Grant Writer Grant Winner

Another One Bites the Dust

2011-04-18T18:22:00.000-07:00

Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute are now on the chopping block. They will never recover from the 60 Minutes expose. What's worse, the non-profit community will be slow to recover, if what Mortenson has been accused of is true. Sadly, the girls and young women of Afghanistan will suffer, the very ones he intended to help get an education. But is it necessarily the case that the fall of one non-profit means the eclipse of others? Mortenson's organization is world class, perhaps like the Red Cross or the United Way. He has attracted the support of presidents and corporate executives. So will they now be less sanguine about philanthropies and other saviors?

Google's Culture Clash

2011-03-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

Recently The New York Times reported on DotOrg, a philanthropy founded in 2004 by Google and endowed with tens of millions of dollars. Its mission: to tackle major problems like climate change, global poverty and the spread of pandemic diseases. DotOrg would be unconventional. It would operate as a business, free of the constraints placed on other nonprofits. Seven years later, DotOrg is now involved only in engineering-related projects that are often the outgrowth of Google products. What happened?

A clash of cultures. A confrontation of two minds: non-profit humanism vs. engineering meritocracy. Simply put, the engineers at Google could not fathom that African health problems could not be resolved once and for all by applying a health algorithm derived from analysis of Google data.

The ambitions of DotOrg were vast: "to completely reinvent philanthropy and, in doing so, reinvent the world and address a hugely important set of problems with solutions only Google with its immense intellectual talent and resources could find by aggregating information." In short, Google engineers thought they had the solution to the world's problems, if only these problems would hew to their data analysis.

DotOrg is now a one-project philanthropy and most of its budget has been re-purposed. In the clash between engineers and development professionals, the engineers, who now have given up on the project because it no longer interests them, are the victors.

Gates Foundation Equity Partnerships Multiply

2011-03-13T16:15:00.000-07:00

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation reports that they are investing $2 million in a California education group called Inigral, a startup that uses Facebook to help college students avoid dropping out of school. This may be a new strategy by the Foundation to show that social networks and social media can have an impact on post-secondary success, according to Michael Staton, CEO of Inigral.

The news could be significant for socially motivated entrep0reneurs who work in the same areas as the Foundation. In 2009, it said it would invest $400 million out of its $35 billion endowment in companies working in the fields of health, development and education.

An interesting aspect of the deal is that it may be the first time the Foundation has used a portfolio company to collect data that will be used to improve its charitable work.

Brand Health and PepsiCo

2011-01-31T17:19:00.000-08:00

I remember some excitement and some controversy when huge corporations began running contests for grant money. You prepared your pitch and emailed it. You waited. If enough people "voted" for your cause, you won. If your project didn't win the competition, you didn't win. American Express and others got involved in this competitive scheme for the public good, and won some brand recognition.

Today, the New York Times published an account of PepsiCo, makers of Pepsi Cola and other brands, going into the market of selling their brand on social networks by offering money if you can collect enough votes for your cause. PepsiCo, in a surprise move, withdrew its advertising from the 2010 Superbowl, and they will do it again this year, better to invest the $23 million in something more worthy, and more advantageous.

If you read the New York Times article carefully, you will see that the corporation is not trying to finagle a purchase out of you and not even a heartbeat of affection for their product. No, they want to promote the health of their brand by getting it in front of the Millennial Generation. I'm for it, number one because it will benefit a wide array of worthwhile causes, and also because it presents a new way of getting grants, besides the old way, to which I have become accustomed, of working very hard on the proposal and then tossing it out there to see what happens.

Graft Strikes At The Heart of Giving

2011-01-25T12:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's announcement that contributors to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, were victims of fraud came as no surprise to those of us involved in international work, especially in the developing world where governments and economies are shaky and corruption is a way of life. I'm reminded of work I did for causes in Ethiopia, where graft is rife. I quickly learned that the USAID and the World Bank had reduced funding there because their grants were being passed along to officials whose approval was needed to dig for water, build clinics or distribute food and clothing. Now, because of this latest controversy, foundations that might have felt it necessary to go ahead with the extortion, bribery and assorted lesser crimes just to get their missions accomplished, see the downside: not only public embarrassment but harm to their relationships with donors.

The Gates Foundation issued a statement late yesterday (1/24/2011) saying that "the Global Fund is doing a tremendous job of ensuring that critical health interventions reach those who need them most. Fraud allegations that have recently been reported in the news refer to a small portion of the Global Fund's resources - only four of 145 countries and $34 million out of a total disbursement of $13 billion. This fraud was discovered and reported publicly by the Global Fund, which has a rigorous audit and investigation system in place...we know that dealing with these hard-to-reach places is challenging, but not trying to save these lives is unacceptable." If the last sentence reads a little defensive, it may be that it foretells what everyone may expect to hear: "how much of my donation will go to graft?"

It appears that dozens of supporters who have pledged over $30 billion, are now holding off on fulfilling their commitments "until money is recovered or more is known about alleged misappropriations". What effect will this trend have on smaller donors, foundations and organizations that are doing good work in the developing world?

Rise of a New Giving Elite

2011-01-21T13:27:00.000-08:00

In the January/February 2011 issue of the Atlantic you'll find an essay by Chrystia Freeland titled "The Rise of the New Global Elite". I can recommend it if you have a strong stomach for hubris. According to Ms. Freeland, who has impressive creds, the very, very, very wealthy are not among us, they are floating somewhere very high up there, well beyond the stentch of our pathetic needs and desires. I'm only mildly exaggerating this. Anyway, of interest to us is the author's description of these Masters of the Universe coming to the realization that they have some sort of obligation to share their money with the rest of humanity. It's all the rage since the formation of the Gates/Buffett alliance, except these new foundations are being formed by people who are oddly, sadly out of touch. They are funded to support conclaves (like the one in Davos) or pet projects (like endowments for ski resorts). You see, these folks don't think our worthy causes are worthy enough for them. Read the article, it's alarming.

Social Network Philanthropy

2010-11-09T15:57:00.000-08:00

The Social Network, a movie about a true nerd's revenge, features a fictional portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. The movie was released in October and a few days prior to the release, Zuckerman announced that he had pledged $100 million to the schools of Newark, New Jersey. Given that the film shows a man desperate for the approval of women and greedy for the money that will attract them, his charitable gift could be seen as a bit of makeup on the old tart's face.

For more, see Zadie Smith's article in teh New York Review of Books (11-25-2010).

Who are the highest and mightiest?

2010-10-18T15:54:00.000-07:00

It seems wrong to abuse the good. When people do good in this world, we must support them, maybe even love them. But down deep inside we may think the people who do good, especially if they announce it with pride to the world, a little suspect. Maybe there's a selfish motive behind those apparently high acts of charity. And of course there's not a little human nature in wanting to see the high and mighty taken down a notch or two. That's why I'm re-reading the "Talk of the Town" in October 4th's New Yorker. Under the heading "Dept. of Haves, The Real Thing," the author makes gentle fun ofMelinda Gates. Mrs. Gates was in New York appearing at events and commenting on the work of the eponymous Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the (as if anyone needed to be told) richest charity in the world, and getting richer. Mrs. Gates, it turns out, is particularly emboldened in her charitable work by the thought that toilets are lacking all over the world, leading to the transmission of disease. The article concludes with Mrs. Gates repeating an anecdote she'd heard about clever women putting their Indian village's new latrine in front of the village elder's home so that "he would keep it clean." Mrs Gates commented "And I thought, How perfect. The women knew exactly where the power sat in the village."

More Money, Please

2010-08-31T16:36:00.000-07:00

I'm often tardy in my reading, but sometimes I get a special pleasure out of something enlightening in the ancient stack of "to do". A case in point is an essay entitled "What Should a Billionaiire Give and What Should You?" by Peter Singer, first published in The New York Times magazine of December 17, 2006. (And reprinted in The Best American Essays of 2007.) In this thoughtful piece, Singer reviews the history of philanthropy in the United States in an effort to answer the questions: what is philanthropy, who are the philanthropists, how are they different from people who aren't wealthy, and what are their motives for giving away their fortunes? He's done his homework, so there's a healthy amount of information to review, but he's also done some deep thinking about giving. Singer is a philosopher, so he thinks about ideas from the viewpoint of "what is true and how do we know its true," and perhaps more importantly, "what is right"? I find his answers provocative. Also, he's a clear and energetic writer.

Grant screw up causes New Jersey to lose $400 million

2010-08-31T16:14:00.000-07:00

In an August 26th report in The New York Times, Sharon Otterman wrote: "The state (New Jersey) was drenched in recriminations...as Governor Chris Christie said a clerical error by a midlevel official had caused the state to lose out on $400 million in federal school reform money - an error that caused its Race to the Top grant application to fall short of the 10-member winner's circle by just three points."

Recriminations were flying in an attempt by the state's largest teacher union and school districts to discredit the governor. They claim that the real failure was "the governor's for not securing the support from a large number of school disrtricts, a point specifically cited by some evaluators as a weakness that cost more points than the clerical error."

The clerical error was on just one page of a 1,000 page application.

The story becomes even more political, with the republican governor and others blaming the Obama adminsitration for not calling "or checking the state's Web site when it discovered the error."

"It was an ignominious end to a process that had already been marred by broken agreements and name-callling between the state government and New Jersey's [teachers]."

Because of factors that left the governor up against the deadline - he had "little more than the Memorial Day weekend to complete a new version of the application, which was due that Tuesday. In the end, only one person was assigned to review the checklist for the 700-page appendix to the grant application. The governor said that "with an application of such magnitude, in the future two people will be assigned to the task."

"It was a stunning error," the Assembly Appropriations Committee announced. It will hold an inquiry into how the mistake happened.

Comment: It might have been a case of death by clerk.

Cherry Lane

2010-08-07T19:10:00.000-07:00

The depression continues to deliver a body blow to the country's arts non-profits. Most recently I read of the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village. This is a veneralbe arts icon. From its beginning in 1924, it has attracted the top writing talent of the day: F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Edward Albee, Harold Pinter. I can remember the names associated with the Theatre in the 60s and 70s, people who went on to have careers in television and film, starting on the tiny stage on Commerce Street. John Malkowich, Bob Dylan, Harvey Keitel, Sam Shepard.

Because of a loss of donation income, the Theatre has been forced to close indefinitely. This economic disaster is leaving so many dead in their tracks.

Billionaire Paul Allen to give the majority of his money to charity

2010-07-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

Billionaire Paul Allen said today that he plans to give away the majority of his money to charity, following in the footsteps of his Microsoft co-founder and celebrated philanthropist Bill Gates. The pledge marks the 20th anniversary of Allen's foundation, and it follows a recent campaign by Gates and Warren Buffet for the nation's billionaires to give away at least half of the money they've earned.

"Today I also want to announce that my philanthropic efforts will continue after my lifetime," Allen said in a statement. "I've planned for many years now that the majority of my estate will be left to philanthropy to continue the work of the Foundation and to fund non-profit scientific research, like the ground breaking work being done at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. As our philanthropy continues in the years ahead, we will look for new opportunities to make a difference in the lives of future generations."

Allen, who established the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation in 1990, has awarded more than $400 million to non-profit agencies since the foundation was started. He's also contributed $600 million to non-profits that he's started such as the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Experience Music Project. Today, the foundation announced that it plans to give $3.9 million to 41 non-profits. Allen is also celebrating the 20th anniversary of his foundation by giving away $20,000 to five charities, including the Oregon Food Bank, The Center for Strenththing, the Teach Profession, Adlante Mujeres, Book-It Repertory Theater and the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute. Allen ranked 37th on the Forbes list of billionaires earlier this year with a net worth estimated at $13.5 billion. At one point, he ranked in the top 10.

What does a billion dollars buy? It's hard to hurt a billionaire financially. They're well protected. But say your average billionaire wants to contribute a few hundred millions to charity. First don't forget for a billionaire, like Allen, with over $13 billion, to expend $400 million is for him/her to contribute less than 5% of the fortune. This means, in Paul Allen's case, that over $12.5 billion is left to distribute upon his demise. But for a mere $400 million today you could provide clean water to 1 million humans. Or medical care for 100 million malaria suffers. My question is: what are you waiting for?

All this calculation makes me uncomfortable. It does not reflect the pure generosity of someone, no matter how rich, who contributes $100.

Worthwhile Quotes #1

2010-07-15T10:15:00.000-07:00

I'm a collector of quotes. I go back to them occasionally for inspiration and insight. I often find that in some past frame of mind, I have chosen a few words that summarize a truth, which is something that is often hard to find.

Let me share a few:

"But still, you must agree, one can't sit with one's hands in one's lap, one must do something."
(Chekhov, A Woman's Kingdom)

"The Master said, He does not preach what he practises till he has practised what he preaches."
(Confucius, Analects 2:13)

"To see what is right and not do it is cowardice." (Confucius, Analects 2:24)

NGOs in bed with the devil

2010-06-02T17:15:00.000-07:00

Say Alif, in his NGOConnect Africa blog, reports that the Nature Conservancy has been in bed with BP for some time, accepting millions in donations and even having a BP executive on the board. Same with the Gulf of Mexico Foundation (New York Times, 5/5/2010), which it is revealed has "at least half of the 19 members of the group's board of directors with direct ties to the offshore drilling industry. One is currently an executive at Transocean, the company that owns the Deepwater Horzon rig that exploded, causing millions of gallons of oil to spill into the Gulf of Mexico. Seven other board members are currently employed at oil companies including Shell and Conoco Phillips."

Mr. Alif asks the right ethical question: should NGOs accept money from any company or organization, even if their activities run contrary to the NGO's mission? This is a question that has recently been batted around in the grants listserv on the Charity Channel, with most people weighing in in favor of caution. That is an obvious, if not disingenuous answer, in my opinion, especially when you are actually in a situation where your organization's survival can only be assured if you dance with the devil.

Philanthropy Unmasked

2010-02-18T17:40:00.000-08:00

Dr. Jonas Karasu, a Manhattan psychiatrist, in an interview for the New York Times, noted that a wealthy client's inability to accept his own limitations is not without beneficial side effects. "I see this in the way my patients are consumed by the idea of their deaths, or their attempts to counteract death," he said. "All of the philanthropy you see - the buildings named after people for giving $50 million to this museum or to Columbia - is a result of one man after another trying to conquer his mortality."

How Foundations Work

2010-02-11T18:59:00.000-08:00

I was reading an article on Andy Warhol in The New York Review of Books. The following caught my attention: "Lawyers paid for by Warhol's own foundation happily arrived in court to denigirate Warhol's work, even claiming at one point that investing in Warhol could be "risky," to lower the value of the estate. Why? Since the foundation was requried by law to give away 5 percent of the estate's value, it wanted that value to be as small as possible, thus reducing the amount it had to contribute to charity."
NYR 2-25-2010, pg. 41

The Sun Is Shining Somewhere

2010-01-21T18:35:00.000-08:00

2009 was a great year for the YMCA in Seattle, and nationally. The Seattle chapter raised $40 million in its capital campaign, including $2 million in matching grants from the Kresge Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is difficult to do, very difficult. What might be of greater interest, since all this talk about other people's money is making me sad and envious, is the news that the YMCA of the USA has the nations's most valuable nonprofit brand, worth $6.4 billion. This according to a survey that uses brand image, 2007 revenue and potential for future growth to calculate value.

It's Not All Dreaming

2010-01-21T11:15:00.000-08:00

It's a thrill always having something to do, whether it be creative private, creative public or creative relationship. They're all intertwined. The question is, for the outsider looking in, where is it going? Lately, it's been going straight ahead. Stunning, Stimulating and Satisfying. But it's coming off a fallow period where all the work felt like it was for me alone and it was a drag, with no way out. Now I see a positive way to move, and it's not all dreaming.

To Negotiate or Not

2009-09-04T18:47:00.000-07:00

The grants listserv on the Charity Channel is always a source of interest to those of us who are observers of the trends in the grantwriting profession. Questions of broad interest to the subscribers are met with a flurry of comments, often twenty or more. Although I have never left a comment (I leave most of my musings to this venue), I admire those like Pamela Grow, who gives her opinions freely and is for the most part celebrated for it.

Yesterday Lu Cavanaugh reported that a new client had asked her to delay 30% of her fee until after the grant was awarded, presumably contingent on the success of the proposal. This way of dealing with independent contractors is an issue that comes up regularly in discussions among grantwriters. The professional organizations have weighed in with the universal opinion that it is “unethical” for a grants professional to take a commission based on the award of a grant, especially if it is based on a percentage of the award.

Some people argue that this deal puts the grantwriter in the disadvantageous position of waiting for her money until after a long period has passed. How do you enforce the contract? How do you know how much money you are owed? Can you afford to wait three or even nine months to be paid? These hardly seem like ethical questions. They are more like business questions – a questions of negotiation.

Others argue that it sets a bad precedent that could lead to all grantwriters facing this deal. Again, this is not an ethical question, but a business question. If it were stated in that form, I find this argument much more compelling than the latter. After all, small businesses are often paid a portion of their fee and the rest when the project is finished (and they are occasionally cheated by unscrupulous clients – caveat venditor).

Personally, I say let the market take care of theses things. If a grantwriter wants to take a percentage, or a bonus, then it needn’t affect the rest of us at all. Let us take care of ourselves. After all, we all ask for advances against the project estimate. Don’t we?

Here's the end of the story: when Lu negotiated for her full fee at the conclusion of her work, her client relented. I guess they valued her expertise more than whatever they would gain by withholding a big part of her fee. If you are the vendor with proven superior skills, you have a strong position from which to negotiate. (see Women Don’t Ask by Babcock and Laschever).

Getting To Know Fundraising from Both Sides Now

2009-07-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

Today brought two free conferences/interviews/webinars/teleconferences/lengthy web postings. I don't know what to call them, there are so many hybrids. Anyway, the first one began at 9 a.m., too early to be genuine fun, but it was okay. Topic: how to prepare for a visit from a grantor. The idea is that grantees have a difficult time of it, when a grantor decides to come visit, usually in preparation for making a decision. The topic seems narrow, and it is, but the panel of three, including the much-self advertised Pamela Grow, were diligent to the point of being relentless. What I came away with: be on your best behavior, find out in advance what the grantor wants, and followup. The other issues covered, including who to invite to the meeting (only those who have something to say) and how long to keep them (as long as they're interested) seemed routine and the fact that they were repeated was agonizing.

On a completely different topic, in the following hour, Bernard Ross (presented by the Network for Good) offered a completely original melange of common sense, popular psychology and fundraising basics called Using Psychology to Win Over Donors. This was basically a tutorial on how to handle information when it comes to communicating with those who have the money. He started by comparing the funder to an ATM machine and the grantee as the one who's pushing the buttons. Push the right buttons and the cash comes out. I don't have the space to go into all he said. Instead, I will point you at his book "The Influential Fundraiser: Using the Psychology of Persuasion to Achieve Outstanding Results." (about $30 on Amazon)

How do you meet attractive grantors?

2009-07-08T12:35:00.000-07:00

Like all grantwriters, I'm getting a little weary of the never ending search for new grantors. Old grantors are fine, but these days they're drying up faster that a rain puddle in the Mojave. So, where do we go for the new money? The search is painful and long. I try all the databases I know of to come up with 150 possible sources. I whittle those down to 36 by studying the guidelines and especially the web sites. I put everything I know about the grantee and his project together in a brief speech, and go to the phone. I deliver the speech to a program specialist. I ask if my project fits the grantor's interests today. If not, I go on to the next possible grantor. At the end of the process, I'm left with 20 possibilities. Of those, I have determined almost everything I can about the grantor. I have found out about the LOI, the proposal, the judging committee, the time, the money. In short, I have done everything I can think of to explore the universe of grantors, and then I write, proofread, and send, more and more often via an automated on-line application. What have I got to show for all this activity? Maybe a 3 in 10 success rate. Somedays it feels like 1 in 100 would be good work.

Salvation Can Wait

2009-06-15T14:27:00.000-07:00

Joan Kroc, the widow of Ray Kroc who brought the world the inexpensive meal, a.k.a. the Big Mac, left $1.8 billion to the Salvation Army to erect 30 lavish community centers around the country. The Salvation Army, a revered church and charity, has been unable to manage the funds effectively.

Now only four centers have been completed, two scheduled to open later this year and 5 more next year. The Salvation Army blames the economic climate for the loss of 14% of the gift (about $126 million). As a result, the Army has required communities to raise a total of $628 million nationally. To date they've raised only 34% of that amount, or $214 million.

There is trouble everywhere. From Detroit, MI to Salem, OR, the Army is having trouble raising money. There is some hope to resurrect part of the original plan. A major donor has pledged to line up 18 other large donors to paydown a proposed $48 million loan to cover the amount the Army requires to continue, with the remainder coming from a grass-roots fund-raising effort. But the plan was rejected by the leadership of the Army because the "legal and practical obstacles were too high".

Donors are telling Army officials that they prefer to support the Army's more traditional mission of serving basic needs.

One leader of the Kroc fund-raising committee blamed internal Army squabbling for the cancellation of the center in Detroit. Now the Army is in the position of having to turn down donors, such as $250,000 in gifts from the Detroit Black McDonald's Owners. A big protest is planned for Chicago.

The Salvation Army has shown greater flexibility toward fund-raising goals in some areas, allowing some to split their campaign into three phases. A site has been cleared and holes dug for three swimming pools as envisioned by Mrs. Kroc. Funds still to be raised to continue the building.

In the end, it's a familiar song: "Some folks are less capable of giving because of investment returns and asset values being less, but they still want to hear from us. Some are saying not now, but that's not no forever."

Let's hope not because we need help.

Toiling At Windmills

2009-06-07T22:36:00.000-07:00

Marketing and Innovation, said to be the foundation blocks of a successful business, require creative thinking. But when thought is cornered and beat to a pulp, it feels a little dangerous to think. And when creativity is burned alive, or worse, ignored into an ice age of frozen regard, you are easily dissuaded. But if it were easy, everyone would do it and those among us who are courageous (are there any here?) wouldn't bother. I think of courage like a child thinks of courage: explorers, scientists, generals - all working under terrible mental and physical conditions with the aim of carrying on despite the odds. And they are rarely self conscious about it, until after, if they survive and in the comfort of the cottage in the country or their Frank Lloyd Wright - inspired glass house on a cliff over looking a turbulent sea. I don't want to even think about myself in these ranks. But, if you want to explore it through the eyes of an eccentric who leaves no prisoners, in short, a courageous man with a pen, you could do no better than to look up Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey. I especially enjoyed "The End of General Gordon." Now there was a hero!

Grant Writing and Branding

2009-05-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

Vint Cerf, who designed Internet protocols and the first commercial email service, said "journalism is going to become all about branding."

And for those who still believe that making news work on the Internet is simply a matter of digitizing the print product, Cerf had this to say: "You need to change your thinking about the use of the medium. It doesn't just transfer over. It really does force you to do something different."

I call your attention to this, although it is somewhat of a digression, because I see it as a look into the future of grant writing as a field for independent contractors (a.k.a. freelancers) who will increasingly advertise their services not only in the conventional ways, means and places, but electronically as well. Cerf's point is simple: develop a brand so your audience will trust you and come to you for information and help.

Money Is Tight

2009-04-17T11:45:00.000-07:00

Mal Warwick has published his 20th Book. It's titled "Fundraising When Money Is Tight." I find it not only readable and informative, but visually attractive. The eye floats over succinctly styled pages, including graphics that inform and inspire. It will certainly inspire those of us who are shaking with dread of what may be coming down the dark corridor of the future, only to end with a locked door.

Grantwriting, Grants and Philanthropic Institutions

2009-02-13T17:46:00.001-08:00

I hope I'm not veering to far from the grant writing grant winning side when I tell you about another book that is rich with inspiration and instruciton. This is Joel L. Fleishman's The Foundation: A Great American Secret (2007). A survey of American philanthropy going back to Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, and concluding with a look at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this is much more than a historical guide to the great tradition of American giving. It is in fact, an analysis of the strategies the great philanthopists have used to assure that their money reaches those causes they hold dear, and that it is used to the greatest effect. This is surely informative to anyone who works with foundations and endowments because it puts a human mind and spirit behind the billions given in non-profit transactions every year. How many of us understand how Foundations come and go (or even that they do come and go)? How do they succeed and fail? More importantly (to the grant seeker), how do foundations select those causes that will have the greatest impact? This book will not only give you the logic behind such decisions, but it will put a human face on them.

Here is an intriguing portion - just a taste - of the last chapter entitled A Prophetic Epilogue: "The twentieth century is the era in which the large private foundation form was born, securely established and robustly replicated across the U.S. landscape. It was perhaps the first time in history that large and unrestricted pools of funds of private wealth had been created to benefit the public interest under independent management. That development signifies a major step, not yet fully recognized, in the evolution of democratic institutions and sociopolitical theory."

I borrowed this book, but I'm going to get my own copy. It's worth the cost and it will be worth the time to read it carefully.

How Do Those Corporate Grants Get Made?

2009-02-13T17:41:00.000-08:00

I've found myself reading more about the field. Grant writing is properly called grant solicitation and what we do should be called soliciting grants using proposals. So says Reynold Levy in his excellent book A Candid Account of Corporate Philanthropy: Give and Take, published by Harvard Business School Press in 1999. This is a very informative book, and it treats a subject of great importance with a depth of understanding we should expect from a man who spent 10 years of his career heading the AT&T Foundation. I can recommend it to my colleagues in Grant Writing because it is rich with anecdotal evidence for the importance of corporate giving, the thoughtfulness of corporate giving, and the wisdom with which corporate giving strives to make better the communities where these corporations do business. The book opens with "...My friends, it is unselfish effort, helpfulness to others that enobles life, not because of what it does for others, but more what it does for oursleves. In this spirit we should give not grudgingly, not niggardly, but gladly, generously, eagerly, lovingly, joyfully, indeed with the supremest pleasure that life can furnish." From a speech given in 1923 by Julius Rosenwald, whom many in the arts will known as a patron of Medieval manuscripts and much else.

Realism and Balance

2009-01-07T12:36:00.000-08:00

I’m a realist. If you’re sick, you don’t ignore it and hope it gets better, you get help. But in these times of reckoning, when the world is facing unparalleled economic stress, it’s hard to find help. What is really happening?

With my face to the wind, I try to find every bit of information I can that can help me understand. It’s difficult. On one side, you have the optimists who tell you that the whole thing will blow over soon enough, the stock market will recover, the credit market will recover and so on. On the other side, there are those who will compare the present state of the economy with the Great Depression. They will say that we haven’t reached bottom yet, that there will be more bankruptcies, and lots more foreclosures. The retail business will tank. More banks will fail.

Even the wealthiest among us are killing themselves because they’ve lost money, and with it prestige, honor and trust.

With the prospect of breadlines, the Dust Bowl and stock brokers selling apples on the street, we have a right to be afraid. We have a responsibility not to let the optimists talk us into lowering our guard. Yet, we must not let the gloom over our financial losses defeat our determination to move ahead.

Exploiting the trouble, many individuals and organizations have organized ad hoc seminars and meetings on the subject of the downturn and its effect of non-profit funding. Mostly these events are uninformative because no one knows what will be the outcome for us of the financial chaos that has engulfed the world.

Listening to our pundits, you would think that nothing much is happening. “Recession?” Maybe, but it won’t last long and then everything will be good again. “Fewer grant dollars?” Of course, but not that much fewer and anyway it will only affect a few grant seekers (the new ones). “A long, extended period of less grantmaker giving?” Only until 2011, and then everything will be back to normal.

I recommend a bit of wisdom: Fundraising In Times Of Crisis by Kim Klein. Klein writes well, analyzes well before she writes, and does not make premature conclusions. Mostly she says prepare to work harder getting small donors, and then getting some of them to become major donors. She explains how to do this in sufficient detail that it can help get a small organization on the way to financial stability. Even in these troubled times. Incidentally, Klein doesn’t mention grants.

If Only Grants Could Speak, What Tales They Would Tell

2008-10-08T15:23:00.000-07:00

I noticed something today. In my imagination, I think of grantwriting as an intuitive, creative pursuit much like writing short stories. In short story writing, there is a form: situation, conflict, resolution, but using that form, myriad variations result. One sort of variation is to complicate each of the three parts, another simply rearranging the three parts, and still another making one or more of the three very short or very long. My point is why does the grant formula seem to remain the same, usually: Summary, Need, Goals&Objectives , Methods, Evaluation, Sustainability, Qualifications and Budget. That’s about it, isn’t it? That’s what my training says, and it is confirmed by the standardized grant application forms, including the on-line recipes. Indeed, they’re all recipes and, unlike the short stories, there is very little variation permitted. That’s why it struck me today that I am a school of one when I change the order, de-emphasize Needs and emphasize Evaluation, for instance. It seems to me that the grant proposal form is open to an extraordinary amount of variation. I have concluded that the standardized order is superfluous in describing a project and making the description passionate, concise, logical, and truthful. Am I a school of one when I claim that my proposals are just as good as yours, even though you follow the formulae like a straight highway between here and there, and I don’t?

I ask myself who invented this form. I can testify that it has been around since 2001, when I took my first grantwriting workshop from the Foundation Center. I must go to the library to see if there are books that pre-date that. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were none. In fact, I have made it one of my jobs to research this question, and I have come up with zip. There are no books about grantwriting written before 2000. It’s as if the field appeared from the forehead of Zeus. Could it be that someone put together the whole “discipline” of grantwriting and thereafter, teaching it to fledgling grantwriters, made it gospel? I must ask one of these people. I know a few.

My point is to ask why we are so hide bound when it comes to writing proposals, yet most books proclaim that it is somehow creative. It is no more creative than writing a business contract, which also has a standardized beginning, middle and end. If you leave out any of the parts you risk, unlike the grant proposal, coming in conflict with the courts if there is ever a business dispute. Maybe that is the creative wiggle room in grant writing. Maybe that is where the mastery of the spirit applies as the poet’s metaphor has it). I wish. Instead, all I get, year after year, is the same topic order, even the same word order, especially if you listen to the scholars of the discipline.

Let me conclude with an optimistic thought. Like most pursuits involving the intellect, the information services business has evolved in the past generation. I believe, therefore, that the next generation of grantwriters will throw off the chains of their teachers and predecessors. Along with their cohorts in philanthropy, grantwriters will develop new ways to communicate. Not simply better, but more creative. After all, reading is not so difficult, if you accept that we all have our own ways of communicating.

Life Means Hope

2008-09-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

With the world wide financial crisis and the fear it has begun to cause, I wonder how the nonprofit sector will fare. Already I have encountered small philanthropies that are shrinking their giving because of exceptional stock market fluctuations. Their income from stock has begun to dry up, so they can’t see donating money they don’t have.

This morning I sit here researching grants for a small nonprofit that helps orphans in Africa. It’s a very worthy cause and I am quickly growing committed to its mission. However, I am finding it surprisingly difficult to find funding from the small philanthropies, perhaps because the need is so large (over 2 million youth in Africa alone) that it looks hopeless. So I have begun scratching the surface of the enormous, often government-led grantors. For instance, I have looked into the World Bank’s giving, which is mostly to developing world governments or charities that work on a national scale. Here is the World Bank’s statement about their giving as displayed on their website:

Over the past ten years, the DGF supported some 150 priority programs with a Bank contribution of US$1.8 billion, catalyzing about US$1 billion annually from major Bank partners i.e. other international financial organizations, regional development banks, bilateral donors, UN agencies, foundations, grant recipient organizations and private sector.

You can see that even the World Bank’s enormous economic clout is in peril from a world wide financial collapse, and even a world-wide credit freeze. Expectations are that the billions in the coffers of the World Bank, which is loaned on contingencies, could shrink by 50%. That would mean funding would be spread more thinly and to fewer people who suffer from river blindness, starvation from crop failure caused probably by global warming, the man-made death and destruction of war, and myriad preventable or treatable tragedies world wide.

I am personally rather bitter about this turn of events because I realize that I live in the most economically successful country in the world, with all its privileges. Yet, despite our extraordinary advantages, we are crumbling. And because of our mistakes and moral failings, and because we must maintain our consumer economy, it looks like we will have to abandon the neediest. I’m talking about the children who will die without knowing that life means hope.

Speaking At the Center for Nonprofit Success Meeting

2008-07-22T23:16:00.000-07:00

Last month I stuck my neck out and signed up to join a panel discussion about finding sources for grant support. As it turned out only two out of three of us showed up: me, speaking for searching for grant funders and Jessica Balsam, a prospect researcher offering insight into her work. I had pumped myself up to succeed in giving a cogent presentation without my usual warbling due to nerves. As it turned out, I had almost no negative reaction and in fact mostly enjoyed myself.

My offering concerned the “search for the white rhino,” by which I meant the search for the rare and off-the-beaten-path grant source. I have a good amount of experience doing this, mainly out of desperation, when all the best known grantors don’t pan out. I have often found myself going back to the original challenge of the research, which was to find points of connection between the program or project needing funding and the resource pool of funders available on the Internet. I do this only after exhausting the databases, such as the Foundation Center, which are easily exhausted because they use search tools with limited vocabularies. The objective of my talk was to show ways of engaging the power of the Internet to net some unexpected grantors.

I had prepared a short written document that I hoped would serve as the basis for the information I was going to present. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to take into account people’s innate laziness. In short, the audience – all twelve of them – had not taken the time to look at my materials, let alone read them attentively.

To make a long story short, I spent 45 minutes discussing creative ways to look at a project, its vocabulary, and its funding requirements. I was nearing the end, when someone in the audience raised his hand. He said, “when are we going to get to the grant making organizations. It’s been 45 minutes.” Evidently I had exhausted him and my time, just as I was getting to the best part of my talk: the Cluster.

I love the Cluster. I use the Cluster. The Cluster is a great tool.

Essentially the Cluster is a method for discovering creative connections between words. It’s used in Creative Writing classes for the purpose of defining new characters or to develop plots. I’ve found that it’s a great way to find new words to search with on the Internet. It works very simply. You start with a word that is on the top of the list when you describe your project, such as “Education” and you connect that to another word that comes to mind, such as “hats,” whether it has any apparent connection to the first word or not. And so it progresses. Finally, after you get tired of the whole thing, you discover that you have a whole new set of terms to search Google with, that may lead to unexpected sources of funding. It works.

But I guess I didn’t present it well, because no one asked me any questions, except the guy who wanted me to move along.

If I had it to do over again, I would go at the Cluster first.

Don't Wager With My Gift: It Hurts My Feelings

2008-06-21T16:09:00.000-07:00

I found a recent story puzzling first because I am admittedly ignorant of the subtle vagaries of the stock market and second because I found myself reacting emotionally to something that on the surface was purely abstract. Namely, a wager placed by Warren Buffet that would ultimately benefit the non-profit sector with a $1 million donation. Not that I would personally sneeze at $1 million, but the problem is that Mr. Buffet could easily wipe his nose at it, given his billions, and so would his opposite, a major hedge fund. The subject of the wager? Whether the fees paid to fund managers outweigh the benefits of investing with them and all their expertise. Buffet says you might as well just read the market indicators and bet with your head. The hedge fund managers claim that their extraordinary grasp of analytical tools makes an investment with them much more likely to result in profit.

Wagers placed, meet back here in 10 years and we'll see who wins, the pot to go to the charity of the winners' choice.

You may need to explain to me why this is okay, because I am, as a hard-working member of the non-profit sector, offended that my causes are a cliche. "To the charity of your choice, indeed." Just give the money to charity and bet with mumbly peg. Not as spicy? Not as newsworthy?

I understand cause marketing, but I want to establish here and now that there is an element of condescension in every donation, gift or grant, that the benefactor would do well to dispel, somehow. Not that I mind leftovers, not when I’m starving out here looking for ways to help the homeless, ease the distress of AIDS orphans, or bring disabled kids into the classroom.

I will conclude this brief announcement by noting that in this relativistic world, the hard working, blisteringly bright, Mr. Rick Wagoner, CEO of GM made $15.7 million in 2007, up 64% while his company posted a $39 billion loss, closed four plants, and saw its stock price fall by 19%. Nice work, Mr. Wagoner. By the way, how much are you giving to charity? 5%? Not enough. It had better be at least a million.

Brilliant: Communication Between Grantmaker and Grantwriter

2008-06-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

At times something really good comes out of the interaction of foundations and grantseekers. Sometimes the dialog emerges strong and meaningful from the hierarchy of those who have and those who need. In this case it is the Duke Endowment sponsoring a luncheon presentation by Hal Williams. Williams is a commanding speaker, idiosyncratic, funny, a little didactic, but always informative (a term he would probably dislike). For a grantmaker, this DVD is exciting and worth at least a couple of viewings. It is a huge foundation addressing the needs of their grantseekers for clarity and meaning in the grants process. See Charity L. Perkins (cperkins@tde.org) for a copy of The Duke Endowment Focus on Results Grantee Workshop, January 2008.

Pubic speaking is not easy

2008-06-12T13:48:00.000-07:00

I had created what I thought would fill 30 minutes. I showed up at the Funding Summit at Shoreline Conference Center on June 10th and 12:30 pm. I found my co-presenter, and we sat like two people who have little in common, talking with little to say, to the point of exhaustion, and then we went to the Rainier Room (does every conference center and hotel have a Rainier Room – I guess they have to) to see the set up and watch the audience walk in. I had vowed to follow the actor’s advice to love the audience and let them love me, so I observed as the women and men, mostly women, came in, tired and a little desultory. The time came to speak and the third workshop presenter was not there. We went on without her. I spoke and at first felt uneasy, but I told myself that they loved me. I continued, they loved me. My topic was the use of certain creative thinking or free-thinking devices might be of value when people deal with mission statements and other artifices. I had to stretch it at times, but I thought it was a good topic. I quickly moved into the murky area of deductive (analytic) to inductive (synthetic) reasoning, and I felt that I was losing their attention, so I quickly shifted my discussion to the techniques I’d brought with me, mostly from writing and dance. These techniques, particularly clustering, would, in my opinion, allow the proposal writer (and others) to expand their vision and vocabulary simply by playing with the words in their mission statements. I felt so alone. I made an attempt at interaction with a flip chart, but they chose “Mexican Food” (the offering at lunch) and the relationships were not fast in coming. Finally a woman in the back said “red” and I said “I love it,” but that was the end. I spoke on about the coin game and scratching, but I felt my grip on them slipping away, and quickly. A man in the back row, with a lap top opened in front of him, raised his hand. “We’ve been going for 45 minutes, are we going to hear something about sources of funding?” I was shocked that I had gone 45 minutes already. I thought it had been more than 20. I apologized and quickly finished with a statement about how they might enjoy using the techniques I’d shown them, but there were no questions.

Establishing the Value of Your Cause in the Market Place

2008-03-12T15:13:00.000-07:00

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had something to sell that the market wanted instead of dreams of a utopia where everyone is healthy, wealthy, educated and happy? What if our causes spoke to the foundations in such a way that they were compelled to give support? Indeed, what if there were some way to make them come to us , seeking our assistance and advice on dispensing their money? A fantasy, I know, but a recent story in the New York Times gave me hope.

Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, former hedge-fund analysts, have formed a non-profit called GiveWell that provides funders with hard data on the performance of non-profits they may be considering for support. GiveWell chooses a category of organization, such as African Relief, then solicits information from all of the organizations in that category. A percentage of non-profits will respond with data on their work, its cost and its outcomes. Although many organizations find GiveWell’s questions intrusive, and even beside the point, and even though some resent the implication that their mission can be summarized in how many people were served, a high percentage see the value of transparency, and cooperate with GiveWell’s in-depth analysis.

The result, displayed on GiveWell’s website, is a look at many organizations and a rating of their performance. This is a return on investment model, something few organizations study themselves, although many foundations now require metrics on outcome as a necessary part of reporting and a prerequisite for funding.

I’m interested in GiveWell mostly because they may help some of us establish our value in the marketplace. If you can prove that your return on the dollar is significantly better than mine, then you will probably get the funding we're competing for. And if GiveWell works the way the founders wish it to, foundations will come to this new resource to get the information they need to make their decisions more rational and thus more palatable to their boards of directors, who more and more frequently require numbers to demonstrate success.

Ignorance of Outcomes Leads to Missed Opportunities

2008-03-11T23:03:00.000-07:00

In a New York Times Sunday Magazine feature story, five experts on educational philanthropy were brought together to discuss the way education is funded in America today. At one point the dialog between a head of philanthropy and the administrator of charter schools addressed the subject of measuring outcomes.

“Historically, when philanthropists would give money to a nonprofit or a school system, they would say, ‘I want to fund this many kids.’ And the next year they could ask the organization they had funded, ‘Well, did you reach that number?’ And if you funded that many kids, the grant was considered a success.”

The charter school administrator said that “in fact, a lot of the money that goes into education still goes into inputs. I recently had a discussion with a major philanthropy that wanted to invest in some programs in the city, and I asked them, ‘What are the results you expect this to produce for your investment?’ And they had no clue. But increasingly, that’s a rarity. There’s been a shift. If you don't produce results, even though everybody loves you, your funders are not going to continue to fund you.”

I find that most non-profits don’t know how to measure outcomes. There is ignorance about evaluation tools, almost a fear of the challenge to collect and analyze data, and as a result, there are many funding opportunities that are lost.

Singing the Un-sung Melody

2007-12-13T15:02:00.000-08:00

Since it doesn't look like my Houston colleagues can manage to get an e-zine up and running, and since I spent some valuable time writing an article on arts funding for them, I thought now would be a good time to post the results of my efforts. Here is "Feed A Tenor, Starve a Child".

A few weeks ago I had a conversation that enlightened me about the state of funding for the arts in my community. Seattle is known for a vibrant cultural scene, with a stunning new Museum and sculpture park, a world-class Library housed in an architectural masterpiece, a robust literary scene, a world-class orchestra, opera and ballet, and an award-winning theater community. But my colleague was saying how hard it has become to find significant funding. She expressed her frustration by quoting the old saw, “feed a tenor, starve a child.”

I asked her why the arts were suffering, when there was so much philanthropy – record amounts according to the Wall Street Journal and other publications. She said it was true that philanthropic giving was increasing, but the problem is that funding for the arts is not much more, as a percentage of giving, than it has been for years. She asked me a few rhetorical questions. How can the arts expect support when there is so much to do in social services? Should we stop soliciting arts funding and close our museums, silence our orchestras and darken our stages? Should everyone with money to give turn from the arts and give it instead to social service causes, until the world’s problems are solved?

In 2004 the Rand Corporation published Gifts of the Muse ($18 from http://www.rand.org.), which in less than 100 pages provides the reader with dozens of thoughtful arguments for arts support, using global examples and arguments by some of the most eminent thinkers on the philosophy and economics of the arts.

With profound arguments for the intrinsic value of the arts in society, this book expounds on the idea that the arts benefit all citizens, not just the wealthy who may achieve a measure of immortality by naming a concert hall or museum wing.

The arts benefit us first by encouraging the talents of people who become valuable to the life of businesses, cities, and citizens. These are the painters, dancers, choreographers, singers, sculptors, playwrights, architects and poets who enliven our lives and surroundings, give us hope, encourage thought, and make plain that individual expression is valued. By their product will we be known, and so by their product are we mirrored to others. In this sense, art is not only the expression of the creators, but also of the perceivers. We make and support the arts we enjoy, and so they are a reflection of us.

An economic argument lends some credence to this: “The arts sector attracts the types of workers who spend money on the arts and pay taxes, and these workers are the ones that desirable firms (which create good jobs and pay taxes) need in order to prosper.”

The multiplier effect is another economic argument that proposes that arts organizations not only spend money on artists but also on people with skills in administration, marketing and other essentials to running a business. Their efforts create a demand for other services, (advertising, office supplies, accounting services), while arts consumers need still other services (lodging, food, parking, childcare). Government revenues also benefit because arts employees pay sales taxes and income taxes.

Grassroots arts organizations benefit in their own ways. The bottom-up groups that are responsible for bringing diverse people from the community into cultural programs are organizations that train people in skills that lead to political action and ultimately revitalization of communities. Two principles hold here: build a sense of community and build a capacity for collective action, based around our embrace of individual expression in the arts.

Gifts of the Muse offers three recommendations for promotion of funding for the arts:

· Develop language for discussing intrinsic benefits, which are benefits, beyond quantifiable ones, that are the defining elements and essential appeal of the arts.

· Address the limitations of the argument for economic benefits by researching and specifying what makes the benefits case in the community. Examine benefits more closely with quantifiable methods that are not limited to showing in general that people connected to the arts spend money.

· Promote early exposure to the arts, meaning expose children to a blend of the arts, preferably in the family, but also in the schools, in community-based arts programs, or through popular commercial entertainment.

“The most promising way to develop audiences for the arts is to provide well-designed programs in the nation’s schools.” This means arts education not only in elementary school, but throughout all grades. And it means not only more funding for arts in the schools, but better outreach on the part of the schools to professionals in the art world. More than one-time field trips, this is organized learning over a significant period of time.

There will probably never be a resolution to the issues that surround funding the arts over funding social services; yet, there are many arguments for arts funding.
· Art is good for the economy because it contributes to a network of transactions.
· Art helps us comprehend what it is to be human – to feel, to create, to be alive.
· Art is our legacy, so we must preserve it or there will be nothing left to show who we were, what we thought and how we lived.

Art is expression and tells our stories in bold emotional terms that are both cathartic and sustaining. The arts touch our lives and our communities, so the issues around arts funding touch us all, and the long term effects of cultural policies are felt both by artists and audiences. Most of us in some way are engaged with the arts, whether we are happy simply knowing that the arts exist in our communities, or we participate in them, or we plan to, or we look forward to having them available for future generations.

A healthy philanthropic community supports activities that heal lives and encourage hope. Philanthropists and donors on every tier want their money spent on programs that benefit people. This does not always mean contributing to a medical breakthrough or a campaign to eradicate illness, illiteracy or environmental scourges. Often it can mean contributing to the life of one’s own community by making certain that the people who express for us what it means to live, feel and think today can sustain their artistic pursuits. The arts, if they are encouraged to thrive, can define a culture, make a society more comprehensible to those who live in it, and bring people together.

A Glittering Jewel of Philanthropy and Politics

2007-10-27T12:17:00.000-07:00

A “glittering jewel of colossal ignorance,” was the result of a remark Russ Limbaugh made about Iraq War veterans calling them “Phony Soldiers” for criticizing Bush’s war policies. This jewel was a letter of complaint signed by 41 Democratic US Senators. Limbaugh decided to auction the letter on eBay and donate the proceeds, matching them 1:1, to charity.

When the eBay auction closed yesterday afternoon, the winning bid was $2.1 million. It is the largest amount ever paid for an item sold on eBay to benefit a charity.

The money will go to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation Inc., a nonprofit organization in New Jersey that provides scholarships and other assistance to families of marines and federal law enforcement officials who die or are wounded in the line of duty. Mr. Limbaugh is a director of the organization, which had total revenues of $5.2 million last year.

The letter was bought by the Eugene B. Casey Foundation, a $294 million foundation in Gaithersburg, Md., that has given money to a wide variety of organizations, including the Washington Opera and the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund. In a statement, the foundation said its purchase of the letter was intended to demonstrate its belief in freedom of speech and “to support Rush Limbaugh, his views and his continuing education of us.”

Mr. Limbaugh, who declined a request for an interview, had advertised the sale on his show and elsewhere. He said fans had written him with concerns that wealthy liberals like George Soros would drive the price of the letter to $20 million or more in hopes of bankrupting him.

On the floor of the Senate on Friday, Mr. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, praised the auction. “I strongly believe that when we can put our differences aside, even Harry Reid and Rush Limbaugh, we should do that and try to accomplish good things for the American people,” he said.

Gates Foundation Tackles Malaria

2007-09-24T15:39:00.000-07:00

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has so far given $1.14 billion to the fight against malaria. A disease that kills 1 million people each year, it has so far defeated all attempts to combat it. Now, with Gates money, a new battle, using the latest science and technology is being waged against it. This is a great story about the use of philanthropic support to further the goals of society. Bill money is an extraordinary force for good in the world. It has already saved lives, and it is poised to save millions more in the coming years. As one who believes every life is precious and who sees the loss of even one life as a loss for the world, I give this Foundation my heartfelt support.

Philanthropy As An Afterthought

2007-09-22T13:09:00.000-07:00

“As I plunked down 2,000 rupees to cover the bill, I had an idea. I totted up what I'd spent so far: 2,541 rupees remained in my budget. When I got back to Manhattan, I vowed, that cash would go to the Bombay Leprosy Project. It wasn't much, but I knew that in Mumbai, it would go a long way.” (Frugal Traveler: Visiting in Luxury, With Money Left for Philanthropy, September 23, 2007 New York Times)

Thus a report from India ends with a nod toward philanthropy following a two-day pub crawl through Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The premise is that the author will spend only $500 during his two days there. But he finds the task difficult when his friends take him bar hopping on Friday night (until 5 a.m.) and clubbing on Saturday.

It turns out there are at least two strata in Mumbai society: the wealthy and the poor. The poor are everywhere, and the wealthy are concealed behind gates, high walls and security guards.

At 43 rupees to the dollar, the reporter had 21,500 rupees to spend in a place where the middle class makes about that in a month. Forget about the needy. They’re lucky to see that kind of money in a year. Yet, the reporter details what a struggle it is to get by with American standards in a country as economically challenged as India, especially when you spend 75% of your money on luxury the first night.

But you should be glad to know that with the pennies left, the Bombay Leprosy Project will be encouraged to continue its good work.

More Published Face For Me

2007-09-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

I’ve decided to break out of the blogosphere and into the e-zine world with an article in a Houston publication starting up in the fall. I write so much anyway, I figured, what’s one more assignment. I’m going to write about arts funding, a passion of mine, despite the fact I’ve done very little of it. In fact none since finding NEA funding for two artist friends some time ago. I would hope that someone sees my brilliance at sussing out the logic of arts funding that they give me a chance to do the job. I certainly feel a kinship with those trying to make the argument that funding the arts is as important as funding soup kitchens.

It’s not feed a tenor, starve a child anymore. It’s more like starve a tenor, lose a culture.

Struggling To Help the Third World

2007-07-14T12:41:00.000-07:00

Advanced Micro Devices had better watch out. Intel is trespassing on their largesse. Advanced Micro Devices has been helping the poor for many years, while Intel has been comfortably partnered with Microsoft. Now things are changing.

I refer to a story in the New York Times (July 14, 2007) that describes a breakthrough for a non-profit called One Laptop Per Child. Nicholas Negroponte, the chairman of the Board of One Laptop Per Child has pursued Intel for a while, by chiding the Chairman of Intel, Craig R. Barrett. Negroponte says that Intel is harming the effort to bring cheap laptops to third world students. There are all kinds of technological issues here, but the real issue is the competition among chip makers. Negroponte, a wise and clever man, has brought Intel to the table simply by embarrassing them with the fact that its much smaller competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, has been forthcoming while Intel has been withholding. He’s said that Intel has been trying to sabotage the effort to help the poorest of the poor gain computer literacy.

Intel, on its side, has said it favors other educational approaches. Until now. Now it sends one of its Vice Presidents to sit on the Board of One Laptop Per Child, presumably to guide its journey, increase its fundraising profile, and generally help the “issues” resolve themselves.

Advanced Micro Devices has given the effort over $2 million in the last couple of years. Let’s see what Intel gives.

Why They Don't Want $15 Million

2007-07-12T23:51:00.000-07:00

For the first time in my recollection, one of the ethical debates that constantly turns up in discussions of fundraising has finally found a home in the real world. This week the University of Iowa turned down a grant from the Wellmark Foundation in the amount of $15 million in exchange for a naming opportunity. In this case the Board of the University went to Wellmark and offered the opportunity to name the School of Public Health if the corporation would provide funding. The Corporation’s Board voted to give the University up to $15 million if it would rename its school the Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield College of Public Health. Administration and faculty refused, saying that his would look like Wellmark was buying the University. They said naming it the Wellmark Foundation College of Public Health would be okay, but not the Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield College of Public Health.

I’m a little confused about this decision. I thought this is what naming opportunities are all about. In this case, where is the ethical issue? The classic one that comes up all the time is what if Altria, the big tobacco company, offered to sponsor your little league team for a million dollars if you would advertise Marlboro cigarettes at each game. You would probably turn them down. But what if your program were a struggling inner-city agency to help homeless girls find shelter? What if Altria offered you a million dollars per year for five years if you would put their logo on your literature? Would this be a hard decision?

Here we have a distinguished university deciding to refuse a gift from an established insurance company. Where’s the harm? Apparently it’s the image of a university turning to a commercial enterprise for help. Their excuse is that 80% of their research money comes from outside funding, so this would look like they're allied with one funder. This doesn’t make sense. Most institutions grant naming rights to major funders, if they want it. Why do they want it? When it’s an individual, it’s because naming is a form of recognition of their generosity. And some people see it as a form of immortality. If it’s a corporate entity, it’s because a gift to an institution of higher learning shows that the entity cares about the education of future professionals and that it’s willing to share some of its profits in the public interest.

Why be disingenuous? Where there’s a need and someone or something willing to fill that need, why not grant some quid pro quo to make everybody happy? I think the University is making a big mistake. They may not see many other corporations making them offers in the future.

Philistines and Philanthropists

2007-05-28T21:01:00.000-07:00

Last week I learned a lot about arts funding. What we're seeing world wide is a trend in philanthropy that shorts the arts in favor of social and health care causes. What's happening? Why? Who's getting the money we need to fund the music, the theater, the visual arts? Well, if you read the headlines, these endeavors can take care of themselves. High ticket prices, big Broadway hits, record auction prices. So why give scarce dollars to the arts?

Give them, instead, to the needy, the hungry, the homeless, and the ill. But wait, aren't the arts the soul of a nation. And if you don't believe in "soul," how about this: the arts are the basis of all human endeavor, the basis for the will to struggle, to hope, to aspire.

"A true artist reveals the mystical truths" said Bruce Nauman.

The arts express our values, our dreams, our truest ambitions. A healthy artisitic culture means that the society which supports it is healthy - it knows itself and it wants dialog among its citizens.

At this time, without the arts, we would all be nothing more than consumers led around by our noses by commercial interests, with no way to discriminate between beautiful and ugly, or even right and wrong. These things rely on a dialog that exists because of artistic expression.

"Artists are the unelected legislators of our minds." Without them, our expression would quickly disintegrate; we would have no mirror to hold up to ourselves, to see who we are and what we are becoming.

Cheating Charities

2007-04-18T22:12:00.000-07:00

All kinds of people get upset when they think somebody is taking advantage of kids or sick people or poor, dumb animals. That’s the image that was recently provided by a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter when she dug deeply into the 990s of a number of charities, only to find that for every dollar they collected, 8 or 9 cents went to the cause and the rest went to fundraising and fat salaries for the executive director. Not that I’m against fat salaries – not at all – but how do these folks sleep at night. In one case, disabled veterans were to benefit from over $2.5 million in donations, but instead saw about $300,000 of it. The truly stupid part of this is that the charities in question have to post their disgusting accounting in public – on the 990s. But this has been going on for as long as I can remember, which means for a long time, and no one has found a good way of dealing with it. The Seattle Post Intelligencer article suggests ways of identifying whether your solicitation is coming from a professional fundraiser, but what does that mean? Professional fundraisers are supposed to be dishonest compared to amateur fundraisers? What I’d like to know is why the IRS doesn’t close these people down. Surely they have some quick way to look at the 990s of all the charities in the country and tease out the ones that spend more than 75% of their income on operations. That would be a clue that something stinks.

Reading, Writing, 'Rithmetic

2007-04-08T11:07:00.001-07:00

I’m always reading something. Last week, in the midst of reading short stories by Julian Barnes and Dave Eggers, I turned to a classic, Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. Ever heard of this one? I hadn’t until I read Francine Prose (Reading Like a Writer), for whom it clearly was a seminal work of shocking dimensions both formally and because of its content. It’s all of about 125 pages, but it took me three days to wade through it. Normally I could do this in one evening, but the book was so weirdly constructed, that I had to turn back innumerable times just to catch a thread of narrative. Simply put, it is magical realism pared down to only the magical part. It is a little like Cormac McCarthy stripped of a story line, and much like Emile Bronte in its shocking turns, but for these allusions to make sense, but subtract the logical, linear, time-goes-in-one-direction sense of reality. The protagonist, Pedro Paramo, is a shadowy figure who may or may not be the narrator’s father, but who is certainly dead by the time the book opens. Most of the text is like a waking dream, where, dreamlike, anything can happen (people who are not really real speak and interact with the narrator). In the midst of that, which like most dream narrative is somewhat boring, is the story of a man who is ruthless in the use of his power to take others’ property to fulfill his endless lust for ownership of people – particularly women. He is finally killed by revolutionaries, or so it appears.

More relevant, perhaps, to your interest is my non-fiction reading. I received, “hot off the presses,” Michael K. Wells’ Successful Program Evaluation, a book that promises to give the grantseeker a full telling of how to discuss evaluation of projects cogently so that the grant maker will be impressed that the project will be logically and professionally evaluated both for its substantive outcomes and for its formal ones. I’ve paged through it once and find it fairly well organized, and not too plagued by Wells’ uninspired prose. In short, he gets the point across, although it’s a slog getting there. I’ve found his other books of value, so I plan to keep this one on my desk to consult.

A much better written, and therefore more useful book is Flawless Consulting by Peter Block. Its subtitle is "A Guide To Getting Your Expertise Used." It is a second edition of a book from 1981 that I’m sure has inspired many consultants to pull up their socks and develop a better style. A theme throughout is Authenticity, by which Block means the capacity of an individual to tell the truth even when it seems dangerous to his self interest. Also known as integrity. But in this case, it is something that contributes to the whole purpose of consulting, which is to get the client to recognize the issues and to confront their solution. Hiding from the problems is, therefore, counter-productive. The book is chock full of relevant references to psychology and business, without lapsing into tedious discussions of how to do your taxes or arrange your office for the best results. Highly recommended if you’re a consultant and have had any less that satisfactory experiences with clients. If you’re like me, this has happened mainly because the non-profit manager does not know what you do and you’re unaware of that, so you never take the time – or you’re never given the time – to explain it fully so that everyone is clear about what is going to happen during this adventure.

Why do budgets hang people up so often? Because they’re intimidated by them, and that is because they’ve never taken the plunge to learn what they are and what they’re supposed to tell about the project. I consider myself pretty good at budgets, mostly because I get that nice satisfied feeling when I grind a spreadsheet out from the random figures a client gives me, usually presented in spreadsheet format, but without any rhyme or reason so far as order goes. And, the numbers are more often than not meaningless, don’t add up, and are in the wrong place relative to the other numbers. Anyway, I like to read about the subject so that I can sound authoritative when I have the opportunity, which is rare, to speak to a bookkeeper or CFO. I want to know how to read an annual report, an annual budget, and an audit. So I picked up two books recently, and I found them rich with information and even advice. One is Not-for-Profit Accounting Made Easy by Warren Ruppel, a CPA with a distinguished career in non-profit work, and a good writer. His book is thorough without being pedantic. The writing is excellent and often even amusing (without being condescending). It didn't keep me up at night, but all things being equal, it is an excellent read. The other is Bookkeeping Basics by Debra L. Ruegg and Lisa M. Venkatrahnam, a somewhat more elementary guide that I found somewhat confusing on a few concepts, such as accrual versus cash basis accounting. I think it’s because the authors (why did it take two of them to write a 78-page text?) are not sure who they’re writing for. Nonetheless, for a quick look at the subject, this book will serve.

Finally, my favorite. Cheryl A. Clarke (of Storytelling for Grantseekers fame) and Susan P. Fox (a fundraising consultant and educator) have written Grant Proposal Makeover, which takes non-winning grant proposals and demonstrates how they could be transformed into winning grant proposals. Since my business motto is “grant writing grant winning,” I had to have this one, and I’m glad I got it, because it mostly lives up to its intention to edify people like me. Why does that great proposal get dinged by the federal evaluator when it seems to fit every last inch of the guidelines? What’s up with that, as my haircutter says. Well, Clarke and Fox are articulate, insightful and amusing in their analysis of each part of a good proposal, style, substance, budgets and organization. They even discuss the cosmetics of a good presentation. I devoured this book, and I’ll consult it again (because I can be a slow learner when I devour). There should be more books like this. It’s a frank discussion of a subject we’re all shy of talking about: why we fail. Everybody fails (learn from your mistakes! I’ve always heard that, so if it’s such good advice, why is it so hard to do?), and here’s a book that calmly takes you through it, whether you’re a beginner or a “seasoned professional,” as they say. (That word - seasoned - in this context has always bothered me because, as I think most seasoned chefs will tell you, the seasoning goes on first, so it adds to the flavor throughout the cooking. So maybe we should say “tender, juicy professional.”)

A New Opportunity

2007-02-25T15:02:00.000-08:00

On February 21, 2007, The New York Times reported that corporate funding of the arts was drying up. Arts organizations in New York, the center for the arts in the United States, are reporting that their corporate sponsors want proof that their money was buying the audience for their products and services that will show a good Return On Investment. The arts organizations have to prove to their benefactors that the audiences for ballets, dance companies, symphonies, and visual arts shows were adequately large and diverse to merit the thousands of dollars the corporations spend annually – or did. The corporations, and specifically their marketing departments, which increasingly control the distribution of grants, want recognition from the largest audiences they can find. If possible, they want national recognition in a culturally major league venue. In short, they want their names shouted, their logos paraded, and if possible their products placed in the spotlight.

As icing on the cake, it is often perceived by the public that support for museums and ballet companies is noble, and the corporations can assume their generosity reflects a public generosity, thus ennobling us all. Now all of this is changing because corporate philanthropy is changing. No longer do corporate donors offer a balanced giving model of 30% for the arts, 30% for education and 40% for health. Now it is more likely to be 5% for the arts, and a much larger share for education and health.If you are a grantwriter for arts organizations, take heed. There will soon be no more dollars from those generous corporations in return for your offer of a brief acknowledgement in the annual report. Their focus is turning to social issues and giving to these issues is what burnishes the product identity of a bank, an insurance company or a technology company. Does it have anything to do with the popularity of such causes among the big donors, I ask? If so, then journalists could help out by paying closer attention to their actual giving and notice that the Paul Allen Foundation gives regularly to the arts in the Northwest. And even the Bill Foundation gives to local cultural institutions, such as the Seattle Art Museum. Most recently we saw both heralded in the opening of the Olympic Sculpture Garden, opened last month in Seattle.

But you may point out that these are not corporations. Right you would be – they are private charities whose object is to uplift us in our darkest hour, whether because of disease or financial crisis, or because we lack something to do on Friday night.I lapse into irony for a reason. I see that irony abounds on this issue, and where there is irony, I suspect there may be hypocrisy. The fact is we all enjoy the arts, whether in the form of kitsch movies or best sellers, or in high brow events such as touring art exhibits or live theater. So you can’t afford some of these things; so they are the (almost) exclusive province of the wealthy. I think, if we look closely at it, we are truly uplifted, honored, and glorified by the arts. Have you ever lived some place where they don’t have the arts? Where the nearest museum is five hundred miles away and the only live music you can hear is played at the local roadhouse? I have, and for an educated person, it’s very demoralizing. Even if I don’t attend, I want culture to be available. It just makes me feel better to know that on Wednesday night a bunch of my fellow citizens are going to the Concert Hall to hear Beethoven’s String Quartets, Wagner’s Parsifal, or someone reading the poems of Elizabeth Bishop.

Arts organizations are a source of well being for us all. In fact, I personally support the arts. Last year, I gave 325,000,000 Bill Dollars to local arts organizations through my memberships and donations. And I’m happy to do it. Judging by their correspondence with me, the arts organizations are happy I do it, too. So I’ve done my duty by the arts, and I suggest if you value the arts in your community, you should immediately buy memberships in all your local museums and performing arts organizations. If everyone did this, there probably would be no need for corporate grants.

And this degree of public support would also indicate to the funding organizations that community support is fantastic. Ironically, this would show them that arts organizations are important because they bring in the metrics, thus leading to increased corporate funding for healthy, thriving cultural entities.So why are we begging for help from these corporations? We should demand that they help the arts – more than ever before – as an antidote to the violence- and money-besotted culture they helped to create.

Sometimes I can’t face myself in the morning because I’ve spent the night before indulging in my favorite escapes, by most of the world’s standards, expensive, wasteful and not all that satisfying. At least with the life enhancement available in the arts, we might recover some of the dignity lost in idle consumption and habitual materialism. Maybe we could even find the energy to resist the mind and body polluters who are so depressing. The way it looks from here, American business has a genius for increasing profits in very creative ways, and they have equally impressive genius for selling the general population the notion that it’s all good. But the net result is billions and billion on their side of the ledger and less on my side. Everyday, the financial pages are full of reports of mergers and acquisitions worth billions. You are hard-pressed to find a buy-out that is worth less than 10 figures.

So why not support the arts, at the very least because it sooths us, so the bitter pill of exploitation goes down with a little bit of cultural sugar.The arts are undervalued in the USA. Big discovery. Yes, the arts are undervalued. But the fact is they are invaluable because they are life-affirming for the community starved for moral, cultural and intellectual sustenance. Feeding that natural, inherent hunger is why they exist, aside from the useful titillation of the idle rich. When the corporations realize that their associations with the arts show that they support life, they will value and support the arts.

But so long as they equate their social responsibility exclusively with curing disease, or a clean water supply in Nigeria, or the battle against AIDS, they will never see the arts as more than luxury. I’m not ashamed of the fact that the arts are a luxury for a society rife with disease, degradation, and poverty. And if I lived in Uganda, I would be outraged if some philanthropy built a $100 million modern art museum in Kampala. But we are a wealthy society, and we must grow to encompass our cultural dreams and achievements, if nothing else than to prove to ourselves that we have it in us.

Billions can be a worrisome thing

2007-02-06T20:13:00.000-08:00

When in January a Los Angeles Times reporter began researching the investment history of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the first places she consulted was the 990s filed in the databases of Guidestar.com, a website that provides access to these tax returns of the non-profits free of charge. The Gates Foundation’s 2004 990 (the most recent one available, all 94 Mb of it) runs to 2565 pages, so reading it must have been a chore and a half for the reporter. Once you’ve found the pages where the Foundation’s investments are listed (in detail, with monetary investment amounts provided with the name of each investment), there are nearly 100 pages of them (over 4000 investments), as might be expected of an organization with $32 billion to invest. But a good reporter is not afraid of research.

And what did the LA Times dig up? Some very tantalizing facts, worthy of publication and syndication, which is where the Seattle Times picked it up for its January 18, 2007 apologia, under the headline "Gates Foundation faces multibillion-dollar dilemma." I was naturally drawn to the article and read it avidly, thus quickly. Now, several weeks later, I have the leisure to think about what the world’s richest philanthropy is doing with all that dough, and I discover that some of it is invested in some of the very companies whose exploitative and destructive operations are exacerbating the very problems the Gates Foundation is trying to eradicate, namely malaria, polio and AIDS. Shocking indeed, and juicy. Nothing like showing the giant’s feet of clay to get us proles salivating.

I am one to believe that the wealthiest, and supposedly most privileged among us must be held to a higher standard. After all, people like Bill Gates (if there are any others) are examples for youth, who because of him, aspire to great wealth through entrepreneurial struggle. There are chinks in the armor, of course – there always are. Here we have the drop-out rich kid propped up by his wealthy, powerful family until the crazy software-for-profit scheme gets legs. All of us should be so disadvantaged. But he has come a long way, and now he is an example for us all, except for this thing about the hundreds of millions he has invested in trashy companies. Of course his home town newspaper will not trash nor tarnish, so they make up the ususal excuse for bad behavior: everybody does it, so it’s okay. And more subtlely, who’s it hurting, anyway?

BP (British Peteroleum) is one among many oil companies that rape the earth and reap enormous profits for stock holders. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is only one among their thousands of stockholders, among them Greenpeace. Of course, Greenpeace does not buy BP stock by the armload, but by the pinch with nose closed, in order to get in the door of the stockholders meetings where the really mean stuff happens. One would register surprise if the Gates people showed enough interest in this confab to ask Expedia about the cost of a roundtrip.
Be calm, everyone “ so far the foundation has managed its investments separately from its grant programs. It invests in a diversified portfolio for a steady return, and then uses the profits toward greater social goals,” simpers Seattle Times reporter Kristi Heim. Of course the grant programs are managed separately! Of course they aren’t commingled with the investments. They’re separate offices on separate floors. These people hardly speak!

How dare you!!!

The long and short of Heims’ piece is that the Gates Foundation is doing what almost everybody does: they’re investing their wealth where it does the most good – for them. Forget the environment or third world health, where are the profits, dammit?! If they were going to inspect their investments with an eye toward eliminating the most egregious offenders of Gates Foundation’s Goals and Objectives, which they’re are not, then they would have to work really, really hard to get the job done. And there is simply not time nor money nor staff enough to do it. So, in short, the answer to the Los Angeles Times is a huffy: “You don’t get it, do you? We’re the GATES Foundation. Dammit.”

But the hometown apologia newspaper says that COO Cheryl Scott promised to review the foundations investments, although they were not planning to meet the challenges head on by actually doing anything. They, no doubt, will rely on the sacrosanct factor and the how-dare-you reaction to kick in and make this silly business go away.

Not so fast. On closer inspection anyone familiar with foundations will find a familiar pattern. Any of them worth over 10 million is heavily diversified, meaning they don’t know where their money is invested because it is handled by a money manager whose job it is to maximize the return on the investment. I’m sure the Gates Foundation has a battalion of such people to manage its billions and to assure that the bank account grows. So that is what is at the root of this ostensibly evil regime: a legitimate need to see the money safe and growing for the benefit of the world, with an unfortunately blurred if not blind eye toward how exactly it’s done.

Now that the world’s attention has been called to the issue, the Gates Foundation vows to revamp its investment strategy to eliminate any awful disease-carrying, planet-raping enterprises among its stock buys. Good luck to them. With so many profitable grass-roots organizations around, how will they ever decide? What price political correctness?

Microfinancing and Fundraising

2006-12-20T19:39:00.000-08:00

Grantwriting is only one factor in the wider venture of fundraising. Professionals work tirelessly to find support for schools, hospitals and other institutions that depend on donations to operate. Grantwriters deliver 10% to 20% of the total revenue in fundraising organizations, most of which are based in the institutions that benefit. Some, like John F. Schultz and Company were built by entrepreneurs who, through a sense of charity, work to further the causes they believe in. Of course, the income these entrepreneurs derive can be measurable by the standards of other professions – some make in the six figures for hard work writing and help organizations grow. But it is the successful grantwriter who is in demand, not the least expensive.

Micro loans have recently come into public awareness through the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus, an Indian banker and economist who saw a need for small loans to the poorest entrepreneurs to start businesses or to further the growth of a new business. This has been going on for over a decade, most successfully in India, but the movement to fund these little projects has spread around the world. Now, for as little as $25, a school child can be fed, clothed and her books purchased for a year, or a woman can increase her output of woven cloth, or a farmer buy another ox, and so on. These are small gestures for people in the West that mean a tremendous amount to the rest of the struggling world.

Two online micro loan ventures were recently written up in the Seattle Times (December 18, 2006) in an article by Kristi Heim. She investigated GlobalGiving.com and Kiva.org for her essay, sprinkled with anecdotes by local people who have practiced, in small ways, their own philanthropy. These donors are often people who are retired, living on fixed income, and looking for good ways to give meaningful Christmas gifts. Heim interviews Dennis Whittle, CEO of GlobalGiving.com, a non-profit founded in 2000. He sees the internet as “revolutionizing philanthropy” through a system that can take donations, distribute them to needy recipients, and report back to the giver.

“The Internet links the donor and the recipient in new ways. GlobalGiving.com for example, allows [the donor] to email the project coordinator in Zimbabwe, see photos and messages from the students and receive updates from the field throughout the year.”

Kiva.org connects individual lenders and borrowers worldwide. President Premal Shah says, “Philanthropy used to be balls and receptions catering to high net-worth individuals. I think there’s something democratizing if you can bring technology into it and let the average person be like a Bill Gates or a Rockefeller.” Kiva.org profiles individual entrepreneurs from all over the third world and lets the donor chose which to sponsor. In other words, you can read about the people you may want to support and pick the individual causes that match your giving priorities.

For example, a retired woman living near Tacoma, Washington found Beatrice Wanjiru Njuguna of Kenya on Kiva.org. Njuguna is a 47 year old mother of six who grows and sells vegetables. She applied for a loan of $300 and the lady in Tacoma contributed. Now she receives email updates about Njuguna, who has already repaid a third of the loan on schedule.

Kiva.org, in business a little over a year, has attracted 18,000 lenders, each contributing an average of $82. Kiva.org collects the money and transfers 100 percent of it to local microfinance institutions, which distribute the money and manage the loans.

The loans are financed at a rate of 19% to 30% depending on the microfinance institution.

Both Kiva.org and GlobalGiving.org work on operating budgets of under $500,000, lean by any standard. They estimate that 85% to 90% of the donated money reaches the projects, with the remainder supporting operations and money-transfer fees.

One of the best things about microfinance on the Internet is that transactions can be done quickly. Sometimes it is only a few days between the time donations are made and when they are received by the local project.

The greatest reward, of course, goes to the donor. The lady in Tacoma has seen her small gift grow as Njuguna doubled her income as a result of the loan. Both women can make claim on being a source of health and happiness.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grows

2006-11-03T01:02:00.000-08:00

Aside from applying for grants, I for one want to keep up with who's who at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Since September they've been hiring on the managerial level and the new faces promise to bring some changes to the way grants are distributed and to whom. Although the Gates's have final say on those issues, I'm told there is a signing limit whereby the smaller (less than $100,000) grants can be awarded by project managers, who are actually available to the lumpen grant seekers.

In an article penned by Kristi Heim for the Seattle Times and published on October 17, new hires were announced. "New hires are flocking to the Gates Foundation, including: Elizabeth Wong, senior program officer for Special Initiatives; Lawrence Yanovitch, senior program officer for Financial Services for the Poor; Teresa Peters, senior program officer for Global Libraries; Amolo Ng'weno, senior program officer for Financial Services for the Poor; Sylvia Mathews, president of the Global Development Program; Roy Steiner, senior program officer for Agricultural Development; Bakari Bakari, director of operations for Global Development Program; Priya Jaisinghani, program officer for Financial Services for the Poor. " These new hires include "a World Bank vice president, a genetic engineer from seed giant Monsanto, the founder of an Internet company in Africa, and the former chief executive of a $100 million cattle-breeding company."

Now that the Foundation has to spend over $3 billion annually (3,000 million dollar grants), more than any federal government program for NGOs. Heim describes the situation thusly:
"New hires are flocking to Seattle from around the country and the world, demonstrating the Foundation's ability to attract top talent. But keeping them all focused on the same goals and values in the midst of such frantic growth is another challenge. The foundation has hired about 100 people since January, 68 of them for newly created positions. It now has 319 employees and the flood of job applications averages about 100 per day."

Evidently Global Development is the department to be in because it is growing the fastest. It's brief: to bolster the nonprofit's work in health and education by improving food production, supporting small business through microcredit, and increasing access to computers and Internet in libraries. Growing to 36 employees in the last five months, the department has so far given away $200 million in grants. Heading it up, Sylvia Mathews, who at 41 has already become a seasoned politico, having served as deputy chief of staff for President Clinton. She's quoted as saying her new hires are "people who are experts in their field but also have a proven track record of devising innovative solutions."

Pay. How much does the richest foundation in America pay its employees? "According to the foundation's most recent tax filing (2005 990), its highest paid employee made about $400,000 a year."

Get out your resumes. They're still hiring, even locally. They want "...people who are really driven by the Mission...with a willingness to tackle some tough things with not a lot of road signs on how to do it. People who are very comfortable with change." The goal of staff training, or indoctrination if you will, is to instill the principles of the Foundation, the core faith being in "the power of science and technology to improve lives."

Although everyone is crowded together in the present digs (even Bill had to take a smaller office), the Foundation will move to new quarters near Seattle Center in 2007 or 2008).

Finally, some philosophy, which I respect: "be humble and mindful." Even if you're rich, have enjoyed a birthright your whole life, have a fabulous education and have always been treated like a genius, keep you eye on the needs of the poor, the ignorant and the sick. They need to have 600 employees, doubling in size by 2008. My heart goes out to them: keep up the good work, be an inspiration to us all (we need it).

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Update #1

2006-10-29T07:18:00.000-08:00

Aside from applying for grants, I for one want to keep up with who's who at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Since September they've been hiring on the managerial level and the new faces promise to bring some changes to the way grants are distributed and to whom. Although the Gates's have final say on those issues, I'm told there is a signing limit whereby the smaller (less than $100,000) grants can be awarded by project managers, who are actually available to the lumpen grant seekers.

In an article penned by Kristi Heim for the Seattle Times and published on October 17, new hires were announced. "New hires are flocking to the Gates Foundation, including: Elizabeth Wong, senior program officer for Special Initiatives; Lawrence Yanovitch, senior program officer for Financial Services for the Poor; Teresa Peters, senior program officer for Global Libraries; Amolo Ng'weno, senior program officer for Financial Services for the Poor; Sylvia Mathews, president of the Global Development Program; Roy Steiner, senior program officer for Agricultural Development; Bakari Bakari, director of operations for Global Development Program; Priya Jaisinghani, program officer for Financial Services for the Poor. " These new hires include "a World Bank vice president, a genetic engineer from seed giant Monsanto, the founder of an Internet company in Africa, and the former chief executive of a $100 million cattle-breeding company."

Now that the Foundation has to spend over $3 billion annually (3,000 million dollar grants), more than any federal government program for NGOs. Heim describes the situation thusly:
"New hires are flocking to Seattle from around the country and the world, demonstrating the Foundation's ability to attract top talent. But keeping them all focused on the same goals and values in the midst of such frantic growth is another challenge. The foundation has hired about 100 people since January, 68 of them for newly created positions. It now has 319 employees and the flood of job applications averages about 100 per day."

Evidently Global Development is the department to be in because it is growing the fastest. It's brief: to bolster the nonprofit's work in health and education by improving food production, supporting small business through microcredit, and increasing access to computers and Internet in libraries. Growing to 36 employees in the last five months, the department has so far given away $200 million in grants. Heading it up, Sylvia Mathews, who at 41 has already become a seasoned politico, having served as deputy chief of staff for President Clinton. She's quoted as saying her new hires are "people who are experts in their field but also have a proven track record of devising innovative solutions."

Pay. How much does the richest foundation in America pay its employees? "According to the foundation's most recent tax filing (2005 990), its highest paid employee made about $400,000 a year."

Get out your resumes. They're still hiring, even locally. They want "...people who are really driven by the Mission...with a willingness to tackle some tough things with not a lot of road signs on how to do it. People who are very comfortable with change." The goal of staff training, or indoctrination if you will, is to instill the principles of the Foundation, the core faith being in "the power of science and technology to improve lives."

Although everyone is crowded together in the present digs (even Bill had to take a smaller office), the Foundation will move to new quarters near Seattle Center in 2007 or 2008).

Finally, some philosophy, which I respect: "be humble and mindful." Even if you're rich, have enjoyed a birthright your whole life, have a fabulous education and have always been treated like a genius, keep you eye on the needs of the poor, the ignorant and the sick.

They need to have 600 employees, doubling in size by 2008. My heart goes out to them: keep up the good work, be an inspiration to us all (we need it).

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

2006-09-19T14:23:00.000-07:00

We are monitoring this site for information about the evolution of the Gates Foundation in response to the Warren Buffett money. $3 billion more to spend by the end of third quarter 2007 means a big ramp-up for them. Even at present giving rates. That leads to a number of possible scenarios and that is what we'll be watching. You can get in on it too by following the link.

Dan Griesmann on the Charity Channel

2006-09-19T12:58:00.000-07:00

The grantwriter can access information anytime day or night on the internet. Not so long ago we had to use expensive databases such as Lexis/Nexus and CompuServe to find information on foundations and corporations. The information was hard to find and at the rates charged by Western Union and Dunn & Bradstreet, among others, a search could cost $100 before you knew it. And what did it produce? Lists of names, sometimes phone numbers, sometimes addresses, rarely contact names or profiles. It took a lot of frustrating hours to come up with a list of prospects, and then the work had only begun. Today, by contrast, the grantwriter can find information in minutes that brings the grantmaker forward, with all the data about guidelines and contact names (not often enough, alas) and past funding. 990s are a click away. Newspaper articles and statistics and even other researchers whose experienced brains are there to be picked (very often, astonishing as it is). And we are spoiled. We want someone to lead us straight to the latest grantmaker, into the hands of the right source with money to grant our institutions and clients. Such a source is Charity Channel. I use them everyday, and they are getting better, starting from a high point anyway. This is to call attention to only one of dozens of features, the weekly updated column of Don Griesmann's Grant Opportunities. If you go to the link I have provided, you will see the latest installment of Don's fantastic, well-researched, and always accurate list of grant opportunities. He provides a précis of each opportunity and a link so the grantwriter can explore at will. From this page you can go to the Charity Channel homepage and discover the bundle of treats they provide. Gratis.

Enough to Go Around

2006-08-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

Now that most of the smoke has cleared, I can look back at the Gates/Buffett partnership. The press reports are helpful as a way of getting behind the scenes of the personalities involved, at least as much as their respective handlers will allow. I can assume that each of them has a public personality they want to cultivate, just like politicians and entertainment personalities. Buffett comes across as avuncular, solid, huge integrity, and honest beyond reproach. Likewise Gates&Gates. Although one hears rumors about the old Bill and his proclivities twenty years ago, all that is gone now, sacrificed for fatherhood and married bliss. Melinda, although in the background, is known for intelligence, warmth and caring, and leading her husband to hug AIDS babies in Africa. Without her urging, Bill would not do this. No divorces on the horizon, no damaged kids or wives, fortunes intact.

And what fortunes they are! The analogies fly. The new Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will be as rich as a small nation, will possess more wealth than the GDP of Iceland, will feed the world’s hungry for a year, cure aids and malaises of every incurable sort, and improve the education system of the United States so more kids can go to college and be happier. These three incomprehensibly wealthy people are stepping up to the plate of noblesse oblige and knocking a home run for mankind. They are examples for us all.

The question is: how do I as a grantseeker get some of this money?

Are there good ways to approach them, and are there really stupid ways of approaching them?

Please tell me, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/ When grantwriters read a web site, they want to understand the goals of the institution. Reading the words on face value can be misleading. After all, everybody wants to eliminate illiteracy. But does everybody want to do it by building better city parks so kids will have some place nice to go after school so they won't be tempted to waste their lives with drugs and early pregnancy? In fact it requires considerable skill to go into grantmakers’ web sites looking for a grant without wasting a considerable amount of time rooting around in the wrong place for the wrong cause and for the wrong amount of money.

Money is the factor that must never be forgotten.

The cause is important because it may inspire and the method is important because it will directly bring about the objectives, which are based on the community’s need for the services of the grantseeking organization, etc. and etc.

But it’s the money, stupid, as ever.

How do you determine the amount of money you can expect to get from the process of going to the organization – say the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation (GF) now that they have “merged” their money with the Warren Buffett money (WBM)? Are all of us going to get millions? Don’t forget: the WBM must be spent down by $3 billion annually, or it’s not going to stay with the GF - that's the deal.

At $33 billion, I calculate eleven years of spending at three-thousand-million-dollars per year.

Surely some of all of that money can be spread around to many, many causes. But will that happen? Even if, as has been reported, the GF will hire 600 more people to fill its Seattle offices, one has to ask what they will be doing. Fighting disease? Shaking up high school slackers? Supporting modern dance? Maybe these 600 new hires will each be assigned to a pixel in a hi-res map of non-profit assistance and virtually every cause with a 501(c)(3) will get its share.

Maybe GF will place on each desk a portfolio of causes they will support and each of those causes will receive a phone call out of the blue from the GF offering them money if they will obey the following rules: submit a needs statement, draw up a budget and keep to it, report quarterly and don’t come back for more until you’ve spent everything. And let us know the outcome.

Experienced grantees will point out that this contrasts with the way things are run now at the GF, where a banker’s scrutiny is applied to every grant awarded. GF program managers scrupulously administer the grants and demand that the grantee do the same. It is like Bill has invested in your company, and you only have so much wiggle room before he comes down on you like a ton of bricks. At least there won’t be any buyouts or predatory investments.

No, it’s possible to dream of the day when there’s so much money that has to be spent, even your cause will get some.

What We Grantwriters Love To Do Most

2006-08-01T23:19:00.000-07:00

We recently convened around a table laden with the bounty of the Northwest - Vietnamese Sandwiches, Beans and Rice with Tom Douglas' bar-b-que sauce, Costco hor devours, Trader Joe's organic Oreos, and Chinese cookies. We sat for a while, talked, decided to break for food, talked some more, then got down to work. In three hours we got an hour and a half's work done, but it was done well and everybody participated and it never bogged down in pretense or silence. Everybody respected everybody else and the problems of the org were confronted and we went on. Then we had some fun talking grantmakers. Which among all the ones we had to choose from would back our venture? Wait, we have two ventures and we don't want them to conflict - landing at the same time on the same grantmaker's desk. So we worked that out and we all chose something that needed to get done and promised we'd see to it that it got done. These were professionals. I felt great to be among them.

2006-06-21T12:41:00.001-07:00

Working With New Clients

There are two kinds of new client. There are those who are new to me and there are those that have just been born. I'm concerned with the latter.

I get calls from people who have ideas for enterprises and they want to know if they should become a non-profit or take the for-profit route. I always meet with them to hear their ideas, the way they're expressed, and the hopes and dreams of the people involved.

If their goal is to enrich themselves, then the answer is obvious. But if they want to add something to the community, help people, maybe even save people, then the issue becomes one of credibility. Do they have the money and the time to get started on their own? Better, have they already got a start of some kind, i.e. do they have community interest? Is there an established need for what they're proposing? Or are they looking for a grant to get them started? Probably the latter, I've found so far. They want someone to hand them a pot of money so they can go realize their well-meant dreams.

The trouble with most of the organizations I've encountered to date, if you could call them organizations (are they organized?), is that the people involved have not established much credibility.

For instance, one group approached me to help with a project to educate Americans about how they could live longer if they had healthier life styles. They had an interesting approach: they would teach the message of nutrition and healthy living via cartoons, because they figured that most people would not read, but almost everyone will watch a cartoon. I listened and then I asked (when I could get a word in...they were very talkative) "do you have a business plan?" No. "do you have a timetable?" No. "do you have a budget?" No. and so on.

Then I asked them if they wanted to get paid for doing this, and they made it clear that they did.

There were three people sitting at this table, eating, drinking coffee and talking. Plus me. One was the leader and she did most of the talking. A Ph.D. psychologist. The second person was an older man who was also a Ph.D., but not in psychology. And the third person was a man who came out of technology and was going to manage the animation. They all three wanted to quit their jobs and work on this project. I advised them to start a for-profit organization because I didn't see any way they were going to find enough money to do what they wanted to do and come out owning the product and earning good salaries.

Unless they could find backers. Backers, I said, might give them money to get started but they would want to see results. They said they wanted about $20 million over the next couple of years. I told them that they were dreaming if they thought any non-profit would fund it. But maybe government would if they could connect it to a government program. With any luck, they could get an earmark.

I think I was more exhausted when I left than when I came in, and I was finishing a ten hour day.

Another man came to me with a way of generating electricity from water.

He had found an invention on the Internet that he had perfected in his garage and shown to his satisfaction that it could generate electricity from water. He wanted money to scale up. He asserted that he was a religious man and he did not want to make money from this technology, because money would change him. Instead he wanted to form a nonprofit that would build the technology and give it to underdeveloped areas that needed electricity.

I listened to him as he explained the physics and chemistry of the device. Then I asked him if he owned the patent on the technology. He showed me a print out from a W\website and this print out depicted the machine. "Here's the patent," he said.

I read the first page. The patent had been issued to a man in California. I asked if that man had given permission to use his patent. My religious friend said he hadn't talked to him, but since the inventor hadn't built the machine yet, he figured that the patent holder didn't want to use the patent. I told him that nonetheless, the inventor still owned the patent, even if he never used it, and he would own it for years to come (it was issued in 1999).

I told him he couldn't do anything with the technology until he got permission from the patent holder. He said he'd look into it and that ended our meeting. He did not seem happy with my advice. I suppose he wanted to be told to just start up a 501(c)(3) and go ahead with helping the world.

I've got other stories I could tell. But here's what it comes down to: people come to me looking for approval and advice. I can't give them approval. I'd help anyone with any project short of criminal activity or something that would hurt people. But when these potential clients haven't thought it through or when it's clear they are foremost interested in making money from the project (including high personal salaries), I tell them not to bother. I think some people want non-profit status so that they can elude taxes and get a lot of free money from grantmakers who have nothing better to do than give it away.

Not by a long shot.

The TGCI Workshop - Program Planning and Proposal Writing

2006-06-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

What follows is a day-by-day chronicle of my experience in a workshop on program planning and proposal writing, aka grant writing.

Introduction
TGCI holds workshops throughout the United States and charges about $900 pre person to attend a five day workshop led by a seasoned grantwriter. I signed up because I’d heard it was a good workshop and because I have committed myself to learning as much as I can about the field. I’ve found that most of these professionally-run workshops are quite useful. Most define a particular approach to writing grant proposals for one or more of the three branches of funding opportunities: government, corporate and foundation. In this case, I found that the emphasis was on foundation funding, with acknowledgement of government and corporate. Actually, government was covered nicely by a lengthy discussion of how to search for opportunities and how to apply for them. More about that later.

Summary: TGCI compares well with other grantwriting workshops. It is thorough and stimulating and it is led by an effective, energetic and knowledgeable grantwriting professional.

Monday, June 19, 2006
Introductions around the room from 28 attendees showed that school districts, faith-based organizations and museums predominated. The workshop leader, Susan Chandler, a consultant and trainer from Portland, Oregon who leads workshops throughout the country, was both patient and forceful (without being overbearing). She took us immediately into Grantsmanship, which means the integration of project and organization with strong relationships with grantmakers. I noticed that many people in the workshop were uncomfortable with the emphasis on relationships, less so with the responsibility to make sure the proposal is right for the grantmaker. This was clarified soon enough. I was impressed with the emphasis Ms. Chandler placed on defining the problem (or need). There’s no magic to it, but the logic of the definition is often missed. It really has to do with how the grantee fits with the community’s needs, and the grantmaker’s agenda. A strong discussion of the problem, how to define it and how to state it. We looked at Outcomes in terms of objectives and here I learned another way of defining objectives, i.e. in terms of outcome objectives (which I took to be objective outcomes) and process objectives, which were defined as objectives for establishing methods to solve the problem. These issues would later relate to the evaluation.

Next, Methods. The method is defined as a response to the causes of the problem and is the longest, most detailed part of the proposal. It is also where Ms. Chandler suggests we begin to formulate the Budget..

Then the discussion turned to Outcomes, which can be defined by the problem/need. What are the solutions you will pursue. This is where one of my favorite acronyms comes in. Outcomes must by SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-limited. I found myself referring to this throughout the week.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006
I'm now at the TGCI Grantsmanship Workshop, second day. The first day was spent orienting the class of 28 to the PPPW method, meaning the proposal planning and proposal writing method TGCI recommends. It consists of a technique for placing the parts of a grant proposal in a logical order and then using a similar format to order the contents of each part. This creates a logical flow that is complete and satisfying to the reader.

The instructor is knowledgable and we're covering the same ground as usual, in good depth and at a good, comfortable but aggressive rate. The most challenging thing so far is the focus on the problem, a subtle moving away from a focus on the project. TGCI teaches that starting with the problem will lead to a better understanding of the other parts of the proposal.

Day Two is committed to the evaluation of the proposal, or rather the project outcomes or results. The evaluation is linked to the methods and the objectives, so that the project can be viewed in logical order - from need to how to meet the need to how to assess the success or otherwise of the project.

Evaluation. This is a topic no one likes, covered in interesting depth here, with the instructor demurring that she has always hired someone to do this for her.

At lunch with several of my fellow students, the conversation ran from the intricacies of the logic model to San Miguel de Allende to Pilchuk to talking to the dead. I enjoyed it and felt like it was only warming up when the group finished its Subway sandwiches and went their separate ways. The afternoon session beckons in about 20 minutes. We will be discussing? I didn't look. The work's intensive and I'm verging on lazy - manic. Too much coffee, I'm guessing.

I think about the work I've taken on with Aquaculture and all the grant writing at the Museum. Plus my short stories. And my recreational reading. The grants class helps me focus on grants. I know all the grantwriting contributes to writing logically.

The discussions in the evaluation group were not very effective. We needed a facilitator to keep us on track. There were too many questions about capacity building, establishing the problem, discovering evaluation techniques. Not enough answers.

All of my fellow students have their own takes on this. What will unify the vision of the best practices? Will the instructor come in and straighten things out, or will the class reach some consensus?

I see the method now. Throw a lot at the class, let them sort it out, then bring it all together for them at the end of the week. We'll see if that's the case.

Wednesday, June 21
Class today about researching grant sources and relationship building. Good, with tips on finding the right sources by drilling down into the databases, 990s and online guidelines. Reduce 50 sources to 5-10. Apply to those using PP/PW, get results from most if not all because the source is project-appropriate, the proposal is well designed to follow the guidelines, and all procedures followed. Use of the 990PF was particularly interesting because I have not been using that enough in my consulting work; in fact, I have not been doing enough research to eliminate the chaff from the wheat. Question: corporate foundations vs. corporate giving. How do you tell the difference? Again, research. The Corporate Foundation will submit a 990, but corporate giving comes directly from the corporation, usually reflecting the interests of the corporation and the giving meant to enhance the corporation's standing in the community. The Corporate Foundation will be more about philanthropy, with giving according to the interests of the board, established by the board, and money distributed to organizations that both represent the board's interest and enhance the corporation in the community. In sum, the corporate foundation will be an active community participant along thematic lines and enhancing the corporation only because their largesse is notable; corporate giving comes from the interests of the corporation and usually enhances the corporation directly. Eg. Marlboro cigarettes supporting NASCAR because their demographics indicate that the NASCAR fan is a smoker. So, the corporate giving is like advertising.

Relationships discussion. Here we get on more slippery ground, in that the use of the relationship is clear: to get your project under the eyes of the foundation project manager and decision makers. But relationships are external to the grants process, and the grants process may be entirely tangential to the purpose of the grant. For instance, your board of trustees may include someone who is related to a board member at the foundation; or, the board member for the foundation may share a common interest with the foundation. The connection is the thing. So it follows that if a connection has been established through previous grant making, then that should be continued through regular communication. This may be in the form of a quarterly phone call, a mailing of a newspaper article about the project the grant funded, or a thank you note for some help given by the project manager.

I asked about federal grants and stated how discouraging it was to apply again and again but never receive one. The advice was to make sure that the application was done correctly down to the last comma, because grants have been lost on a single point. 95 vs. 96 percent, and correct proposal form can make the difference, given that more important matters are correct.

What I have always considered important, the sniffing around part of research, was de-emphasized in favor of the deep drilling method, which is still sniffing around, but on a more sophisticated level. The important thing here is to have a clear idea what the project is and to go for it directly, with few diversions. Spending a lot of time on research will save a lot of frustration and hurt relationships if grants are pursued that are inappropriate, and this could have been determined by more diligence.

Thursday, June 22
This morning the draft proposal is submitted. We've written it by committee, so there are the usual symptoms of that flawed method of arriving at a finished document. I'm sure all the flaws could be corrected with enough editing, but we only had less than 2 hours to edit a 6 pager. The subject was capacity building for a small organization called Middle East Media. The idea is to grow the funder base by investing grant money in donor management and fundraising. The goal is to develop the organization from a $350,000 organization to a $500,000 organization in three years. I did the budget, which was certainly a draft because the project leader was less than enthusiastic about the process. She didn't seem to trust the "what if" method. I worked it out with her and did the best part of the work at home, including a budget narrative. She was much more comfortable with that. After a few minutes, she signed off on the budget and a few minor corrections to the narrative. The budget, I'm afraid, does not match the narrative because the narrative mentions the $350,000 current revenue/expense, whereas mine is less than $200,000. By the end of three years it is up to about $275,000. The grant amount, however, is $163,661. Nice, neat number, no?

This whole process was to lead us through what the workshop leader (and TGCI) called the PP-PW method, meaning the programl planning, proposal writing technique. Namely: start with the problem (or need) and work forward from that, developing the narrative around method and outcomes/objectives. Then the budget, finally the introduction. I like the method. Anything to avoid starting at the beginning (Statement of Purpose, Summary, Introduction, and so on). I despair of getting the necessary overview before the outcomes/objects and especially the budget, although I'm a little obsessed at present by the budget. I claim it clarifies the mind and makes the writer respond to the truth of the proposal, whereas other sections can easily become flights of fancy. And flights of fancy mean overwriting and overwrought writing. The passion quickly drains out of it because of bloat. The end is a thoroughly unreadable document.

Where concision? Where logic? Where clarity? These are all writing problems; not so much organizational problems as rhetorical and stylistic problems. The document has to be persuasive, yet it has to be organized, logical. Often the two motives compete. The fiction writer tries every trick to get the reader hooked, and to keep him that way. The insight is that the ticking clock of the thriller is hard to establish in a didactic document - one that is filled to capacity with factual information (exposition) and description. There is the so-called narrative, but it is hard to make it flow with passion when it is top-heavey with facts to be matched to numbers. In my experience, there is an implicit conflict between expression in terms of the passion of the cause and expression in terms of an analysis of the cause.

The tricks of dialog, or of scene and situation, change of POV are unavailable to the nonfiction author. Maybe the way to go is to maintain a straight face and not interfere with the emotions. Like a meditation where a mundane phrase focuses the mind.

Friday, June 23
A wrap-up, a time for consideration, remembering, criticism, contemplation and discussion. We had created proposals from real projects. The proposals contained all the ingredients of the proposal ideal we had been taught, including the summary, introduction, statement of need or problem, goal/objective/outcome, method and evaluation. And budget. The day before (Thursday) we had divided into groups to critique one proposal and read all five others in preparation for the group discussions that would follow. This gave each of us an opportunity to compare our work to that of other students: a peer review. When the class re-convened, one proposal was analyzed by a group of four or five class members, then by the whole room, then by the workshop leader. As usual, she had good insights and led us once again through the discipline of logical arrangement of content to follow from problem to goal/objective/outcome to method to evaluation to budget to summary and introduction.

You could see the possibilities for variation, but we tried to stick to the rules.

Today we went through five proposals, one after the other. My opportunity to review came fourth. Our group (reduced to three by the absence of one of our members - gone off to be with her daughter) went through the positive aspects of a proposal for $200,000 in funding for a language curriculum in Alaskan public schools. The proposal was good, solid and we struggled to find something not-so-strong about it. I think the best criticism was that the students were not properly motivated by anything the proposal had to say. Another criticism, perhaps not so apt was that the budget did not provide for continuing the project beyond the one-year grant period (sustainability was dubious). But in the group critique that followed our comments were shot down and the issue of logic was brought up again. All in all, this was the winningest proposal of all six, at least it seemed so. I thought the discussion was a little defensive.

Faith-based programs were dominant here, and I had for the first time the insight that all social services program have an implicit element of faith, if not based on God-worship, then on a belief in the innate goodness and improvability of humanity. I wonder how well I will write such proposals when my turn comes. I have a mixed reaction to religious causes, even when they are merely charitable. On one side I feel a fundamental sympathy for the motivation to serve God. On the other I feel that the faithful are often pushing a dogma, even if it is implicit. A form of propaganda, which implies a lie told to persuade. Which is disturbing even when what you're trying to persuade people to believe and do is a good thing, a good causes, helpful to people, and good for the world. But that said, it is part of my job to persuade and as a professional I should restrain my personal opinions.

In the end, we gathered in groups to discuss what the class had brought us. We all agreed that it had been good, it had taught us one thing or another (logic, organization, ordering information) and we all felt we would go back to our work better prepared to deal with the expectations of our employers. Some people worked alone, with many other responsibilities, and I felt for these people because they might not get to apply the lessons learned here until long after the good effects had worn off. Others might get to apply them under the pressure of their board or their executive director to get a lot of proposals out and bring in a lot of money in a short period of time.

I'm confronted by some of the same issues. Fortunately for now, I run my own ship. I will go back and tackle five proposals, three enormous ones, and two smaller ones, all in the next month to six weeks. This course will add to my confidence and my organizational capacity. It will make me fit the parts of the proposal together more logically, and it may even help me smooth out the rough spots in my style. But will it help me get my point across to the people I have to work with? Will it help me convey the important parts of the grant proposal - the organization, the budget, the guidelines, the deadlines? That's all on me, and only time will tell if TGCI has given me some foundation for authority. This workshop has added to my arsenal of weapons I will use to drive back the dark forces of disorganization, vagueness, and information bloat. Henceforth, I will not let the preconceptions of my peers inhibit me from enacting best practices.

The Money Dilemma Part One

2006-05-24T16:39:00.000-07:00

I had a successful day. I helped people and I learned from people. I gave and I took. At the end of this, I'm happy, I feel good. Because I have done good. The ethical part was giving my time and intelligence to helping in the effort to reach out to underserved communities here in Seattle. The smart thing I did was to listen to people who study dilemmas. The way to resolve a dilemma is to acknowledge that all sides believe they are right and that not every side can win satisfaction. Wisdom, but not an easy formula. In fact, not a formula at all but a way of life.

On a more quanitifiable issue, we discussed money. Where does it come from if you're a non-profit and do you mind if it comes from a tainted source, a source whose activities may conflict with your mission, or whose agenda is to co-opt your good reputation in the community to win absolution? No easy solution here, either. From one side you have the view that all money is good and in the current atmosphere non-profits are businesses looking for investors and investors have a right to expect something back for their giving. From another side all money is tainted, but over time through good works those who are tainted by it gain absolution. Anyway, these days we tend to have short memories. Still another side sees that a corporation giving money wants to impress the community and its stockholders that it is doing good, and the non-profit is a vehicle to that end. What's wrong with that? There may be a little bit of extortion at work here: you will support me in my agenda, or I will cut off the funds you so badly need to survive and do your good work.

I will save for another time writing about the perennial issue of working on contingency. Should professional fundraisers (and grantwriters) work on contingency, in other words for a percentage of the take? Most professional organizations say no because #1 it is unfair to the fundraiser who may never see sufficient compensation for his/her labor and #2 the contingency worker may try to lead the employer - the non-profit - into grants they are not prepared to manage. The latter means, for instance, that a grant worth $10 million, offered by the US Department of Labor, is a very attractive target for a fundraiser getting 10%. But...the grant is too large for the organization, which would have to staff up 500%, hire an accounting and HR staff, get new offices, hire a board, and so on, just to manage the grant. It could end up costing more that it's worth, and it may end up being the end for the non-profit. It's happened - more often than you might think. So I stay away from contingency jobs because they're unfair to everybody.

That's not the end of the ethics and money subject. I'll come back to it often. Because my business is the non-profit business, the 6th largest economy in the country, and it's rife with dilemmas.

2006-05-20T17:51:00.001-07:00

Need and Budget

I just updated my FAQ and in it I remarked on the value of a budget analysis based on need. Need is a major issue in grant writing. To establish need doesn't mean showing that the project needs money. Of course it does, otherwise you would not be applying for funding. No, need refers to the value to the community of the services or deliverables. Certainly there is always a need for medical care, but is there a community need for medical research? Depends on whom you're speaking to. But generally need is a statment of practical, immediate need in the community for what the project will bring, if funded.

I could argue persuasively for cultural endeavors, because I know about them and I support them personally. They mean that the community supports the arts and the arts are about quality of life, communication, community identity, educating the youth, bringing the community into contact with outside organizations that enlarge the community. It may also mean funds coming into the community because of taxes paid by businesses that benefit from the money spent by visitors to the community who come to enjoy the cultural events.

But could I argue for scientific research into the maintenance of grasslands in Nebraska? I could, vaguely, but persuasively? No. Probably not. I'm not qualified, although I could pretend to be and maybe fool some of the people some of the time. But not the experts who would presumably be reading the proposal.

So reliably establishing need in a proposal must come from good research...the head as well as the heart, and always experience - the wisdom borne of time and effort.

Where does budget analysis come in? You have to look closely at the budget and see if it is reasonable. That is, does the benefit to the community merit spending the money on the operations, the staff, the administration, and the project? The irony is that without the funding it may not be possible to judge the value to the community. In other words, the project may or may not enrich the community $1 million worth, but we need to spend $500,000 to find out. Few grantmakers would take the wager. You might luck out and find just the right fit with your mission and the mission of a foundation, but it would be the exception.