All the latest
Visit us regularly, and find out the latest info on oour grants and applications.
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[This will be our blog (or a link to it).It'll be where we cn do a little thinking aloud. Below is the sort of stuff it might contain.]
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Our ground rules
Grant making is a two-way street. Grantees should be able to expect things of us, as well as vice versa. This is what we will offer them:
• TDT will be an interested funder Eric Thomas was interesting mostly because he was interested – deeply interested in people, in ideas. We’re interested, too, and want to know what our grantees are doing. Our themes are interesting to us, and we want to know what our grantees are doing, and whether we can help beyond funding.
• TDT will be a supportive funder If we’re funding a significant element of a project, that makes it our project as well as grantees’. We genuinely want to support grantees – though of course, as a very small funder with no staff we can’t devote unlimited time to each. But – without interfering – we will genuinely want to know how projects are going.
• Significant funding Significant in what it allows a grantee to do that they wouldn’t be able to do otherwise; significant in the learning they produce; significant for us, too. This doesn’t necessarily mean large grants: a small grant might pay for a specific piece of work that then formed the basis of a larger, more easily fundable project.
• Good-value funding We know William MacAskill’s work on philanthropy; and will follow many of its principles on how to make funding produce the best results.
• Outcomes orientated We want to fund work that has identifiable outcomes and benefits.
Evidencing
We know, from experience of both grant making and grant receiving, the importance of measurements. We also know their limitations: “how do you measure the value of a hug?” someone queried recently: yet there are ways of doing even this. Perhaps more challenging is the issue of “funder bias” in grant reports and research papers: it’s in the interests of neither granter nor grantee to be brutally honest about projects that have gone badly.
We will, with the help of our advisers (see xx), pull together thinking on monitoring and evaluation, impacts and outcomes, and honest reporting, and apply those lessons to what we ask of our grantees. As with applications, we will take a balanced approach, asking grantees for no more evidence than we or they could reasonably expect them to provide.