Why Grant Makers Should Reject Shiny New Things

Illustration by Maria Mottola

Editor's Note: Lisa wrote this opinion piece for The Chronicle of Philanthropy. You may view the original here.

During the endless days of Zoom meetings that began with pandemic lockdowns, I invented a “philanthrobingo” game to keep me focused on listening. I included often-repeated terms: “build the plane while flying it,” “the new normal,” “Zoom Hollywood squares,” “what brings you joy,” “if you’ve seen one foundation, you’ve seen one foundation,” “Funders want a shiny new object,” “the 30,000 foot view,” and so many more.

The game was better in concept than reality. And even though I made fun of the phrases, I did find myself using them.

The “shiny new object” phrase has stuck around from when I was a grant seeker, and I hear it just as often now that I am on the other side of the table as a grant maker.

As a foundation official, I hear my colleagues mostly using the phrase to disparage other grant makers who change their funding strategies abruptly (or on schedule), leaving their grantees struggling to change their programs or get left behind. I rarely hear anyone talking about their actual desire for a shiny new object.

But I feel that longing. I was raised watching Sesame Street, and I learned to pay attention in two-minute chunks to Muppets that sing. I like engagement and color and entertainment and quick important lessons, and I was always ready to move right from Bert and Elmo on to the Electric Company (I know, I am firmly identifying myself as a Gen Xer).

But the attraction to the shiny new thing isn’t only about attention spans, nor is it generational.

The reason we are attracted to what’s shiny and new is that grant making, when done right, is kind of boring.

If you have a grant-making focus you are committed to and have found grantee partners that you believe in, then the year-after-year work is getting dollars to them. And that can (should?) feel kind of formulaic for foundation staff. It takes years and decades and generations to make the kinds of changes needed to fix our current broken systems, and to imagine and build a better future. That work can’t be done in five-year chunks, even if we want it to be.

My colleagues and I may want to delve into imagining another way, finding other approaches, meeting new leaders, coining new phrases — but we shouldn’t change our grant-making strategies to keep ourselves interested. I, for one, know that I might be able to carve out a great job for myself, but in so doing, I might do a lousy, and harmful, job of advancing justice.

And it is advancing our progress toward racial justice especially that matters as we mark three years since the racial uprising prompted by George Floyd’s murder. A lot of grant makers (and corporations and individuals) increased their financial support for racial-justice work after the protests in the summer of 2020. New funds were created, and new positions added to foundation staffs to focus on equity. Foundations found grantee partners they had never supported before, often small, Black-led movement groups. And for what was usually the first time, they recognized the power and potential in these organizations.

The one-time, three- and five-year commitments that many foundations made in that moment are over or at their halfway mark. Shockingly, we have not ended racism in America — nor made any kind of meaningful dent in the redress that Black Americans are owed. And yet, I am feeling the drumbeat of grant makers getting bored. We spent so many Zoom meetings talking about our DEI policies, went to so many rallies, gave so many standing ovations, taught our board so much about systemic racism. What next?

I think the right answer is that nothing is next. That we need to stick with this work, honor these commitments, for what could be seven generations, not seven years. That’s probably 500 grant cycles. Of reading the same proposals. Or writing the same checks (with increases to keep up with inflation and, where possible, tapping into bigger shares of our assets to distribute more money to the nonprofits we are hoping to help succeed).

If I get to the day that this prospect is too boring, if my desire for a new shiny object is so strong — then I think I need to go find a different way to stay in the fight. And I hope other grant makers will do more to weigh their own desires for constant intellectual stimulation against the potential of philanthropy to support the deep, slow, and important work of making our world a better place.