Giving Compass' Take:
- Zachary Turk shares lessons on practicing equitable funding in youth fellowships and using an inclusive lens to challenge oppressive systems.
- What practices can individual donors adopt to build equitable funding strategies?
- Read more about investing in youth engagement and social action.
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In 2017, Open Society Foundations launched a global Community Youth Fellowship Program — a collaborative grantmaking initiative focused on engaging young people as individual grantees through a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens. The program allowed us to address crucial questions such as: How can philanthropy use an equity-centered approach to support young activists to build their leadership and a leadership pipeline in their communities? How can young activists be supported to work collaboratively, building solidarity across movements and generations? In our new report, The Time Is Now: Funding Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive Youth Fellowships (English and Spanish, PDF), we reflect on lessons learned and positive practices in this work and interrogate our own approach.
Our initial emphasis was on intellectually and developmentally disabled activists. By identifying and involving disabled youth as fellows, we sought to help dismantle the prejudices of ableism and promote disability rights. Further, by rethinking grantmaking procedures and centering principles of justice, equity, and inclusion in our processes, we strove to advance a vision in which all areas of work can and must be aligned with program values.
We used this as the basis for expanding principles of accessibility and inclusion to all our fellowships, ensuring that they were all open and easily accessible to all applicants, including disabled ones — in the words of writer and disability justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: to "honor what different bodies and minds can do, giving us all room to participate, time for rest and joy as well as for work and duty."
Through each step of designing the fellowship program, we looked at how grantmaking processes might, unwittingly, reinforce oppression and exclusion. Activists Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones have shown that white supremacy culture defines many organizations, and this systemic, institutionalized centering of whiteness often creates grant application processes from which many with non-dominant identities are excluded. We asked ourselves: How do we expand reach in our calls for proposals? And how can we lower barriers and support young activists to navigate proposal requirements while working at simplifying them? Overall, how can we, as grantmakers, contribute to the redistribution of power? With each iteration of the fellowships, we learned how much work needs to be done, by us and by others, to move toward grantmaking that intentionally challenges systems of oppression and centers trust.
Read the full article about funding youth fellowships by Zachary Turk at Philanthropy News Digest.