In the second half of 2025, CEP’s Assessment and Advisory Services Team worked with the teams at Philanthropy Together, Redstone, and Vital Impact to survey recent grant recipients of 21 “bright spot” collaborative funds. In “The Collaborative Effect: Grantee Perspectives on How Collaborative Funds Work 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.
Wildseeds Fund, which supports grassroots organizations, communications strategists, and movement journalists working to uplift frontline stories, build power, and embolden transformative food and farm systems change, exemplifies those positive results. In this blog post, Wildseeds Executive Director Esperanza Pallana shares four practical observations about how the Fund builds trust and works alongside grantees.
Kevin Bolduc: Esperanza, when I first looked at the results of your Grantee Perception Report, I was surprised, honestly. 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.
Let’s start with impact. You’re granting less than $2 million a year and yet your grantees see Wildseeds as unusually successful in creating knowledge, influencing policy, and producing impact on their fields, and they appreciate your distinctive focus on storytelling and narrative approaches. Can you share an example of how Wildseeds and its grassroots grantees approach this work together?
Esperanza Pallana: The story of HOW we do our work is as important as the story of the impact our grantmaking and capacity building has. We are advocating for the communities most impacted by inequities in our food and agricultural systems to have the power to allocate resources toward the needed changes, in policy and in practice, and for their needs to be heard directly from them. Our work is time tested evidence on the effectiveness of community-controlled funding.
Wildseeds Fund’s founding history is rooted in intersectional connections to reduce siloes in philanthropy. We started as a collective and have grown that practice. Wildseeds Fund and our grantee partners work to shift power for systems transformation to ensure equitable, healthy and nourished communities and climate. We leverage our resources, platforms and the tools of communications and narrative toward this common goal. We not only look to movement leaders to guide our work, but we have also shifted power by ceding decision making power of our primary grant program, or nearly 90% of our grant making capital, to movement leaders.
We expanded our governance to include frontline leaders so they are not just advising on allocations, they are leading how we craft our grantmaking programs and making decisions on allocations and strategic direction.
The staff of Wildseeds Fund are members of the communities we serve. They have a wealth of experience as organizers in the work of our grantee partners and have the knowledge of working with funders.
We host peer networking opportunities that strengthen the connections across communities in the U.S. and we always invite feedback from our grantee partners on their experiences with Wildseeds Fund and how we can better serve them through our grant programs and capacity building offerings. Our gatherings are intentionally smaller groups to ensure the capacity to genuinely listen to and connect on what is shared.
KB: Your grantees see your values play out in your actions. In fact, their ratings of the extent to which you’re demonstrating values of diversity, equity, and inclusion are literally the 100th percentile in our comparative dataset. In this moment of challenge to those words and values, how did you move forward in 2025?
EP: The only way to uphold participatory democracy is to protect it and practice it. This means not backing down in the face of oppression. Our core purpose is civic engagement, collective action, and participatory democracy. We leverage communications to foster that. 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. We stand alongside the communities we serve.
As mentioned before, our staff are from within the very communities most impacted by inequities in our food and agricultural systems. Staff attend events and participate in community work as community members alongside everyone else. I think this speaks volumes to who we are and what we invest our personal time in.
When the words and values of diversity, equity, and inclusion are being threatened by a violent and hostile government, we are very clear about our refusal to participate in anticipatory obedience. We seek to avoid bravado and performative politics while being unwavering in our commitment and practices.
We believe diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential to democracy. “Funder” is just one role we balance. We are also practitioners. We believe it is our duty to uphold our rights, freedoms and democracy alongside everyone else.
KB: You have two program staff and outstanding ratings of your responsiveness, approachability, and clarity of communication. You provide nearly all grantees with assistance beyond the grant. One of the most common questions I get from funders is how to build strong relationships with lean staff. How do you and your colleagues prioritize your time?
EP: We are able to dedicate the time required to prioritize relationships over transactions due to:
- Our unique structure as an intermediary with a backend administrator.
- Intentional processes and organizational practices that ensure face-to-face time with grantee partners in their spaces.
- Staff roles and participatory partners dedicated to building and managing relationships.
- A budget that reflects the staffing and participatory costs.
- Board leadership that understands and supports this orientation.
Rather than a program officer role, we have a director of programs and movement support. This position is charged with 70% grants management and 30% relationship management and assessing grantee partner needs. She leads the participatory process of our primary grant program and our partner network of grantees. As our executive director, I implement participatory processes across our leadership and partnerships.
For grant requirements, such as reporting, we offer the option to report by meeting with us. This also offers an opportunity to connect directly with grantee partners.
Our Movement Leadership Council and I also meet with prospective grantees and facilitate grant reporting for current grantees on an as needed basis. This helps build deeper connections with grantee partners. Movement leaders are provided stipends for their time, which is an important step in respecting their time.
The backend administrative and financial and more transactional processes are managed by administrative staff with the Wildseeds Fund administrator. The executive director is charged with managing the relationships directly with administrative staff and leadership, funders, strategic partners, and grantees, including grantee partners outside of the primary grant program, Wildseeds Grants.
It has made a difference that we have a dedicated budget for the roles, time, and expense it takes to implement a participatory process. We see it as essential to our work (and have worked) to ensure we do not have a parallel process with greater authority. We instead translate Wildseeds Fund processes to be in compliance with our administrator.
KB: You use terms like participatory grantmaking and co-governance. Can you say what that means in practice and how you think those approaches connect to your positive grantee survey results?
EP: We lead with the term “movement-led” so let me start there. We are an organization whose leadership comes from within frontline movement communities. As staff, we are active in the work of movement leaders working to advance food and agricultural systems change through climate, land, and labor justice. These leaders are on staff, active in our governance and strategic direction, guiding the development of our primary grant program and making allocations. They are also our strategic partners and who we are responsive to on our grant making. This is how we are movement-led.
We are participatory in that we share the power of governance and decision making on capital allocations and capacity building. The participatory part of our program work is a collaborative, grassroots approach to designing and implementing initiatives, where the people directly affected by a program actively shape its goals, decisions, and outcomes. We have gone a step further and welcomed the people directly affected by our programs into our governance. They govern with the funders that collaborate on the capital pool and direction of the work of Wildseeds Fund. We are calling that co-governance as it represents the funders and the community leaders impacted.
The structure of Wildseeds Fund is enabling a form of community-controlled capital but we are leveraging the very common fund structure of a Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) and a high-capacity administrator. We have found that this structure has enabled us to be high touch, flexible, and responsive and well as replicable. We are strong advocates for community-controlled capital and see Wildseeds Fund’s structure, processes, and practices as a strong option for funders on the pathway to projects that are fully community governed, owned and controlled.
KB: As an intermediary, you’re both a funder and a grantee. What’s one practice you all use that you wish more of your funders used?
EP: Wildseeds Fund staff stay active in the field as practitioners. As an intermediary, we also seek funding. This positioning as a funder and practitioner gives us keen insight into the power dynamics between funders and grantees, into community wants and strategic alignments within movement work. I wish more funders would ensure their staff are directly in the field to be building relationships directly with frontline leaders and better understand the what and why behind frontline, community-led solutions.
Kevin Bolduc is vice president, Assessment and Advisory Service at CEP. Esperanza Pallana is executive director at Wildseeds Fund.
