GWI has shared glimpses of this unique participatory process through blog posts and on the Good Work Hour, but the final fund design itself has not been available till now.
The new community fund created through this intensive community-led process is called Kingston Common Futures. Launching now for its pilot year, with an application process opening up in 2025, the fund will distribute $150,000 in grants to community-building projects and provide the infrastructure for community-led funding decisions.
Included in this announcement post:
- A brief overview of the fund design program
- A summary of Kingston Common Futures’ mission and scope
- An introduction to the fund’s team and a description of next steps
A landing page for this exciting community initiative with more info can be found at kingstoncommonfutures.org.
Fund Design Process
How Do Community Members Design A Fund?
“People often think that the 9-month process that we facilitated… was actually a process of deciding where funding goes. They ask: Well, what got funded? And we answer: Nothing. Which usually prompts a big laugh. At that point, we back up and explain that the typical way funding gets allocated is often opaque and inequitable. This project is all about redesigning that process to be more democratic and transparent. It’s about shifting power to the community, to allow for the emergence of a fund that is grassroots, not only in its funding focus, but in how it came to be in the first place,” said Hélène Lesterlin, co-leader of this project, in a recent blog post.
The focus on democratizing access to resources started with the GWI-hosted Rooted Resources festival back in May 2022. This curated gathering brought together practitioners and community members to learn about and discuss a wide range of approaches to defining and building community wealth. One of the things to emerge from the festival was a vision for a democratic process to inspire and design a community fund. Three members of the GWI team jumped at the challenge to create a container for community members to collaborate on designing a fund: Aja Schmeltz, Hélène Lesterlin and Micah combined their expertise in facilitation and program design, cohort-based training, local initiatives, collaboration skills, Just Transition, investment funds, and community building. What they developed was a hands-on learning journey – for people with no prior experience – that was designed to generate the trust and knowledge needed for community members to collaboratively design all elements of a community fund together.
In the fall and winter of 2023, GWI hosted forums in spaces throughout Kingston, open to all community members, to discuss the idea of a fund and start to find out what people might want the fund to address and what challenges they were experiencing in Kingston. GWI collected input from these forums, and spread the word about the opportunity to participate in the fund design program. The application process opened in the spring, available to anyone who was a Kingston resident. Through this extended community outreach and application process, GWI recruited and selected the 18 members of the community fund design group.
“We wanted to make sure that the participants for the fund design program were diverse and able to work together. We focused on gathering a group that would represent a range of life experiences and backgrounds. What surprised us as we read through the applications and in the interviews was how consistently people talked about seeing this project as building community and as a chance to meet others who were committed to positive change. They were all drawn to this opportunity because they wanted to collaborate to build something real that would benefit the people of the city they loved,” said Micah, who co-facilitated this project.
The design group participants committed to a significant time investment over six months, with meetings, workshops, or discussion sessions lasting 2-6 hours each week. They also participated in a three-day design retreat in November 2023. To make it possible for people to make time for this project, GWI offered stipends to offset lost wages or childcare costs.
The first day of the program, in June 2023, the group gathered, and found the room full of mostly strangers. Many wondered what this was going to be like. As the weeks and months went by, the group coalesced as people developed trust in a context of mutual respect and care. Group discussions about money and the inequities that pervade our financial system could be triggering, but also invited enlightenment and learning, as group members from many different backgrounds shared their perspectives. Participants remarked how much this open dialogue made the experience so meaningful.
Here is a selection of feedback GWI received after the design retreat on what people discovered or valued being a part of the group:
The original plan for a six-month program shifted to incorporate an additional ten weeks in the first part of 2024. The first six-month phase focused on learning new skills and domains of knowledge, while building trust and community amongst the group; it also had the group designing the outline of the fund, its goals, and the ways it would function at a high level. The additional time was needed to complete the design of the full blueprint of the pilot fund, down to details like what the decision-making process for allocating funding would be, what kinds of projects would be funded, how the fund would itself enable and support community building, and how to measure impact and the timeline for this first pilot. 14 of the original 18 members of the group signed up for the blueprint phase, with all 18 members consenting to the finished fund design.
The intensive design process is over, but this is an ongoing process of learning, creating, testing, and putting a project into action. GWI is now shifting their role to being an incubator of the project, supporting the core team who will be working directly on building and managing the fund. Like any new endeavor, this project will continue to evolve and learn from the community as it launches and moves into reality.
This community-driven fund design process would not have been possible without the support of GWI donors and the NoVo Foundation, which provided the funding for the emergence of this work from the beginning. NoVo in Kingston, a branch of the NoVo Foundation, will be funding the implementation of the fund, and seeding the pilot fund with $150,000. GWI anticipates that the fund will evolve into a project that allows the broader community to donate, participate in funding decisions, and create a network of support and visibility for people and projects that are building community in Kingston.
Introducing Kingston Common Futures
A Just Transition-Aligned Community-Driven fund
Kingston Common Futures is designed to support projects and initiatives that put into practice ways of managing shared resources to meet community needs in regenerative ways. In its pilot year, the fund will lead a transparent and engaging application process, facilitate democratic decision-making, and award monetary grants to a diverse group of projects. Kingston Common Futures is committed to modeling care and to developing a growing network of resources and relationships between applicants, projects, and community members.
Kingston Common Futures will be allocating $150,000 in grants to community projects. Grants will range from $5,000 – $50,000.
The goal of the project is to not only provide access to grants but also to provide a growing network of support, which will include opportunities for volunteers to get involved: activating their communities, sharing their expertise as mentors to projects, and lending their time and perspectives as part of the decision-making process. It will all start with an extensive period of community engagement and outreach, with the actual application process for grant funding opening in the spring.
Kingston Common Futures is being set up as a fiscally-sponsored project of GWI, which is an organizational form that allows the project to accept philanthropic donations for its operations but also launch quickly with a small team. The idea is that it could eventually develop its own infrastructure and become an independent organization.
A Fund with a Community-Centered Mission
Kingston Common Future’s vision and mission statement were developed by the community fund design group as part of the fund’s design. These words, co-written, form the foundational principles of all the future work of this new project in Kingston.
VISION
We envision a future where all people are woven into an inclusive community, offering their gifts and working together in stewardship of our abundant planet, for the common good.
To move towards this vision, we need to confront and upend historic imbalances and systems of extraction, and commit to working for equitable access to power, financial resources, and networks of mutual support in our home. To bring into being the multicultural, multiracial, regenerative community of the future, we start today, by modeling joyful networks of care and collaboration.
MISSION
Kingston Common Futures exists to redistribute power, provide support, and democratically allocate financial resources back in the hands of the people of Kingston for a more just and thriving community. We are guided by the principles of Just Transition in all our work.
For more information and to get involved, please visit kingstoncommonfutures.org.
Announcing the Kingston Common Futures team:
GWI and the design group are excited to announce the members of the core team who will be launching Kingston Common Futures: Amanda Cassiday and Clay Moodey. Amanda and Clay, members of the design group, were selected to move forward with implementing the fund through a hiring process that involved GWI and a subcommittee of the design group. GWI will continue on as an incubator partner, in addition to acting as the fiscal sponsor of the project, providing operations infrastructure, legal and compliance oversight, as well as community outreach, marketing, and implementation support.
Moving from being a design group member to a core team member is a big transition, but also a natural evolution of the commitment this process required and the enthusiasm it engendered. Amanda and Clay are both stepping into unknown territory by taking on this work, and yet they know they have deep support from their design group members and GWI. They are steeped in the fund development process and eager to begin implementation work as they take up their roles; they both bring a deep commitment to community building and powerful, relevant experiences from their personal and working lives to this project. (See kingstoncommongfutures.org for their bios)
Amanda Cassiday, who is serving as Community Steward, Director of Strategy and Development, shares her reflections on the process:
“A common thread that continued to come up both in GWI’s Rooted Resources conference and in the community fund design group was a desire to build a new system by and for those who call Kingston home: where decision-making power and funding power go back in the hands of those doing and receiving the work in the community. We are thrilled to be able to prototype a model that not only empowers and directly funds the Kingston community, but also serves as a conduit to further weave networks of support and collaboration within the community. This model gives me so much hope for a future that is community rooted and actioned; and that those who typically wouldn’t have access to funding will have a voice, a say, and an impact.”
Clay Moodey, who is co-leading the project as Community Steward, Director of Process and Learning, looks back on the design group’s intentions and how that will guide the fund during this first pilot year:
“One of the earliest tasks the 18 design group members completed was a set of Working Agreements for our group. Drawing on beautiful examples and the experience of folks in the room, we drafted a long and short version of our agreements. The short form states:
We agree to GROUND ourselves in self awareness, mindfulness, and compassion for self and others by STAYING OPEN; to NOTICE common ground, triggers, and differences, and stay curious about disagreeing by practicing MOVE UP, MOVE UP; to PRACTICE learning, experimentation, not knowing, and respecting boundaries while CREATING GENEROUS SPACES; to DEVELOP active listening, cohesion, trust, and cooperation while TAKING CARE OF NEEDS and BOUNDARIES; and to CELEBRATE and SUPPORT each other in keeping these agreements while collaborating to ACHIEVE an outcome that benefits all.
We discussed these as being “mutual invitations for collaboration,” and they are a seed for Kingston Common Futures. These invitations remind me to bring the best of myself, to be patient, and to be generous. The work of Kingston Common Futures will offer these intentions to a wider group of folks who call Kingston home.”
Karen Ruiz León, one of the design group members, reflects on her own evolving thinking as she participated in the full learning and design journey:
“My relationship with money has been one of survival in the midst of scarcity. The learning phase of the community fund helped me learn about different forms of wealth that go beyond money and showed me what this can do for our community.
Kingston Common Futures addresses inequities in our current financial system and acknowledges how profoundly damaging this has been for BIAPOC and other minoritized populations. The fund seeks positive change for the common good and emerges as a restorative practice that centers our voices and needs. It is a call to action to take care of our ecosystem, so that it can take care of us.”
Kingston Common Futures has opened a search for another new hire – a full-time Outreach and Communications Manager. There will be other opportunities to contribute through volunteer and paid short-term positions soon.
Further Information & Resources:
- Blog posts with deeper background on this participatory fund design project
- Images to accompany a post or article (press and web-ready) available upon request.
- For questions or interview requests, please contact Hélène Lesterlin.
