Humanis Way: Participatory Grantmaking for Meaningful Change

Yayasan Humanis dan Inovasi Sosial (hereinafter referred to as Humanis) manages a diverse portfolio of programs that employ tailored strategies and approaches to grantmaking. Each approach is carefully designed to ensure that decision-making processes, particularly participatory ones, align seamlessly with Humanis’ core values and program goals.

This guideline aims to document our core processes, capture key insights into the nature of participatory grantmaking, and identify strategic areas for growth in future programming. Our goal is to establish a set of guiding principles that ensure Humanis’ grantmaking remains participatory, care-based, community-centered, inclusive, transparent, and accountable. Learning from our experiences and best practices, we acknowledge that there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach.

This document is both timely and strategic, serving as a testament to demonstrate Humanis’ commitment, reliability, and credibility in participatory grantmaking. We recognize the long-standing systemic complexities within the development sector, including top-down funding dynamics, increasingly restricted civic spacetime, and the complex political landscapes that often hinder access to resources and collaboration. By acknowledging these realities, we envision this document as a living reference: guiding Humanis and its partners in program design and implementation. Our goal is to foster a space for honest dialogue, ensuring our practices remain both visionary and pragmatic.

Humanis Way: Participatory Grantmaking distills five key principles to guide all grantmaking processes that enable meaningful participation:

• Centering Care;

• Trust-Based Power Shifting;

• Walking with Social Movements;

• Embedding Intersectionality; and

• Reimagining Adaptability and Flexibility.

The sections that follow elaborate on Humanis’ practical understanding of participatory grantmaking. For each principle, we examine its meaning, relevance, and strategic benefits, while candidly addressing the challenges to anticipate. Each section is supported by relevant case studies drawn from our firsthand experience. The document concludes with actionable recommendations to improve grantmaking practices, not just within Humanis, but in collaboration with civic actors and the broader development sector.

This document is not a rigid blueprint, template, or format that limits our imagination and interpretation. Rather, we share stories from our experiences to illustrate the diverse ways these principles can be applied. However, we invite interested readers to reach out to Humanis for further information and guidance on how to tailor these principles to their own organizational contexts.