Propel Toolkit: Co-designing funding criteria

Funding criteria shape who applies, who gets funded, and ultimately what kinds of change are possible. Traditionally, criteria are designed by funders, which can unintentionally reinforce existing power dynamics – requiring applicants to interpret, translate, and adapt their work to fit externally defined priorities.

Co-designing criteria with community groups represents a meaningful shift in power. It recognises that organisations – particularly those working closest to communities experiencing structural inequalities – hold critical expertise about what effective work looks like and how that can be captured in a funding application.

Applicant-led criteria can:

• Make funding more accessible and relevant
• Reduce the burden of “decoding” funder language
• Surface priorities and approaches that funders may not have considered
• Strengthen alignment between what is funded and what communities actually need

Before adopting this approach, consider whether you have:

• Clarity on your non-negotiables
  What aspects of your funding purpose must remain fixed (e.g. mission, legal requirements), and where is there genuine flexibility?
• Strong relationships or trusted access points
  Co-design works best when there is trust, or when you work through intermediaries who already have it.
• Time and resource for participation
  Meaningful input takes time. This includes compensating participants where appropriate.
• Internal readiness to act on input
  Are decision-makers open to being influenced? Is there appetite to shift established processes?

Propel is a pooled fund, hosted by Collaboration Circle, that supports organisations working to address structural inequalities through a long-term, systems change approach. It focuses on enabling organisations to explore, develop and lead sustained efforts that shift the conditions creating inequality, rather than funding short-term activities alone.

To design its long-term grants, Propel brought funded organisations together and asked them to define the key features of work that they wanted to be assessed on. For example, feedback led to adapting questions about organisational identity to better reflect how groups describe their purpose and origins.

What worked:

• Grounding criteria in lived experience organisations made them clearer and more meaningful to applicants
• Sharing frameworks on how applicants would be assessed against the criteria with applicants and assessors created a more consistent understanding of what Propel was looking for at the decision-making stage.

• Translating broad and diverse understandings of systems change into clear application criteria.
  To address this, Propel used a shared systems change framework throughout the process and hosted webinars for applicants, assessors and decision-makers so everyone had a common understanding of the concepts informing the application and assessment process.

• Ensuring participants’ perspectives were reflected without overcomplicating the process.
  To balance inclusion with practicality, the design process included multiple opportunities for participants to review and shape emerging ideas, alongside regular checks to ensure that the final process remained clear, simple and feasible for applicants, assessors and decision-makers.

Starter questions for co-designing criteria

In the co-design process, you might ask current or potential applicants:

• What does meaningful or effective work look like in your context?
• What enables organisations like yours to create change?
• What are your work’s key features related to a systems change approach?
• What do funders often misunderstand about your work?
• What kinds of impact are most important, but hardest to evidence?
• What would make funding criteria feel fair and accessible to you?

Aligning the process

Ensure consistency by:

• Sharing the same language and frameworks with applicants, assessors, and decision-makers
• Creating guidance or examples to clarify expectations
• Offering spaces (e.g. webinars, drop-ins) for applicants to ask questions and test their understanding

Reflective prompts for funders

Use these to review your current or planned criteria:

• When were your criteria last developed or updated?
• Who was involved in shaping them? Who was not?
• Which parts of your criteria do applicants most often misunderstand or struggle with?
• To what extent do your criteria capture the realities of the organisations you aim to fund?
• Where might your criteria unintentionally exclude or disadvantage certain groups?
• How much flexibility do you currently allow for different ways of working or defining impact as part of your application process?
• What would it take to involve applicants more meaningfully next time?