Participatory Philanthrophy: What Don’t We Know?

First, let me apologize to everyone for what I consider a very selfish blog post. My dissertation interests stem around better understanding supply side factors of institutional philanthrophy, which has led to my specific interests in understanding the motivations, process, intentions and outcomes of involving citizens on grant making committees.

That being said, I’ve recently come across a term called ‘participatory philanthrophy’. This concept has a number of institutional forms which vary according to the organization. On one end of the continuum the public has an opportunity to comment or ‘vote’ on potential grantee applications. A great example of this is The Case Foundation’s work http://miyo.casefoundation.org/

On the other end of the contiuum are situations where the public serves as a ‘board’ for the philanthrophic organization making site visits, scoring applications and often times recommending final grant award amounts to a committee of ‘experts’ or outsiders.

Although this topic is recently catching hold in philanthrophic organizations we would be remiss not to acknowledge the public participation literature, where citizens are involved in decision making in the public and private sectors (like budgeting, economic development, environmental risks, etc.)

 One of the main findings in public participation literature to date is that not only do the goals of involving the public need to be articulated up front, but establishing exactly how public participation can lead to those goals signals certain process and procedural requirements that will ensure its effectiveness.

So how can philanthrophic organizations use this literature to their benefit?

1) Involving the public can be linked to goals in a few different ways (this is not an exhaustive list)

a. Impact on citizens

b. Impact on acceptability of decisions

c. Ability to acquire additional information

I am hypothesizing that most philanthrophic organizations would use citizens in order to acquire additional information from individuals who live, work and play in the areas where potential grantees are doing their work. Perhaps their perspectives lend themselves to new information or better insights.  However, this is just my hypothesis and until explicit information is garnered from the few philanthrophic organizations who do this type of work, we are all speculating. To date, all we have are many normative and ancedotal statements that involving citizens creates ‘better decisions’.

Secondly, if the goal of involving the public is to acquire new and additional information from citizens who are ‘on the ground’ experts how can ‘participatory philanthrophy’ be structured in order to achieve this goal?

How can philanthrophic organizations ensure that the information they require is representative of citizens in the community, and not just those citizens who have the resources and time to participate? More importantly, how will they know if they have achieved a group who’s interests are representative of citizens in the community?

As you can see from just this one example, there is quite a bit of work to be done in really implementing successful participatory philanthrophy programs. I’d love to have feedback on what you think the goals of these programs are and how philanthrophic instituations can achieve these goals through involving the public?

Despite all of my questions, I’m quite happy that this is starting to take place in our philanthrophic institutions. Yet, that is likely because of my own normative beliefs that involving citizens in grantmaking can create ‘better grantmaking decisions’.

I’m hoping my dissertation work can explain exactly what that is.