I’d be interested in more elaboration on what kinds of grants you may evaluate in the future and more generally your place and comparative advantage in the EA grantmaking ecosystem. E.g., should people with ideas get in touch with you? How could you see yourself collaborating with other grantmakers? How did you decide to look into Donational?
Hey Jonas, apologies about the delay in replying here. Much will depend on whether we move forward with the program based on our own internal assessment of its potential and feedback we received from the community, especially those with an interest in grant making and community building via funding projects.
We loosely outline our remit and purpose in the introduction section and our current plan is to help potentially promising projects that would clearly benefit from the “early-stage planning, facilitating networking opportunities, and other as-needed efforts traditionally subsumed under project incubation” that we want to provide. Projects can often use assistance of this sort, and similar to some VC models, we hope that conducting a thorough and transparent evaluation of their program will be helpful to show others for getting funding traction. A perennial issue for existing grant makers is a lack of projects or research that are prepared to execute for one reason or another, and RG would hope to put time and resources into making a project ready and fundable. This role is meant to compliment the existing landscape.
As we mention in the OP, we do not currently fund projects ourselves—our goal is to help improve and recommend worthy projects to existing funders at this point. Given that many of the methods in this report are widely applicable, RG could also investigate and evaluate projects on behalf of existing grant makers or individual funders in cases where our interests align. In this case, were a potential funder interested in looking into a “shovel-ready” or existing project, we could be contracted assess it more thoroughly.
As for sourcing applications, we mention in the Our Process section that Rethink Grants will begin with an in-network approach to sourcing projects, relying on trusted referrals to help us reach out to promising individuals and organizations. If RG continues to conduct evaluations, we then consider projects on a rolling basis. A project that seems potentially cost-effective, run by a high-quality team, and has room for more funding moves forward through our evaluation process. We decided to look into Donational because it appeared to be a high potential project that satisfied these requirements.
I’d be interested in more elaboration on what kinds of grants you may evaluate in the future and more generally your place and comparative advantage in the EA grantmaking ecosystem. E.g., should people with ideas get in touch with you? How could you see yourself collaborating with other grantmakers? How did you decide to look into Donational?
Hey Jonas, apologies about the delay in replying here. Much will depend on whether we move forward with the program based on our own internal assessment of its potential and feedback we received from the community, especially those with an interest in grant making and community building via funding projects.
We loosely outline our remit and purpose in the introduction section and our current plan is to help potentially promising projects that would clearly benefit from the “early-stage planning, facilitating networking opportunities, and other as-needed efforts traditionally subsumed under project incubation” that we want to provide. Projects can often use assistance of this sort, and similar to some VC models, we hope that conducting a thorough and transparent evaluation of their program will be helpful to show others for getting funding traction. A perennial issue for existing grant makers is a lack of projects or research that are prepared to execute for one reason or another, and RG would hope to put time and resources into making a project ready and fundable. This role is meant to compliment the existing landscape.
As we mention in the OP, we do not currently fund projects ourselves—our goal is to help improve and recommend worthy projects to existing funders at this point. Given that many of the methods in this report are widely applicable, RG could also investigate and evaluate projects on behalf of existing grant makers or individual funders in cases where our interests align. In this case, were a potential funder interested in looking into a “shovel-ready” or existing project, we could be contracted assess it more thoroughly.
As for sourcing applications, we mention in the Our Process section that Rethink Grants will begin with an in-network approach to sourcing projects, relying on trusted referrals to help us reach out to promising individuals and organizations. If RG continues to conduct evaluations, we then consider projects on a rolling basis. A project that seems potentially cost-effective, run by a high-quality team, and has room for more funding moves forward through our evaluation process. We decided to look into Donational because it appeared to be a high potential project that satisfied these requirements.