A wave of change is rolling across the grant-making landscape. Two values not often associated with grant making are spurring this change: humility and equity.
When foundation leaders choose to put these values first, big changes tend to follow at their organizations, such as greater staff diversity and more participatory forms of grant making.
But most grant makers don’t have the authority to make all the key decisions at their organizations. They are just working people, trying to do their best in institutions that often are filled with barriers to change.
Yet we believe every person working at a foundation has the power to bring greater respect, empathy, and equity into grant making, whatever their role. In our new book, we lay out many ways grant makers can bring this about. Here are four to get you started.
Practice having better conversations with grant seekers.
Due to the wild imbalance in power between a person seeking money and someone giving it away, conversations between these two parties can easily go in unintended and unhelpful directions.
For example, a casual comment such as, “Have you ever thought about expanding your work to cover these groups of people, too?” could cause grant seekers to remake their organizational strategy on the fly just to seem responsive. As grant makers, we must take care to avoid creating distortions like this.
To prevent this kind of misunderstanding, ask a neutral third party to sit in on some of your conversations with potential grantees and share feedback on your communication. Receiving these insights after a meeting can help you speak and listen in ways that will help grant seekers reach their goals.
Learn to say no quickly and clearly.
One of the hardest parts of being a grant maker is saying no. Consequently, decision makers may feel tempted to hedge, to say things like, “Well, maybe next year” or to go silent and “ghost” grant seekers rather than rejecting them.
To make this process easier and reduce stress, practice saying no to people quickly and clearly. The best way to do this is to share useful feedback straight after you say no, to give people useful information for their next steps. For example, you might point them to a foundation that is more likely to be sympathetic to their pitch or explain why certain wording or ideas in their pitch are likely to set off alarms.
Many grant makers feel they don’t have time to share feedback or fear doing so will lead to a never-ending cycle of reapplications. We empathize but strongly encourage program officers and other foundation decision makers to take a few minutes and identify a useful tip or two to share when rejecting an application. It could change lives — and cost you very little.
Do simple user testing of your application process.
Some grant makers have fancy websites with online application forms; others are completely private and invite people to apply over the phone or by mail. Either way, all grant makers have a process, which may be easy and accessible or complicated and inaccessible.
If you work for a foundation whose application process is exhausting and obscure, you may be contributing to societal inequalities. Generally, historic discrimination results in some groups being better able to navigate complex applications than others. Never forget this if you care about equity.
For example, some grant makers have online application forms that have not been developed alongside disabled people so many forms cannot be used easily by people with visual impairments.
User testing of online applications is straightforward and can lead to simple changes that foster inclusion. You can even do so informally without the permission of colleagues: the results can then be powerful assets to help you lobby your colleagues to make things better.
Release data on the grants you make.
Understandably, grant seekers want to know which types of work a foundation supports. If you don’t share this information, you may cause thousands of hours of unnecessary research and sleuthing from potential applicants and receive time-consuming inquiries from organizations you will never support.
This information can be shared in a variety of ways, but it’s best to both publish it on your website and submit it for inclusion in a grants database like Candid or 360Giving.
Some boards insist that grant amounts and grant recipients remain private. In such cases, consider seeking permission to share a brief confidential summary of some previous grants with nonprofits that have a good chance of getting a grant. This limited transparency is far better than none and can help groups understand your interests — and save precious time.
There are many more ways to be a humble modern grant maker, but these four steps are a solid starting point for showing nonprofits the respect and empathy they deserve.