Idea 02 - Organising society and organising money

The collision of the logics for organising society, and organising money, has created lots of interesting experiments around the world.

Observing this from a distance, it seems a lot of the earliest and most progressive work has been done with the groups that are most disenfranchised (sometimes even dehumanised) in different contexts worldwide: young people, LGBTQIA+ communities, sex workers, Palestinian communities in Israel, environmental activists (speaking on behalf of the natural world), people of colour, women and girls.

There is also a story of intersectionality and geography mixed with marginalisation, in many of the democratic money experiments and, until recently, more examples from grant-making than from social investing.

One more thing that stands out from the stories is the question of community control over what?
It’s a really important question because there are examples where communities have control over the returns from money invested and controlled by someone else, and somewhere communities also have power over the capital that’s invested (like in Barking and Dagenham).

To give that some contours, the US makes a good case study: foundations in 2021 had $1.3 trillion in assets and made $95 billion in grants (7% of total assets).

Even if every single foundation gave participatory grant-making power to communities tomorrow, that would be control over only 7% of the money.
Power over the 93%, how it was invested, in what, and with what consequences, would stay exactly where it was.
Chances are the 93% might be the cause of some of the things the 7% was trying to fix.
It’s worth using the lens of control over what?
Not all examples are equal.

There are quite a few experiments with the ideas of democratic money (for example, try filtering the more than 2,000 examples of democratic innovation in this list from Participedia), with some of the most reflective sense-making from places like this report from Grantcraft and from Hannah Paterson’s Churchill Fellowship.