I want to apologize to directly affected grantees (who’ve already been notified) for the negative surprise here, and for our part in not better anticipating it.
Is more information available about the process and timetable of GV transitioning out of these subareas? Some of word choice here (surprise, not better anticipating) makes it sound like the transition may be too quick.
Part of being a responsible funder working toward fostering a healthy ecosystem is not pulling the rug out on departing grantees too quickly—especially where the change in direction has little or nothing to do with the merits of the grantees’ work, and where the funder’s departure will have significant systemic effects on a subarea. To be clear, I don’t think a funder is obliged to treat its prior funding decisions as some sort of binding precedent. But the funder’s prior actions will have often contributed to the pickle in which the subarea’s actors find themselves, and that usually calls for grace and patience during the exit transition.
I might analogize to the rules for laying off workers in the US; we expect more notice when there is a mass layoff. It makes sense that because the presence of a lot of new jobseekers in the same line of work and geographic area makes life harder for those who lost their job in a mass layoff vs. a isolated/small layoff. So it likely is with grantees as well.
Is more information available about the process and timetable of GV transitioning out of these subareas? Some of word choice here (surprise, not better anticipating) makes it sound like the transition may be too quick.
Part of being a responsible funder working toward fostering a healthy ecosystem is not pulling the rug out on departing grantees too quickly—especially where the change in direction has little or nothing to do with the merits of the grantees’ work, and where the funder’s departure will have significant systemic effects on a subarea. To be clear, I don’t think a funder is obliged to treat its prior funding decisions as some sort of binding precedent. But the funder’s prior actions will have often contributed to the pickle in which the subarea’s actors find themselves, and that usually calls for grace and patience during the exit transition.
I might analogize to the rules for laying off workers in the US; we expect more notice when there is a mass layoff. It makes sense that because the presence of a lot of new jobseekers in the same line of work and geographic area makes life harder for those who lost their job in a mass layoff vs. a isolated/small layoff. So it likely is with grantees as well.