Sunday, August 19, 2007

The view from the other side of the fence

We are doing a project for a local foundation, advising them on a grantmaking program within our area of expertise. I cannot possibly count the number of grant proposals I've written over the years. I left so-called "permanent" employment in part to escape having to write any more of them. It becomes so terribly tedious, telling your story over and over again in the pursuit of money. So to read proposals from the other side of the fence, so to speak, is an interesting experience.

The foundation received applications for roughly seven times the amount of money that they have to give away. Our task at this point in the process is to deliver a "long list" of proposals that we think the foundation should read and choose from. We're just talking getting it down by half, leaving the final decisions and some large philosophical choices up to them.

But man, even that is darned hard. I want to keep the really fabulous proposals, because they are, well, fabulous. And I want to keep the basket cases, because they really need the money. But that's already a lot, and in between are a bunch lot that are just fine, really, who am I to say that they don't make the top cut? But I can empathize with these people, I've done their jobs before; quite a few of them are colleagues whom I know and respect. All of the organizations do wonderful, important, inspiring work. A few claim that they will hire our firm to work for them if they get the grant (fortunately, I don't like to work very hard, so that's far less likely to induce bias than you might expect).

I'm not going to make the final decisions here - not even close - but already I have learned that giving away money is a lot harder than it sounds. And then of course I think about how much our government spends in Iraq every day, and for less than one percent of a single day's expenditures on the Iraq War, I could fund every single one of these proposals - fabulous, messy, run-of-the-mill, all of them.

1 comment:

Shelly said...

Well one in seven is about fourteen percent.

The NIH percentage for funding used to be about twenty-five percent but now it is about twelve percent. And I think NSF is even less. I have never been on a funding panel, but I imagine it would be VERY hard.