Below is an excerpt from a recent Nonprofit with Balls blog post, “Time inequity: What it is and why it’s no-good, very-bad,” which accurately captures the motivation for developing our checklist of recommendations to eliminate implicit bias in grantmaking processes. This blog is great, and its author, Vu Le, will be doing the closing plenary of the PEAK Grantmaking (formerly Grant Managers Network) conference this Wednesday at 10:30am-12 pm in Hollywood, CA. (Kelly Brown, director of D5 Coalition, and I will also be doing two back-to-back short talks on DEI in grantmaking, at the PEAK conference, at 3:45 pm and 4:35 pm tomorrow Tuesday, so come join us!)

Funders: We have an unfortunate joke in our sector that that the smaller a grant is, the more irritating and time-consuming the application is. This is hilarious, until we realize that many organizations led by marginalized communities can only access these small grants. I mentioned a while ago about how one of my Executive Director colleagues of color had been on the verge of tears because she had spent over 40 hours writing and rewriting a grant proposal and getting it rejected for the second time. It was for $5,000.

Funders need to be aware that time is not distributed equitably. Many of my colleagues of color who run nonprofits are getting paid part-time but are doing way more work than they’re paid. They often have other jobs. As community leaders, many have community obligations and crises that the rest of us simply don’t have to worry about. Do not waste their limited time. If your grant is less than 10K, it honestly should not be more than a 3-page narrative and one or two attachments. Or even better, just accept a grant proposal that they already spent 30 hours writing for another foundation. Save people the time, and allow them to use it to implement programs and services.

…organizations led by marginalized communities will have less hours in the day—because they tend to have fewer staff and more community obligations—to research your foundation’s priorities, seek support, write the proposal, and rehearse for the site visits. They may not be able to study and play the funding game as well as an organization that has more time in the form of a development team or contract grant-writer. If we want to address injustice, we have to focus on community needs, not simply reward whoever has the most time and resources to prepare the best application.

Donors: …please be aware that many smaller, grassroots organizations, a significant number of which are led by marginalized communities, do not have a development team or even a half-time development person. Which means that they may not be able to send acknowledgements for your gifts as fast, or be able to focus on cultivating a relationship with you as effectively as other organizations. …since leaders of color, leaders with disabilities, etc., may have less time because they have all sorts of other stuff to deal with, please try to be understanding and supportive.

Emphases above are mine.