Ariel Nessel makes a lot of money, and he wants to give away
as much of it as he can. So late last year, the 39-year-old Dallas real-estate
developer decided to provide a $1,000 grant every day of 2013 and beyond to
support individuals’ small, grass-roots efforts.
Mr. Nessel has long been making regular gifts to charities
that focused on social justice, animal rights, and promoting plant-based diets.
Over the past five years, he says, he gave more than $700,000 in total.
By his mid-30s, however, he found himself longing for a
deeper philanthropic experience.
“I was writing, say, 12 big checks a year, but that form of
being generous didn’t leave me feeling nurtured inside,” says Mr. Nessel. He
wanted to be more directly involved in the causes he cared about, so he thought
he would sell his company and go to work for a charity himself.
However, he says, when he approached nonprofit leaders, they
each responded the same way: It was great that he wanted to help them, but what
they needed most was his money.
So he kept working at his company, making money to give away
and writing the same big checks to the groups he had always supported.
But he also decided to adopt a new and highly personal
approach to giving.
“I thought, instead of giving a few times a year, why not
give every day, and right to the people who are doing the work?” Mr. Nessel
says.
A Grant Maker Blooms
Mr. Nessel turned his idea into a grant-making foundation
called the Pollination Project, with the help of his sister-in-law, Stephanie
Klempner. (She now sits on its board.)
He has pledged to provide enough money from his personal
fortune to pay for the $1,000-grant-a-day approach, plus the salary of Alissa
Hauser, a veteran of traditional nonprofits, who was named executive director.
Mr. Nessel says he plans to provide the money well beyond a year, but he hasn’t
been more specific. The Pollination Project has also attracted a $25,000
donation from a family foundation, though the fund doesn’t want to be named.
Ms. Hauser comes to the Pollination Project after five years
running the Engaged Network, a group she co-founded that seeks to train citizen
activists to be more effective.
In recent months, she and Mr. Nessel made sporadic “beta
test” gifts (two to three each week) to early applicants so the project would
be ready to kick off formally on New Year’s Day. Leah Lamb, a filmmaker,
received the first award of 2013 for her short pro-environmental videos made
for broadcast via social media.
People Power
The decision to give small grants directly to individuals
comes from Mr. Nessel’s belief that “power is no longer with organizations as
much as it is with people.”
He points to the Occupy and Tea Party movements.
“Individuals with passionately held views and values are free to make these
concrete in innovative and creative ways,” he notes. “When you give them
funding to put behind these ideas, it’s a very powerful thing.”
And indeed, the Pollination Project grantees look to be as
different from conventional grant seekers as the foundation itself is from
traditional funds.
In October, the organization’s first “beta test” grant went
to Alex Sandoval, a 17-year-old senior at a Los Angeles high school who last
year organized a performance troupe that gives lively multimedia safe-sex
presentations at high schools throughout the city.
Ms. Sandoval used some of the money to buy props for the
group’s shows and some to have T-shirts made for troupe members to wear while
performing.
“We are technically a school club, and our request for
T-shirt funding was turned down because the design features a condom,” she
says.
Receiving the Pollination Project grant was an enormous boost,
says Ms. Sandoval. “Because we are teens addressing sex, our group is hard for
some people in the school community to support or even acknowledge.”
She says that the Pollination Project’s public investment
gave her group credibility and meant it didn’t have to dumb down performances
to get money.
Seeking Donors
Even though the Pollination Project just started its
grant-a-day project, it’s already seeking to expand by attracting new donors
beyond Mr. Nessel.
One possibility, says Ms. Hauser, is for the foundation to
assemble lists of projects so donors “could look over and pick one to fund,
maybe in honor of a special day like a birthday.”
As it seeks to grow, it is already thinking about ways to
make its process more efficient.
To reduce the costs of assessing how to award each of its
365 grants for the year, it is giving large chunks of money to a few
well-established organizations that can pick the best grass-roots recipients.
One such award went to Youth for Environmental Sanity, a San
Francisco charity, which disbursed a $10,000 grant to 10 people who run
projects in its global network.
Shilpa Jain, the group’s leader, says that the Pollination
Project approach is extremely useful for small projects in developing countries
because the relatively small award will go a long way.
She also praises the organization’s willingness to support a
wide variety of programs.
“Many foundations are so narrow in what they’re willing to
fund, and the reporting requirements can be burdensome,” Ms. Jain says.
Groups like hers, which work with a large number of
nonprofits doing simultaneous small projects in many places, can spend a
disproportionate amount of time documenting expenditures and results, she says.
The only drawback to the Pollination Project’s current
grant-making approach that Ms. Jain sees is that the award amount is
potentially too small to create impact in countries like the United States and
Canada.
Low Profile
Most of the grants will not be disbursed to large groups,
however. The foundation is committed to giving money to individuals, whether
their projects are officially registered as charities or not. (Pollination
issues a Form 1099 to individuals if it awards more than $600 to them in a
calendar year, because a grant not given directly to a charity is taxable
income for most individual recipients.)
The foundation’s board members select grant winners from a
pool of applicants. People who work on projects involving environmental, social
justice, and community health get highest priority.
Anyone can apply directly through the group’s Web site, and
the project is spreading the word about the grants on social media.
But the project has thus far been so low profile in
philanthropy circles that when The Chronicle asked two big grant makers in Mr.
Nessel’s hometown about it, neither the Communities Foundation of Texas or the
Dallas Foundation said it had enough knowledge of the effort to comment.
Trust and Reporting
Mr. Nessel is giving recipients $500 immediately, then the
rest after grantees provide a progress report stating what they have
accomplished.
After that, beneficiaries must file a short report detailing
how they spent the money, their accomplishments, and what they have learned;
photos or a short video of the project in action are also required.
“We are, of course, interested in accountability and
outcomes, but if you require too much measurement, there is a risk of crushing
the very effort you’re attempting to support,” Ms. Hauser says.
“So we are approaching this from, trust the person and
believe they will use the money to make amazing changes.”
Mr. Nessel understands that his checks by themselves are not
enough. “Money is such an underachiever on its own,” he says.
But given at a propitious moment, even a small amount can
“exponentially expand and magnify work that is already being done,” he says.
“We don’t want to build the plane. Our aim is to be the air under its wings, so
it can get liftoff.”
No comments:
Post a Comment