At the AJL Foundation, participatory grantmaking has always been about shifting power—placing decision-making in the hands of community members who best understand the needs, strengths, and aspirations of their communities. Over the past five years, community grantmaking committees have guided our grantmaking decisions, nominating, vetting, and recommending organizations for final board approval. Youth, parents, local leaders from government, nonprofits, and neighborhoods are experts because they are deeply rooted in and to their communities. 

In 2020, we changed our grantmaking process from traditional grant cycles, one where staff and board members reviewed and decided on where grant dollars should go, to a community participatory process where everyday people make grantmaking decisions for the foundation. We made this change after realizing the board and staff weren’t the right people to make decisions about what the community needed. We knew we had to go to community members and ask what we could do better, including how much a grant should be helpful to a nonpprofit and how they, as community, could be centered in the process. The next year, 2021, we implemented what we heard and launched the participatory grantmaking process.

Then, in 2025, we found ourselves at a 5-year mark of working with community for grantmaking and we wanted to be intentional, again, about pausing and listening to community for changes and improvements to the grantmaking process. We continued to give grants but paused the participatory part of the grantmaking so we could use that time to complete an evaluation of the grantmaking process. With the help of Dr. Kimberlin Butler, owner and founder of The L.E.A.D. Agency, we went back to community to check in on how we were doing. We wanted to learn directly from community members, nonprofit partners, and collaborators who have shaped this work – gratitude to our partners and the team who helped us with the evaluation!

Coupled with doing the evaluation, the pause created space for the foundation to make good on feedback we’d already heard from grant partners to shift toward multiyear grantmaking. Across philanthropy, we heard that organizations struggled to build strong programs, support staff, and respond to community needs when funding is uncertain year to year. Multiyear general operating grants provide stability, flexibility, and the ability to plan for the long term—something many of our partners had consistently told us they needed to implement. Since we needed time to focus on the evaluation but didn’t want to pause on grantmaking, for the first time in five years, staff selected organizations for funding. Importantly, this was done using decisions from past community grantmaking committees across multiple years of participatory processes. We looked for organizations that were approved by the community over multiple years and were already receiving multiyear funding by being selected year after year. Knowing that people on the grantmaking committee change every year, we saw some of the same organizations get nominated repeatedly. This told us that there are trusted community partners with a proven track record of serving their communities, so we started the selection process with those partners.

We also selected grant partners based on current times and where we saw funding being stripped for active oppression. Many of the communities our partners serve—particularly LGBTQ+, immigrants, refugees, and communities of color—are being directly targeted by policies and rhetoric from the current federal administration. In times like these, philanthropy has a responsibility to stand clearly with those communities and ensure that the organizations supporting them have the resources and stability they need to continue their work.

2025 was a year of reflection and the transition has been about deepening our commitment to community-led philanthropy, not stepping away from it. We are grateful to the community grantmakers, nonprofit partners, and evaluators who are helping us learn and grow. Their leadership continues to guide the AJL Foundation as we work toward a future where philanthropy is more accountable, more equitable, and more responsive to community.