Make Grants, Then Ask For Applications
I’ve spent forty two years working in the voluntary sector and about thirty seven of them worrying about money. Grant seekers and grant makers need one another. The relationship should be close and collaborative. In practice my experience has often been different – too much second guessing; distrust; unexplained and inexplicable decision making; gaming and borderline deceit. Not all the time of course, and certainly not as often as when I began my working life – behaviour on both sides has improved hugely and there are wonderful examples of very good practice – but the big picture is still not good enough.
There are lots of tweaks that could be made and there are lots of better practices that could be learnt from the best and more widely adopted. But in my funding utopia both sides would go further than that.
Here are my five suggestions from the third horizon. They overlap and they contradict one another because the world is messy and because no single model is an answer to everything. Most of all, they challenge common practice.
- Support organisations that don’t know what they’re doing
Occasionally I’ve changed places and sat as a trustee or a funding adviser. It’s been a revelation: so many organisations know how to end poverty, banish loneliness, beat crime. And of course, they do because that’s what the funder asked for – big answers to big questions.
This wouldn’t much matter if the answer didn’t necessarily come with outputs, the measurable targets which, through hell and high water, the applicant will endeavor to deliver. Good work, perhaps, but any attempt at continuous learning and improvement or testing and innovating will now be set aside in pursuit of bums on seats and ticks in boxes.
Most charities, and particularly small ones, can’t afford to think. They don’t have all the answers but they don’t expect to be funded unless they pretend that they have.
Why not surprise them? Support the great organisations that don’t know what to do. Redesign the application form and ask for questions. Look for curiosity. Assess experience and skills. Require an understanding about implementation but not a programme. Fund the investigating and the exploring, the testing and the failing. Pay for thinking and imagining because no one changes the world with what we know already.
2. And then also honour the copycats
Some years ago I was a judge on The Guardian’s Public Service Awards. I remember one shortlisted application from a project that had adapted and combined models from Canada and South Africa and was achieving remarkable results. This was cheating, one judge said;the project wasn’t new. It was duly rejected. Set aside the fact that the competition criteria said nothing about newness and that the project hadn’t hidden but had proudly owned its antecedents, it was the casual conflation of “new” as “award-winning” and “old” as “bog standard” that troubled me. This common attitude drives an obsessive search for novelty and/or an incentive to game the system and describe a programme as brand new when actually it’s particular strength is that it is already known to work. Innovation is important but wasted if it isn’t adapted imaginatively and adopted extensively. Send a clear message – allocate a portion of the budget exclusively for the tried and tested.
3. Give an extra 50% to the organisations that keep asking for the same thing
It’s easy to get stuck. If the need is correctly identified and the response is a good one, demand will be high. A small team will be frantic on the hamster wheel, meeting need. The funder can see the need and value the provision but worry about a grants budget that is increasingly silted up paying for the same thing year after year. What to do? Place an arbitrary limit? End the grant after 3 years? 5 years? Even though the need is evident and the work is good? Or continue indefinitely and give up all hope of funding anything new?
There is a third way. Offer 50% more on top of the regular grant for new work that reduces or at the very least changes the nature of the need. Such an early action approach in a school exclusion project might take the work to a younger, pre-crisis age group; a homeless project might pivot onto families on the brink of eviction.
Make the offer, don’t wait to be asked, but be strict about the conditions. ccept the challenge with the extra money or nothing.
4. Fund in phases, not in full
This one is personal. At the moment, and not for the first time, I am working on a new project https://shiftdesign.org/portfolio/the-relationships-project/ that is looking promising but we’re running out of development money and not quite ready for the big pitches.
Getting modest amounts of start-up money for a sparky new idea isn’t as difficult as you might imagine – all sorts of funders like to be associated with small sums and an exciting innovation. Investing long-term when the model is still new but demonstrably sound is also attractive. It’s the middle bit that’s difficult, when it’s neither seedling nor ready for harvest.
Recognise that development isn’t just a beginning and an end but a series of steps. Mis-steps too, even those which go backwards, are part of an honest journey of discovery. Commit to modular funding promising several stages of support, subject to continuous iteration.
5. Make grants. Then ask for applications.
When the Boston Philharmonic conductor Benjamin Zander was teaching at the New England Conservatory he would routinely award all his students an A grade before they began work at the start of the year. He expected them to live into his expectations and was “rarely disappointed”.
What might be the Zander approach to grantmaking? Make grants then ask for applications? It would, in a single strike, remove all the constraints from the conventional grantmaker / grant seeker relationship. Creativity would be unleashed, untrammeled by guidelines and conditions.
Select candidates carefully. Examine values. Consider character and past performance. Seek alignment of interests. Look for hunger.
Then show belief. Make a grant. No written work submitted, no forms, no conditions. Expect.
I have a hunch, you will be rarely disappointed.
