The Gift Economy versus the Strategic Grantmaking Economy

Neighbor helps neighbor. Barn raising, husking bees, passing the hat for someone in need, clothes collected for the poor, "link love" in web 2.0, gratitude, grace, the "bank" of favors given and received, the kindness done years ago that can be called upon in one's own hour of need. If that is the gift ecomomy, what of strategic grantmakers? They give, or grant, but without a web of reciprocity. They measure success as business people or accountants or investors do by the numbers. Are stratetic grantmakers who hold the frontline organizations "accountable," in or out of the gift economy? Are they net positives or net negatives within the economy of love, grace, and gratititude? I know grant-seekers who, in dealing with strategic grant-makers do what employees do when held accountable in a byzantine system of forms, dummy up the paperwork. That kind of dysfunction, where one person far from the front lines insists on the management role, and the other person, closer to the realities of the situation, pretends to be managed, is maybe why we need more of the true gift economy if we are to recover our humanity.

Comments

[Geoff]

How sad and lonely the grantmaker who, understanding the power of reciprocity but feeling alienated in the web of generosity, cannot experience the joy of community that their active participation might bring. The model of philanthropy we are used to divides us into three competing categories: underappreciated donors, exhausted servers and disempowered recipients. Where there is no overlap between these groups and no sense of community between their constituents, money may flow but overall wealth is depleted. The dysfunction you speak of occurs where there is a value-system mismatch between these three groups; the results are lost in translation between value systems. We build the wealth of communities by finding our shared values and participating together to build upon these, as we all share in this increasing wealth. Money may play a part in motivating our participation, but being zero-sum, it cannot measure the resulting shared wealth of the community's web of generosity in which everyone receives by giving.

[Phil Cubeta]

Geoff, your response is quite profound. Maybe it is not always just a value-misalignment. Sometimes it is a methodological mis-alignment. The funder works for a supervisor with several funders who value to the foundation he or she assesses annually. The supervisor works for a Director who reports to a Board of business people. The top down look sees a "business like enterprise run by metrics." The outside in view sees haughty grant-makers operating in a vacuum, being fed bs in pseudo-objective formats by those who want their money. As one social justice grant-seeker said to me. "Our program officer at XYX foundation is 27 and clueless about social justice but wants to hold me accountable, after my 35 years of field building at the national level. She asks me, for example, how many of our constituents fall into various racial categories. We don't know and have no way to easily find out. So we make stuff up and our grant-maker duly notes it on her spreadsheet."

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

Some in the non-profit space may be leading the business sector in this http://blogs.wsj.com/worldbusinessforum/2009/10/07/cultivate-the-creative-class-within-your-companies-or-else/ I did offer this gift to my former employer and it did get a good reception with some of my managers.

These open currency based information systems that we are proposing and building could easily be mined for answers to those sorts of questions as well as the more important ones that more seasoned program managers will want to look at. The possibility of creating metrics for what your network sees as its wealth and works to build in all of its relations and actions, of making even just a few of the key flows visible through data tools and visualizations should be attractive to everyone.

[Phil Cubeta]

Thanks, blogged it.