Every culture and organization has stories that cement the common understanding of its members as to what is important and what is dangerous. At the Foundation, many of these stories are about the difficulty of getting honest feedback from grantees and people who might like to be grantees. One of our former colleagues famously (to us) demonstrated this problem. Sitting in a big conference room at plenary session at a professional meeting, s/he whispered to another staffer, "Watch this. I'm going to ask the stupidest question ever--see what happens." And lo, the speaker on the dais said, "Profound and excellent question...." Simple politeness or the corrosive effect of the power differential between foundations and grantees? How can we know?
In a story of my own from years ago, I recall negotiating a grant with a grantee for whom I have the highest regard. I thought the Foundation should commit some additional funds to the successful project, but that the grantee should also commit to putting in grant applications to other funders down the road. S/he pushed back a bit (unaccountably, I thought), but eventually agreed despite clear misgivings.
Realizing that there was some miscommunication, I asked the grantee to tell me what s/he thought had been agreed. It turned out that the grantee thought that s/he had agreed to submit an NIH application before the proposal was reviewed by the Foundation's board of trustees—only a month away. I was shocked. That wasn't what I wanted, and I certainly knew that such a timeline for a federal application was impossible and likely to be counterproductive. The lesson I took from this was that even in a strong and successful partnership, the power differential could amplify an ordinary misunderstanding into a serious mistake.
These problems in getting honest feedback and maintaining open communication are part of the reason we have once again asked the Center for Effective Philanthropy to survey our grantees. We know that responding requires a big time commitment. We know that some of you may feel that we won't take your feedback seriously or that your feedback may not be truly anonymous. But I assure you that we do take it very seriously and it is anonymous. This survey will include some special questions about our annual grant evaluation process as well as the standard CEP set that allows us to benchmark ourselves against other foundations. We hope that honest and useful feedback about our weaknesses and errors will help us improve.
The effect of the power differential between foundation staff and people in the aging community is a slow erosion of honesty--metaphorically, we could have really bad breath and not even know it. In other posts, I've talked about arrogance as the "black lung" occupational hazard of Foundation work. Please help us find a cure. If you are a grantee, please respond to the survey request you have received by March 16. Prior survey results can be seen at http://www.jhartfound.org/publications.htm. Non-grantees are equally welcome to give feedback, either on this blog, or anonymously here. Although it’s marked Grantee Feedback page, anyone should feel free to use it.