Hi Jason. Yeah this makes a lot of sense. I think in general I don’t have a very good sense of how much different people want to provide input into our grantmaking vs defer to LTFF; in practice I think most people want to defer, including the big(ish) donors; our objective is usually to try to be worthy of that trust.
That said, I think we haven’t really broken down the functions as cleanly before; maybe with increased concreteness/precision/clarity donors do in fact have strong opinions about which things they care about more on the margin? I’m interested in hearing more feedback, nonymously and otherwise.
Important caveat: A year or so ago when I floated the idea of earmarking some donations for anonymous vs non-anonymous purposes, someone (I think it was actually you? But I can’t find the comment) rightly pointed out that this is difficult to do in practice because of fungibility concerns (basically if 50% of the money is earmarked “no private donations” there’s nothing stopping us from increasing the anonymous donations in the other 50%). I think a similar issue might arise here, as long as we both have a “general LTFF” fund and specific “ecosystem subfunction” funds.
I don’t think the issue is dispositive, especially if most money eventually goes to the subfunction funds, but it does make the splits more difficult in various ways, both practically and as a matter of communication.
Hi Jason. Yeah this makes a lot of sense. I think in general I don’t have a very good sense of how much different people want to provide input into our grantmaking vs defer to LTFF; in practice I think most people want to defer, including the big(ish) donors; our objective is usually to try to be worthy of that trust.
That said, I think we haven’t really broken down the functions as cleanly before; maybe with increased concreteness/precision/clarity donors do in fact have strong opinions about which things they care about more on the margin? I’m interested in hearing more feedback, nonymously and otherwise.
Important caveat: A year or so ago when I floated the idea of earmarking some donations for anonymous vs non-anonymous purposes, someone (I think it was actually you? But I can’t find the comment) rightly pointed out that this is difficult to do in practice because of fungibility concerns (basically if 50% of the money is earmarked “no private donations” there’s nothing stopping us from increasing the anonymous donations in the other 50%). I think a similar issue might arise here, as long as we both have a “general LTFF” fund and specific “ecosystem subfunction” funds.
I don’t think the issue is dispositive, especially if most money eventually goes to the subfunction funds, but it does make the splits more difficult in various ways, both practically and as a matter of communication.