Ford’s Walker in Harvard Business Review: What Foundations Are Missing About Capacity Building
Over the past five years, more and more foundations have come to understand that their nonprofit grantees’ infrastructure needs more love, and more grant money.
Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, has gone so far as to issue this brave statement about Ford’s historical practice of only allowing 10% of their project grants to go to an organization’s core operating costs (and requiring that 90% go directly to the specific service program that was the subject of the grant):
All of us in the nonprofit ecosystem are party to a charade with terrible consequences—… foundations, governments, and donors force nonprofits to submit proposals that do not include the actual costs of the projects we’re funding….At Ford, we have been willing participants in this charade. Our policy of 10 percent overhead on project grants in no way allows for covering the actual costs to administer a project. And to be honest, we’ve known it.”
God love you, Darren Walker...