Human rights grantmaking should encompass two distinct elements: a commitment to support community-led groups and a commitment to community-inclusive decision-making processes within our funding institutions. Human rights funders recognize that individuals and communities experiencing injustice should lead in articulating the change they wish to see and the paths taken towards its realization. Impacted communities—and the social movements that represent them—must lead not only because we want to shift power, but because they know better than anyone else about their own needs, contexts, and possibilities for change.

Human rights funders should prioritize funding that enables organizations and movements to implement their own visions, strengthen their capacity, and adapt to changing circumstances over the long term. We should make our grantmaking processes more inclusive and participatory by directly engaging impacted communities (with a particular focus on marginalized and excluded groups within those communities) in identifying problems, analyzing structural causes, and determining solutions. We must ensure that this engagement is not extractive, but rather supports the self-determined objectives of these communities and has their full consent.

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