Funders, stop viewing your tedious and paternalistic requirements as nonprofit "accountability"

Last week, I was in Toronto facilitating a conversation on equitable grantmaking with a group of brilliant colleagues, including several funders and impact investment leaders. During the rise of authoritarianism, it is vital for funders to understand what’s at stake and to act accordingly.

I reminded the workshop attendees that conservative funders fund five key things: Institutions, politics and politicians, judges and judiciary systems, media and narrative work, and cultural warriors. This is why conservative movements have been running circles around progressives.

But it’s also HOW they fund that makes them effective. I went through this chart, the Equitable Grantmaking Continuum, which anyone here can access. Feel free to print it out and see how your foundation is doing; or if you’re a nonprofit leader or consultant, mail it to your funders, maybe with a severed stuffed unicorn head Godfather-style for particularly egregious ones.

The discussion that ensued was lively. However, one question a colleague asked has been sticking with me. I’m paraphrasing: “Sorry, but what about accountability? I mean, we can all move toward being Level 3 funders on that Continuum and give general operating grants and 20-year investments and so on, but we need to talk outcomes and accountability, eh?” 

This is a question we hear all the time, and I know colleagues who ask it mean well, but it is truly one of the most annoying questions of all time, and I always have to recall a song my kids learned from a children’s show, Daniel Tiger, to help calm myself down when I hear it: “When you feel so mad that you want to roar, take a deep breath, and count to four.”

Here’s why it’s so annoying:

It’s condescending and paternalistic: The assumption behind the question above is that if nonprofits weren’t forced by funders and donors to write detailed proposals, budgets, and reports at regular intervals, if they were granted unrestricted funds, they too would be unrestricted in their actions and would just run amok like feral children, with no aims or goals, and it would just be chaos and madness. It must be up to funders then to be adults to keep an eye out on these organizations.

It's based on a lack of understanding of how nonprofits operate: Most nonprofits and movements have outcomes they’re working on that are clearly spelled out everywhere, including in grant proposals. Accountability structures are already built into their operations through mechanisms such as annual reports and formal tax filings where they list what goals and outcomes they accomplished and how they spent funding for the year.

It fosters an individualistic, retail-like mentality embedded in philanthropy: Many funders and donors have been trained to buy into the retailification of the sector I wrote about earlier, where funders and donors believe they can purchase specific outcomes that align with their own priorities. That’s why many funders won’t accept nonprofits’ annual reports which list out all outcomes achieved but require unique snowflake grant reports that details what their grant specifically bought.

It conditions nonprofits to think small and incrementally: “Accountability,” the way many funders currently envision it, is not about how effective nonprofits are in achieving their mission and vision and advance equity and justice, but about how effective they are at conforming to the fickle whims and requirements of various funders and donors. Over time, this trains nonprofit leaders to focus only on the short-term, easily measurable, easy-to-explain outcomes that would satisfy these whims and requirements, foregoing more ambitious visions and goals.  

All of this is incredibly destructive and helps explain why progressive nonprofits and movements have been falling behind conservative ones for decades. The paternalistic, condescending assumption that nonprofits are inherently untrustworthy and need funders to keep them “accountable” has been toxic and preventing progressive nonprofit and movement leaders from doing their work.

I often use the metaphor of a village that’s on fire, and nonprofits are like firefighters trying to put out the flames. Funders and donors provide the funding to purchase water and hoses and firetrucks and pay the firefighters’ salaries, and so on.

Some funders though only want to pay for the water, and not the hose, since they consider the hose to be “overhead.” Others make the firefighters write burdensome applications and wait six to 12 months before giving them money to fight the fires. They require the firefighters to submit reports accounting for how they spend money, but it must be in their reporting format, including their own chart of accounts. Most only provide funding to save houses for one year, maybe two, and the firefighters must constantly scramble for more funding, which means the fires are never put out, and they keep spreading.

And when asked why they keep forcing firefighters to do all these things, funders and donors' response is “Well, we want to make sure everyone is accountable and are achieving outcomes.”

No, what they are doing is wasting everyone’s time, including their own, and allowing the fires of injustice to spread.

With everything on the line now, we need funders and donors to give multi-year general operating dollars (MYGOD), fund faster, give more, remove barriers they impose on nonprofits —basically do what conservative funders have been doing for decades for their grantees. Get over these paternalistic, condescending philosophies and assumptions and act like true partners.

The irony of progressive-leaning funders’ hyper focus on “accountability” is that it lessens accountability, because it diverts time, energy, and resources away from what matters, like working together to solve entrenched systemic issues. If there were fewer barriers in firefighters’ way, they would be MORE effective in putting out the fires.

Similarly, if there were fewer burdens and restrictions in nonprofits’ way, they would be MORE likely to meet outcomes and be more accountable to the communities they’re serving and to the collective vision of a just and equitable future.

As Daniel Tiger sings: "Lifting something heavy/Can be hard to do alone
/But you're much stronger/With your friends than on your own."

Nonprofits are lifting some heavy stuff right now, so be that friend!

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