Social Justice and a Relevant Philanthropic Sector (Part 3)

Miles Wilson is a philanthropic professional with nearly 30 years of experience supporting the U.S. social sector as well as past efforts in Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, and South Africa. Miles’ work has covered a broad spectrum of core social sector activities, and he currently serves as the Deputy Director of Education Grantmaking at Ascendium Education Group. Miles was most recently a Senior Fellow with the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions. This feature,

Social Justice and a Relevant Philanthropic Sector, is the third in a six-part series of blog posts about his experiences in philanthropy. A version of this blog series is running on the Center for Effective Philanthropy website. Access the entire six-part series here. During my career in philanthropy, I have worked for foundations whose grantmaking was almost entirely project support grants as well as those almost entirely general operating support grants. What I recall from those experiences was a high degree of distrust by foundations and unreasonable line-by-line reviews of budgets to determine if costs are appropriate. As a result, nonprofits inevitably felt forced to pad their budgets in places where it would be least noticed knowing that foundation would provide the least amount of grant dollars. However, foundations would hold them to a level of performance that did not match the level of funding. I watched this scenario happen even when foundations only partially funded a project. The foundations that provided almost entirely general operating support tended to put greater focus on initially determining alignment of missions between themselves and the nonprofits. In this case, there was a much clearer sense of partnership and trust between the foundation and nonprofit organizations. I also saw these foundations engage with nonprofits that were funded to ensure that nonprofits had sufficient resources, both financial and non-financial, to succeed in achieving their missions. There is no doubt in my mind that the latter approach produces the greatest benefit to foundations, grantees, and the common issues and constituencies the grantee and foundations seek to impact. The Nonprofit Finance Fund is also deeply concerned with the lack of general operating support and says, “The reality is that non-program dollars are hard to come by, which means that organizations can barely cover ordinary administration and infrastructure costs, let alone use funding to thoughtfully, strategically plan for growth or change.”