Need vs. prevention: the funding conundrum
Howard Lake | 17 April 2015 | Blogs
Watching Comic Relief the other week, I saw the story of a group of Rwandan women who had contracted HIV during the genocide in the early 90s. Without retroviral drugs few of them would still be here today, but Comic Relief paid for those drugs and gave them their lives back. It was a powerful and moving film, and an incredible story to be able to tell donors – the women in the film were living proof of the lasting effects a gift can make.
[youtube height=”450″ width=”800″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap4lp_ddTdA[/youtube]
Charities are there to help those in need, whatever the nature of that need may be. And charities are generally able to fundraise for people in need because it is only human to respond to their stories. The story of a life in ruins, that is brought back from the brink and transformed completely, is something we will always respond to.
[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]As a grants fundraiser I’ve often been troubled by the fact I can raise funds comparatively easily to help those in acute need, but fail to secure the money required for the project that prevents the tragedy occurring in the first place.[/quote]
But acute need is only ever the tip of the iceberg. The Rwandan women contracted HIV through rape. What lead to that rape was war and gender inequality. Dealing with tribal conflict and societal attitudes to women is far more complicated than prescribing someone with medication. And so it follows that securing funding for a preventative project is a lot harder than securing it for a project that helps those already in the direst circumstances.
As a grants fundraiser I’ve often been troubled by the fact I can raise funds comparatively easily to help those in acute need, but fail to secure the money required for the project that prevents the tragedy occurring in the first place. Medical research and conservation may be exceptions to this. But if you work on educational, social or community projects then the funding for preventative work, or work that improves outcomes for the majority, is much harder to come by.
Helping people ‘in the system’ who are already service users, or would qualify to be by virtue of their level of need, is straightforward enough. But work that is of wider public benefit, including campaigning and awareness-raising, all-important work to change behaviour, is notoriously hard to fund. Securing grants for second-tier organisations is the hardest of all. They do very necessary work, but they’re at one remove from the outcomes at ground level and often struggle to attract funding as a consequence.
If charities are thinking bigger, they’re doing so for a good reason
Many charities don’t just want to respond to need, they want to eradicate it in the first place by dealing with its root causes. Others don’t have a focus on the neediest people but deliver programmes that increase the wellbeing of a wider cross-section of society. The scarcity of grant funding for these things may be no problem for charities with ample unrestricted money from other sources, but many organisations are not in this position.
I believe funders need to do more to help charities make their wider visions a reality, and that there is often a mismatch between what charities require from grant makers and the grants that are actually available. Perhaps funders are daunted by the scale of the challenge and the fact it may require long-term investment. Perhaps they don’t like the levels of risk and experimentation, and the fact that world-changing aspirations don’t always translate into something that easily fits into the boxes on the application form. There may be no neat list of hard outcomes, no straightforward way for the grants officer to write a compelling summary for the board. But if charities are thinking bigger, they’re doing so for a good reason, and funders need to go with them.
Sam Case works in fundraising at Join In (on Facebook and Twitter), an Olympic legacy charity which puts more volunteers into community sport.
Image: prevention is better than cure by Zerbor on Shutterstock.com
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.