The Open Road Alliance and the Rockefeller Foundation developed a Toolkit which serves as a framework providing guidance to funders on how to implement best practices in risk management, including how to determine their appetite for risk, communicate that tolerance to grantees, incorporate risk in both internal and external discussions throughout the grant cycle, and other actions. The New York Times ran a story, “A Tool Kit for the Donor Eager to Grasp All the Risks of Donation,”  about this work to help funders talk about and manage risk more effectively. My hope is that by having explicit conversations about risk, this will help donors to take on more risk in their grant making, which includes funding smaller, more under-resourced organizations doing innovative work.

The Toolkit includes ten adoptable and adaptable tools that cover a spectrum of practice including how to determine your organizational risk profile and how to integrate specific financial, governance, and other procedural risk management activities into daily philanthropic practice. The tools are designed to be used in total or a la carte. Ultimately, the Toolkit is meant to facilitate and mainstream comprehensive risk management in philanthropy in order to preserve and maximize impact.

The Putnam Consulting Group has put out this new study, “The Road to Achieving Equity: 12 Findings from a Field Scan of Foundations That Are Embracing Equity”:

Over the past few years, equity has emerged as a key issue in American society, described as the “defining issue of our time” by authors and speakers in various fields. In the first half of 2016, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation asked Putnam Consulting Group to conduct a field scan to learn how other foundations are working to incorporate equity — both in their internal operations and in their grantmaking. We conducted 30 conversations with staff leaders at 15 foundations considered by their peers to be on the forefront in embracing equity.

I’ve talked to some grant makers who believe that we should fully fund grant requests, or not fund them at all. However, I spoke with one grantseeker and he felt that he’d rather get something (partial funding), than a deferral to apply later. In part, this is because he said that he’s applying to multiple funders to fund the same project, so it’s not like he’d be relying on any one funder to support the entire proposed project. Also, there’s no guarantee if he were to apply again that he would receive funding, and by the time he reapplies, he’d probably have to develop and submit a completely revised proposal, because the project would be in a different phase of implementation.

Maybe one solution is to offer the partial funding to grant applicants and give them the option to decline the funding now and apply in a later grant cycle? We’ve partially funded several grant requests, and no one has ever turned away the money.

Any thoughts on partial funding? Please share your comments here!