Equality Fund’s “Step Up, Step Back” framework offers radical alternative to competitive grantmaking by recognizing how traditional funding competitions damage social movements. When organizations compete for limited resources, funders consolidate power while forcing potential collaborators into adversarial relationships, extracting unpaid proposal labor, and incentivizing organizations to emphasize individual achievements over collective movement-building. Step Up, Step Back inverts this by bringing funded organizations together to collectively determine resource distribution through facilitated process where groups advocate for their own needs (“step up”) while acknowledging others’ priorities (“step back”), creating solidarity rather than competition. This feminist approach centers relationship, addresses power dynamics explicitly, and redistributes decision-making from funders to movement actors who understand community needs better than distant philanthropists.
Key Highlights
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Competition Harms Movements: The framework names how competitive grantmaking forces organizations doing aligned work to compete rather than collaborate, creating artificial scarcity that undermines movement solidarity. Equality Fund demonstrates that funders create these dynamics through design choices that could instead foster cooperation and collective resource stewardship.
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Participatory Allocation Process: Step Up, Step Back brings all funded organizations into shared space where each presents their work and resource needs, then collectively determines distribution through facilitated dialogue. Organizations “step up” to advocate for their funding while “stepping back” to acknowledge others’ importance, creating process that builds relationship rather than extracting competitive proposals.
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Power-Aware Facilitation: The framework recognizes how power dynamics shape whose voices dominate participatory processes, using skilled facilitation to ensure marginalized organizations can advocate effectively while preventing well-resourced groups from dominating decisions. This addresses valid critique that participation can reproduce existing hierarchies without intentional power analysis.
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Feminist Funding Values: Step Up, Step Back embodies feminist principles—centering care and relationship, making power visible, prioritizing collective over individual success, honoring diverse leadership, and trusting communities closest to issues. These values reshape funding from transactional exchange to movement investment based on solidarity rather than funder control.
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Building Trust and Accountability: Rather than accountability upward to funders proving worth through reports, the framework creates horizontal accountability among peers who understand each other’s work. Organizations become accountable to movement collectively, building trust through ongoing relationship rather than extractive reporting to distant decision-makers.
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Scaling Movement-Centered Funding: Equality Fund demonstrates that participatory allocation can work at meaningful scale, distributing significant resources through collective decision-making. This challenges assumptions that only competitive processes or funder control can manage large funding pools, showing alternatives exist when funders commit to sharing power.
Practical Applications
Step Up, Step Back enables movement-centered grantmaking across contexts:
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Feminist funds and movement funders can adopt the framework directly, bringing grantees together for participatory allocation that builds solidarity rather than competition, using facilitation approaches that address power dynamics among diverse organizations
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Community foundations can pilot participatory processes for portions of grantmaking, testing how collective allocation strengthens local movements compared to traditional competitive applications, then expanding based on learning about what supports genuine participation
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DAOs and crypto funding mechanisms can adapt Step Up, Step Back principles when allocating treasury resources or public goods funding, creating spaces for projects to collectively determine distribution rather than purely individual voting or quadratic mechanisms that may not build relationship
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Collaborative funds and pooled giving circles can use the framework to make collective decisions about resource distribution, building trust among diverse funders while ensuring that allocation decisions reflect movement priorities rather than individual donor preferences
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Corporate giving programs can integrate participatory elements when funding social movements, recognizing that collective allocation by funded organizations produces better outcomes than corporate staff determining what communities need
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Philanthropic networks can advocate for broader adoption of non-competitive approaches, documenting how Step Up, Step Back and similar models build movement capacity rather than fragmenting organizations through competition
Connection With SuperBenefit
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Step Up, Step Back’s participatory allocation framework challenges SuperBenefit to consider how DAO treasury management and public goods funding can center relationship-building alongside resource distribution—the framework demonstrates that effective allocation requires not just better voting mechanisms but facilitated spaces where participants collectively determine priorities through dialogue, suggesting that coordination primitives should enable ongoing deliberation rather than only individual vote casting.
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The power-aware facilitation approach provides model for how SuperBenefit can ensure that governance tools don’t reproduce existing hierarchies despite good intentions—recognizing that technical decentralization alone doesn’t redistribute power if better-resourced actors dominate participation, requiring intentional design and facilitation to enable genuinely collective decision-making.
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Equality Fund’s feminist funding values validate SuperBenefit’s conviction that regenerative coordination must center care, relationship, and collective wellbeing over efficiency and individual achievement—showing that slowing down for dialogue and trust-building produces better outcomes than optimizing transaction speed, even when this feels inefficient by conventional market logic.
Related Concepts
- Power - Distribution and transformation in funding relationships
- Governance - Decision-making in philanthropic contexts
- Community - Leadership and self-determination
- Coordination - Mechanisms for resource distribution
- Grants - Funding approaches and practices