In the midst of increasing discussions about "accountability" in charitable work, this article poses a fundamental question about the impact of funder requirements on the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations and their ability to achieve justice and equity.
Last week I was in Toronto leading a discussion on “just grants” with a group of brilliant colleagues, including several funders and social investment leaders, and as authoritarian trends rise, it is vital for funders to recognize what is at stake and act based on that understanding.
But the issue is not just about what they give, but also how they give, as this is what makes them more effective; I presented them with this chart known as the “Equitable Grantmaking Continuum,” which is available for everyone here, and anyone can print it and look at where their organization stands on this continuum, and if you are a leader in a nonprofit organization or a consultant, you can also send this to funders, perhaps attaching it – in dark humor – to the head of a stuffed unicorn cut off in the style of The Godfather movie, especially with very blatant cases.
The ensuing dialogue was lively and rich, yet a question posed by one of the colleagues lingered in my mind, and I will rephrase it in meaning: “Excuse me, but what about accountability? I mean, we can all move towards becoming third-level funders on this continuum, providing general operating grants and twenty-year investments, and so on, but we need to talk about results and accountability, right?”
This is a question we hear all the time, and I know that the colleagues who ask it mean well, but it is actually one of the most annoying questions ever; and every time I hear it, I have to recall a song my children learned from the children’s show “Daniel Tiger” to calm myself: “When you feel so mad that you want to roar, take a deep breath, and count to four.”
And here’s why this question is so annoying…
It is condescending and paternalistic at its core; the underlying idea behind this question is that if nonprofit organizations were not forced by funders and donors to write detailed proposals, precise budgets, and regular periodic reports, and if they were given unrestricted funding, their actions would also become unrestrained, and they would act like children left in the woods without controls or goals, and things would slide into chaos and madness, as if funders are the only adults in the room, and they must "monitor" these organizations to keep them in line.
Moreover, it is a question based on a genuine ignorance of how nonprofit organizations operate; most of these organizations and movements have clear results and goals they work towards, written clearly everywhere, including in the grant proposals themselves, and accountability structures already exist in their daily work through mechanisms such as annual reports, formal disclosures, and tax forms or regulatory filings that specify what they have achieved in terms of goals and outcomes and how resources were spent during the year.
Above all, this logic fuels an individualistic, consumer-minded mentality within philanthropy; many funders and donors have been trained to adopt what can be termed the “fragmentation” or “segmentation” of the sector, treating giving as if they were purchasing a specific product off a shelf in a store, expecting to “purchase” specific results that align with their personal priorities, which is why many funders are not satisfied with comprehensive annual reports that outline everything the organization has achieved in terms of results, and instead insist on unique, tailored reports for each grant that detail “what exactly did their funding purchase.”
It programs nonprofits to think small and to move only in incremental steps; accountability, as envisioned by many funders today, is not about how effective the organization is in achieving its mission and vision and advancing justice and equity, but about how well it can adapt to the fluctuating whims and changing requirements of a group of funders and donors, and over time, organizational leaders learn to focus on short-term, easily measurable, easily explainable results in reports, ones that satisfy these whims and requirements, sacrificing in exchange broader visions and more ambitious goals.
All of this is highly destructive and helps to explain why progressive organizations and movements have lagged behind their conservative counterparts for decades; the paternalistic, condescending assumption that nonprofit organizations are inherently untrustworthy and need funders to keep them “accountable” has been a toxic assumption disabling leaders of progressive organizations and movements from fulfilling their roles as they should.
I often use the analogy of a village on fire, where nonprofit organizations are like the firefighters trying to extinguish the fire, while funders and donors provide the necessary funds to purchase water, hoses, fire trucks, pay firefighters salaries, and so on.
However, some funders only want to pay for the water alone, refusing to fund the hoses because – in their view – it falls under the category of “overhead costs,” and some require firefighters to write burdensome funding requests before waiting six to twelve months to provide them with the necessary funds to fight the fires, then asking for detailed reports on how that money was spent, but according to their own templates and using their accounting guide, and many of them provide only short-term funding for fire relief for one year, maybe only two years, so firefighters find themselves in a constant race to seek new funding, meaning that the fires never truly get extinguished but continue to spread.
When asked: why do you force firefighters to go through all these procedures? Many funders and donors respond: “We just want to ensure that everyone is held accountable and achieving results.” The truth is that they are not achieving real accountability, but wasting everyone’s time, including their own, and allowing the fires of questions to continue to spread.
At this stage where everything is at stake, we need donors to provide Multi-Year General Operating Dollars – MYGOD, to grant faster, to increase the amounts they provide, and to remove the barriers they impose on nonprofits, in short: to do with the organizations they support what conservative funders have been doing for decades, and to move beyond those paternalistic and condescending philosophies and act as true partners.
The irony in the excessive focus of progressive funders on the idea of “accountability” is that this very focus reduces accountability because it dissipates time, energy, and resources away from what is essential, which is the collaborative work on addressing deep-rooted structural issues; if the barriers facing firefighters were fewer, they would be more capable of extinguishing the fires, and similarly, if the burdens and constraints imposed on nonprofits were eased, their chances of fulfilling the desired outcomes would increase, and they would be better able to be accountable to the communities they serve, and to the shared vision.
As Daniel Tiger says in one of his children’s songs: carrying heavy things is hard when you try to do it alone, but you become so much stronger when your friends are beside you: nonprofit organizations today are indeed bearing heavy burdens, so be that friend.
Ultimately, this discussion reminds us that building a healthy relationship between funders and nonprofits begins with a deep review of the philosophy of “accountability” itself; true accountability cannot be reduced to forms, tables, and repeated reports but is measured by the capacity of the entire system to remove barriers to fieldwork, enabling leaders to face certain challenges with greater flexibility, speed, and efficiency. The more the funder transforms into a reliable partner providing longer-term and less complex grants, the greater the chances for organizations to achieve broader impacts and to exercise genuine accountability to the communities they serve before any other party.
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