Weaving community knowledge on moving money together

How do we move money and power differently, and what are we learning along the way? 

At the Wild Times Gathering in Birmingham, hosted by Social Change Nest, we explored those questions with our hands as well as our heads, using fabric, pens, wool, leaves and a loom.

Together with Natasha Friend from Camden Giving and Anjelica Finnegan from York Together, the PGM Community hosted a session exploring participatory money movement, community decision making and governance.

Everyone brought their own experiences, questions, challenges and ideas, writing them onto strips of fabric and paper, weaving them into a shared loom, so that individual insights gradually became one piece of collective knowledge.

And there was a lot to weave together.

Some of the threads:

• “Communities don’t want charity, they want solidarity.”
• “Let go of the idea that it needs to be perfect.”
• “How do we move through conflict to repair?”
• “Intentionality + transparency + care.”
• “Mobilise wealth holders hyper locally - relationships - but don’t skew the power.”
• “What brick do you want your money to lay?” (Generational change)
• “How can PGM up its game on the amounts it moves? We need more money.”

And one question came up more than once: is “participatory” even the right word? Does it capture what we're trying to do - and, underneath the terminology, who is actually having the conversations and making the decisions?

Some bigger threads emerging through the session,

How do we move beyond inviting people to participate towards genuinely sharing power and decision making?

How do we move much more money in this way?

How do we hold relationships, care, conflict and healing as part of the work - while accepting that participation will never be perfect?

Across the PGM Community, people have been experimenting for years with questions around sharing decision-making power, moving money to communities, paying people to participate, navigating conflict, building trust and creating the conditions for meaningful participation. Where else might the knowledge and practice developed through participatory grantmaking be useful? As conversations grow around devolution, community power and local decision making, what knowledge could participatory grantmaking practitioners bring to that conversation?

If you're working with participatory approaches to moving money - whether you've been doing this for years, you're just getting started, or you're somewhere in the messy middle - come and join the PGM Community and keep weaving the conversation with us. 💛

A huge thank you to everyone who shared so generously, and to Social Change Nest and the Wild Times community for creating the space for us to experiment, make, move, talk and learn together.

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