I don’t have the specific grant agreement in front of me and feel somewhat uncomfortable disclosing more information about this application before running the request by the grantees. I’m happy to share the following thoughts, which I believe address most of your questions but I’m sorry if you are mostly interested in this specific case as opposed to the more general situation.
For all grants, we have grantees sign a grant agreement that outlines the purpose and use of the grant, record-keeping requirements, monitoring, prohibited use, situations where we are entitled to recover the grant, limitation of liability etc.
Grantees submit progress reports every six months; these are useful inputs in evaluating future grants to the grant recipient. We are figuring out how to provide more accountability to speculative projects, but we will likely (for some projects) have more intensive check-ins. We’ve been experimenting with hosting office hours for current grantees, and some have used it to update us on their progress and get feedback (though the calls are for whatever use the grantee would find most helpful).
There was no staged payment schedule for this grant. We have done this in the past, and it might have been good to do this in this case—but at the time the grant was made, there were substantial resources for longtermist grantmaking. I don’t think that this grant would be above our current bar. If we were to make a similar grant to it again, then we’d likely try and tie payouts to concrete criteria (and I am in several discussions with applicants where we are trying to figure out what the criteria should be, but it’s worth noting that it’s a lot of effort—it could easily double the normal time taken to evaluate an application) and it’s somewhat unclear whether it’s worth the cost, but at least right now I am excited about doing more of this work.
I’m not sure about clawing back money. We often include unsatisfactory progress as a condition for clawback in grant agreements—but I’m nervous about exercising this without clear, upfront, mutually agreed definitions of satisfactory progress. I am much more comfortable exercising clawback options when grantees have used the grant “for purposes other than those for which they have been awarded”. Grantees often check in with me about repurposing their grant or looking to return funding when they feel they have underperformed or would like to end the project early.
I am much more comfortable exercising clawback options when grantees have used the grant “for purposes other than those for which they have been awarded”.
For a grant of this nature, where the grantee does not produce the work product envisioned by the grant, I’d at least want to see that the grantee had devoted an appropriate amount of time to attempting to complete the grant. Here, that might be something like 0.4-0.5 FTE-years (somewhat making up a number here). To the extent that the grantee both did not produce the output and did not spend enough time attempting to do so in light of the grant amount, then I would view that as ~ using the grant for unauthorized purposes.
That isn’t the best possible system, but at least it is low cost and promotes donor confidence (insofar as it at least should ensure that the grantee made an honest effort and didn’t slack off / enrich themselves).
That makes sense. I currently believe that the grantee did honour their commitment re hours spent on this project, and if I came to believe otherwise I would be much more inclined to claw back funding.
(You didn’t explicitly make this claim, but I’d like to push back somewhat on people with unsuccessful longtermist projects “slacking off”. In general, my impression from speaking to grantees (including those with failed projects) is that they are overworked rather than underworked relative to “normal jobs” that pay similarly or are similarly challenging/selective.)
I don’t have the specific grant agreement in front of me and feel somewhat uncomfortable disclosing more information about this application before running the request by the grantees. I’m happy to share the following thoughts, which I believe address most of your questions but I’m sorry if you are mostly interested in this specific case as opposed to the more general situation.
For all grants, we have grantees sign a grant agreement that outlines the purpose and use of the grant, record-keeping requirements, monitoring, prohibited use, situations where we are entitled to recover the grant, limitation of liability etc.
Grantees submit progress reports every six months; these are useful inputs in evaluating future grants to the grant recipient. We are figuring out how to provide more accountability to speculative projects, but we will likely (for some projects) have more intensive check-ins. We’ve been experimenting with hosting office hours for current grantees, and some have used it to update us on their progress and get feedback (though the calls are for whatever use the grantee would find most helpful).
There was no staged payment schedule for this grant. We have done this in the past, and it might have been good to do this in this case—but at the time the grant was made, there were substantial resources for longtermist grantmaking. I don’t think that this grant would be above our current bar. If we were to make a similar grant to it again, then we’d likely try and tie payouts to concrete criteria (and I am in several discussions with applicants where we are trying to figure out what the criteria should be, but it’s worth noting that it’s a lot of effort—it could easily double the normal time taken to evaluate an application) and it’s somewhat unclear whether it’s worth the cost, but at least right now I am excited about doing more of this work.
I’m not sure about clawing back money. We often include unsatisfactory progress as a condition for clawback in grant agreements—but I’m nervous about exercising this without clear, upfront, mutually agreed definitions of satisfactory progress. I am much more comfortable exercising clawback options when grantees have used the grant “for purposes other than those for which they have been awarded”. Grantees often check in with me about repurposing their grant or looking to return funding when they feel they have underperformed or would like to end the project early.
For a grant of this nature, where the grantee does not produce the work product envisioned by the grant, I’d at least want to see that the grantee had devoted an appropriate amount of time to attempting to complete the grant. Here, that might be something like 0.4-0.5 FTE-years (somewhat making up a number here). To the extent that the grantee both did not produce the output and did not spend enough time attempting to do so in light of the grant amount, then I would view that as ~ using the grant for unauthorized purposes.
That isn’t the best possible system, but at least it is low cost and promotes donor confidence (insofar as it at least should ensure that the grantee made an honest effort and didn’t slack off / enrich themselves).
That makes sense. I currently believe that the grantee did honour their commitment re hours spent on this project, and if I came to believe otherwise I would be much more inclined to claw back funding.
(You didn’t explicitly make this claim, but I’d like to push back somewhat on people with unsuccessful longtermist projects “slacking off”. In general, my impression from speaking to grantees (including those with failed projects) is that they are overworked rather than underworked relative to “normal jobs” that pay similarly or are similarly challenging/selective.)