Modern Grantmaking Writes
Every month we convene to discuss the topic of the article in our next newsletter. We don the blood-red robes of the Ancient Guild of Modern Grantmakers, and climb up to the golden summit of Wellcome’s Endowment. There we wait until the giant eagle known as Due Dil drops the guts of a freshly killed novice grantseeker from its mighty talons. We stare into the viscera until one of us cries, “Of course! Risk Management!”. And then off we go to write it up.
OK, not every detail of this story is 100% accurate. But we do meet monthly to decide what our article should be about and we do have a process for developing and choosing it. Our key rule for choosing the article topic is simple: it always has to contain practical advice that a working grantmaker might be able to use.
As a consequence we’ve researched and shared quite a large volume of practical grantmaking advice since we started this newsletter. We often find ourselves responding to requests for help from grantmakers by pointing them to individual newsletters. A lot of the most useful advice we can share is hiding in the depths of our archive.
We think more grantmakers could benefit from these writings than have been able to so far. So we decided to bring the best of our newsletter articles together in a single free publication which will be out soon. It’s called ‘Modern Grantmaking Writes’.
We’ve clustered together topics under various headings like “Transparency and communication" and “Governance and leadership”. Each article is also a sub-five minute read, so if you had a loo solely dedicated to grantmakers (perish the thought), it’d make ideal reading material.
‘Modern Grantmaking Writes’ will be published on 13 April and it goes without saying we’d love it if friends of Modern Grantmaking would share the news.
