When I started talking to people in the UK funding sector about my fellowship, one of the questions that got brought up, again and again, was how to get boards and senior managers on board with participatory approaches. As the majority of foundations I met were set up as participatory funders this question was quite difficult for them to respond to. The tension between boards and approach was totally alien to them as their boards and senior management had been the instigators and biggest champions of participatory approaches.

For the few more traditional foundations I met with, they were likely to have only small pockets of participatory grantmaking within their portfolios either through one-off programs of funding or through testing smaller aspects of participation within their work, such as having a layperson on their decision making panels or recruiting staff from the communities they were trying to serve.