A Chronology of Conversations with Foundations About Mapping Grants
The first thing I did was ask questions and listen to foundation staff. Going back to the common theme of program staff being unaware of similar, place-based work being done in their communities, it is almost universal to hear “if only we knew where our colleagues (funding locally) were putting their money, it would make a huge difference in the way we do business”. Clearly, foundation staff understand the gain to be had from shared geographic knowledge of their place-based funding. Over a three year period I heard this from foundation presidents, program directors, and staff in Baltimore, Chicago, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, New York City, New Hampshire, and Vermont. I also heard it from the staff and leadership in three separate grant-makers' associations and two non-profits whose work is foundation effective
I learned that almost all foundation people think that mapping and sharing data on their place-based grant-making is a wonderful idea. They acknowledge that it would help them make better place-based grants, aid collaboration with their colleagues in the field, and demonstrate how transparent they are to their communities, to the press, and to to those involved in governmental oversight.
However, in my experience over the past several years, a surprising and contradictory fact is that the same foundations and foundation people, who express such interest, will almost never voluntarily carry through on mapping and sharing data on their place-based grants. I may be wrong - I hope so - but in years of working on this issue, I've never come across a foundation that consistently maps its place-based grants and shares them with anyone outside of the organization. I've certainly seen isolated cases of shared mapping on single projects and a few cases of internal mapping, but never any mapping of place-based grants that is consistent and consistently shared with anyone outside the organization.
In attempting to encourage foundations to do this mapping and sharing (that they readily acknowledge would be so useful), I heard the following - and variations - many, many times:
we don't have the time,
we can't free up any one to do this work,
we don't have the technical staff we'd need,
our technical people need to make this decision,
we already do that,
we don't make any place-based grants,
a lot of our dollars are re-granted so this doesn't apply to us,
we're already working on a project (usually knowledge management) that will do this for us,
and on a slightly different level,
the media would misuse this information,
people would be upset if they thought we were putting our money in the wrong neighborhoods,
the local non-profits would ask too many questions and be too upset if they weren't funded,
our board would want to know why we aren't putting our money in more distressed areas.
The answers to the first set of objections are easy:
it doesn't take more than a few minutes per grant,
it isn't technical, anyone can learn how to map place-based grants in thirty minutes, and your technical people shouldn't be the ones making this sort of strategic decision,
occasionally requiring a grantee to produce a map or using a service like Foundation Search is not the same as mapping and sharing your place-based grant information,
almost everyone makes some place-based grants,
ask the re-granting agency to do the mapping (it's still grant dollars you should care about),
none of the knowledge management projects I've seen have ever been finished with any shared mapping component in place.
The second set of common objections, which I will address in a following section, I believe reflects a deeper and more difficult problem that goes to the heart of the resistance to mapping and sharing place-based grants data.
Next Steps: Proof of Concept
After consistently hearing the same first set of objections for over a year, I changed tactics, and rather than trying to get foundations to embrace the idea and begin mapping themselves, I volunteered to do the mapping for them at no cost (including mapping of re-granted dollars) to see if that would satisfy their objections. I thought that they would readily embrace the idea once they saw how useful it was and what little strain it put on their time and their budgets.
I chose as my test case of this new strategy, a group of half a dozen foundations in Baltimore who met three time in 2005-2006 to talk with each other about their community development grant-making in the city. I attended two of their meetings in 2006. At both meetings several of the attendees bemoaned the fact that they didn't have a needed comprehensive overview of where the other attending foundations were making community development grants in the city of Baltimore. After both of the meetings, I contacted all of the attendees and offered to map their grants and those of their colleagues at no cost if they'd agree to share the information with each other.
While no one refused the offer, their participation was far from enthusiastic (despite the fact that they were getting what they claimed to need), and in the end, while I was able to map the community development grants of the majority of the foundations and the major re-granting agency, not a single foundation was willing to share the information or make it publicly available. Remember that the only information that wasn't already available in their 990's or their annual reports, was the actual mapping of the locations where the grant dollars were spent (usually just a polygon on a map encompassing a neighborhood in the city). I simply gathered it all together and mapped it onto city of Baltimore.
During the time I was gathering and mapping the data, I was contacted by a journalist writing the weekly philanthropy column for the Wall Street Journal. She'd heard about the mapping project and thought that foundations that were using mapping to improve their grant-making might make a good story. Despite the fact that it was all public data and I'd done all the work at no cost to the foundations, in order to be politic, I felt that I really needed to get agreement from the foundations before I went ahead with any substantive discussion with the journalist.
To my surprise, none of the foundations were comfortable with my continuing any discussions that might lead to a column in a national paper (even when it would reflect positively on them and make them seem more open and transparent in their work).
[Next: Analysis – What Does This Mean?]
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