Last week, I was in Toronto facilitating a conversation on equitable grantmaking with a group of brilliant colleagues, including several funders and impact investment leaders. During the rise of authoritarianism, it is vital for funders to understand what’s at stake and to act accordingly. I reminded the workshop attendees that conservative funders fund five key things: Institutions, politics and politicians, judges and judiciary systems, media and narrative work, and cultural warriors. This is why conservative movements have been running circles around progressives, and the progressive focus on accountability and measuring outcomes in grantmaking only further solidifies this.

But it’s also HOW they fund that makes them effective. I went through this chart, the Equitable Grantmaking Continuum, which anyone here can access. Feel free to print it out and see how your foundation is doing; or if you’re a nonprofit leader or consultant, mail it to your funders, maybe with a severed stuffed unicorn head Godfather-style for particularly egregious ones.

The discussion that ensued about accountability in grantmaking was lively. However, one question a colleague asked has been sticking with me. I’m paraphrasing: “Sorry, but what about accountability? I mean, we can all move toward being Level 3 funders on that Continuum and give general operating grants and 20-year investments and so on, but we need to talk outcomes and accountability, eh?” 

This is a question we hear all the time, and I know colleagues who ask it mean well, but it is truly one of the most annoying questions of all time, and I always have to recall a song my kids learned from a children’s show, Daniel Tiger, to help calm myself down when I hear it: “When you feel so mad that you want to roar, take a deep breath, and count to four.”

Here’s why ideas about accountability in grantmaking are so annoying:

It’s condescending and paternalistic: The assumption behind the question about accountability in grantmaking above is that if nonprofits weren’t forced by funders and donors to write detailed proposals, budgets, and reports at regular intervals, if they were granted unrestricted funds, they too would be unrestricted in their actions and would just run amok like feral children, with no aims or goals, and it would just be chaos and madness. It must be up to funders then to be adults to keep an eye out on these organizations.

Read the full article about "accountability" in grantmaking by Vu Le at Nonprofit AF.