Global Greengrants Fund has a long and rich history of power shift in action. Over three decades, the Fund has developed a decentralised decision-making model, in which over 200 activist advisors, representing the communities that experience environmental injustices and human rights violations, decide on the appropriate allocation of resources. With this incredible network, we provide both seed-funding and long-term support that is flexible, unbureaucratic and inspired by the organising logic of ecosystems, where decision-making power is not centralised (in the Global North) and no single entity makes all the decisions. Instead, an organic sensory system adapts and responds to the local context, with a multitude of advisory board decision-makers investing in their local priorities, aligned with the needs of grassroots movements. As an organisation committed to environmental justice, we draw inspiration from the decentralisation of natural ecosystems such as coral reefs. These ecosystems teach us to challenge cultures of separation and individualism embedded in colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and endless growth. We recognise that each has a crucial and symbiotic role to play, be it providing nutrient rich resources to the system or building self-sustaining, reef-like structures.

This beautiful model of decentralised grantmaking is deeply rooted in our DNA, yet doesn’t automatically reflect how we are organised internally. Almost by default, over the years we became a hierarchical, top-down, siloed organisation, forced into extractive systems of relating that are all too familiar, from childhood to workplace to wider society. The old colonial paradigm, where the few exert leadership over the many, and where everybody knows their place and sphere of influence, purported to provide security to us all. Yet, it became the corset constricting us from living our values fully, and from addressing the very power imbalances we are working to shift in our grantmaking. We needed nothing less than a full-scale, internal systems transformation.

Recognising this, Global Greengrants Fund embarked on a journey towards inner change and power shift, not just in our grantmaking but in how we, as the people of this organisation and network, show up with and for each other. We believe that greater equity, power sharing, and collaboration will help us better live up to our values and carry out our work in the world with more authenticity and legitimacy. In 2022 we made a decision to become more collaborative, networked, and less centralised, while becoming more self-organised. We began with a focus on ‘inner work’; examining and shifting our individual and collective assumptions and deepening our understanding of power and oppression, and how philanthropy has often adopted the same extractive structures we aim to repair. We are now in the slow and often painful process of shedding the supposed security of hierarchy and re-imagining who we are as an interdependent, self-regulating ecosystem. This approach requires new ways of collective decision-making, building a culture centered in care, working to understand the more insidious nature of power dynamics and building a shared language and toolkit of practices to name and respond to power imbalances.

Read the full article about power shifting by B de Gersigny and Eva Rehse at Alliance Magazine.