Small is Beautiful…Grants, That Is (Part 2)

HowMatters

How Matters

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• Accountability
• Aid effectiveness
• Alternatives
• capacity building
• civil society building
• community ownership
• community participation
• community-based organizations
• evaluation
• foreign aid
• foreign assistance
• funding applications
• grassroots organizations
• International aid
• international development
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• microgrants
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• small grants
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• UN-WOMEN

SmallChange

Thanks to probing, concrete questions from Maryline Penedo, moderator of a virtual discussion on aid effectiveness from a gender perspective sponsored by UN-WOMEN at the end of last year, I was able to better share my experience of alternative small grant mechanisms that directly support community groups. From the inside in, it’s often difficult to describe your own experience, but Maryline helped me to elaborate on the approach used by a family foundation I worked with for many years that was crafting an alternative to business as usual in the aid and philanthropic sectors. I’m gratefully utilizing her questions to create a Q & A format in the second of two posts (see Part 1 here) that attempt to answer the important questions posed by fellow blogger, Dave Algoso, “So what’s that look like? And who, if anyone, has done this well?”
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Q: Could you be more explicit about what you mean by “minimum accountability requirements” necessary [to lower the barrier for local organizations to benefit from funding]?

A: The foundation’s proposal and reporting formats were specifically formulated to break down language and conceptual barriers that often serve to exclude community-based organizations from more typical funding mechanisms.  For example, rather than having to provide abstract objectives and a logframe, organizations were straightforwardly asked to respond to about ten questions such as “What are you trying to achieve?” and “What do you plan to do in this proposal to bring about these changes?” At the reporting stage, the same occurred with such questions as “What were you able to achieve?” and “How do you know if you are making progress on your goals?” Every attempt was made to de-technicalize development jargon and offer questions that were easy to translate in local languages, including financial reporting...
 
Read the full article, including a list of international small grantmkers, at: how-matters.org