Activist-scholar Ashish Kothari, visited Helsinki 28.2–1.3 as a guest of the Development Days Conference 2019 of the Finnish Society for Development Research. Among other he gave a talk on Systemic Alternatives during a civil society event organised together with the department of Development studies of Helsinki University and the Siemenpuu foundation at Helsinki University’s Tiedekulma (Think Corner) on 28.2, and a keynote during the Development Days conference itself on 1.3, which I had the pleasure of attending as a panelist following his talk and as a commentator following his keynote. …
The Feminist Fund celebrates its first birthday and is sharing some of the achievements they have made.
The Feminist Fund is the only organisation in Poland providing financial assistance exclusively to girls’, women’s, and feminist organisations. Our mini-grants are available to non-governmental organisations, but also to self-organised informal groups, particularly those operating in smaller locations, where women vulnerable to cross-discrimination and violence, may become decisionmakers. We are here to foster feminist movements in Poland by providing money for activities engaged in by women, and by transgender, non-binary, and queer persons. …
How does a fund for participatory grant making with a community building process of activists working around systemic change structure itself and imagine its own democratic design? Two of the thus far developed features are that of a FundAction Facilitation Group and working groups.
The first Facilitation Group (FG) of FundAction (FA) was set up in May 2017 for the period of one year, and was nominated from the first individuals present at the first FA meetings in Seville, Spain (December 2016) and La Bergerie, Villarceaux, France (February 2017). This first FG worked together to turn the idea of a participatory fund and platform into reality, guided by the decisions made at these first meetings. In this manner, they worked towards the setting up of FundAction from May to September 2017, as well as towards the first Rethink grants that followed that in November…
FundAction has a few donors. (Too few! Anyone who wants to support European activists, get in touch!) One of these, the Guerrilla Foundation, recently gave us a €20k grant for 2019, with some feedback on our work in 2017/2018. We thought we’d share this feedback — plus initial responses from the Facilitation Group — for transparency purposes, but also to show what positive relationships with donors may look like. All of the donor representatives FundAction works with are supportive, dedicated, and imaginative, and this blog offers an example of how we work with them in a spirit of mutual accountability.
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The facilitation group of the FundAction had an in person meeting on 23 October in Belgrade, Serbia. The meeting was hosted by one of the facilitation groups members, Iva Cucik, of the Ministry of space, and was held at the Magacin Collective cultural space- Besides participatory grant making, FundAction also wants to enable the development of a cooperating activist network in Europe around systemic change, and we took several steps forward, particularly in the area of community and process building. …
If looking at social activism from the peripheries, one is often led to wonder how the social initiatives become a reality from the inklings of ideas they have stemmed from, and after making seemingly grandiose claims such as ‘bringing about systemic change’, in fact begin to gradually emulate them. FundAction, as a participatory grantmaking platform emerged similarly as an idea from conversations between activists and funders, with the aim to shift the power dynamics to the forefront and confront the challenges of grant making and dissemination together. …
The results of the Renew grant are in. After receiving 41 proposals out of the 160 members of FundAction, the community reviewed by commenting and voting all the applications. Resulting of this process, eleven -it was supposed to be ten, but the tenth and the eleventh had the same number of votes- applications made it to the next step. From then on, a P2P Review Panel composed of random members from the community had the responsibility to decide which applications received funding. …
FundAction is about to launch a new round of grants: ‘Renew’ grants, intended to support systemic change. But what is ‘Systemic Change’? It feels like a jargon term, something developed for ‘insiders’. But even within communities, a common understanding is not necessarily shared. Within FundAction’s Facilitation Group, we’ve been having a conversation about ‘what is systemic change?’, to help us know what to say about the Renew grants.
In the first instance, I think it’s useful to say that the different grant programmes at FundAction (Resist, Rethink and Renew) were inspired by an EDGE Funders Alliance conference with a similar…
The aim is to support new ideas from organisations that live our values and who are working towards systemic change.
How is peer-to-peer grant-making even possible? The facilitation group member Nico Haeringer has made a tutorial of our case.
