CJRF’s 2024 Open Call: Four Lessons from Our First Participatory Grantmaking Experience

In late 2023, CJRF’s Advisory Board approved an 18-month strategy to deploy up to US$4M in funding by experimenting with different participatory grantmaking methods. As a funder who has made grants via traditional philanthropic methods and structures in the past, CJRF is now investing in a period of exploration and learning via a series of participatory grantmaking pilots.

In April 2024, CJRF launched the first in this series of pilots – a global open call for proposals, for which 175 grant applicants from 49 countries collectively decided which proposals won grants. Facilitating such a large participatory process took until November, and it posed many challenges for CJRF. Through it all, we held close a spirit of ‘learning by doing.’ We gathered feedback and took notes, both to inform our future work and to share with other funders. This blog briefly describes the participatory grantmaking pilot, then shares four initial lessons we took from the process.

Announcing CJRF’s First-Ever Global Open Call Grant Recipients!

The Climate Justice Resilience Fund is pleased to announce the four grant recipients from our recent global open call: Mainyoito Pastoralists Integrated Development Organization (MPIDO), Centrum Inisiatif Rakyat Mandiri (CIRMA), Samprity Aid Foundation, and Development of Educational Action Network (DEAN). Each organization will receive a multi-year, flexible $200,000 USD grant under the proposal theme of “Building connections, networks, and collaborative spaces for climate justice and resilience.”

Key Lessons from CJRF’s Grant Portfolio on Climate Mobilities

We are excited to announce the release of the Effective Support for Communities Experiencing Climate Mobilities: Lessons from the CJRF Grant Portfolio (2017–2024) report, created in collaboration with the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS). This report highlights key lessons from 11 grants implemented across Alaska, Bangladesh, and the Pacific, focusing on community-driven solutions to the challenges of climate mobility.

Empowering Communities in the Arctic: A Visit to Arctic Bay’s Indigenous Stewardship Program

Since 2018, CJRF has supported guardians in the Arctic through Makeway, which hosts the Northern Indigenous Stewardship Circle, a network of communities with guardian programs across the Canadian North. In October 2023, I visited the Inuit community of Arctic Bay and spent time with the local guardian crew. My visit revealed the remarkable ways in which this program is not just a response to climate change, but also a beacon of hope and resilience.

CJRF Is Hiring - Program Officer

CJRF seeks to employ an organized, collaborative, insightful, and flexible Program Officer to support the initiatives, including:

  • the design and execution of successful multi-stakeholder processes;

  • administration of grants made via the initiatives;

  • harvesting lessons from the participatory grantmaking experience;

  • supporting exchange of lessons among participants in the various initiatives; and

  • facilitating integration of priorities and lessons learned into CJRF Board decisions and grantmaking systems.