Building a $100 Million Proposal and Inviting the World to Listen In

How, exactly, does one assemble a compelling $100 million grant application? A small Detroit nonprofit has set about finding out, and it is inviting the world to follow along.

Civilla works with government agencies and others to reconceive the delivery of public services from the perspective of a user or recipient, an approach known as human-centered design. The nonprofit is producing a podcast detailing its pursuit of the inaugural prize from 100&Change, a unique grant competition announced in June by the MacArthur Foundation.

Civilla co-founder Michael Brennan said the audio series, titled One Billion, serves two purposes: to help the five-person nonprofit think through, and hammer out, a proposal and to make a statement about openness in the grant-making world.

“Let’s be the first organization in America that is applying for this grant to put full transparency on our messiness,” he said of the decision to create a podcast about Civilla’s effort. “On the things we don’t know. On our vulnerabilities. On our weaknesses. On the craziness of trying to navigate the application.”

MacArthur’s 100&Change is open to nonprofit and for-profit organizations around the world. (Individuals cannot apply.) The $100 million grant will be awarded once every three years to support a single proposal to solve a critical world problem.

Civilla’s big idea is to redesign government-benefits forms — long, redundant, and confusing — to make them shorter and easier to fill out. It’s a problem Mr. Brennan has been pondering for a half-dozen years. He carries around a copy of Michigan’s current, 60-page public-benefits application, the longest such form from any state in the country. Civilla had already designed a streamlined version and was pushing Michigan to try it out before MacArthur announced its grant.

Mr. Brennan is a former executive with United Way, where the biggest grant he ever applied for was $27 million from General Motors. But with one in four Americans accessing some form of public assistance, he and his colleagues think that the cumbersome applications are a big problem worthy of a $100 million solution.

“Our view was this wasn’t just a State of Michigan thing,” he said. “You could think about Fafsa [Free Application for Federal Student Aid] forms. You could think about Affordable Care Act [forms]. Veterans Administration forms. You can go down a long list, and you see all across America this opportunity to fundamentally change access to critical services and benefits, bring greater dignity, and bring in better efficiency.”

In one episode of the podcast, Mr. Brennan and his colleagues weigh how to pen a 150-word summary for a big, complicated project.

In another, they wrestle with building a team capable of managing a $100 million grant and executing a world-changing idea. Mulling the movie Ocean’s Eleven, in which George Clooney’s character recruits a crew of highly specialized thieves to rob a Las Vegas casino, they conclude that Civilla also needs to attract best-in-class talent. So Mr. Brennan dials up Michelle Obama.

He gets stymied by the White House operator. But he and his colleagues have better luck with a call to Sarah Stein Greenberg, executive director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. She agrees to join the team and wastes no time pointing out her concerns with the proposal.

Mr. Brennan says several thousand people from about 20 countries have tuned in to One Billion, which is being produced with less than $1,000 worth of equipment.

‘Robust Interest’

Would-be 100&Change entrants have until September 2 to register with MacArthur, and formal applications are due October 3. While declining to put a number on responses so far, Cecilia Conrad, the foundation’s managing director and the 100&Change point person, said the contest has drawn “robust interest” from organizations around the world. Colleges and universities are likely to be prevalent among the list of contestants — Michigan State University is one that confirmed to the Chronicle that it was preparing a proposal.

“One of the things we found is that people are really thinking through what it means to have evidence to back up the solution,” Ms. Conrad said. “That is important to us.”

When the competition was first made public, Ms. Conrad said, there was some misconception that 100&Change was a challenge grant exclusively seeking a brand-new solution. In fact, she said, the foundation welcomes existing solutions to problems that need money to be deployed or scaled up.

She has heard from some groups that do not plan to apply during the inaugural 100&Change cycle but are starting conversations internally with an eye toward submitting a proposal in three years for grant No. 2.

“We have been gratified by the kind of response we have received,” Ms. Conrad said. “One of the goals of this project was to inspire conversation around solutions and I certainly hear a lot of that going on.”

A panel of judges from outside MacArthur, including scientists, economists, human-rights lawyers, and nonprofit leaders, will select 10 semifinalists in December. Those groups will get funding to further explore and advance their ideas, including how to identify critical data to evaluate performance.

Five finalists will be selected in summer 2017. They will make presentations the following fall to the MacArthur board, which will name the winner.

Kicking the Pants of Philanthropy

Greg Miller, co-founder of the California-based OSET Foundation, said his group is seriously considering submitting a 100&Change grant proposal based on its core project — building an adaptable, open-source, elections operating system. The software is to be publicly owned, with the patents held by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. The work coincides with a looming deadline — 43 states are required to update voting machines by 2020, and many are fumbling with how to go about it. Mr. Miller — who a decade ago left a job as a venture capitalist to pursue the work — and his colleagues are already meeting with Washington lawmakers about the technology.

The MacArthur grant offers groups like his a chance to expand their horizons to address big problems, he said. Major infrastructure projects need the same resources and effort of any large-scale undertaking in the for-profit world, Mr. Miller said.

“On balance, I think what MacArthur is doing is really trying to kick pants of a lot of organizations and a lot philanthropists to say, ‘You know what? It is time to start thinking on the scale necessary to innovate in the world in the digital age,’ ” Mr. Miler said.

Mr. Brennan of Civilla, who credited MacArthur for its “courage” in deciding to pursue such an open-ended big bet, said he and his colleagues “know we are a long-shot chance” to win.

But he said the Civilla team hopes, at the very least, that competing for the $100 million grant will accelerate its work.

“For us, over the next 12 months, we want to advance the pilot in a manner that helps not only residents and the State of Michigan but helps other entities across the country reimagine the way they think about providing services and creating access to services.”