In the second half of 2025, CEP’s Assessment and Advisory Services Team worked with the teams at Philanthropy Together, Redstone, and Vital Impact to survey recent grant recipients of 21 “bright spot” collaborative funds. In “The Collaborative Effect: Grantee Perspectives on How Collaborative Funds Work Best,” the researchers illuminated the way collaboratives’ specific practices and design choices allowed them to achieve unusually positive grantee perceptions of impact, relationships, and grantmaking process.

Wildseeds Fund, which supports grassroots organizations, communications strategists, and movement journalists working to uplift frontline stories, build power, and embolden transformative food and farm systems change, exemplifies those positive results. In this blog post, Wildseeds Executive Director Esperanza Pallana shares four practical observations about how the Fund builds trust and works alongside grantees.

Kevin Bolduc: Esperanza, when I first looked at the results of your Grantee Perception Report, I was surprised, honestly. It’s not every day that I see such positive grantee feedback across such a wide variety of the topics we ask about in the survey: Unusually strong impact on grantees’ fields and organizations, very high quality of interactions and communications, and helpful and streamlined processes.

Let’s start with impact. You’re granting less than $2 million a year and yet your grantees see Wildseeds as unusually successful in creating knowledge, influencing policy, and producing impact on their fields, and they appreciate your distinctive focus on storytelling and narrative approaches. Can you share an example of how Wildseeds and its grassroots grantees approach this work together?

Esperanza Pallana: The story of HOW we do our work is as important as the story of the impact our grantmaking and capacity building has. We are advocating for the communities most impacted by inequities in our food and agricultural systems to have the power to allocate resources toward the needed changes, in policy and in practice, and for their needs to be heard directly from them. Our work is time tested evidence on the effectiveness of community-controlled funding.

Read the full article about movement-led participatory grantmaking by Kevin Bolduc and Esperanza Pallana at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.