Contextualizing Foundation-Grantee Relations (original) (raw)

A quick scan of the literature might lead one to believe that private foundations are extensively opaque to outsiders and disproportionately powerful in their relationships with grant seeking nonprofits. Issues of foundation transparency and foundation-grantee power sharing are attracting increasing attention throughout the field and in the literature. Opaque practice compounded by unequal power is most certainly confounding to the public's ability to see into charitable intent and activity, as well as to the development of foundation-grantee relations. Many outside of private philanthropy are calling for increased foundation transparency. The public credibility required to maintain favorable public policy (e.g., tax advantages, ability to practice outside the public's watchful eye, perpetuate insider control) and the civic trust needed to act as genuinely effective agents of change seem explicitly related to some level of transparency. Still, some believe the non-public circumstances in which private philanthropy is practiced offer a unique capacity to innovate – to disrupt and improve existing strategies and practices in pursuit of beneficial social change. Private foundations possess unparalleled capacity to resist unwanted outside interference and to make grant decisions with less concern about potential political benefit or consequence. Finally, it is said that private foundations are freer than more public grant making organizations to experiment without potential for damaging their institutional reputations as a consequence failure. Both sides of the foundation transparency discourse offer compelling arguments. Moving beyond a societal perspective on this matter to the matter of foundation-grantee collaboration, both transparency and power sharing are important issues in the development of effective foundation-grantee relations. Non-operating foundations rely extensively upon grantee partners for the executional capacity to pursue charitable objectives. Without grantee partners, foundations would be largely impotent in their efforts to benefit society. Research clearly shows that inter-organizational collaboration, such as effective foundation-grantee relations, demands mutual respect, trust, and perceived value. These three attributes of inter-organizational collaboration are most certainly underscored by mutual commitments to transparency and shared power, which the literature suggests too often fails to exist in private philanthropy. While many grant seeking nonprofits may experience private foundations as inaccessible, opaque, and disproportionately powerful, an examination of 33 private foundations and paired grantees found that there is more to this story. It turns out that private foundations become increasingly transparent and more willingly share power with select grantees under specific circumstances. Under these circumstances, grantees report their experiences with private foundations as especially satisfying and productive. With remarkable consistency, these particular grantees reported that they preferred working with private foundations over other kinds of grant making organizations. Benefits associated with working with private foundations included elevated respect, trust, access to valuable intangible resources beyond funding, and ability to safely engage in risky pursuit of new innovations. In these cases, foundations were experienced as intimately accessible, highly relational, deferential to grantee concerns/interests, and deeply respectful. These reported behaviors are dramatically different than observations typically made about private foundations in the literature. Observations typically reported in the literature are often based upon broad surveys of grant seekers and/or individually