By Shrabani Bhattacharjee
Over the past two years, I have worked as a Knowledge Transfer Partnership Associate with Funders Together and London Metropolitan University.
My role involved helping to develop Collaboration Circle, a pooled-funding model designed to bring funders, civil society organisations and communities together to make decisions in a more collaborative and equitable way. Much of my work took place behind the scenes – business planning, financial modelling, governance, due diligence, risk management and operational processes. Alongside this, I conducted research into organisational culture, leadership, psychological safety and collaborative governance.
These experiences taught me that equity is not a separate principle that can be applied once the important decisions have already been made. It is built, or undermined, through the operating choices made at every stage of funding.
Who helps design a programme? Who can afford to apply? Who decides what counts as credible evidence? Who carries the risk? Who has authority when people disagree? Who owns the learning produced?
These can look like administrative questions. In practice, they determine how power is distributed.
Systems shape relationships
My biggest takeaway is that successful collaboration depends as much on relationships and culture as it does on systems and structures. Strong governance, financial controls and clear processes are essential, but they only work when people feel trusted, included and able to contribute honestly – and that takes time. Creating space for different perspectives and building shared ownership can feel slow, but it leads to more thoughtful, sustainable decisions.
A funder can ask an organisation to invest significant time in an application without knowing whether it has a realistic chance of success. It can invite communities to share knowledge while retaining control over how that knowledge is used. It can encourage funded organisations to speak openly while maintaining processes that make honesty feel risky.
Trust is not created simply by describing a programme as collaborative. It grows when people understand how decisions will be made, know their contribution can affect the outcome and feel able to raise difficult issues without being penalised.
Equity is cumulative
Alongside Collaboration Circle, I contributed to the Advancing Equity Project, exploring how equity can be embedded throughout grantmaking – from outreach and programme design to applications, due diligence, decision-making, grant management, evaluation and learning.
No single intervention can make a process equitable on its own. A shorter application form cannot compensate for an assessment process that privileges one kind of organisation or evidence. Community engagement does not redistribute power if communities are consulted after the fundamental decisions have been made. Flexible funding can give organisations greater freedom, but that freedom is easily undone by reporting requirements that consume disproportionate time and capacity.
"Equity is cumulative. Each stage either reinforces or limits what has been achieved elsewhere. This work strengthened my belief that equity must be reflected in ordinary decisions through which funding is designed and managed."
Participation must be matched by authority
One of the most rewarding parts of my time at Funders Together was watching Collaboration Circle move from an ambitious idea on a whiteboard to a live model making real decisions. It showed me that there is an important difference between inviting people to participate in a process and giving them authority over its outcome.
Through Propel, funders and equity and justice organisations contributed to developing and assessing the funding approach. Equity partners helped define what should be assessed, bringing their own understanding of community leadership, equity and systems change into criteria they shaped. The creation of a Funding Committee with delegated authority to decide how pooled funding should be distributed was particularly significant. Participation was matched by decision-making power.
That did not make the process simple. Real collaboration is slow – people bring different responsibilities, working styles and relationships to risk, and may interpret evidence differently or disagree about priorities. But the purpose of collaboration is not to remove difference or make every decision comfortable. It is to bring different forms of knowledge into decisions and create conditions where disagreement can be handled honestly.
Making risk and learning visible
My work on governance, due diligence and financial modelling reinforced an important question: when a funding process changes, where do the risk and administrative burden go?
Collaboration does not eliminate risk. It determines where risk sits, who can carry it and who decides what is acceptable. A funder may reduce its own exposure by adding conditions or retaining approval points, but this can transfer uncertainty and administrative work to the organisations seeking funding. Trust does not mean that risks should go unexamined. Shared power still requires clarity about responsibilities and transparent processes for raising concerns.
The challenge is to make different forms of risk visible – not just financial and reputational risk for institutions, but also wasted time, unstable income, restricted decision-making or organisations feeling unable to speak openly when circumstances change.
The same applies to learning. Evaluation can extract information for a funder’s purposes, or it can create knowledge that is useful and accessible to everyone involved.
The Equity Learning Library brings together much of the research and practice explored through the Advancing Equity Project. It brings together evidence, examples and practical questions that funders can use to examine their own decisions.
As I leave Funders Together, I am proud that this body of work is available publicly. It captures many of the questions that have shaped my time here and lets that learning keep influencing practice after I have moved on. These questions don’t disappear outside the funding sector; they simply take a different shape. I will now be joining Palladium’s Humanitarian Stabilisation Operations Team as an Operations Programme Manager, where I expect to meet the same questions of trust, power and accountability in a different operating context.
The central lesson I will carry with me is that equitable collaboration must be built into the way work happens.
It is not enough to ask who has been invited into the room. We must also ask who shaped the invitation, who sets the terms, whose knowledge carries weight, who holds authority, where risk sits and who benefits from what is learned.
Explore the Advancing Equity Learning Library and consider where equity could be strengthened across your own funding practice.