In this episode, I'm offering up another one of my Rants and Reflections. Today's topic: The Nonprofit Nutrition Cycle. Let’s face it: many foundation grants are frozen solid. They are restricted by purpose, program, time, even by line items in the budget. To borrow language from George Overholser’s great article on buying, not building, frozen funds are great for “buying” programs, but are terrible for “building” the very organizations that run the programs.
In a just and effective system, every funder would, at minimum, contribute flexible funding and, at best, intentionally deploy resources to build strong organizations, rather than just selectively buying a piece of one specific program.
Resources
George Overholser's article: https://nff.org/fundamental/nonprofit-growth-capital-report