28 January 2026  Authors: Jo Brown, IVAR (Learning Partner) and Louise Henry, Collaboration Circle

Most funding processes follow a familiar pattern. A small group holds the power, evaluating applications and making decisions while applicants wait at a distance. Even when everyone has good intentions, the structure itself concentrates this power in ways that are hard to shift. Over the past three years, Propel has been deliberately testing alternative ways of assessing applications and making funding decisions, with the aim of redistributing where influence sits within those processes.  

Why changing who gets to decide matters 

As a cross-sector collaboration, Propel works hard to ensure all partners are involved in shaping the programme. This includes not only agreeing shared ambitions, but actively questioning how decisions are designed, and who is trusted to make them. For some funders, decision-makers are often far removed from the organisations applying for grants and even further away from the communities that benefit from their work. Propel has always sought to fund differently, bringing funders and civil society into the same decision-making space. The rationale for this approach is deliberate: decisions about long-term systems change are stronger when they draw on lived experience, long-term relationships, and contextual knowledge, alongside grant making expertise. 

Collective decision-making in practice 

On paper, the new approach for applying for a long-term grant was straightforward. Organisations submitted a short expression of interest and, if successful, a full application followed. So far, so familiar. What changed was not the application stages themselves, but who shaped the criteria, who assessed applications, and how final decisions were made.  

Propel brought together grantees at an away day in 2024, and workshopped what a ‘good long-term systems change grant’ looked like. This feedback from grantees was then translated into the criteria for the Propel long-term grants. In practical terms, this meant that assessment criteria reflected grantees’ own definitions of sustainability, leadership, and systems impact, rather than being imposed solely by funders. 

Three people then assessed each expression of interest: 

• A current funder - the idea being that they have been supporting and advocating for the applicant throughout their current grant. They know the team behind the application, have read their reports, and visited their work in action. 

• A long-term funder - a funder who will be investing in Propel’s long-term grants. These assessors are experienced in systems change and the nuances of long-term funding.   

• An equity partner or young assessor - Youth-focused applicants were assessed by a young person from the GLA’s team of Young Assessors, whilst equity partners (a group of partners from infrastructure organisations, involved in Propel from the beginning) bring their lived experience to assessing community involvement. 

Each assessor brought a different form of legitimacy to the process, relational knowledge, funding expertise, and / or lived experience. 

In practice, it worked very differently from a standard funding round. Assessors were not simply comparing applications against set criteria. They were bringing different kinds of knowledge to the table and working out how their perspectives fit together. This required assessors to make their assumptions explicit and to understand how their perspectives complemented, rather than competed with, one another. 

Equity partners made a distinct contribution, designing their own criteria for what it means to be genuinely led by and for the communities that they serve. Inviting partners to assess is one thing but trusting them to design a process gives them ownership. This shifted the role of equity partners from contributors within a predefined framework to co-architects of the assessment itself. Participants reported that decisions felt more grounded and credible when informed by multiple perspectives. As one Equity assessor reflected, “We devised those particular questions… rather than that being prescribed by funders”.  

A collaborative panel undertook the shortlisting, convened and supported by London Funders, and with funders and equity partners around the table as decision-makers.  

By the time the shortlisted applicants had submitted a full application (this is being done across three cohorts, so it is ongoing), funding for Propel’s long-term grants from City Bridge Foundation and the National Lottery Community Fund had been moved into a pooled fund held by Collaboration Circle. This shift in where the funding sits is a critical structural change, enabling shared decision-making to be matched by shared financial authority. 

The assessment team for the EOI and full application stages used the same approach, building a shared perspective that no single assessor could have achieved.  

Collaboration Circle also set-up a new Funding Committee, where power is explicitly shared between funders and equity and justice organisations. The Committee is co-chaired by a funder and equity infrastructure organisation, and the rest of the committee includes three funders and seven equity and justice community organisations. When the Committee met to make the final grant decisions, they drew on a wealth of experience and perspectives, including lived experience, long-term relationships, grant management, and system-level understanding, to build a full picture of each applicant. Crucially, this committee held full delegated authority over decisions, rather than operating in an advisory capacity. 

Applicants responded positively to the process. On a welcome call with a long-term grantee, they told us that their grant award felt “all the sweeter” knowing that equity and justice organisations were part of the decision-making process.  

This feedback reflects the legitimacy applicants attributed to decisions shaped by peers and community-facing organisations. 

Where power shifted  

Partners valued how the process reshaped dynamics. Equity partners didn’t just rubber-stamp the criteria; they designed the assessment itself. Funders, grant managers, and equity partners sat together as peers, something participants noted felt unusual. This peer dynamic disrupted more typical hierarchies between funders and civil society organisations involved in funding decisions. This mix of perspectives made grounded decisions and offered a more “rounded view” of each organisation.  

In decision-making, the power visibly shifted. The Funding Committee aren’t an Advisory Group whose decisions have to be ratified elsewhere – all decision-making on a pooled fund of £35m is delegated to this group. This delegation represents a substantive transfer of authority, not simply a consultative gesture.  

Shifting power is messy: lessons for others 

Sharing power can appear straightforward in principle, but proves more complex in practice. Timing and capacity were the most significant pressure points. Funders sometimes struggled to align their assessments with equity partner reviews, and key insights occasionally arrived too late to shape their judgment. These tensions highlighted the operational implications of shared decision-making, particularly when working across different organisational cultures and time constraints. 

A few lessons cut across the whole process: 

• Start earlier than feels necessary - Build flexibility into timelines when multiple groups contribute to assessments. Involving more people takes more time. 

• Learning before doing – Take time to ensure key elements of the criteria are understood by all involved and create time for training and questions.  

• Account for different working styles – We don’t all retain information in the same way. Summary slides or one-page overviews can reduce cognitive load during panel discussions. 

• Review voting methods - Balance transparency with approaches that reduce group influence. We trialled both anonymous and public voting.  

These lessons speak less to technical fixes and more to the conditions required for shared power to function with integrity. 

What this process makes clear is that sharing power in funding decisions is not simply a procedural choice, but a shift in how authority is understood and exercised. Decisions were shaped not by a single vantage point, but by the deliberate combination of lived experience, long-term relationships, funding expertise and system-level insight. 

The value of this approach did not lie in eliminating tension, but in making decision-making more transparent, accountable and collectively owned, particularly where decisions carry long-term consequences for organisations and communities. The challenges that surfaced were not signs of weakness, but evidence of a system adjusting to redistributed responsibility. 

For Propel, this marks an ongoing test of what it means to govern pooled funding in ways that are credible to funders and legitimate to the communities such funding is intended to serve. 

As Propel’s long-term grants move into delivery, this work will continue to be tested, refined and shared. Learning from the long-term grants, alongside other collaborations hosted through Collaboration Circle, will be actively surfaced so that others can reflect on what it takes to share power in practice, not just in principle.  

In the coming months, we will be launching the Equity in Every Step library, which will bring together different approaches to equitable funding, relational grant management and shared decision-making. We are also pleased to invite further participation from equity and justice organisations who want to help shape what comes next.