Thanks for the questions! Most of our due diligence happens in the step where the Manifund team decides whether to approve a particular grant; this generally happens after a grant has met its minimum funding bar and the grantee has signed our standard grant agreement (example). At that point, our due diligence usually consists of reviewing their proposal as written for charitable eligibility, as well as a brief online search, looking through the grant recipient’s eg LinkedIn and other web presences to get a sense of who they are. For larger grants on our platform (eg $10k+), we usually have additional confidence that the grant is legitimate coming from the donors or regrantors themselves.
In your specific example, it’s very possible that I personally could have missed cross-verifying your claim of attending Yale (with the likelihood decreasing the larger the grant is for). Part of what’s different about our operations is that we open up the screening process so that anyone on the internet can chime in if they see something amiss; to date we’ve paused two grants (out of ~160) based on concerns raised from others.
I believe we’re classified as a public charity and take on expenditure responsibility for our grants, via the terms of our grant agreement and the status updates we ask for from grantees.
And yes, our general philosophy is that Manifund as a platform is responsible for ensuring that a grant is legitimate under US 501c3 law, while being agnostic about the impact of specific grants—that’s the role of donors and regrantors on our platform.
Thanks for the questions! Most of our due diligence happens in the step where the Manifund team decides whether to approve a particular grant; this generally happens after a grant has met its minimum funding bar and the grantee has signed our standard grant agreement (example). At that point, our due diligence usually consists of reviewing their proposal as written for charitable eligibility, as well as a brief online search, looking through the grant recipient’s eg LinkedIn and other web presences to get a sense of who they are. For larger grants on our platform (eg $10k+), we usually have additional confidence that the grant is legitimate coming from the donors or regrantors themselves.
In your specific example, it’s very possible that I personally could have missed cross-verifying your claim of attending Yale (with the likelihood decreasing the larger the grant is for). Part of what’s different about our operations is that we open up the screening process so that anyone on the internet can chime in if they see something amiss; to date we’ve paused two grants (out of ~160) based on concerns raised from others.
I believe we’re classified as a public charity and take on expenditure responsibility for our grants, via the terms of our grant agreement and the status updates we ask for from grantees.
And yes, our general philosophy is that Manifund as a platform is responsible for ensuring that a grant is legitimate under US 501c3 law, while being agnostic about the impact of specific grants—that’s the role of donors and regrantors on our platform.