A ‘New New Normal’ for Foundation Giving: 3 Acts That Will Make a Difference

Social distancing is disrupting needed services and creates unexpected sharp declines in revenues for many nonprofit organizations. For those nonprofits, how foundations give money makes a difference, and many foundations are now showing flexibility in their funding practices.

Here are three steps that foundations should take that  “would help address the immediate crisis, enable more organizations to recover, and lay the foundations for more trusting relationships between donors and grantees that will be essential to build the resilience for the next inevitable crisis:” 

• Flip the default by pre-emptively converting all funding to unrestricted, as the Mellon Arts Program did for all expenses incurred from March through May.
• Pay, don’t delay.” many organizations will need to spend the foundation’s money now to survive”
• Create the basis for trust and insight. “Watch grantees channel their resources to the most pressing need without telling the foundation because they fear the consequences, or acknowledge that is going to happen anyway and remove the useless red-tape restrictions.”

Read the full article.

Author: Antony Bugg-Levine, CEO, Nonprofit Finance Fund