Midy Aponte-Vargas has written one of the clearest statements of philanthropy’s core problem I’ve read this year. The operating-system framing is right. Capacity-as-deficit is right. The argument that more flexible funding is only a gentler version of the old system rather than a new one is right. And coherence — whether an institution’s parts are in honest relationship with its commitments — is a better question. I don’t want to soften any of that. The diagnosis deserves underlining, not qualifying.

I do, however, want to push on the hardest problem that the piece does not quite reach: how capital gets allocated. As I read it, the piece dismantles the old allocation logic with real force, and by way of alternative says, in effect, “fund what already exists in communities and expand what is already proven.” But “already proven” rewards the organizations that are already visible, already legible, already resourced enough to have generated proof. Without more structural reform steps, this is likely to default to funneling money to precisely the well-known institutions the argument is trying to de-center. A critique of legibility cannot rest on “fund what’s proven,” because proof is legibility.

This matters because when you remove an explicit allocation rule and don’t replace it, you don’t get less concentration of power and you don’t shift power. You get more discretion in the current model. And discretion exercised by funders at a distance from the problem is the nub of the existing problem. “Trust the communities” is a disposition, not a mechanism. Absent a mechanism it collapses back into the program officer’s judgment: the status quo with better manners.

So the reset Aponte-Vargas rightly calls for needs a way to move money that is neither the old scorecard nor unaccountable discretion. I’ve spent some time on this. A fictional walk-through is here: a fund that allocates on independently assessed capabilities — defined not by the funder but by all the constituents of the problem together (funders, implementers, community, government) — with the measurement of the problem deliberately separated from the measurement of what organizations do, and with capability scores made public so the whole ecosystem can learn.

Read the full article about capability scoring by David Bonbright at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.