Grant Making in a Time of Upheaval

Our grantees have struggled mightily with a range of challenges as foundations have seen their assets boom and learned that it doesn’t take luxury travel or other trappings to do good well. Let’s work now to keep moving forward.

Brave grantees and fast decision making by foundations were key to getting through the scariest days since lockdown. But it became clearer than ever that foundation officials have a lot to learn, writes Lisa Pilar Cowan.

Too often financial supporters think they are helping by making recommendations to people who already know how to carry out nonprofit missions. Let’s focus on what we have to give that truly matters.

I had a clever column worked out to open 2021, one that would detail my New Year’s resolutions to be a better grant maker. I had talked with the colleague who illustrates these dispatches for the Chronicle about the most amusing ways to show me as cleareyed and resolute.

Our offices should inspire brainstorming and conversation, filled with music and art that shows we want to work with nonprofits to devise new approaches, not impose them.

Grant makers are racing to declare what the 2020 elections taught us about next steps. But perhaps we should just be quiet, keep moving money to our partners, and reflect on what is working best.

Ditching old ideas, structures, and titles, like the program-officer term that connotes people of wealth commanding others to take action, will help us do more to meet our aspirations.

For too long, many of us involved in program grants have done too little to push endowment investments to match our mission goals. That’s no longer acceptable.

Nonprofit leaders are thrilled to get more general operating support, but they are still spending a lot of time complying with rules that have little to do with helping their organizations accomplish essential work.

When I feel like we’re making too little progress, it’s tempting to switch gears and adopt the latest approach — but what nonprofits need most now is consistent, flexible, long-term funding — and lots of it.

The Movement for Black Lives is doing something new by getting grant makers to call their peers. Now we need a bigger push to ensure we’re all working every day to advance change, writes Lisa Pilar Cowan of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.

Dismantling Racism Might Require PhilaAs foundation professionals, it is our task to respond with humility and recognize that anything short of a radical overhaul of our institutions is shallow and beside the point.nthropy to Dismantle Itself (Dispatches)

The race to stockpile toilet paper is an illogical and impractical response to the crisis. So, too, is foundations’ unwillingness to increase the share of assets that go to charity every year.

As in every disaster, nonprofits during the pandemic have been inundated with dollars to use for specific purposes. But too often that assumes today will be like yesterday — and that is now less true than ever.

Is the current scrappy, urgent approach to grant making the one we must all adopt forever after?

Meeting together on Zoom, the walls that hobbled collaboration are falling. How can we keep the spirit going and make grantees a central part of every aspect of our operations?