Decolonizing Grant Applications: What Funders Need to Understand About Indigenous Communities

Across the country, Indigenous communities are leading bold, healing, and future-focused initiatives; programs in housing, culture, education, health, language, and land. But too often, the grant systems designed to support this work fall short.

Not because funders don’t care but because the systems themselves were built without Indigenous governance, timelines, or priorities in mind.

We’ve had the honour of supporting First Nations and Métis communities in securing over $6 million in grant funding. Our role is often to translate community-driven vision into proposals that meet institutional requirements. And what we’ve seen—again and again—is that the challenge isn’t in the ideas.

It’s in the funders’ structure.

Indigenous priorities are guided by ceremony and seasons not quarterly funding cycles.

We often hear statements like “We needed funding six months ago.” And the truth is many communities are responding to long-standing needs that don’t wait for intake windows or rigid eligibility rules.

What helps:

• Rolling or open-intake options

• Indigenous-specific streams with flexible start dates

• Responsive grant design tied to community-defined timelines

Community leadership takes time and deserves to be honoured.

It takes time to engage leadership, gather Nation-level approvals (like Band Council Resolutions - BCRs), build partnerships, and prepare a thoughtful application. And yet, many grant cycles give 3–4 weeks from launch to deadline.

What helps:

• Longer (i.e. 60–90 day) submission windows

• Respectful extensions when requested

• Early notice of upcoming intakes or pre-launch consultations

• Accepting alternatives means to apply for funding (like videos or a meeting)

Application templates can unintentionally flatten Indigenous priorities.

Many grant applications ask for logic models, key performance indicators (KPIs), and evaluation plans. Thankfully, we know how to do these things, but what is lost is an understanding of how a project reflects community knowledge or traditional governance.

What helps:

• Inviting cultural context in narrative responses

• Accepting oral or video components where appropriate

• Allowing communities to define their own success measures

Partnership isn’t just a letter of support—it’s shared decision-making.

Some applications require Indigenous participation on paper, but keep power and adjudication within non-Indigenous institutions.

What helps:

• Including Indigenous leaders in grant design

• Co-developing funding streams with communities

• Ensuring adjudication includes lived experience and Nation-based leadership

Reporting can lift up, but often just exhausts.

We’ve worked with community staff who are doing front-line work, managing multiple funders, and still asked to submit detailed quarterly reports in Excel. Even as professionals, helping to lead this process with communities, we struggle to get information from community leaders who trust us - not because they don’t want to share it, but because they are delivering fire-wood, buying a new fridge, picking someone up from the hopital, attending meetings, and putting out many, many more fires.

What helps:

• Funding administrative time for reporting

• Offering adaptable templates - a powerful story can tell much more about impact than a report

• Valuing stories, not just spreadsheets

Funders hold enormous potential to be part of something transformative.

The communities we support are not asking for exceptions. They’re asking for relationships. For processes that honour Indigenous time, knowledge, and leadership. Decolonizing grants doesn’t mean abandoning accountability. It means co-creating structures reflecting the values and realities of the communities.

At Axioma, we walk beside Nations every day. We know what’s possible when funders and communities truly meet in partnership.

If you, as a funder, are ready to modernize how your organization supports Indigenous-led work, we’d be honoured to talk. Please.

marsi cho, hiy hiy, thank you,

Rolando,

Managing Partner

rolando@axioma.ca