I recently met up with a friend who made the magical transition from being the Executive Director of a policy and services organization to being the Executive Director of a family foundation. I say “magical” because this is a fantasy I suspect many EDs have - the opportunity to sit on the other side of the grant proposal. She’s one of the only Executive Directors I know who has done this and who I’ve had the opportunity to talk to about the switch. It couldn’t possibly be as magical as I’ve imagined it to be, could it? Yes, she told me, it was, in fact, every bit as amazing as I had fantasized it to be. The grass is greener on the other side of the fence as it turns out. Dang it.
Why do I share this story of total jealousy? I’m so glad you asked. As I was considering what I wanted my next career step to be after serving as an Executive Director for almost 10 years, top of the list was working for a private or corporate foundation. I imagined there would be so much I could bring to the world of philanthropy, informed by my experience across a variety of organizations and a healthy dose of Vu Le’s snarky and insightful commentary on philanthropy. Foundations would, of course, be clamoring for someone with on-the-ground experience, right?
Since I am not currently working for a foundation, you know where this is going. Now, I will fully acknowledge that there are any number of reasons why I may not have been the right fit for the few foundations for which I applied to work. My issue is actually not with that part of the process. My issue is that most of the foundation roles I looked at didn’t list as a required qualification for roles that are responsible for giving out funds, any actual experience working in the kinds of organizations that would be receiving those funds. It seems to me that such experience would be beneficial – the knowledge of what it's like to spend hours working on a grant proposal to receive $5,000 or how it feels to be on the other side of the power dynamic table or the difficulty of splicing data to meet the specific program interests of a foundation. Silly me. Much more prominent in foundation job descriptions was knowledge of grantmaking processes and experience in marketing. (I’m talking to you, corporate foundations.)
Now, I know this could just be sour grapes – I’m annoyed that I can’t taste the sweet, sweet waters of getting paid to give money to awesome organizations doing vital work in communities and the world. I’m sure there’s some of that. But the bigger issue here is that those who are giving money away are missing an incredible opportunity to have on-the-ground knowledge about the realities of putting that money to work. This isn’t to say that many foundations don’t already have some of this knowledge, nor am I suggesting that institutional philanthropic support is going to waste simply because there is a dearth of first-hand experience working in organizations. But it seems to me that experience delivering programs in social impact organizations should be a baseline requirement for working in professional philanthropy.