This year for the Spring 2024 Grow grant round we had 124 community readers! This was a record breaking number of participants in this important program!

Twenty of these readers joined us as participants of our first ever $150 incentive program. The purpose of this program was to Shift Power in our own process by encouraging leaders from our past grantee groups to participate as grant readers. We also sought to actively bring in perspectives that we know are underrepresented in the grant reading process based on our own data. To qualify for an incentive, a person needed to be (1) a brand new Grow grant reader (2) affiliated with a group that had received funding from Grassroots Fund in the past (any grant program) and (3) brought at least one of the following underrepresented perspectives to the process: under 26, identified as Black, Indigenous and/or a Person of Color (BIPOC), and/or didn’t have higher education credentials (such as a Bachelor's, Master’s, Professional degree). 

We have reason to believe that this program had a meaningful impact on who engaged with our process this round. Compared to Fall 2023, we had ~25% more self-identified BIPOC readers (44% of readers overall) and participation from Black or African American readers doubled (~18% of readers overall). We also more than doubled the number of young people under 26 participating (14.5% overall) compared to Fall 2023. However, we had relatively the same participation from readers without higher education credentials (~14% overall in Spring 2024 compared to ~12% overall in Fall 2023). 

Another big change in our grant reader program this round had to do with making anonymous reader comments and scores on applications visible to other readers. This meant that after the reader review period ended on April 14, grant readers could go back to their assigned grants and see how other readers tried to apply the Guiding Practices based on how they scored the application and their comments (see here for what the Grow rubric looks like). We have received good feedback on this addition to the process, especially in how readers enriched their own understanding of the Guiding Practices by viewing other reader’s comments. A reader shared with us the following reflection:

“[Seeing other reader’s comments gave] great examples of how the community sees the guiding practices and may apply them in different ways from my own. It helped me deepen my understanding of the practices, at least consider new ways to think about them.”  – Spring 2024 Reader