I’m somewhat more skeptical of the grantmaking thing though because there are few enough positions that it is not very legible who is good at it, whether others currently outside the field could do better, etc.
I could be wrong—I can point to specific things from some grantmakers that I thought were particularly good, for instance—but it doesn’t feel to me that it’s the most amenable field for such a program.
(Note that this is low-confidence and I could be wrong—if there are more objective grantmaking skill metrics somewhere I’d be very interested to see more!)
Some trainable things I think would help with grantmaking:
-knowledge of the field you’re making grants in
-making a simple model to predict the expected value of a grant (looking for a theory of change, forecasting the probability of different steps, identifying the range of possible outcomes)
-best practices for identifying early signs a grant won’t be worth funding, to save time, without being super biased against people you don’t know or from a different background to you who eventually could do good work
-giving quality feedback to successful and unsuccessful applicants
-engaging with donors (writing up summaries of why you gave different grants, talking to people who are considering donating through your fund)
-evaluating your grants to learn how closely what really happened matched your model
It doesn’t seem to me obviously less trainable then being a Navy seal
Good point re: Charity Entrepreneurship.
I’m somewhat more skeptical of the grantmaking thing though because there are few enough positions that it is not very legible who is good at it, whether others currently outside the field could do better, etc.
I could be wrong—I can point to specific things from some grantmakers that I thought were particularly good, for instance—but it doesn’t feel to me that it’s the most amenable field for such a program.
(Note that this is low-confidence and I could be wrong—if there are more objective grantmaking skill metrics somewhere I’d be very interested to see more!)
Some trainable things I think would help with grantmaking:
-knowledge of the field you’re making grants in
-making a simple model to predict the expected value of a grant (looking for a theory of change, forecasting the probability of different steps, identifying the range of possible outcomes)
-best practices for identifying early signs a grant won’t be worth funding, to save time, without being super biased against people you don’t know or from a different background to you who eventually could do good work
-giving quality feedback to successful and unsuccessful applicants
-engaging with donors (writing up summaries of why you gave different grants, talking to people who are considering donating through your fund)
-evaluating your grants to learn how closely what really happened matched your model
It doesn’t seem to me obviously less trainable then being a Navy seal