Welcome to our new blog. Our first is a discussion about what Melinda Tuan called “the dance of deceit” that is so common between private foundations and non-profits. David works at a large private foundation in the Bay Area and would like to have more honest conversations with non-profits.

We all seem to get that social change is complex and depends on infinite variables, most of which we can’t control. But then when a program officer and a director of an organization sit down to discuss the progress of a grant, it’s like we suspend disbelief in order to let the fiction go on. We often talk about metrics as if they’re meaningful, as if they’re some sort of test score, when usually they’re just numbers on a spreadsheet with only the loosest connection to what actually matters. Speaking from the perspective of a program officer, I find it frustrating. But for a grantee, with all the power dynamics inherent in being dependent on foundation funding, it must be totally maddening.

Read the source article at medium.com