I think this will vary a lot depending on what kind of work you’re aiming to do, but I could imagine a training programme for e.g. promising young grantmakers being very helpful
Charity Entrepreneurship tries to do this for entrepreneurs
Adding to that, Lucia Coulter of the Lead Exposure Elimination Project had high praise for Charity Entrepreneurship when I interviewed her:
Charity Entrepreneurship has [...] made a big difference – their support from the incubation program to now has helped with pretty much every aspect of our work. [...] Firstly they provided a two-month full-time incubation program, which I went through (remotely) in the summer 2020. This was where I decided to work on lead exposure (which was an idea researched and recommended by Charity Entrepreneurship), where I paired up with my co-founder Jack, and from where we received our initial seed grant. During the program we learnt a huge amount of extremely relevant and practical material – for example, how to make a cost-effectiveness analysis, how to make a six-month plan, how to develop a monitoring and evaluation strategy, how to hire, and a lot more. Since then Charity Entrepreneurship has provided LEEP with weekly mentoring and wider support through the community of staff, previous incubatees, and advisors. I highly recommend checking out the Charity Entrepreneurship incubation program if anyone is interested!
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
I think this will vary a lot depending on what kind of work you’re aiming to do, but I could imagine a training programme for e.g. promising young grantmakers being very helpful
Charity Entrepreneurship tries to do this for entrepreneurs
Adding to that, Lucia Coulter of the Lead Exposure Elimination Project had high praise for Charity Entrepreneurship when I interviewed her:
(emphasis mine; source)
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