How Wildseeds Fund’s Movement-Led, Participatory Model Earned Exceptional Grantee Ratings

The useful part

September 22, 2026 Kevin Bolduc Vice President, Assessment and Advisory Services, CEP Esperanza Pallana Executive Director, Wildseeds Fund Never Miss A Post Share this Post: Best," the researchers illuminated the way collaboratives' specific practices and design choices allowed them to achieve unusually positive grantee perceptions of impact, relationships, and grantmaking process. In this blog post, Wildseeds Executive Director Esperanza Pallana shares four practical observations about how the Fund builds trust and works alongside grantees.

How it works

• Can you share an example of how Wildseeds and its grassroots grantees approach this work together?
• The story of HOW we do our work is as important as the story of the impact our grantmaking and capacity building has.
• Our work is time tested evidence on the effectiveness of community-controlled funding.
• Wildseeds Fund and our grantee partners work to shift power for systems transformation to ensure equitable, healthy and nourished communities and climate.
• They have a wealth of experience as organizers in the work of our grantee partners and have the knowledge of working with funders.

What to take from it

We leverage our resources, platforms and the tools of communications and narrative toward this common goal. Our core purpose is civic engagement, collective action, and participatory democracy. We cannot claim to be neutral or convey neutrality to avoid risk when the frontline leaders upholding our ability to participate in democracy risk so much daily.

Example or evidence

• In fact, their ratings of the extent to which you're demonstrating values of diversity, equity, and inclusion are literally the 100 th percentile in our comparative dataset.
• Staff roles and participatory partners dedicated to building and managing relationships.
• We are participatory in that we share the power of governance and decision making on capital allocations and capacity building.
• Wildseeds Fund, which supports grassroots organizations, communications strategists, and movement journalists working to uplift frontline stories, build power, and embolden transformative food and farm...

Details worth keeping

Grantees | The Center for Effective Philanthropy Blog. It's not every day that I see such positive grantee feedback across such a wide variety of the topics we ask about in the survey: Unusually strong impact on grantees' fields and organizations, very high quality of interactions and communications, and helpful and streamlined processes.

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