The 2019 âspikeâ you highlight doesnât represent higher overall spending â itâs a quirk of how we record grants on the website.
Each program officer has an annual grantmaking âbudgetâ, which rolls over into the next year if it goes unspent. The CJR budget was a consistent ~$25 million/âyear from 2017 through 2021. If you subtract the Just Impact spin-out at the end of 2021, youâll see that the total grantmaking over that period matches the total budget.
So why does published grantmaking look higher in 2019?
The reason is that our published grants generally âfrontloadâ payment amounts â if weâre making three payments of $3 million in each of 2019, 2020, and 2021, that will appear as a $9 million grant published in 2019.
In the second half of 2019, the CJR team made a number of large, multi-year grants â but payments in future years still came out of their budget for those years, which is why the published totals look lower in 2020 and 2021 (minus Just Impact). Spending against the CJR budget in 2019 was $24 million â slightly under budget.
So the actual picture here is âCJRâs budget was consistent from 2017-2021 until the spin-outâ, not âCJRâs budget spiked in the second half of 2019âł.
AG: Ah, but itâs not higher spending. Because of our accounting practices, itâs rather an increase in future funding commitments. So your chart isnât about âspendingâ itâs about âlocked-in spending commitmentsâ. And in fact, in the next few years, spending-as-recorded goes down because the locked-in-funding is spent.
NS: But why the increase in locked-in funding commitments in 2019. It still seems suspicious, even if marginally less so.
AG: Because we frontload our grants; many of the grants in 2019 were for grantees to use for 2-3 years.
NS: I donât buy that. I know that many of the grants in 2019 were multi-year (frontloaded), but previous grants in the space were not as frontloaded, or not as frontloaded in that volume. So I think there is still something Iâm curious about, even if the mechanistic aspect is more clear to me now.
AG: ÂŻ\_(ă)_/âÂŻ (I donât know what you would say here.)
The 2019 âspikeâ you highlight doesnât represent higher overall spending â itâs a quirk of how we record grants on the website.
Each program officer has an annual grantmaking âbudgetâ, which rolls over into the next year if it goes unspent. The CJR budget was a consistent ~$25 million/âyear from 2017 through 2021. If you subtract the Just Impact spin-out at the end of 2021, youâll see that the total grantmaking over that period matches the total budget.
So why does published grantmaking look higher in 2019?
The reason is that our published grants generally âfrontloadâ payment amounts â if weâre making three payments of $3 million in each of 2019, 2020, and 2021, that will appear as a $9 million grant published in 2019.
In the second half of 2019, the CJR team made a number of large, multi-year grants â but payments in future years still came out of their budget for those years, which is why the published totals look lower in 2020 and 2021 (minus Just Impact). Spending against the CJR budget in 2019 was $24 million â slightly under budget.
So the actual picture here is âCJRâs budget was consistent from 2017-2021 until the spin-outâ, not âCJRâs budget spiked in the second half of 2019âł.
So this doesnât really dissolve my curiosity.
In dialog form, because otherwise this would have been a really long paragraph:
NS: I think that the spike in funding in 2019, right after the GiveWellâs Top Charities Are (Increasingly) Hard to Beat blogpost, is suspicious
AG: Ah, but itâs not higher spending. Because of our accounting practices, itâs rather an increase in future funding commitments. So your chart isnât about âspendingâ itâs about âlocked-in spending commitmentsâ. And in fact, in the next few years, spending-as-recorded goes down because the locked-in-funding is spent.
NS: But why the increase in locked-in funding commitments in 2019. It still seems suspicious, even if marginally less so.
AG: Because we frontload our grants; many of the grants in 2019 were for grantees to use for 2-3 years.
NS: I donât buy that. I know that many of the grants in 2019 were multi-year (frontloaded), but previous grants in the space were not as frontloaded, or not as frontloaded in that volume. So I think there is still something Iâm curious about, even if the mechanistic aspect is more clear to me now.
AG: ÂŻ\_(ă)_/âÂŻ (I donât know what you would say here.)