Diana Samarasan and Katy Love

Diana Samarasan is an independent consultant with expertise in participatory philanthropy, global disability rights, and intersectional approaches. She is the founder and former executive director of participatory grantmakers, the Disability Rights Fund and the Disability Rights Advocacy Fund.

Katy Love is an independent consultant who has led, facilitated, or joined nearly 50 participatory grantmaking processes. She supports grantmakers across geographies and issues as they shift power from their institutions to the people or movements that they serve. Before that, Katy led the grantmaking team at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, which ran six participatory grantmaking programs.

Articles by Diana Samarasan and Katy Love

Grants Strategy

Facilitation: The Secret Ingredient for Successful Participatory Decision-Making in Philanthropy

Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a bad experience working with a group of people to make a decision. [...]

December 5, 2023 | 6 min Read

Grants Strategy

An Evolution of Evaluation in Grantmaking With a Participatory Lens

We all want to know whether our work makes a difference. Among grantmakers, there tends to be a lot of [...]

October 9, 2023 | 7 min Read

Closeup of an audience member taking notes.

Diversity Equity and Inclusion

Participatory Grantmaking: I’m in! Now what?

You’ve read about participatory grantmaking—and maybe even heard about other organizations using this model to distribute control of their funding [...]

October 17, 2022 | 6 min Read

A group of hands laid out on a table together.

Donor Stewardship

Grantmaking: What’s Participation Got to Do with It?

In philanthropy, unlike democracy, there is often no way for people to participate–to share what they think or to influence [...]

September 13, 2022 | 5 min Read