Key Lessons: International Grantmaking

• Inform yourself about relevant legal and tax issues. If you decide to fund directly, undertake due diligence on the relevant legal and tax issues in the United States and target country, and set up the processes and timetable to govern your work. Enlist staff and long-term consultants as allies in making sure that things run smoothly administratively, as well as programmatically. As one grants administrator from a private foundation observed, "Generally grants administrators are another set of ears for grantees to answer questions, helping them to understand how to think about reporting, or whatever."
• Give yourself time for research and reflection. Our contributors strongly recommended spending plenty of time to educate yourself, your colleagues, and your board members about the target issues and countries you are interested in funding. The former head of a major European donor center and library told how a new environmental funder got started in Eastern Europe: "What they really wanted to know initially was, what is everybody else doing so that we can find gaps and opportunities to make a mark? They got a grad student to come into the library and sort of camp out for a week or two, then write a full report."
• Clarify the values that guide your grantmaking. A grantmaker at a family foundation explained how the organization's values informed its grantmaking: "We have topical areas - community development, health, economic development - but within these there are hundreds of possible programs. The challenge was to create a screen. We articulated a set of values: local involvement in decisionmaking, informed by local people and bottom-up. That ruled out a lot of things. We realized that we would not be funding outside people who wanted to go into a new community and start new work. We would work with people who had relationships on the ground and were building capacity of local people to solve their own problems. A number of our grants go to NGOs based in the United States, but we fund them only if they are working closely with a community organization abroad."
• Identify institutional and personal constraints. What financial resources, staff time, and personal time will you dedicate to international work? How hands-on do you wish to be? Can your organization manage the program decisions and the legal and tax issues involved in direct grantmaking? Or would it make more sense to work through an intermediary, at least initially?
• Develop ways to help you communicate effectively with grantees and applicants. What is the communications culture in the country or region in which you plan to work, and how might that condition your dealings with grantees? For example, are people most comfortable communicating in face-to-face settings or may some of the work be conducted by phone or e-mail? Might they hesitate to communicate news, especially bad news, in a timely manner? Contributors emphasized the importance of working with grantees to ensure mutual comfort and clarity of expectations regarding how and when you should be in touch.
• Consider a site visit or study tour to a new setting to meet with potential grantees and others. This can provide the kind of crucial information that grantmakers need to back up their funding recommendations. For example, the director of a small family foundation recalled a site visit to a rural community development project in Mexico: "The director was one of those charismatic, spark-plug people, and I could tell that he personally was going to make this work. That day in the office, it was clear that it wasn't a bureaucracy: This was a group of impassioned people."
• Listen carefully to the interests and concerns of local communities. The assistance of experienced consultants can be particularly helpful in coordinating local conversations. Organize meetings to scope the field and for others to get to know you. When exploring a field with potential grantees, remember that your education may cost them time and resources. You may want to reimburse their travel expenses, provide honoraria, offer training, or underwrite groups working on similar issues to network and learn from each other.
• Consider small grants as a way to explore the field. This approach offers opportunities to learn about a field or country, while also giving you a chance to offer timely assistance to promising projects that might not fit within a larger grant.
• Take advantage of the knowledge and connections of local philanthropies. Grantmakers suggest making contact with local donors and donor networks when gathering initial information, and considering a partnership further down the road.