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| Re: The Conundrum's Conundrum
Posted by Linda Procopio   on 2/3/2009, 5:16 pm, in reply to "The Conundrum's Conundrum"
VIP Poster
In many ways, we as aggressive grantseekers contribute to this trend. Foundations who once accepted competitive grant proposals, are more and more often choosing to give only to a preselected few. Smaller family and corporate foundations are so over-solicited that they retreat to this cost-effective solution, rather than have to hire additional staff to shift through the deluge. With the ready availability of online databases that make it easy to FIND foundation application information, and the ability to use computers to quickly cut-and-paste together Letters of Inquiry and proposals and mail them out to 'anything close', we have all encouraged grantmaking foundations to go the 'preselected' route. I think all grantseekers need to be more selective in who they solicit, or this trend will get worse.
So how do we overcome this trend? There are no easy answers, but I think we all need to respect the hopes and dreams that went into creating these grantmaking foundations, and remember that these people could simply have spent all of their wealth on more lavish living and 'bling'. And so, any sense of entitlement is inappropriate, just as it would be inappropriate for anyone to question where you decided to spend your money. A happy trend is that new foundations are being formed every day, and that although many of them are formed to direct charity to a preselected recipient, others are formed that accept grant proposals. That's why having access to an evolving updated database is still a good investment.
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