It’s a good time of year for looking back and reflecting… Earlier this year I stepped down from my Executive Director role at Todd Foundation to become an independent consultant. Here is an article I wrote recently about the lessons learned in my 10 years with Todd Foundation. (This was originally published in the December…
Continue reading →The following article was originally published in Australia’s “Generosity” magazine in 2015: What if we gave a $10,000 grant but only $9,000 was received? And what if our $100,000 funding programme delivered only $45,000 of community benefit? We’d probably be outraged. Unfortunately, due to a concept I call “funding burden”, this happens frequently – and…
Continue reading →What is funding burden, you ask? It’s the term I am using for the value of the time community organisations spend applying for and reporting on grants – a value which is often wildly out of proportion to the actual money on offer. This is a concept I have been exploring, developing and blogging about…
Continue reading →(or why we give less than we think) As grant-makers we want to provide accessible funding, select grantees wisely and understand our impact. The way we usually go about this is through contestable funding and robust processes for selection, accountability and sometimes evaluation. All well and good – except for the compliance costs these processes…
Continue reading →