About the APPT Creators
We - Diana Samarasan and Katy Love – have been working for increased participation in philanthropy for a long time.
In 2015, we were co-founders of a participatory grantmaking working group hosted by the Human Rights Funders Network. Through a partnership with GrantCraft (now part of Candid), that group helped to spark the foundational participatory grantmaking resource, Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resources through Participatory Grantmaking. In 2018, we joined other passionate practitioners and advocates to create the participatory grantmaking collective, a precursor to the Participatory Grantmaking Community.
Porticus Foundation, which is undertaking exploration of how to create more participatory processes and approaches in its own work and more broadly in philanthropy, provided funding to us starting in 2021, to develop a preliminary participatory audit tool, with support from Salzburg Global Seminar, which evolved into the APPT.
Diana Samarasan
Diana is an independent consultant with expertise in global disability rights and inclusion, disability at an intersection with gender and other rights, and participatory practices in philanthropy. She is the founder and former executive director of the Disability Rights Fund (DRF) and the Disability Rights Advocacy Fund (DRAF), which are collaborations between donors and global disability activists to support disability rights movements across the Global South. Diana was an early advocate for including people with lived experience in decision-making about global grantmaking strategy and funding. She also led the Mental Disability Advocacy Centre (now Validity) and worked at American Refugee Committee (now Alight) and Doctors of the World. She is a graduate of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and has served on numerous boards, including as co-chair of Human Rights Funders Network and the United States International Council on Disabilities. She is currently a board member of the Center for Inclusive Policy, a disability think-and-do tank; the Climate Justice Resilience Fund; and the Harvard Alumni Disability Alliance and is on the research board of a disability data project at Fordham University. Reach her at dianasamarasan.work@gmail.com.
Katy Love
Katy is an experienced practitioner of and advocate for participatory grantmaking, a practice that moves decision-making about grants from funders to the people impacted by those funds. She has created, led, managed, or participated in nearly 50 cycles of participatory grantmaking. As an independent consultant and trained facilitator, Katy works with funders globally to shift power from their institutions to the people or movements that funders aim to serve. In recent years, she has worked with funders on gender equity, racial equity, climate and environmental justice, disability inclusion, youth leadership, and more, from local and regional to global philanthropy. Before that, Katy led the grantmaking team at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, running six participatory grantmaking programs. She is a member of the Steering Committee of Human Rights Funders Network. Reach her at katylovework@gmail.com.