Margaret Garcia’s Flow Funding Story

What’s it like being a Flow Funder for Stars and Seeds?

Flow funding resources the community, but it also resources the women who make the decisions. One of the biggest sources of growth for me has come from being invited to make decisions because of who I am and what I embody as a woman in my community. This opportunity has also allowed me to meet the edges of myself, my comfort and discomfort around money, what I can hold, what I can release, what I desire for myself and my community that money can make possible. 

This opportunity has allowed me to be in and play with creative energy in ways I had never experienced. It has liberated a part of my womanhood that knows power, knows decisions in my body, and understands the issues from a place of empathy and logical knowing. It has offered the container to heal wounds around sharing power and responsibility by allowing us to explore infinite ways to decide together. It has allowed me to more fully step into the identity we hold together as women of the Earth.  

This has allowed me to feel deeply into my humanity that we are all in this moment of great change together. We need those with resources, those who know their community, and those doing unseen work to all work together. 

Why is place-based grantmaking so important? 

The wisdom I bring to Flow Funding is like the wisdom of soil from different places, and how they hold the knowing of how to absorb water, what seeds lie dormant, and the germination conditions for the endemic plants to sprout, grow and thrive. The wisdom is that of being in relationship to the landscape, ancestors, complexity, and ways of being human in this place. 

I have watched well-meaning philanthropy change the dynamics in my community by funding groups and projects led by newcomers who had the right words and good intentions and attempted to represent communities they are not integrated into.  Flow Funding allows for the alchemical titration of funds from outside the community to land softer and in the hands of the folks who have been doing the work for generations, with and without funding.

Why is Flow Funding such an effective and impactful method of grantmaking? 

Flow funding sends a signal to communities that we trust them to know what is best for them as community members. Flow funders seek, find, and recognize community members who are visionaries, innovators, and change-makers. We understand the power and potential of uplifting people and projects with money in community-wide ecosystems. I have seen firsthand how funding small operations led by women can grow and inspire other women to ignite their efforts for a better world. Flow Funders are able to create criteria and determine how impact is defined. We can look for and encourage efforts that are nourishing and meaningful based on place and people.

What does the process of how money moves through this fund tell us about the impact of this work?

This experience has invited me to find my agency—the state of being in movement as an instrument for change. Each time I am invited to relax, play, decide, story-tell, nominate grantees, and even craft letters to those we decide not to fund, it feels like a chance to write a different story around my place in the world and money's place in my world. We create the future of our dreams. 

Why does sharing power work well when it comes to preserving land and land-based traditions? 

Land-based traditions are rooted in sharing power with the places we call home and the people and creatures we share our home with. For generations, and in some cases for time immemorial, land-based people experienced sharing resources such as water, knowledge, and land.  Allowing Flow Funders to share power around money allocation is supporting us to experiment, heal, and innovate. Power sharing around flow funding offers an opportunity to be neither victim nor perpetrator of the power of money, but to feel into the authority and co-creative power that money offers our communities. In small groups, we share the power by learning the important skills of communicating, trusting, questioning, and deciding together.