Hi everyone. I hope you have had a nice break and were able to rest and recharge. I haven’t done one lick of writing in two months, so this post may be a bit rusty (especially as I refuse to use AI for any part of the writing process).
During my hiatus, I did speak at a conference, and I guess I was rusty at that too, because five angry people walked out of my keynote, probably due to some combination of my cussing, mentioning of white supremacy and wealth hoarding, or saying how foundations that have a “wait and see” approach when nonprofits are in multiple intersecting crises are assholes.
Anyway, I stayed the rest of the first day and attended the closing plenary, which was a panel of funders. Now, before we go any further, let me reiterate that some of my best friends are funders, and there are many instances where funders can be very helpful when sharing their knowledge. I’m just not sure, after having been in the audience of so many of these events, that the funder panel format is more beneficial than detrimental to our sector.
A funder panel is usually a group of several program officers who are invited to share glimpses into their work and advice for nonprofit leaders. It all sounds useful, possibly even exciting, which is why so many conferences have them. And yet, they’ve always bothered me. Maybe it’s because without fail, I hear standard philanthropic tropes like “when you see one funder, you’ve seen one funder” and “resources are limited and we get sooooo many applications.”
I thought about why these events tend to annoy me, and having spoken to other colleagues, I know they annoy them too. Probably because of these reasons:
They normalize terrible grant philosophies and practices: It seems valuable on the surface for several funders to give advice on how nonprofits can increase their chance of getting funding. “Be concise in your proposals. Submit your proposals to the grant portal ahead of deadline. Don’t lie in your program reports.” Etc. All reasonable. Except, by positioning all these things as the default, it prevents us from critically examining them. Why are funding “limited” when most foundations hoard 95% of their assets and only give out 5%? Why are funders all requiring unique proposals and reports in the first place and not just accepting proposals that are already written? Why can’t they just accept annual reports instead of requiring their own snowflake reports? Why is ok that each funder has their own aggravating grant portal for grantees to waste their time navigating through?
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