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Recently on the participatory grantmaking listserv we had a lively discussion about how Participatory Grantmaking is translated or expressed in various languages. The conversation revealed an exploration of words, culture, and the creativity of communities rewriting how we talk about power and funding.
Rubina Singh from Ignite Philanthropy shared that in India, they often use the English word itself as they have a mix of English in their daily vocabulary in many communities. The literal translation ends up being very formal and not colloquially used.
In the Netherlands, Martijn Arnoldus from Social Finance Matters shared that they introduced “democratich geven”, meaning democratic giving in 2021, however they aren’t fully satisfied with this term and find that people also often use the English expression. Juan Sanchex from Kaleidoscope Trust shared not one, but three examples from Spanish! In Italy, where the process is not very well known yet, community member Paola Beltrami uses ‘filantropia partecipativa’.
Payal from Resolve Foundation in Hong Kong shared how hard it was to translate into Chinese, and how they broke it down into community participation, and grantmaking model.
In the north east of England, Christine from Gateshead Community Bridgebuilder shared work they are doing with Neil Denton, a professor in practice at Durham University. They workshop language around participation, devolution of decision making, power etc. BEFORE they begin their process, so that the language used in their PGM work has a universal understanding within that small community.
And there are also places where no translation came. Hazel Birungi shared that in Uganda, where there are over 56 tribes including both Indigenous communities and those that have migrated to the country, the word doesn’t quite translate in the languages she is familiar with.
At the PGM Community we’ve often struggled with the name Participatory Grantmaking. Colleagues Katy Love and Ruby Johnson wrote a fantastic piece on our blog about this, A Word About Language, and named some other terms that we see, such as Community-led philanthropy, or Participatory Philanthropy. They talk about the importance of building bridges among everyone doing the work of making the sector more equitable and redistributing power.
We are also aware of how English centric all of our work at the community is, and we are aiming to focus on that in 2026. We are happy to share our resource database which now has resources in 10 different languages!
Language is a beautiful thing, especially to linguistic nerds like myself. It is alive and is created by communities. The process of translating participatory grantmaking is an opportunity to be creative, engage the community, and re-create how we talk about decision-making, money, and power!