Pawanka Fund

Nontraditional Participatory grantmaking

An Indigenous-led global fund that supports Indigenous peoples' own initiatives on traditional knowledge, wellbeing, rights and self-determined development. Its method, which it calls LAN Pawanka, is explicitly learning-by-doing and step-by-step, and it describes the Indigenous peoples it funds as local partners rather than grantees — the participatory-grantmaking posture where the constituency governs the money. It is one of the few funds whose remit directly names traditional knowledge, which is the ground on which Indigenous-led evaluation, intergenerational knowledge transmission and commu

Indicative award

Amount not published (varies by call)No grant amounts are published anywhere on the public site. No figure recorded because none is stated.

Timing

Varies by programmeNo specific published date recorded. This funder publishes a cycle rather than a date, and this database does not invent one.No application deadlines or cycles are published. The site gives no application procedure at all and directs enquiries to pawanka@pawankafund.org.

Who can apply

Community organisation

Eligibility

The fund works with Indigenous peoples and Indigenous-led organisations as partners; the gate is Indigenous leadership and self-determination, not registration status or geography. The public site publishes no formal eligibility criteria or application procedure, and there is no open application portal — access is relational, through the fund's partner networks, with enquiries to pawanka@pawankafund.org. A university cannot be the applicant; a social work researcher works through an Indigenous partner organisation that holds the relationship and the funds.

SSWR clusters

Topics

indigenous traditional knowledge · self-determined development · indigenous wellbeing · indigenous-led grantmaking

Apply at

https://pawankafund.org/

This entry

Curated by the working group. Written 2026-08-07. The funder link has not yet been machine-checked.

Amounts and dates on this page are indicative and are maintained by people rather than scraped. Funders change ceilings, windows and eligibility without notice; confirm all details at the source above before applying.

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Pawanka Fund

Also on the American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Global Indigenous Populations (Indigenous Cluster) shelf