developing referral networks
Food banks have become a growing feature of London. In 2017 when Camden Giving was set-up, we received 2 applications for funding from food banks in a whole year, now we expect to receive around 40 a year and we just don’t have enough money to support them all.
The higher your income is, the more likely you are to be aware of food banks. We can make some assumptions about why that is:
The more connected you are to what’s going on, the easier it is to live in financial security.
These services are targeting higher income people as donors and supporters.
Participatory Grantmaking flips the second assumption, people who need the support of financial hardship services are the ones who are awarding funding to them. That’s a good thing because they’ll tell other people they know who made need the service. At Camden Giving we ask our participatory grantmakers if they feel they can tell a neighbour about a local charity. When they join us the answer hovers around 30% of people saying yes, unsurprisingly after they’ve awarded grants that figure rises to 100%. Particpatory grantmaking is funding with an in-built referral network.
Again, this allows us to target who is taking part, focussing on those who have the lowest level of awareness of the services we’re aiming to fund. For example, Londoners who don’t speak English well have the lowest awareness of Law Centres of any group, so it makes sense for people from that group to be involved in funding Law Services, not just because they might identify Law Centres with more effective outreach, but also because they may tell others Londoners who don’t speak English well about Law Centres.
Data-led Participatory Grantmaking
There’s an assumption amongst participatory grantmaking sceptics that participatory grant-making is the opposite of data-led grantmaking. But participatory grant decisions can be informed by data and lived experiences of inequality. At Camden Giving we run data exploration sessions with all of our grantmakers and we ask them to tell us what data they need to supplement their lived experiences. The survey of Londoners is always one of the first places we go, so it’s great to have a more up to date data set.
The key for us is to present data as a piece of a puzzle, not something to override lived experience. We make it very clear that’s it’s fine to say “what that data is saying isn’t what I’ve seen”. We also seen data give power to people to be able to highlight the needs of a community, for example to say “my experience as a Black Londoner reflects what this survey tells us, Black Londoners need help to keep warm this Winter”.
Grantmaking through a lens of abundance
Grantmakers "fix" problems in communities. We rarely look for what is going well and try to support it to sustain and flourish. The Survey Of Londoners highlights issues like; people in debt, people who are lonely, people who have lost trust in political systems. London's systems consistently fail, young, black, brown and disabled people, that's clear.
What's also clear is some groups have some positive experiences of this city, despite the odds being stacked against them. Single parents are one of the most likely groups to be living with very low food security, but are one of the most confident groups when it comes to influencing things in their local area.
Black Londoners are more likely to feel they belong in London than any other ethnic group and are the most likely to be formally volunteering. It’s all too rare to find data that highlights strengths of black communities, rarer still to find philanthropy that actively seeks to sustain the strengths of black communities. All funders, not just participatory grantmakers need to spend time thinking about how we they can fund what’s going well in communities, and support communities to learn from each other.
We’d love to know how other funders are making use of data in their work. Get in touch.