Foundation Impact on Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations: The Grantees' Perspective (original) (raw)

A survey of U.S. environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) receiving grants in 2000 from private California foundations allowed the authors to evaluate conflicting claims on the impact of foundation funding on nonprofit grantees. Different from the view of elitist critics that foundations co-opt their grant recipients, these NGO respondents view foundations as mildly constructive across several organizational domains. These results are more consistent with pluralist and resource dependency arguments that view foundation donors as supportive of NGO capacity building. Whether the funding impact is cooptation or capacity building has less to do with NGOs' degree of dependency on philanthropic funds and more with grant types received and their organizational traits. Multiyear programmatic grants are associated with capacity-building, whereas 1-year program grants are associated with cooptation. A simplistic interpretation of elitist theory may underestimate the diversity of motivations among funders and the tremendous administrative costs associated with a rigid supervision of grantees.