Grassroots Philanthropy: Field notes of a maverick grantmaker - Bill Somerville with Fred Setterburg

When I began to explore the ‘back story’ of philanthropic decision-making in the early 1990s, I could not understand why so few foundations made small grants, really small grants – say under $5,000. Eventually I began to realize that, despite the strong evidence of the relatively high impact of small grants (especially in developing countries), the high fixed costs of administering grants created a ‘glass floor’ of grant size below which foundations chose not to go.

The underlying reason for the unnecessarily high fixed costs to administer the grants, I realized, was the culture of mistrust that moved organized philanthropy to spend heavily on unnecessary due diligence and pointless monitoring and evaluation.