Putting the 'community' in Community-Based Funding: Challenges and Strategies of Local Human Service Funders

Background: Over the past 40 years, state and local communities face increasing pressure to resume responsibility for funding human services. Funding is a critical component of service delivery, as funders often create parameters around organizational eligibility and preferred programmatic approaches. All funders – whether public or private – must employ some mechanism to select grant and contract awardees. “Community-based” grant processes – where community volunteers, rather than staff, make funding decisions – are often lauded as having a deeper understanding of local problems and better sense of grantee capacity. These insights, proponents argue, increase the likelihood that programs best equipped to serve the community will receive funding. It is unclear, however, whether community grantmaking committees can deliver on this promise or if these processes simply reproduce existing power structures. In particular, little is known about how committee members are recruited (RQ1), why they serve in such a role (RQ2), or how they negotiate grant decisions with other organizational and community actors (RQ3).

Methods: Purposeful sampling was used to select two initial funder sites for examination - one municipality and one United Way – each of which provided referrals to other human service funders in their network using community volunteers for grant deliberations. The primary source of data is semi-structured interviews with community-based grantmakers (n=18) as well as funder staff who manage these committees (n=5). Other sources of data included document review (e.g., committee position descriptions, recruitment calls, publicly available rosters, meeting minutes) and direct observation of committee meetings.

Findings: Although the recruitment mechanisms for community grantmaking committees are more diverse than those used for other decision-making bodies (e.g. boards of directors), these processes still yield participants who neither mirror the broader community nor those accessing services. Regarding motivation, most committee members reported no experience with human services (either as provider or recipient), sharing they specifically volunteered in this manner to “learn more about the community.” Interviews with funder staff and document review suggest that representation issues stem – in part – from organizational practices: individuals with direct, topical expertise are largely precluded from committee participation due to conflict of interest policies. Finally, committee members did not describe the grantmaking process as one that required negotiation with other organizational or community stakeholders, a theme echoed by staff who expressed unwillingness to contribute to grant deliberations out of fear that doing so would violate the “community-led” process.

Implications: Although local funders (e.g. those situated at the county level or lower) are increasingly important to human service organizations, their deliberation processes have gone largely unexamined in social work literature. Community-led processes arguably ensure needed services are provided by trusted partners, but current practices erect significant barriers to delivering on this promise. In particular, organizational policies risk excluding critical voices whose knowledge could achieve grantmaking efficacy, instead reproducing the very top-down approach community-based processes are designed to counteract.