Kamna Muralidharan, former programme director at Impact on Urban Health explores how we can shift power dynamics in grant-making and provide actionable steps for funders to engage communities in more equitable ways.
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Fundamentally, philanthropy is flawed – it assumes that one group of people know best about what others need. And while those of us working in funding organisations mean well, we’re often so far removed from the issues we’re addressing that we have to ask ourselves, how can we do this better?

Our work at Impact on Urban Health (IoUH) is about closing the gaps in health inequality. However, when I joined the Children’s Mental Health programme, I was struck by how little any of us understood about what was driving the inequities in children’s mental health in the urban areas of London where we work.

In 2021, Sir Michael Marmot identified enabling all people to maximise their capabilities and have control over their lives as a key policy objective to close health inequality gaps. This is true for practice, not just policy.

So, in the spring of 2023 we began the journey of setting up a Parent Panel – an experimental model for involving local parents in our programme decision-making. The process began with a co-designing phase between members of the CMH programme and parents from Lambeth and Southwark who, over a period of three months, designed a prototype model that would enable us to share power with them in meaningful ways. The final design was set across four stages: Recruitment, Starting, Being on the Parent Panel, and Ending.

Here’s four things we learned from the Parent Panel pilot:

Prioritise accessibility: The Parent Panel included 2 parents who didn’t speak English; therefore, significant time and money was invested into translation, accessibility, and flexibility. The budget also included some contribution for childcare which received good feedback from the group. It felt important to have a focus on wellbeing while giving people freedom and agency, for example, we provided an optional unrestricted budget of £200 per person.

Equal pay: Pay for the expertise you’re engaging with as you would ‘professional’ expertise. What does it take to professionalise lived expertise contributions? Paying people equitably and not letting issues such as impact on benefits be a barrier to action. In the Parent Panel, we offered financial advice so that people could choose how they would like to be remunerated, which limited negative impacts. Not many people took up this offer, but it allowed the participants to decide for themselves how they wanted their payments structured.

Invest time: People are central to the social change work we’re all committed to and building healthy, trusting relationships is a vital part of this. We found that investing time to look beyond our organisational identities, getting to know the parents as individuals, learning about their multi-dimensional lives, and sharing ourselves as individuals was crucial for building confidence and sharing power. We heard from parents that “stronger relationships did impact decision-making through trust, belonging, sense of power and confidence”.

Clarify purpose, redlines, and restrictions: Be clear about what the purpose of participation is: are you looking for advice? Do you want to broaden decision-making? Or are you interested in understanding more about a particular group? To avoid tokenistic engagement, sharing decision-making power is crucial. Whatever the purpose, give people clarity about their role, the purpose of engagement, and the parameters.

Ultimately, each member of the team has been influenced by our engagement with the parents on the panel in some way. And we’ve learned so much about the issues that we’re working on that we wouldn’t have if we hadn’t made the time and space to listen to the people experiencing them.

Our tendency as funders is to distance ourselves from the communities we exist to serve – we fund consultants, researchers, and community partners to do the listening – but something gets lost in translation. The Parent Panel hasn’t only been a worthwhile endeavour to explore how we share power, I'd say it’s also been a non-negotiable practice to strengthen our grant-making efforts. As funders, we worry a lot about doing harm and being extractive, but what’s come through from the parents involved in the process is that the real harm is in us not doing anything differently.

Ultimately, the big question that the Parent Panel and other participatory processes highlight is ‘who is the expert’? Shifting our internal practices to enable participation from the people that our programmes exist to serve, while recognising and valuing their expertise, must be central to any efforts to share power in grant-making.

If you’d like to find out more about the Parent Panel pilot, you can read the full report here. We’d love to hear how others are integrating participatory practices into their grant-making, so please get in touch.

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