Joy Comes to Grant Seeking
My clients are beyond the start-up phase. They have some strong results and are ready to grow. So, I love finding a foundation executive who understands that next-stage nonprofit and integrates its needs into the grant making.
Dr. Carmen Rojas, President and CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, is squarely on my radar. Her approach to philanthropy and her candor about it are exhilarating. Even if your organization is not eligible for Casey funding, you’ll want to hear where her foundation is going.
A Radical Change
When you hear Dr. Rojas talk about the changes since her arrival at Casey in May 2020, it becomes clear that she is among the philanthropy executives who has led a grant-funded organization herself. In an interview, she cited a list of traditional foundation practices that have “undermined the durability” of nonprofits:
The contingency within which we do our grant making—the year to year, the project-specific support, the undue burden of reporting, and the desire for attribution and ‘victories’—has made it so that leaders in nonprofits don’t have the room to take risks, imagine, and build institutions. They are so burdened and are so focused on putting out fires that they haven’t had the resources needed for durability.
In response, her foundation now makes unrestricted awards for up to five years. It funds nonprofits with budgets under $5 million at 25% of annual operating expenses. Dr. Rojas sees it as Casey’s work to find another 25% in support of its grantees.
Cue the applause.
Here is a funder who understands what it takes to seed long-term nonprofit health. It’s not just the funding. It’s the lack of restrictions, the multi-year potential, and the commitment to a deep partnership.
On Major Grants
In her last position, Dr. Rojas led an organization that was seeded with a $5 million gift. That money changed everything for her, “I had an infinite amount of oxygen. For the first two-and-a-half years, my imagination was running wild.”
When she arrived at the Foundation, she found 380 grantees with budgets from $500,000 to $15 million. All of them received grants of $100,000.
She knows what it’s like to feed the nonprofit grants pipeline, “Smaller money is not more oxygen. It tends to be more work.” Hence, Casey’s move toward major grants—relative to the overall budget—and the drive to bring in other investors. This is exactly the kind of partner I like to bring to clients: one that not only shows empathy but acts on it.
Getting on the Radar—and Equity
There’s one catch. Casey does not accept unsolicited proposals.
Staff is regularly on the lookout for candidates. Employees read, research, and talk to grantees and partners about who is doing good work.
Every foundation will have its own way of defining that good work. For Dr. Rojas, “I fundamentally believe that philanthropy’s role is not to take the place of government, but instead to support the experimentation necessary to create meaningful examples of what it looks like to make people’s lives better.”
Just because Casey funds leaders who are on the front lines, she says, doesn’t free it from the fact that it is selecting grantees. “That feels like an important truth that we need to tell—that we are still choosing.”
Breaking Down the Mystery
If your ability to submit a proposal feels out of reach, Dr. Rojas makes sure that she and her staff are not. “I respond to every single email I get…We have a commitment within a week to get back to you.”
Before you hit send on your email to Casey or any other philanthropy, look closely at eligibility guidelines. Staff at most foundations talk of inboxes filled with wildly ineligible requests. This Foundation is clear about its priorities: grassroots organizing in the U.S. South and Midwest.
Says Dr. Rojas, “Send us an email and we will respond, but it’s not often going to be the thing that you want [to hear].”
Activist Grant Seeking
If your nonprofit doesn’t meet Casey’s guidelines, you can advocate for more foundations to evolve in its mold:
Tell your grant makers what they do that makes your nonprofit a more efficient, effective change maker.
Where you have trusting relationships with funders, discuss the foundation landscape and what has deepened your partnerships, streamlined the work, or inspired you.
Use social media to share a positive experience with a foundation or your hopes for philanthropy’s next act.
Casey’s actions reflect its CEO’s fundamental understanding of her job:
I want to fund leaders who can keep as many people alive in this horrible, hard time and can plant the seeds for a possible future that is so much more dignified and hopeful and loving and representative than where we are right now.
I’m rooting for anyone determined to do all that, while making life a little simpler for those working to make the change.