That’s fair, and I think at a very minimum the messaging toward the activist community could often be a little more charitable. “Although it is challenging to evaluate the impact of your work using our toolkit, we do not think that the level of generalized public support for animal welfare (of the sort we think your work is likely to produce) is currently the limiting factor to achieving more impact. We appreciate that much of the work we currently fund stands on the shoulders of activists who have worked over the past several decades, and we do not intend our allocation of very limited marginal funding to suggest otherwise.”
While I ostensibly agree regarding the activist community, I think this problem is probably not unique to activism vs. interventions that ‘tip the scales’ after it had been done. Many systems have interdependent parts, some of which are easier to measure than others.
That’s fair, and I think at a very minimum the messaging toward the activist community could often be a little more charitable. “Although it is challenging to evaluate the impact of your work using our toolkit, we do not think that the level of generalized public support for animal welfare (of the sort we think your work is likely to produce) is currently the limiting factor to achieving more impact. We appreciate that much of the work we currently fund stands on the shoulders of activists who have worked over the past several decades, and we do not intend our allocation of very limited marginal funding to suggest otherwise.”
While I ostensibly agree regarding the activist community, I think this problem is probably not unique to activism vs. interventions that ‘tip the scales’ after it had been done. Many systems have interdependent parts, some of which are easier to measure than others.