Transferring Decision Making Power to People with Lived Expertise

The Tower Foundation has been on a five year-long journey to bring people with lived expertise in the Foundation’s areas of interest into our work. This includes young people in and around their twenties with intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities, mental health challenges and substance use disorders.  

Below is an image of the Public Engagement Spectrum, developed by the International Association for Public Participation, one of several approaches to thinking about different degrees of participant involvement in philanthropy.

Over the years that the Foundation has been working on building our participatory grantmaking approach, we have slowly and deliberately transitioned from engaging young people in an advisory role to handing over grant decisionmaking power to them.  Below is a brief history of that evolution. 

Consulting 

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  In 2019, we started our foray into participatory grantmaking (PGM) with an Advisory Team made up of young people with intellectual disabilities. This team weighed in on grants that we were reviewing through our Programs & Services portfolio that would benefit people with similar identities. We gave their feedback to applicants and asked different questions as a result of their input. We engaged this team for several grantmaking cycles, continuing through early 2020. 

Involving 

• Then, in 2021 we expanded the Advisory Team beyond young people with intellectual disabilities to include those with identities spanning all four Tower Foundation identities of interest. While still functioning in an advisory capacity, this team helped us through a redesign phase, shaping the inclusive team experience to come.

Collaborating

• In 2022, we decided to bring on board our first Tower Foundation intern, who was an alumni of the Foundation’s Community Experts Team. The individual in that role was a peer point of contact for other team members and helped with a range of program logistics. Today that role is filled by Community Experts Team alum, Nissa Bisguier, serving as the PGM Project Manager. (You can read some of her past reflections on the team’s work here.)  
• All of this work to bring community members to the table mapped to our work to become a more equitable and trust-based grantmaker. We asked ourselves, what would it take for us to be a more inclusive grantmaker, one that better reflects the perspectives of young people? Our Board and staff drew inspiration from the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy’s resource, Power Moves. This framework helped us to consider ways that we can authentically shift power to the community.  
• Our equity work at the Foundation also helped us to consider the intersectionality of identities and experiences of team members. An equity lens helped us to make the team experience more inclusive, and broaden our understanding of the many perspectives that team members brought to bear on challenges and opportunities in our community. 

Empowering 

• 2022 was the first year that the Tower Foundation’s Board of Trustees allocated $200,000 for a grantmaking initiative to be designed and executed, from A to Z, by the Community Experts Team. This team officially moved from an advisory role to one that was autonomous, responsible for setting a focus for the fund and deciding which organizations to award grants to. 
• Importantly, 2022 was also the same year the Foundation began to implement our newly established equity goals. Our participatory grantmaking work helped us to take a big step toward more diverse, inclusive, and equitable grantmaking. By this point in our participatory grantmaking journey, we could see that including the perspectives of those most impacted by our grants in the decision-making process helps us to be a more effective funder.
• The impact that lived expertise and participatory grantmaking was having on us is particularly evident in the language we used for two of the organizational goals that we strive to achieve: We meaningfully engage communities in our work; and we closely resemble the communities that we fund.
• In 2023, we repeated what was a very successful virtual team experience with some slight tweaks. That year’s Community Experts Team is pictured here (right).  
• While we are so proud of the work of the Community Experts Team – it is still somewhat removed from the rest of our work at the Foundation through which we award capacity building, programming, and systems change grants. As a result, we decided to look for ways to bring people with lived expertise into our day to day grantmaking. As a result, we started to invite community members with lived expertise to review grants as “Community Grant Consultants” (CGCs) alongside Foundation program officers during our twice-annual Programs & Services grant cycles. As with our Community Experts, CGCs receive a stipend in recognition of the time they spend on grant review and deliberation.
  This addition to our participatory grantmaking portfolio is one that particularly continues to excite me. While the number of voices at the table is fewer, the opportunity to build a pipeline for our talented members of the Community Experts Team to join the Foundation staff in our every day deliberations benefits our grant review process tremendously. 
• In 2024, we brought the entire Community Experts Team together in-person for the first time, across geographies and focus areas, to review 39 strong applications that were submitted to the Community Experts Fund. You can read more about that experience and watch a video that highlights the grant review retreat here.

Lessons Learned & What’s Next

We are now five years into our participatory grantmaking journey and we have learned a ton, from how best to support our team members during the application review process, to how to structure an engaging Zoom call. We know that young people have amazing things to say if you take the time to listen and if you give them the chance to speak. We also know that many of our nonprofit grant partners are pros at doing just that and we have a lot to learn from them as well.  

It has taken a significant investment of time and money to do this work and to do it well. The Foundation is committed to stipending team members and to resourcing the organizations that support the team’s process. It is not casual work. But we have found such value in it. 

In 2025, we are excited to again recruit for another cohort of Community Experts (team members have the option of serving in that capacity for two years). Beyond our routine work to tweak and improve the team experience, we look forward to bringing in an evaluator to review and help us enhance the Foundation’s participatory grantmaking work. 

In participatory grantmaking, there is no one right way to do the work. In our experience, moving gradually across the public engagement spectrum worked for us – allowing us to build our skills and make the case for greater investment in the work over time. But wherever you start to test the waters, if you are open to feedback and curious enough to try new ways of working, we would encourage you to take the plunge.