Re 2: Mostly “good applicants with good proposals for implementing good project ideas” and “grantmaker capacity to solicit or generate new project ideas”, where the main bottleneck on the second of those isn’t really generating the basic idea but coming up with a more detailed proposal and figuring out who to pitch on it etc.
Re 3: I think I would be happy to evaluate more grant applications and have a correspondingly higher bar. I don’t think that low quality applications make my life as a grantmaker much worse; if you’re reading this, please submit your EAIF application rather than worry that it is not worth our time to evaluate.
Re 4: It varies. Mostly it isn’t that the applicant lacks a specific skill.
Re 5: There are a bunch of things that have to align in order for someone to make a good proposal. There has to be a good project idea, and there has to be someone who would be able to make that work, and they have to know about the idea and apply for funding for it, and they need access to whatever other resources they need. Many of these steps can fail. Eg probably there are people who I’d love to fund to do a particular project, but no-one has had the idea for the project, or someone has had the idea for the project but that person hasn’t heard about it or hasn’t decided that it’s promising, or doesn’t want to try it because they don’t have access to some other resource. I think my current guess is that there are good project ideas that exist, and people who’d be good at doing them, and if we can connect the people to the projects and the required resources we could make some great grants, and I hope to spend more of my time doing this in future.
Re 1: I don’t think I would have granted more
Re 2: Mostly “good applicants with good proposals for implementing good project ideas” and “grantmaker capacity to solicit or generate new project ideas”, where the main bottleneck on the second of those isn’t really generating the basic idea but coming up with a more detailed proposal and figuring out who to pitch on it etc.
Re 3: I think I would be happy to evaluate more grant applications and have a correspondingly higher bar. I don’t think that low quality applications make my life as a grantmaker much worse; if you’re reading this, please submit your EAIF application rather than worry that it is not worth our time to evaluate.
Re 4: It varies. Mostly it isn’t that the applicant lacks a specific skill.
Re 5: There are a bunch of things that have to align in order for someone to make a good proposal. There has to be a good project idea, and there has to be someone who would be able to make that work, and they have to know about the idea and apply for funding for it, and they need access to whatever other resources they need. Many of these steps can fail. Eg probably there are people who I’d love to fund to do a particular project, but no-one has had the idea for the project, or someone has had the idea for the project but that person hasn’t heard about it or hasn’t decided that it’s promising, or doesn’t want to try it because they don’t have access to some other resource. I think my current guess is that there are good project ideas that exist, and people who’d be good at doing them, and if we can connect the people to the projects and the required resources we could make some great grants, and I hope to spend more of my time doing this in future.