Skills and capabilities for effective grant making
What should be on a skills curriculum for anyone working in a Foundation or philanthropy?
It’s been just over a year now that I have been working in the Foundation world. A few months into my new identity and role, I reached out on Twitter to find out where communities of learning and practice were happening. There’s obviously membership bodies like the Association of Charitable Foundations (who I already knew), the European Foundation Centre (with whom I’ve just done a short Leadership in Philanthropy programme) and networks like Ariadne. The only thing Twitter came back with at that point was to direct me to the MSc in Grantmaking, Philanthropy and Social Investment at Cass Business School.
The former 3 here are helpful communities to be part of, though I am less sure about some of the content they deliver for people like me, who may be new to grantmaking but already have a wide range of other experience. The latter — well, I already have an MSc, I want to be inspired by an interdisciplinary syllabus and whilst lots of what is taught at Cass is important, I’m not sure it covers the kind of broad base of skills and knowledge that grantmakers need to respond to the challenges of a new era.
Ten Years Time are doing some great work in this area ( I love their mission to “inject ambition into philanthropy”) and they have a Grant Givers Programme. However, it doesn’t feel like a skills programme as such, more a programme to build peer relationships and to expose people to some newer thinking in the space. The Philanthropy Workshop also looks to offer some great learning experiences, skills training and resources, but it costs $12,000 to be a member — which will make it very inaccessible for many people working in Foundations.
So, what I’ve concluded, having now participated in a course, and done some research, as well as been in various discussions (especially with people like Vicki Sellick at Nesta and Tom Steinberg at the National Lottery Heritage Fund) is the field of grantmaking might benefit from a renewed look at what skills and competencies are needed in a more complex and digital society. This post is a reflection of what skills and capabilities I think grantmakers need to have today, and even more so in the future — which feel more about fostering strong relationships, creative problem solving skills and the ability to anticipate challenges well in advance.
I also realise that the kinds of skills and capabilities needed will also depend on or be limited by the size of Foundation and the types of funding programmes the Foundation has. Which raises questions about what skills and capabilities you prioritise, and bring in house versus what do you continue to pay consultants to do, and how might smaller Foundations better share people with specific skills and capabilities.
If this resonates, and once we’ve added more ideas and edits to this list, then perhaps I (we) will set up some kind of learning programme and freely available resources.
Skills
These are the skills that I think would be particularly helpful for those working in Foundations to learn and below I go into some more detail.
Design
“The naturally integrative approach of design helps illuminate the complex web of relationships — between people, organisations, and things — to provide a holistic point of view.”
There are so many ways in which design skills are necessary and beneficial to anyone working in grantmaking and philanthropy, that it is hard to know where to start.
Strategic Design
Strategic design brings together many different useful aspects of design practice, often described as being able to outline the “architecture of the problem,” highlighting key opportunities for improvement in all aspects and outcomes of a problem. Strategic designers have been said to bring three core competencies — integration, visualisation and stewardship. It’s particularly useful where the class of challenges is complex, systemic in nature, and where the solutions will require invention rather than adaptation.
Strategic Design as a practice is useful for Foundations in rethinking how they do all aspects of their business — from the design of the organisation and its functions (procurement, legal, finance etc) to the stewardship of implementing strategy — ensuring that key ideas maintain their integrity during that process. As Dan Hill says, “the dark matter of strategic designers is organisational culture, policy environments, market mechanisms, legislation, finance models and other incentives, governance structures, tradition and habits, and the situations and events that decisions are produced within.”
“As strategic designers, we find ourselves acting as the ‘glue’ that binds together multiple types of expertise, multiple approaches, and multiple forms of value in a team working towards a coherent proposition. Playing the role of glue also entails aligning the details of delivery with a vision.”
It’s easy to set new strategic ambitions for an organisation — Strategic Design ensures that the strategy is implemented and understood continually, consistently and across multiple funding programmes — it enables things to become systemic, permanent and influential.
Transition Design
“The idea of and need for transition is central to a variety of current discourses concerned with how change manifests and how it can be initiated and directed (in ecosystems, organisations, communities/societies, economies and even individuals). “
Transition Design practice brings together the recognition “that whole societies and their infrastructures must transition toward more sustainable states and that these transitions will require systems-level change and a deep understanding of systems dynamics.” It’s a practice that draws on mapping complex challenges and identifying stakeholder groups; developing future visions; and designing systems interventions that take account of time and pace.
Some of the ways the tools and methods of Transition Design can be particularly useful to Foundations and grant making includes, the design of funding programmes (ensuring they are systemic in their ambition for change), looking for emergent possibilities within problem contexts and amplifying grass-roots efforts and solutions that are already underway, as well as linking existing solutions together so that they can function as steps in a larger transition vision.
Org Design
“You can’t understand how a culture works until you try to change it.”
This has some overlap with strategic design because it deals with the design of organisations — their functions (HR, procurement, legal etc which all need designing), but also their cultures. Org Design recognises that organisational cultures are complex adaptive systems and that to improve a culture, it’s better to start with a series of small prototypes of things you want to change. NOBL talk about “pick one project to staff differently, change one meeting structure, choose one customer segment to try a new service approach with, etc. and scale them up as they prove successful.”
The practice of Org Design is especially useful for Foundations in terms of their own culture, how the organisation works, and how it gets good at responding to change. The way a Foundation delivers their grant making and makes funding decisions will be determined ultimately by the organisation’s own culture and values.
Service Design
“Service design is the design of services” wrote Lou Downe back in 2014 and now they have a book being published describing the 15 principles of good service design. Primarily service design as a practice could be useful for Foundations at the simplest level — helping them recognise that they deliver services. It’s amazing how many organisations don’t recognise that they provide services, which means in turn, there is not the necessary intent given to how things are designed. Service Design is not just about personas and journey mapping — in fact one might question the usefulness of the former at all. It’s about how all aspects of an organisation can be better designed to deliver user-centred services.
Learning about the tools, methods and approaches of Service Design for those working in Foundations will mean they can design better services, focussed on user needs — whether that’s grant advice services, grantmaking services, Funder Plus services, grant management services or learning and evaluation services. The whole end to end experience, on and off the web, of people accessing and applying to Foundations will be better.
Participatory Design and Co-design
Co-design has its roots in the participatory design techniques developed in Scandinavia in the 1970s. It’s is often used as an umbrella term for participatory, co-creation, co-production, designing with not for, and open design processes. The Co-design approach enables a wide range of people to contribute to, or lead, in the formulation and solution of a problem. This approach goes way beyond consultation by building and deepening equitable collaboration. This is important as a key tenet of Co-design is that people as ‘experts’ of their own experience, become central to the design process. A wide range of tools and techniques are available to support the Co-design process, these can help participants create user personas, storyboards and user journeys. Potential solutions can be tested through prototyping and scenario generation techniques.
This approach and set of methods and tools can be useful for different aspects of grant making. From the co-design of the strategic direction of a Foundation, to the co-design of specific funding programmes, or the co-design of ways to gather evidence and insight. Participatory design methods can also be directly applied to the practice of participatory grant making — going beyond just designing with, to finding the best way for grant makers to completely get out of the way. It can also be really useful for things like collaborative research.
Speculative Design
“We are not in the business of predicting the future, but are more interested in speculation as a means of making space for people to consider their choices, decisions and form opinions about potential futures, and hopefully be better equipped to engage in the creation of a more democratic future world.” Anab Jain
Speculative Design is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. It’s a means of speculating about how things could be, using ‘what if’ questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). What if there ought to be a change? What if we would change? What if things were different? Looking forwards in time helps imagine problems that might still be beneath the surface or factors that are unknown but plausible or possible.
This capability seems sorely missing from a lot of Foundations — Omidyar and Nesta have their brilliant Exploration and Sensing teams though I’m unsure how much of that work is design-led. Design in this context will go beyond horizon scanning and report writing, zooming into specific signals and trends, creating scenarios around these “what if” questions with tangible and realistic objects, and fabricating an experience of that possible future. In the context of Foundations and philanthropy, these practices could be useful in shaping and defining the strategic direction of the Foundation or shaping the focus of a particular funding programme — even using speculative design as a way of grant applicants having an embodied experience of what a funding programme is trying to achieve before they apply.
Policy Design
Policy Design has a lot of crossover with Strategic Design. Design has more traditionally been used to enable better implementation of a policy, but a growing movement of designers working in policy contexts shows it’s now recognised as a useful approach further upstream — to determine and set policy goals.
“When there is scope to imagine new policy possibilities, prototypes can be used to illustrate proposed ideas — presenting a tangible example of how a new policy might work is a powerful alternative to conventional forms of policy influencing, such as written recommendations or calls for evidence.” — Camilla Buchannan
In terms of how this approach could be useful in Foundations and as a skill for grantmakers to learn — whilst at Doteveryone I tried to shape a practice that used prototyping for policy influencing — and given Foundations develop their own policy positions, and do policy influencing work they could also try some different approaches for doing this.
Human Centred Design (and beyond)
Human Centred Design is really the basics of design practice and a part of all of the others listed above, but I have to remember that it’s not common knowledge in the world of Foundations and philanthropy. On the Leadership in Philanthropy programme I was on last week there was a lesson on Human Centred Design and only 4 out of 24 of us knew what it was, with only one of us (me) being trained and experienced in it. IDEO, who developed the most commonly used framework, is often credited with its conception though I think it links to, and was influenced by, social design practice and participatory design practice.
It’s useful for Foundations and grantmakers to learn as an approach and as a philosophy because it brings intent to what you centre in your design process — whether that’s in how you are designing a funding programme or in how you are managing and measuring the impact of a grant. However, there is much more evolved and better practice than the IDEO model, that Foundations would benefit from using. “User-centred” or “Person-centred” can be problematic given the challenges facing society and the planet. I’ve written here about new practices beyond “User-centred” design and would encourage all Foundations to be more thoughtful and skilled in choosing what they centre, de-centre and re-centre in designing their services and in their assessment criteria.
What else can grantmakers borrow from design?
- Segmentation — I really think one of the biggest challenges we have in civil society in the UK, and in the world of Foundations and the design of funding programmes and sector support, is that we don’t really know, at any granular level, who we’re trying to support. Designers are really good at segmenting people (so are comms and advertising people), because it’s how they know who to design for. Where people have been able to segment and identify a particular “user” that they understand and then respond to the needs of, it becomes a challenge to understand and respond to different types of users.
- Prototyping — A critique of design is that it privileges material ‘things’ over relationships, social structures etc but those ‘things’ can transform the relationships around them. Prototypes can put people into different relationships with each other, inviting them into new positions. Prototyping is also really helpful for making a strong demonstration and to probe or provoke to reveal possibility, resistance, energy and flex.
- Design tools — In particular, it would be really helpful if every Foundation did a Journey Map of how different applicants will experience and move through their service, and a Service Blueprint so that they can understand the relationship between different service components and processes that are directly tied to touchpoints in the applicants journey. In essence a Journey Map is what the person experiences, and a Service Blueprint is what goes on outside of their view to make it happen. Lastly using a Service Audit tool will help Foundation’s recognise themselves as a service delivery organisation with different funding products.
I think I’ve made (too long) a case for why design is such an important skill and set of practices within Foundations, now on to the other skills I also think are necessary.
Relational Skills — Ecosystems, Networks and Movements
Relational skills are obviously crucial for grantmakers to have — and for anyone working in a Foundation. However, this doesn’t simply mean being nice, humble and thoughtful to everyone. These are strategic skills that are often undervalued and assumed.
Grantmakers can play a unique role in creating conditions that transform relationships and by putting people and their contexts into different relationships with each other. Whether that’s in how they do field-building work, build collective awareness, design in interdependencies — Lets not underestimate and underinvest in this as a practice — that requires intent and skill.
Another unique and relational role that Foundations and grantmakers can play is in building, connecting and convening networks — and again, recognising that this is a practice and a set of skills.
Lastly, grantmakers need to be skilled in understanding how movements are created and how to fund an ecology of movements — especially as being able to fund movements will be ever more necessary as catalysts for social and environmental justice. Ayni has great materials on Movement Ecologies, Movement Netlab has lots of resources too, and NEON runs a Movement Builders training (which I went on a few years ago) — some of these materials could easily be repurposed to skill up grantmakers.
Stewardship
Many individuals who work in alliances or collaborative endeavours act as stewards almost naturally. If you are used to continually calibrating the goals of a project with the constraints of your context, you are practicing stewardship. If you maintain a constant state of opportunism and a willingness to pivot when progress on the current path is diminishing, you’re a natural steward.
I associate stewardship with part of strategic design practice but I can see its relevance to grantmaking and believe it’s a skill that needs developing as part of funding practice. In my team at The National Lottery Community Fund, we don’t use the words “grant management” and instead we use the word stewardship — Funding Officers steward the grants they make. This is an important distinction. Stewardship is like an ongoing feedback loop that guides the why, what, how, and who — I feel that with a lot of current grantmaking practice, and especially in grant management, the why is completely lost, and that in turn diminishes a desire for more ambitious change.
Alongside offering a more suitable way to look after grants, stewardship as a practice and skill can also be useful in the wider organisation. As Helsinki Design Lab describe, stewardship can also be about “changing the ‘weather” It can shape the course of change inside an organisation and hold up a mirror to “the way we’ve always done it.” They go on to describe how they “invoke stewardship in place of words like “implement” and “execute” out of recognition that the latter imply a cleanliness or linear progression which is rarely found when working on a shared proposition in a complex environment.What we describe also goes well beyond “facilitation,” which suggests that others do the important work.”
Coaching
Coaching skills — which include active listening, asking open and powerful questions, communicating, designing accountability into people’s lives and work, designing alliances for people to work well together, and emotional intelligence — are useful in grantmaking. I would recommend the framework that the Co-Active Training Institute use ( I trained with them back in 2006) and for coaching teams, I would recommend ORSC, which I did back in 2018, where you are trained in relational and systems intelligence, not only emotional intelligence.
Training grantmakers in Coaching skills would bring a culture of enquiry, curiosity and learning to all aspects of their work. It would deepen the quality of enquiry when grantmakers are seeking more information from applicants about their proposal. It would bring an action-enquiry approach to how learning was done once funds had been distributed — rather than a ‘monitoring’ approach. It would also ensure that different kinds of evidence and insight could be drawn out through a more sophisticated and intentional approach to questioning.
Influencing
It wasn’t until I worked at Doteveryone that I really understood the value of doing effective influencing work. Assuming most Foundations have an agenda — or at the very least a strategy, a position, a set of values, a purpose — then becoming skilled in influencing work can really move an agenda forward. Of course distributing money around a theme, place or issue area is one way to influence change, but it’s often only one part of the work. If grantmakers became more skilled in all-round influencing work, I think their grants would be put to work harder in the world.
What are these skills? It’s about understanding where power lies, it’s about framing and forming narratives (see more below), it’s about having clear theories of change (and influence), it’s about being able to understand plural ways of influencing for change and it’s about what I describe as investing in “systems readiness” — cultivating the conditions, and influencing the people with whom you want what you’ve funded, to land or to stick. There are some great tips in this resource from Doteveryone, but I generally think effective influencing skills is largely missing across a lot of civil society.
Governance
Learning about good governance is probably the most expected item to find on this list. This includes skills in designing good accountability and decision-making processes, ways of doing effective and meaningful due diligence, an understanding of how to comply with law and regulation, an ability to understand finances, and a framework for thinking about and exploring risk.
I like Geoff Mulgan’s framework of risk that he shared with us recently at Wasan Island.
- Calculable risk — the risk we can put numbers on and build tools around.
- Positive risk — the gambles or bets we take where we can’t predict the outcome.
- Existential risk — the huge, complex challenges already here. Climate breakdown, crises of democracy, widespread inequality. As humans, we are good at ignoring well evidenced insights about the risks we face, especially those that are slow or invisible.
I’d also add something about our own personal propensity to risk and how to bring an awareness of that to your practice as a grantmaker. And I’d want to equip grantmakers with skills to look at the following —
- How do you organise more effectively around purpose rather than being so focussed on organising to mitigate risk?
- How do you create environments where risk is seen as an asset?
- How can we collectively take on bigger risks? And take on the risks for our grant holders?
I’d hope if we’re trying to prepare Foundations and grantmakers for the future we’d also want them to develop new knowledge and explore their own thinking about governance. Are preconceived management structures and governance models working? Are there multiple formal and informal ways they might develop mutually accountable relationships with stakeholders — e.g. a more effective way of being in relationship with the Board?
Foundations and grantmakers should be encouraged to look outside their known world at the people and organisations who are really reinventing or repurposing governance. Lets not only teach grantmakers the obvious and the current — what about where things are heading in the future?
“Governance models are broken. We’re holding on to 19th century models that deny the complexity of the ‘systemocracy’ we live in — a world of interdependencies. Incumbents increasingly seek to use governance failure to preserve their structural power positions; governance protocols are failing to govern new technologies and behaviours; decision-making processes rarely factor in long-term externalities; and we are falling short in realising the new economic, social, and ecological recovery possibilities of our age.”
Interdisciplinary
I think that the learning environments for grantmakers need to be both more interdisciplinary in how they’re curated, and also more effective at drawing out people’s previous knowledge and experience to create an interdisciplinary culture. It’s not new to stress that the large-scale, complex challenges we face as a society require work that transcends disciplinary and sector boundaries. Grantmakers need to learn the skills and practice of working in ways that extend the boundaries around each of their roles, and in ways that draw on a wider range of expertise and experience both inside and outside their organisations.
Foresight and horizon scanning
Most theories of change focus on the present rather than considering an exploration of what the future holds. Horizon scanning and foresight practices help identify, understand and amplify the potential consequences and opportunities of the many possible futures which lay ahead. They pick up weak signals that are emerging from our technological, political, social and cultural landscape—and it’s not just about picking up on trends, but on hopes, fears, and possibilities.
I’ve been surprised that this is not a more common function and practice in the Foundation world — anticipation of future and a focus on prevention — and there are many ways that it can be useful. Foresight and horizon scanning practices, and understanding dynamics about the future, can directly inform the strategic direction of a Foundation and its individual funding programmes today. Horizon scanning is also useful to better understand roles in an ecosystem and the most effective places to act. Too much work in civil society is about fixing the same system, whereas the practice of foresight can help show potential opportunities and spaces to move into, and reveal the conditions needed to do so.
Foundations have a unique role — because of their resource and timeframes to invest in this kind of practice — if grantmakers are skilled in making use of foresight and horizon scanning they can help prepare wider civil society for the longer-term. These are also practices that grantmakers can involve potential applicants and grantees in — so that they are not only more informed but can bring multiple perspectives to the future. Social Dreaming and Public Imagination practices was something I’d suggested The National Lottery Community Fund do for their 25th Birthday activities, and Nesta have recently published this great work about Participatory Futures.
Narrative, Culture and Framing
I’ve written about this before elsewhere, but I wish the social sector wasn’t so over reliant on case studies, and learnt to tell more compelling narratives, and more nuanced, systemic stories. My Point People colleague Ella, wrote this excellent piece on the how to use story to change systems, and another Point People colleague, Jennie Winhall, writes about the Big Change Narrative as part of her systemic practice.
Changing or reframing narratives can help to redraw the boundary about social challenges and opportunity spaces, and ensure we don’t fall back on the same logic models that have created the kind of inequities we have in society today. Creating new stories can make different assets and perspectives available in helping address social issues. Cultural audits is a research practice that provides movements and campaigns with a deeper and more emotionally resonant understanding of their audience than traditional research practices do on their own. There is a comprehensive overview of cultural strategies, culture change, meta-narratives, cultural undercurrents, story, and audience-centred research practices in this article, and I would like to see many of them drawn on for grantmakers to become skilled in.
“Politics is where some of the people are some of the time. Culture is where most of the people are most of the time.” ~The Culture Group, Making Waves: A Guide to Cultural Strategy
The Frameworks Institute has been “changing the conversation on social issues” for several decades now, with “an approach to communications research and practice that integrates essential constructs from the cognitive and social sciences to describe and explain how communications in general, and media in particular, influence public support for social programs and policies.” They have different techniques like using a Wide Angle Lens, ways to recognise problematic and optimal framing, practice in deconstructing and reconstructing communications, and the use of Strategic Frame Analysis in building issue coalitions. They now have a Frameworks Academy and it’s worth reading their ‘words that change minds’ article.
If grantmakers had better skills in narrative, framing and storytelling, they’d be able to do more effective influencing work, they’d be able to shape the insights and learning from their grants into more impactful stories, they’d be able to engage with new and different communities because of how they’ve framed funding programmes, and they’d be able to tell strategic and systemic narratives that are more authentic in reflecting the interdependent nature of social issues. A particularly important use of these practices for grantmakers is in building issue coalitions or ecosystems of organisations trying to achieve the same purpose — where a meta-narrative is essential for bringing coherence and a way of threading it all together.
Critical Thinking and Reflection
Critical thinking skills are not something that we should assume grantmakers already have, and they are important for many reasons related to grantmaking. Thinking critically will help grantmakers create a strong case — based on the evidence they’ve evaluated — for why something should or shouldn’t be funded, or why a funding programme should be designed around a particular theme. It can help grantmakers challenge assumptions and hold paradoxes. Grantmakers need to be able to analyse and evaluate — compare and contrast — and synthesise material about funding applications — and over time this develops their sense of judgement. I’m not an expert in how to build critical thinking skills, there are some resources here, but I do think it’s a competency that we’ve assumed already exists in grantmaking, and I’m not always sure it does.
Critical thinking skills would also ensure that Foundations and grantmaking makes better use of other research, evidence and data — to design funding programmes, funding criteria, and in the assessments of what to fund.
Lastly if Foundations valued critical thinking then we’d see grantmakers engaging more effectively in the macro issues of our time — things like the dynamics of technology, and the impacts of the climate and ecological crises etc.
Technology
I wasn’t sure about putting this as something separate, but an understanding of technology is relevant to Foundations and grantmaking in so many ways. Knowing what technology can afford is essential for new and better grantmaking practice. Technology offers new ways for grantmakers and Foundations to collaborate, as well as those we fund. There are technologies that can decentralised decision making, and collective intelligence design (the combination of human and machine intelligence) can take participatory grantmaking to a whole new level.
Data can bring new evidence and insight, make visible new opportunities for collaboration, provide different ways to understand progress and change, and be useful in automating aspects of grantmaking process. The processes and culture of technology (inspired by best practice in the way open source technology is built) can be useful to change the rules of the game — it can bring transparency and agility to the way Foundations work, and to how grantmakers interact with applicants. Understanding both the potential applications and implications of technology, and being able to engage with the question of what’s “Just enough Internet?” feels like a vital skill for grantmakers in a digital society.
Sensemaking, Synthesis and Actionable Insight
“Sensemaking is the ability or attempt to make sense of an ambiguous situation. More exactly, sensemaking is the process of creating situational awareness and understanding in situations of high complexity or uncertainty in order to make decisions. It is a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places, and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively.”
The definition of ‘synthesis’ is the ability to combine a number of things into a coherent whole. Synthesising information, then, is the process of taking bits and pieces of information and creating a new and coherent thought from them. Sometimes these bits of information are related to each other, sometimes they aren’t. The beauty of synthesis is the ability to create new and innovative linkages between seemingly unrelated pieces of information — this is why it’s different from analysis.
Reading Snowden at Cognitive Edge, is where I first came across sensemaking — his work brings together complexity science, complex systems adaptive theory and narrative practice into sensemaking as a discipline.
The ability to synthesise and sensemake is an important skill for grantmaking in a complex world — to make sense of data and insights from multiple applications that can show important trends across a field of work through to different ways of drawing out learning and insights across multiple grants. Synthesis and sensemaking recognise that change processes are not static or linear.
Patterns, Assembling and Curation
Grantmakers can play an important role in assembling multiple actors (organisations, groups, individuals, institutions) and assets to create impact together. How you do this work, working out who you invite in to participate in this kind of field-building activity, and in what sequence and at what pace is a skill.
Being able to spot patterns (I love the book The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent), and to connect the micro/macro, in order to inform who and how you assemble, is another skill.
Curation is also a skill that grantmakers need. When you make multiple grants across a field or theme, you are in essence telling a story — bringing a focus on what is possible, not just on what’s current. There is also a role for Foundations and grantmakers to play in curating and cultivating the conditions that bring a new system into being.
The first part of this post was about skills — which I think of as something you can teach — and that are functional. The next section is about capabilities — which I think of as the ability to take something and apply it in lots of different contexts.
Capabilities
What would I be looking out for if I was hiring someone? Or what do I wish was valued more in terms of the capabilities of grantmakers.
Ambition
This may seem a strange one, but something I have been surprised by in my time in the Foundation community is a lack of ambition for the work that we are trying to do. Do we want to be part of creating long-lasting change, and in the most effective ways possible? It’s possible to be using all the best new approaches but if the teams doing so aren’t aiming for something transformational, or they aren’t engaged in the wider world, or able to use initiative, then the tools and approaches never realise their potential. I think it’s important for grantmakers to have an ambition to create value —that they look for opportunity, not simply problems to solve.
Listening
When I did my Co-active coaching training (see above), one of the things that you learn more about is the ability to listen well. To do co-active listening. What that means is recognising and working with 3 levels of listening — what distinguishes them is where you focus as you listen to the person you’re with.
- Level One listening is listening primarily to yourself, or your own thoughts or agenda.
- In Level Two listening you are intensely focused on what the other person is saying. Nothing’s distracting you. Thoughts about the past or the future don’t intrude.
- Level Three listening is also completely directed towards the other person, but it has a wider focus. You hear more than just the words they’re saying. You pick up on all sorts of other things — body language, the inflections and tone of their voice, their pauses and hesitations.
It’s in Levels Two and Three that Co-Active Coaching take place. This is where you really let yourself be on the receiving end of someone else and their agenda. This is what good grant making requires — deep listening — looking out for signals, really hearing and seeing what people need and are trying to do, and being tuned into the wider landscape that you’re funding in.
Awareness
Awareness — “the ability to directly know and perceive, to feel, or to be cognisant of events. More broadly, it is the state of being conscious of something” — it’s such a broad term but is absolutely something that I would look for in grantmakers. What kinds of awareness am I talking about?
- Do they have self-awareness — of their biases, their privileges, their vulnerabilities, their needs, and their strengths and desires.
- Do they have awareness of their team and their wider organisation — the team dynamics, the organisational culture, the dark matter of unspoken rules, where power resides?
- Do they have awareness of the sector and thematic areas in which they are working. Of the different relationships in the sector and challenges of these, and of who is doing what, where?
- Do they have awareness of the wider world around them. The big macro issues? The root causes of social challenges? The interdependencies that exist?
- Do they have awareness of the past, the history of things, how things have come to be how they are, especially in relation to things like colonialism, ownership, language, what we measure and value, what has been centred and what hasn’t — and how this is perpetuated today? This awareness is crucial if grantmaking is to adopt an equity lens.
And in any activity, all grantmakers should have an awareness of who they are giving power to.
Responsibility
I expect that many people would want to see the word ‘humility’ in this list because of the power that Foundations and grant makers are perceived to have, but I’m more interested in how people are aware of, and use that power responsibly. Challenging and changing power is essential.
I feel like so many funders are paralysed by their humility and consciousness of their power, that they are not acting at all, or only in a very tentative way. For me, if you are a grantmaker it’s much more responsible to recognise your power and then use it wisely and effectively. Yes, money gives you power and influence, but lets not pretend you can completely remove that dynamic from the relationship between grant seeker and grantmaker — and instead own it and make sure you do something with that in the service of others. Power is there to be harnessed for mission.
Respect
There are a lot of words that could feature in a list like this — different desired traits we’d want grantmakers to have, but I believe many of them can be encompassed by what I had originally called common decency and common sense — however, I realised that the word “common” may be problematic here, so instead I’ve gone for “respect”. Pragmatism feels important in grantmaking, being straightforward wherever possible, adapting to the different ways people might want or need to be communicated with, because you can just tell (or you’ve asked) — someone might want a more relational approach from their grantmaker, another grantee might want something that feels much more removed and ‘professional.’ Trying not to waste people’s time, explaining things clearly, only asking for an appropriate amount of information, doing what you say you’ll do, turning up when you say you will, giving feedback if you’ve promised to — and so forth. It is about showing respect and being adaptable.
Valuing Healing and Regenerative Practice
This is the least well formed in my mind at the moment, but in the same way that I write about here in terms of “life-centred design” — how can the act of giving grants, the interactions with applicants and the role of Foundations be regenerative? John Thackara talks about “growing in a new way where we add health and vitality to the places that we all share.” In grantmaking this might mean asking how you can give prominence to care in your interactions and are you being care-full (like Iroquois Philosophy where decisions made today are subjected to the 7th generation test).
Creativity and imagination
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality… Build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
That was visionary designer Buckminster Fuller who was brilliant at developing solutions that sidestepped the status quo. This is why creativity and imagination is important in Foundations and grantmakers need to be able to do the following —
- To find creative ways to challenge the dominant logic
- To have the imagination to seeing the potential new landscape (the patterning of hope)
- To be able to do propositioning, which means to be on the side of creation not just analysis
- To focus on the potential not just the current
- And to be creative about what is measured
Courage
“I am convinced that courage is the most important of all the virtues. Because without courage, you cannot practice any other virtue consistently. You can be kind for a while; you can be generous for a while; you can be just for a while, or merciful for a while, even loving for a while. But it is only with courage that you can be persistently and insistently kind and generous and fair.” — Maya Angelou
Grantmakers need to be courageous — to not only do the comfortable thing but to do what is needed — and that might require a variance with accepted practice, or a challenge to the status quo. As Susan Sontag said — “Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example — for courage is as contagious as fear.” There’s something too, in what EE Cummings said — to have the courage to be yourself.
Experience
“If you live it, you can’t leave it” is something that my old boss, the brilliant Derek, talks about. This is both simple and complex, because of course many people have lived experience that is not visible, and that they can’t leave — like mental health challenges. Lived experience is really important in grantmaking, and so is learned experience. I like how Baljeet Sandhu, whilst being a huge advocate of lived experience, also talks about how “we need each other” — and for her that is about valuing all knowledge — that which has been gained through both lived and learned experience, not necessarily prioritising one over the other. I think the capability is in knowing when it might be important to centre lived experience over learned experience.
A growth mindset
When I was doing my MSc in Positive Psychology back in 2008, I became familiar with the work of Carol Dweck and her ideas about why developing a growth mindset are important. This feels like an important lens for grantmakers to adopt about the organisations they are funding — a growth mindset is based on the belief that people’s (and projects and organisations) basic qualities are things that can be cultivated through efforts and that everyone can change and grow through hard work, practice and learning. And if grantmakers have a growth mindset in relation to themselves they would seek and thrive on challenge and want to stretch themselves, because they know that they will grow and learn.
I could go on, and on, and I already deleted “integrity” and “compassion” (more than empathy)from this list — not because they’re unimportant, they are vital, but because this post is already 8,000 words long. Ultimately I believe that what grantmakers need to be most of all, is expert generalists.
If you’re interested in helping me develop resources for grantmaking or you already know about resources that cover a lot of these things, I would love to hear from you. I’m not interested in reinventing the wheel, but I am interested in bringing better practice into grantmaking.
