People often feel an obligation not to delay after they’ve received funding
Thanks for flagging this! As a purely forward-looking matter (not blaming anyone), I’d now like to explicitly push back against any such norm. For comparison: it’s standard in academia for grant-funded projects to begin the following academic year after grant funding is received (so, often 6 months or more).
This delay is necessary because it’s not feasible for universities to drop a planned class at the last minute, after students have already enrolled in it. But independent contractors can have prior commitments too. For someone in that situation, I thinkit would be a great idea to explicitly build into a proposal that its start date would be “X months after confirmation of grant approval”, to allow time for the necessary adjustments. I expect grant-makers would be understanding of such a timeline. (It’s not fair to applicants to expect them to make risky adjustments prior to receiving grant confirmation, after all!) And if the timeline is built into the proposal that they approve, there seems less risk of pressure of any sort (internal or otherwise) to imprudently accelerate.
Thanks for flagging this! As a purely forward-looking matter (not blaming anyone), I’d now like to explicitly push back against any such norm. For comparison: it’s standard in academia for grant-funded projects to begin the following academic year after grant funding is received (so, often 6 months or more).
This delay is necessary because it’s not feasible for universities to drop a planned class at the last minute, after students have already enrolled in it. But independent contractors can have prior commitments too. For someone in that situation, I think it would be a great idea to explicitly build into a proposal that its start date would be “X months after confirmation of grant approval”, to allow time for the necessary adjustments. I expect grant-makers would be understanding of such a timeline. (It’s not fair to applicants to expect them to make risky adjustments prior to receiving grant confirmation, after all!) And if the timeline is built into the proposal that they approve, there seems less risk of pressure of any sort (internal or otherwise) to imprudently accelerate.
I think that would be a big step forward- and it might not even be a change in policy, just something that needs to be said more explicitly.
I don’t think it solves the entire problem, but at a certain point I just need to write my Why Living On Personal Grants Sucks post.