There are no bad grants. Period.

My hope is not that funders remember that, but that they believe it—and then act accordingly.

There’s an interesting phenomenon that takes place when someone says something to you that you often say to others. Last October, I was speaking with Hanh Le as she was preparing to depart her post at the Weissberg Foundation and I was just arriving as the new CEO of PEAK Grantmaking. When she said to me, “there really are no bad grant investments,” I felt the room light up: Did I just hear her say what I also know to be true—what I myself have said again and again?

Our conversation turned naturally to funders’ role in supporting organizations right now—and with urgency. If a funder desires not only to support a program, but to see a nonprofit thriving when the grant term ends, write a bigger check! Cover the full programmatic costs and add a healthy dose of capacity building or general operating support dollars on top. After all, what exactly is stopping you?

I am a Black woman who grew up in Akron, Ohio. From an early age, I learned that there were always people, often friends of my parents or folks from church, who needed us kids to help them “get the word out” about something important. Maybe a family had survived a house fire in which all the children’s clothes and toys had been destroyed, and we were needed to help raise money for the nonprofit assisting  them—typically a small, local organization operating out of unused space at a local church or co-located with another organization like the Y, run primarily by volunteer or people receiving a modest salary of a few thousand dollars (in a time when the average income for a family of four was just above $21,000).

These are the nonprofits, run by and focused on BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities, that have been chronically underfunded for decades. Typical funder perceptions—that a nonprofit needs to “pass” a risk assessment or meet a funder’s “risk tolerance” to receive a grant—reek of misapplied principles. Risk models were not invented to help philanthropy advance their work: They were created for businesses most intent on protecting their profit margins and financial standing.

Read the full article about taking risks in philanthropy by Satonya Fair at PEAK Grantmaking.