This blog is written by Jessie Cronan, co-founder of Daraja Partners, and cross-posted from Alliance Magazine.
The workshop, Applying Power and Equity Practices to Your International Philanthropy, facilitated by Daraja Partners and Segal Family Foundation, kicked off with a simple, and somewhat light-hearted task.
Groups were asked to list all the things they could do, as donors, to ensure the WORST possible outcomes for their grantees, and by extension their funds. Participants chuckled as they started to write, and soon most groups had filled up their first poster-board-sized page and were on to a second. It turns out, when you ask a group of donors what not to do, the ideas start flowing.
There were some obvious and humorous points – ‘take the money and run,’ for example, or ‘only fund your friends and family.’ However, in most cases the descriptions of what not to do were grounded in incredibly common practices. The major themes included:
- Setting unrealistic expectations and then holding grantees accountable for failing to meet impossible targets
- Providing severely restricted funding and refusing to cover key elements like salaries or monitoring and evaluations
- Failing to listen to communities, and instead dictating how funds must be used (often leading to negative unintended consequences)
- Over-burdensome application and reporting requirements, often coupled with a lack of transparency on the part of the funder
- Funders working in silos, supporting pet projects, and funding (and often hiring) exclusively from within their own networks
From the outside, these feel like fairly obvious points. But when we started to probe deeper, to really think about how many of us, and how many peers in the sector we like and respect, have fallen into some or all of these traps at some point in our evolution, it was sobering. Because, as any non-profit leader can tell you, these are incredibly common pitfalls that even well-intentioned funders fall into. They also severely impede non-profit organizations’ ability to be successful.
No one, or virtually no one, intentionally sets out to achieve the worst-case scenario. Yet what this exercise demonstrated so clearly was the extent to which the status quo in philanthropy has perpetuated systems of inequity, ultimately handicapping us, as a field, from achieving the full impact that we have the potential, individually and collectively, to unlock. Because the antidote to almost all these points is to approach funding as a partnership, and to treat grantees as co-collaborators rather than beneficiaries.
Luckily, the tide is changing. Philanthropy rooted in mutual respect, transparency, and long-term partnership is becoming more and more mainstream, and many donors are actively working to apply an equity lens to their giving. This isn’t just good for the sector from a moral lens, it is also far, far more effective. Because the truth is, when you start to approach the organisations you support as true partners, you unlock reservoirs of creativity and collaboration that too often remain untapped.
This is more important now than ever before. At a moment when the entire international development landscape is shifting under our feet, it is imperative that we make smart investments that drive long-term impact. And that is what we do, when we approach grant-making as partnership rather than an act of beneficence. So let’s learn from ‘what not to do,’ and embrace a paradigm of philanthropy that is not only more equitable, but ultimately more effective.
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Jesse Cronan is the co-founder of Daraja Partners.
