Grant Makers Should Act Like Talent Scouts

I recently met William L. Ury, one of the authors of the classic negotiation book Getting to Yes. “I work for a foundation,” I quipped. “We’re all about ‘getting to no!’”

Like all jokes, mine contained a strong grain of all-too-serious truth: In philanthropy we spend most of our time turning things down.

Whatever missions or guidelines a foundation adopts, far more people want money than the foundation has available. After a few years in operation, any foundation finds itself torn between the desire to provide stable financing and a sense of loyalty to its grantees versus the desire to support innovation and strike out in new directions.

As a result, an unspoken but entrenched occupational hazard of philanthropy is that most grant makers structure their work to reflect the vast majority of actions they will be taking: turning down those who seek assistance.

Some grant makers believe that the values of transparency and accessibility require them to set up an open valve for applications, through a “request for proposals” or some other competitive process. Indeed, the tax laws require such a process for making grants to individuals for fellowships or writing projects or other such activities.

Other grant makers, particularly those with larger staffs, favor a “curated” approach in which professional program officers are expected to know their fields and identify the key players in it who deserve support. Some foundations may also permit unsolicited proposals; others don’t.

Both of these systems are effective, and in no way should grant makers do away with them.

But foundation officials also need to realize that such practices lead, inevitably, to an exclusionary mentality.

Like a civics-text chart of “how a bill becomes law,” grant proposals can be stopped at many points along the way, and very few grants emerge through the narrow mouth of the funnel.

Some people in the foundation world think this is how it should be: A grant maker looks for the best and the worthiest, and if the odds of obtaining money are steeper than those of getting into Harvard, so be it.

But should that be the case?

Today’s system seems to have led to predictability in who gets money from foundations: a cast of characters made up of the usual suspects, a heavy concentration of awards to Eastern Seaboard institutions, and, all too often, a lack of racial, gender, and class diversity that suggests that most grants go to those most experienced in grant seeking.

I don’t exempt my own institution, which has been making grants in the United States for 10 years, from this general critique, despite a diverse and top-notch staff, because the problem stems from the way philanthropy is structured.

However, if foundations thought about starting from scratch about how to find the best, most effective, and most innovative of emerging leaders and organizations in the fields they support, what would be the priorities?

Simply put, if grant makers thought of themselves as talent scouts, how might they go about it?

As a start, it makes sense to look at other organizations that place paramount importance on finding creative and impressive people. What does a good editor or art dealer do?

• Keep an open mind. Ursula Nordstrom, a legendary children’s-book editor, made a practice of seeing any writer or illustrator who showed up at her office with a manuscript or portfolio. If she had been less accessible, the world might have been deprived of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon or Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

• Move around a lot. In his 2003 book, Moneyball, Michael Lewis described how baseball recruiters work: “In the scouts’ view, you found a big-league ballplayer by driving 60,000 miles, staying in a hundred crappy motels, and eating god knows how many meals at Denny’s all so you could watch 200 high-school and college baseball games inside of four months, 199 of which were completely meaningless to you,” all for “the one time out of 200 when you would walk into the ballpark, find a seat on the aluminum plank in the fourth row directly behind the catcher, and see something no one else had seen — at least no one who knew the meaning of it.”

• Constantly read, watch, attend events, and talk with a wide range of others with good eyes and ears. When the urban analyst Jane Jacobs died in April, I was struck by a fact about how she came to write The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which was cited in her obituary by The New York Times.

• Ms. Jacobs’ 1958 Fortune article on urban downtowns, the article said, “caught the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, which offered [her] a grant to write about cities. Two grants and three years later, she produced her manuscript [for Death and Life] on the Remington typewriter that she used until her death.”

• Keep a close eye on young people. Last spring, a New York Times article examined the New York art dealer Jack Tilton and his travels to Columbia and Yale Universities to look at the work of promising art students. “As collectors, art fairs, and galleries keep growing, while first-rate artworks for sale decrease,” the article said, “dealers and collectors are scouting the country’s top graduate schools looking for the Warhols of the future.”

In citing these examples from other fields, I’m suggesting we work harder as grant makers to shift our very ways of thinking. If so, we’ll “get to yes” more often for innovative individuals and groups too often accustomed to hearing “no” from foundations.

Gara LaMarche is vice president and director of the U.S. programs at the Open Society Institute, in New York, a foundation established by the financier George Soros.