At its core, research identifies an important question and derives an approach to answer it. But historically, the ability to conduct research has been limited to those with power, privilege, and resources. While grantmaking provides significant resources to fund research, those resources have been concentrated among largely White-led, affluent research settings.

In a May 2020 report, Echoing Green, a social innovation and leadership development organization, and the Bridgespan Group, a global nonprofit that consults and advises social change leaders, found a funding gap between White-led and Black-led early-stage organizations, and have observed four main barriers that leaders of color experience in their efforts to secure funding:

  • Getting connected to potential funders: Leaders of color have inequitable access to social networks that enable connections to the philanthropic community.
  • Building rapport with potential funders: Interpersonal bias can manifest as mistrust and microaggressions, which inhibit relationship building and emotionally burden leaders of color.
  • Securing support for the organization: Funders often lack understanding of culturally relevant approaches, leading them to over rely on specific forms of evaluation and strategies with which they are familiar.
  • Sustaining relationships with current funders: Grant renewal processes can be arduous if mistrust remains, and funding may stop if the funder has a White-centric view of what is a strategic priority and how to measure progress.

These barriers reflect structural biases within philanthropy that have limited support for smaller organizations led by people of color. For example, PEAK Grantmaking—a network of philanthropy professionals—notes that time-consuming application processes favor previously successful grantees with the infrastructure in place to respond. Previously successful applicants, and those with robust development support, are adept at presenting their work in ways they think funders will understand or want to hear. PEAK Grantmaking also notes that application review processes often occur at the highest levels of an organization, which are more likely to lack diversity and transparency.  

Given these structural biases, there’s a broader movement by some funders to improve equity in their grantmaking processes and to minimize historic barriers to participation. There are numerous coalitions and multifunder initiatives—such as the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropythat are dedicated to advancing racial equity in philanthropy and addressing power imbalances between foundations and grantees.

In addition to multifunder initiatives, some funders are engaging in new ways of grantmaking. For example, over the past several years the Ford Foundation has explored participatory grantmaking—the practice of involving community members and other stakeholders in the grantmaking process. In describing the Ford Foundation’s participatory grantmaking efforts, Program Officer Christopher Cardona said that it is “especially urgent…for funders to do a better job including the grantees and communities we seek to serve in our decision making, and when possible, turning over that power to them.”

Community Research For Health Equity

Turning power over to the community is the impetus and inspiration behind a new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grantmaking program, Community Research for Health Equity (CRHE), managed by AcademyHealth. The CRHE program seeks to elevate community voices through community-led research projects that make the priorities of communities the primary goal of local health system transformation efforts.

To respond to the historical imbalance in research funding for community-based organizations and those led by leaders of color, the CRHE program requires that the research project team be embedded within the community that is the focus of their research study, and that principal investigators are either a community-based organization or a community-engaged researcher working in equitable partnership with community members/organizations.

As AcademyHealth, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and our program partners embarked on designing this new research program, we encountered key decision points that offered opportunities to embed equity in the grantmaking program and related processes.

Each decision point came with its own tradeoffs:

Designing The Funding Opportunity

Should the scope of the funding opportunity be decided within a closed group of foundation or program staff; or by engaging those participating in the research or potential end-users? Should the solicited research include broad topics and flexible research questions defined largely by the applicants, or should the research questions be narrowly defined or prescribed within the funding opportunity?

Developing Application Requirements

Should the program prioritize streamlining traditional application requirements, which historically have been cumbersome and time-consuming to complete, and ask for only the most essential information needed to make a decision? Should we embrace alternate application formats—such as accepting phone calls or video submissions in lieu of written applications or allowing submissions in different languages?  

Building An Applicant Pool

Will we rely on traditional outreach strategies and channels to reach potential applicants, which risks reaching the same largely White-led, well-resourced organizations? Or should we prioritize broadening networks with individual and direct outreach to diversify the applicant pool?

Reviewing Applications

Will we employ the traditionally closed and opaque grant review processes, conducted at the highest staff levels within philanthropy? Or should we prioritize selecting reviewers who better reflect the project teams that will be awarded and the end-users who will be served through the research itself?

Design

In designing the CRHE program, we worked with several partners to embed equity throughout the program. We partnered with Design Impact, a social innovation firm in Cincinnati, Ohio, to design and implement the program, including an initial “design day” to inform the fundamental program design and principles. The design day included staff from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and AcademyHealth, along with individuals with experience in community-engaged research (both as traditional researchers and community researchers) to develop a collective vision for the program and provide feedback on potential structures for the funding opportunity.

Some of the key principles that emerged from the discussion included: being bold and willing to face discomfort to change the status quo; applying an equity lens and committing to inclusion, fairness, and justice; centering community voice and embracing a co-creative research model; and ensuring communication is clear and transparent. 

Following the design day, we engaged a smaller planning group, composed of individuals with diverse experiences and expertise related to community-engaged research, to co-create the program structure and funding opportunity. The planning group shaped the program goals, provided important guidance on the size of awards, and offered considerations for broadening the opportunity to individuals both new to and experienced with community-led research.

Ultimately, we decided that the scope of the funding opportunity should be broad and encouraged applicants to tell us what issues or questions their communities thought were important to study.

We also experimented with ways to make the application process less burdensome. While we weren’t able to accept alternate application formats, we shortened the narrative, reduced the number of application phases to just one, and made some components of the application optional. Then, during the application period, we provided applicants with support, including webinars to introduce the funding opportunity, resources to assist in preparing project budgets, and responses to questions from applicants as they were developing their proposals.

Review

After an initial screening, a subset of applications was sent for external review. The external reviewers included both community-engaged researchers and individuals with lived experience with the health care system, prior experience as a community-member participant in research activities, or both. We specified the review and selection criteria in the funding opportunity and provided the external reviewers with a rubric to guide their reviews and encourage consistent assessments.

Lastly, we considered equity in the structural aspects of the applications as well, including the budget development. Applicant budgets were reviewed for equity and fair compensation of community-member research participants and/or partners.

We’re excited about the ways in which we were able to experiment and test new ways to embed equity in this grantmaking program, but we know we have farther to go. This co-creative planning, design and review process culminated in the awarding of 10 community-led research projects.

The funded studies, which began in April and run for two and three years, will address local health care system issues of importance to communities of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and other historically marginalized populations. AcademyHealth will be working with an external evaluator to determine the degree to which our grantmaking and technical assistance were inclusive and minimized barriers to participation in the program.

In its November 2020 report, GlobalGiving, a nonprofit that connects donors with grassroots projects around the world, stated that “The process of being community‑led is itself impact because it is actually how change happens. People coming together, realizing their collective capabilities and agency, and taking action.” We anticipate rich learnings from both the study findings and the project teams themselves, as they work together to spur action in their local health care systems to address inequities.  

Authors’ Note

The authors thank Dr. Curtis Webb and Sarah Robertson at Design Impact and Lauren Gerlach, Marya Khan, and Maura Dugan at AcademyHealth for their important contributions to the design and implementation of the Community Research for Health Equity program and their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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