I read an interesting article in The Huffington Post recently by Kathleen P. Enright, the head of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, a non-profit that provides informational resources and other support for grantmakers. In brief, she voiced her dismay at the phenomenon of foundations pulling support from charities once they become too successful at what they do. The foundations' reasoning is that once a charity becomes one of the best at what it does, it can attract funding from other sources and foundations; therefore, the foundations should pull the funding from these "successful" charities and instead direct their support to those charities struggling to survive.
To me this seems like a classic case of losing the plot. Most foundations are not funding charities for the sake of sustaining the charities as ends unto themselves. No charity "deserves" to exist if it is highly ineffective simply because the people who work there are passionate about a cause. Most grantmaking foundations want to fund charitable causes for the sake of the cause through whatever charity can forward that cause most effectively, not fund charities for the sake of the charities. Punishing charities that prove themselves to be highly efficient and effective by pulling their funding amounts to promoting mediocrity in the best case, and failure in the worst case. It communicates the message, "We will reward you with more funding if you do a bad job because we like to feel needed, and punish you and the beneficiaries of your work if you do a good job." This is absurd.
The only exception? If a foundation's primary mission is to fund start-up charities working in an under-represented cause, perhaps the foundations' logic holds. For example, if a charity is working on research to cure an incredibly rare and widely unknown disease, and is one of only a few charities working in this cause, a foundation may want to continue supporting such a charity through years of struggle. If this charity fails, the entire cause is lost, in this case. Once such a charity becomes viable and able to attract a diversity of funding from other sources, this type of foundation's goals for the charity could be said to have been met.
However, for the vast majority of charitable causes this type of foundation mission is a bit "meta" for lack of a better word. For example, there are already hundreds of charities that raise money for breast cancer research. If half of these charities are doing excellent work toward forwarding research in the fight against breast cancer, how much sense does it make for foundations to pull funding from these charities and redirect it to groups that can't get their you-know-what together? Is foundation grantmaking about not hurting the feelings of an incompetent underdog, or is it about actually accomplishing charitable outcomes? Personally, I would rather see a cure for breast cancer, even at the cost of hurting the feelings of passionate, struggling underdogs.
Laurie Styron
Read the Huffington Post article for more insight: