Open grantmaking is a broad movement within philanthropy that advocates for greater transparency, accessibility, and accountability in how funders make grant decisions. It ranges from simply publishing who receives funding to radical approaches that share decision-making power with communities. At its core, open grantmaking challenges the historical pattern of philanthropy operating as a private transaction between funder and grantee — opaque, relationship-dependent, and accountable primarily to the funder's own board.
Openness operates at multiple levels:
Transparency in decisions. Publishing who receives grants, how much, and for what purpose. This is the baseline. In New Zealand, charitable trusts and gaming trusts operating under the Charities Act have disclosure obligations, but the level of detail varies significantly. Some funders publish rich data; others meet the letter of the requirement with minimal information.
Transparency in criteria and process. Making grant criteria, assessment processes, and decision-making frameworks publicly available so that any potential applicant can understand how decisions are made. This goes beyond legal requirements — it's a commitment to communicable, auditable standards.
Open application processes. Moving from relationship-based or invitation-only funding to genuinely open application rounds where any eligible organisation can apply. Many philanthropic grants are never publicly advertised; access depends on who you know. Open processes challenge this.
Published learning. Sharing what funders learn from their grant portfolios — what works, what doesn't, what they got wrong. This is rare. Most funders consume information from grantees but publish little about what they learn.
Open data. Publishing funding data in machine-readable formats that enable sector-wide analysis. The 360Giving standard in the UK has enabled significant transparency in the philanthropic sector there; similar infrastructure is underdeveloped in New Zealand and Australia.
Participatory decision-making. Involving community members — including grantee representatives and community members with no direct financial interest — in grant assessment and decision-making. This is the most radical form of openness and the most transformative.
Despite growing rhetoric about transparency and equity, many grant processes remain opaque. The reasons are structural:
Power asymmetry. Funders hold power; grantees need money. This asymmetry creates strong pressure for grantees to accept whatever terms funders set, including opacity. Grantees who complain about non-transparent processes risk their relationships with funders.
Relationship-based allocation. Many grants flow through personal networks — trustees who know executive directors, programme officers who have existing relationships with grantees. Publishing these decisions would expose the relationship basis of many funding decisions and invite criticism.
Legal minimum compliance. In most jurisdictions, funders meet minimum legal disclosure requirements and no more. Without external pressure for greater transparency, there's no incentive to exceed the minimum.
Fear of criticism. Publishing grant decisions opens funders to public scrutiny of their choices. Some funders prefer opacity to avoid having to defend decisions publicly.
Capacity constraints. For small funders, the administrative work of publishing rich data about decisions may feel beyond their capacity.
Accountability to communities. Foundations and community trusts hold resources that have charitable or community purposes. The communities those funds are meant to serve have a legitimate interest in how those decisions are made. Transparency is a form of accountability to those communities.
Better equity outcomes. Relationship-based, opaque funding systematically advantages organisations with existing relationships with funders — which tend to be larger, more established, and often led by people from majority demographics. Open processes — with publicised criteria, accessible applications, and published decisions — create more equitable access.
Organisational learning. Publishing what you fund and what you're learning from it creates pressure to actually analyse your portfolio and draw lessons. The discipline of external accountability produces better learning than private reflection.
Sector-level intelligence. When funders publish data, researchers, policymakers, and other funders can analyse patterns, identify gaps, and make better decisions. Individual transparency creates collective intelligence.
Trust building. In an era of growing scrutiny of philanthropy and charitable institutions, demonstrated transparency builds trust with communities, government, and the public. Opacity, by contrast, invites suspicion.
Publishing a grants register. A simple, searchable list of grants awarded — organisation name, amount, purpose, grant period — is the basic transparency commitment. Many funders don't do even this.
Publishing declined applications (with permission). Some funders publish, with applicant consent, the list of declined applications with brief reasons. This helps the sector understand funder priorities and normalises the experience of being declined.
Publishing assessment criteria and scoring rubrics. Making assessment frameworks public so that applicants understand exactly how they'll be evaluated. This levels the playing field and reduces the advantage of insiders who understand a funder's unwritten preferences.
Releasing grant data in open formats. Publishing grants data as CSV or JSON — not just as HTML pages — allows analysis and aggregation. The 360Giving standard provides a common data format that enables cross-funder analysis.
Community assessment panels. Including community members — from outside the organisation — in assessment panels. Some community foundations run assessment rounds where a panel of community members makes final funding recommendations, with foundation staff in a support role.
Co-designed criteria. Running consultation processes to develop grant criteria with community input before launching a grant round. Criteria developed with community input are more likely to fund what communities actually need.
Published learning reports. Annual or periodic reports that share what the funder has learned from the grants they've made — including what didn't work and what they'd do differently.
Not all transparency is equal. Publishing the names of grantees without amounts or purposes is technically transparent but substantively opaque. Meaningful transparency requires sufficient detail to understand how funding decisions were made.
Transparency can deter some applicants. Organisations in sensitive sectors — corrections, sexual violence, mental health — may be less willing to apply through open processes where their applications might be visible. Thoughtful open grantmaking distinguishes between transparency about funder processes and confidentiality about sensitive applicant information.
Community involvement takes capacity. Running genuinely participatory processes — with community assessment panels, co-designed criteria, and meaningful power-sharing — requires more staff time and more careful process design than traditional closed processes. The investment is worth it, but it's real.
Some relationships are legitimate. Not all relationship-based funding is corrupt. Programme officers who have deep sector knowledge, who are known and trusted in communities, provide genuine value in identifying effective organisations that wouldn't self-select into open application processes. The question is whether relationship access is additive or substitutive — do relationships give access to applicants who couldn't otherwise be found, or do they substitute for open processes?
The New Zealand philanthropic sector is moving slowly toward greater transparency. The Charities Register provides baseline disclosure; some community trusts publish grants registers; Philanthropy New Zealand promotes sector learning.
The New Zealand government's social investment approach includes elements of transparency — publishing what was funded and what outcomes were achieved — but applies primarily to government-funded programmes, not private philanthropy.
The larger community trusts in New Zealand — Foundation North, Trust Waikato, Community Trust South — have increasingly transparent grant processes with published criteria and grants registers. Smaller trusts vary significantly in their transparency practices.
Tahua's grants management platform supports transparent grantmaking with configurable public-facing grant portals, published grants registers, and the data management infrastructure to support open data commitments.