We shook up our Community Grants program to respond to COVID-19

As grantmakers, our daily work is responding to need. But in the back of our minds is “the big one”—a crisis moment when we have to step up and when philanthropy will be more urgent than ever. Maybe it’s a natural disaster or a tragedy in our community, but when we think about it, it’s usually happening at some abstract date in the future.

Maybe a few of us imagined a pandemic. But probably no one imagined one right now. I certainly didn’t, and I know that COVID-19 caught many funders off-guard. 

While it might look different than what we envisioned, this is that moment we have been preparing for. This pandemic is what endowments are for. Isn’t it? Isn’t the money we have sitting aside meant to be used in situations like this—to respond to the need that’s bubbling over in nearly every community across the globe?

In talking with other grantmakers, I’ve heard that sentiment, that this is a time when we really can and should be making a difference. But I’ve also heard some reluctance to spend: what if meeting a pressing need now means being unable to do so in three months?

I, admittedly, worried about that. This crisis is so widespread and overwhelming. It’s impacting nearly every person in every sector, everywhere. Especially for smaller grantmakers, how could we, with our more limited endowments, really make a difference?

The truth is that no one funder can solve the entirety of this crisis. I know we can’t. But what we can do is work quickly to understand the needs we can meet, and meet them as soon as possible. We can work incrementally, with the understanding that some funding is better than none and knowing when we all decide to give, together, we’re stronger and can have a greater impact.

What got me thinking about this were decisions we had to make this year about how to adapt a longstanding Tableau Foundation program. For the past five years, groups of volunteers across Tableau’s global offices have gotten together to decide how to allocate funding to local organizations through our Community Grant program. Last year, we seeded $275,000 across 10 of our offices, where each local volunteer committee decided how to donate the funds in their communities. The idea was that our employees were the most engaged with the priorities and needs of their community, so they should be the ones with the decision-making power to manage our community grantmaking. 

Typically, the Community Grant program is a 12-week process. The local volunteer committees work for several weeks during the summer to meet with local nonprofits, assess needs, and determine if Tableau Foundation grants could make a difference. 

This year, we knew we didn’t have time for business-as-usual. Many of our nonprofit partners across the world have been telling us that they need as much money as possible–not at some future date, with strings attached, but now, with as much flexibility as possible so they can use it to address the most urgent priorities in the communities they serve. Complicating matters, they also told us we can’t take our eye off the long-term strategies we’re supporting - like eliminating malaria or ending homelessness. They said we couldn’t risk losing years of tremendous progress in the fight to eliminate malaria or a decade of progress to end homelessness by redirecting funding from those strategic programs to the urgent needs of COVID-19. It didn’t take long for us to decide what to do.

We decided to listen to our nonprofit partners and trust what they were telling us. Instead of pulling back, we increased the budget of our annual Community Grant program by 172% from last year and condensed the grant process from 12 weeks to three weeks to get the money out the door as quickly as possible. Going through this process in the time of a pandemic, and learning from our incredible employee volunteers drove home for me what the role of grantmakers can be during this time. 

Let the people who understand the need take the lead

Our Community Grants program has always been driven by the idea that our employees around the world know their communities far better than we in the main office could. We have a super-engaged employee base when it comes to local giving and volunteering. We know they have a great familiarity with local organizations and with the unique challenges their communities are facing.

When we decided to focus our Community Grant program on a COVID-19 response, we knew that the employees who live in our Tableau communities could see firsthand how funding could have the greatest impact. We knew they should be the ones making decisions. How this played out underlined for me just how important it can be, as a funder, to get out of our own way and let need dictate where the dollars go. Our money doesn’t make us experts - it makes us enablers. We just have to enable the right people.

Celebrate the surprises

When we began the process of adapting this program for COVID-19, we thought we knew what areas of need might get the most funding, predicting that necessities like food and shelter would be priorities. That indeed held true. But many of our volunteer committees also decided to allocate funding toward another issue being exacerbated by the pandemic: domestic violence. Our core Tableau Foundation team might not have recognized that as an issue—there hasn’t been enough coverage of it, and it’s not an area of focus for us. This fantastic surprise was something that our employees identified as a critical need based on what they heard from their communities. That’s the benefit of trust-based philanthropy—we were able to learn from our colleagues on the ground, and were able to mobilize funding to help in ways the communities needed the most. The priorities were community priorities - not ours. I love that.

Act quickly but thoughtfully

Especially in situations like this, there is value in taking the time to consult with communities and people on the ground to understand priorities. We aren’t the only funder that does this, but each year, we remind ourselves that we must take community engagement very seriously—that’s why it usually takes months for our volunteer groups to make final community grant decisions.

But amid this pandemic, speed in funding allocation is essential. For some grantmakers, this is tough. There’s often a sense when making funding decisions, that speed equals recklessness. And often, it is. Rushing money into a strategic program could create issues if you don’t give yourself enough time to plan and work with your partners. We will certainly think about that as we start to consider long-term solutions to some of the problems created or exacerbated by COVID-19.

But our Community Grants focused on meeting immediate needs based on what we were hearing from our nonprofit partners. We understood that we were alleviating suffering, not investing in long-term strategic impact. That changed our approach.

When dedicating funding to a food bank that is resource-strapped due to increased demand, taking three weeks versus 12 weeks to make a decision does not get us anywhere. It also creates further hardship for the food bank, who must go through the process for process-sake. We learned that when considering our grantmaking process and timing, it was essential to be clear about our funding goals. We had to differentiate grants meant to alleviate suffering from grants focused on strategic outcomes. Doing so allowed us to make decisions quickly. 

Now is not the time for cautious giving

There’s a difference between recklessness and swift decisiveness. In grantmaking, recklessness could look like throwing money at a program that’s likely to fail without taking the time to calculate and assess the risk of doing so. But acting swiftly and with decisiveness could look like deciding very quickly to make a grant to an organization that you trust and whose work you know will make a difference in the community.

Why put a nonprofit you’ve been supporting for several years through a long process for the sake of following your process? Why use a long process to reduce your risk when there’s minimal risk in providing funding to, say, feed people?

We learned that for us, COVID-19 is the time for fast, decisive grantmaking—and a lot of it. I’ve heard some talk in the grantmaking space about taking an approach of “cautious giving,” or rolling back grantmaking for now until we have a clearer sense of the landscape. I would argue that we need to do more, not less, and we need to lean in to and support our trusted nonprofit partners.

And among smaller funders, like Tableau Foundation, there’s another element to this, which is concern that more limited grants won’t be able to do enough to chip away at this enormous need. That couldn’t be further from the truth. We learned from our employee volunteers that there was a genuine impact they could make, even with a $10-$20k grant. 

In Austin, the employees chose to give to an organization called Refugee Services, because they knew that their grant could help 20 families access essentials like food and transit for six months. Here in Seattle, our donation of $10k to FamilyWorks, a local food bank, provided four weeks of meals to the families they’re feeding. These grants are far from addressing the whole scope of the consequences of COVID-19. In both cases, we’re not going to solve poverty or hunger problems in America, but we are helping people suffer less. We also realized that treating a grant meant to alleviate suffering with the same process required for a strategic grant belittles the urgency of the moment for people who are just trying to survive the week. If we are intentionally alleviating suffering, how could we then say that our money isn’t making a difference? We can’t. Every penny makes a difference.

At Tableau Foundation, we’re still figuring out what we can do. We’re grateful for what we learn every day from funders and nonprofits everywhere. And thanks to Tableau employees around the world who worked with us this year, we saw firsthand, when faced with a seemingly impossible set of challenges, how powerful it can be to start by listening and responding with what you can. Even if our grants feel small against this catastrophic backdrop, we learned our actions could make a difference.