Newsletter · 13 July 2026
hum.community update - July 2026
Hi there
Starting this month, the newsletter comes in two parts. The first is what we’re up to. The second is some of the stories that have caught our eye from around the world for anyone who cares about community empowerment, participatory grantmaking, trust-based philanthropy and local democracy. Because right now there’s a lot happening.
Let’s get into it.
Our news
We’ve sharpened our theory of change (and we’d love your feedback)
Since the beginning we’ve been driven by a simple belief: communities should have more power over the resources intended to improve their lives. We’ve spent time fine-tuning our theory of change, mapping exactly how participatory funding leads to stronger, wealthier, more connected communities, and grounding it in published evidence. It’s a living document and we’d genuinely love your feedback.
What if politicians lost their power the moment they lost your trust?
Not at the next election. Not after a scandal and an inquiry. The moment the people they represent stopped believing in them. That sounds like an abstract thought experiment. It was, until we built it. Our new Gov2 governance model brings continuous, earned representation to hyperlocal communities, and we think it has something to say about how democracy itself could work.
Read the full piece on LinkedIn →
Victoria University Collaboration
We’ve moved into the Taiawa tech hub at Victoria University of Wellington, and over the coming months we’ll be working with a team of four third-year business students through the university’s INFO301 capstone programme. Their mission: run a structured research programme across our three stakeholder groups (funders, partner organisations and community groups), test our assumptions against real evidence, and feed the findings straight into what we build next. They’ll be talking to real funders and community leaders, and their final report lands in October.
Product updates (GDPR, Spanish version, privacy policy)
Over the last month we’ve been busy building out the product in response to user feedback. Alongside many interface improvements across all the modules, some notable changes.
First, Spanish translation. From the partner dashboard, the community app can now be switched into Spanish, and we’re adding more languages on request.
Second, we’ve completed a full audit and now fully comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For the GDPR nerds out there, this includes:
Delete your account: self-serve, removes your login and scrubs your personal data everywhere.
Export your data: one tap gives you everything the platform holds about you.
Versioned consent: every signup accepts a recorded, versioned privacy policy (English and Spanish).
Automatic data minimisation: data of departed members is auto-scrubbed after 12 months, logs redact personal information, and exports are anonymised by default.
Compliance documentation in place: Records of Processing, a Data Protection Impact Assessment, and a 72-hour breach-response runbook.
Read our plain-English privacy statement →
hum is coming to the UK. Let’s meet
Our co-founder Mark Pascall will be in the UK from late July to mid September for meetings and conferences. If you’re a funder, partner organisation or community builder who’d like to talk participatory funding in person, please reach out: mark@hum.community
News from around the world
The UK hands communities the right to buy their local assets
The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act received Royal Assent in April. It creates a new Community Right to Buy, giving local people first refusal on valued community assets like shops, pubs and community centres when they come up for sale. One commentator called it the biggest shift of power from government to communities in a generation, after a decade in which thousands of community spaces closed their doors. Ownership rights are a huge step. The next question is the one we work on every day: once communities hold the assets, how do they govern and resource them together?
Read more: the bill receives Royal Assent · a sharp take: what the local power shift means
Eleven-year-olds are deciding how New York spends $22 million
New York City announced the results of its latest participatory budgeting cycle in May: residents across 22 council districts, everyone aged 11 and up regardless of immigration status, decided how $22 million in capital funding gets spent. Several districts smashed turnout records. Montreal’s third citywide participatory budget drew a record 28,000 ballots and invested $45 million, with at least $10 million reserved for youth-led projects. The evidence keeps stacking up too: Brazilian municipalities that adopted participatory budgeting saw infant mortality fall by five to ten per cent. Participatory decision-making isn’t a fringe experiment. It’s becoming how serious cities rebuild trust.
New York results: the 2026 cycle · the evidence: participatory budgeting and democracy
Australia - Participatory granting gathering momentum
TACSI, The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, has laid out the case for why participatory granting is the future of funding. Their argument will sound familiar: traditional grant rounds put community groups in competition with each other, fracturing relationships and eroding trust, while participatory approaches build collaboration, draw on local knowledge, and strengthen capabilities that last long after the money is spent. It's pitched directly at funders, councils testing community-driven commissioning, and place-based initiatives, with examples ranging from FRIDA's global feminist fund to Australia's Good Death Impact Network. Their honest conclusion matches our experience: participatory granting isn't a magic fix on its own, but it creates the conditions for funding that communities actually lead.
Read more: Why participatory granting is the future of funding
150 neighbourhoods, £1 million each, 15 years: the verdict is in
England's Big Local programme, the largest experiment in resident-led funding anywhere, closed at the end of March. Over 15 years, 150 communities each received just over £1 million from the National Lottery Community Fund with complete freedom to decide how to spend it. No top-down targets. No competitive rounds. The results range from a community-owned wind turbine in Bristol now powering around 3,500 homes to a rescued bus route in Huntingdonshire, plus one of the richest evidence bases on community-led change ever assembled. The lesson from Local Trust's chief executive: when communities are trusted with money, time and control, residents step up and build things designed to last. We'd add one more. The experiment ended because the funding was designed to end. The next generation of community power needs infrastructure that doesn't.
Read more: What big local achieved
Ngā mihi
The hum team