by Jen Stevenson Zepeda
As many of you know, Climable is a small (and women-run!) nonprofit. We call what we do “technical translation.” In practice, we are like liaisons that make sure the technical experts, contractors, engineers, etc. are speaking the same language as our community partners and vice versa. This service is valuable…and in demand! With more and more people beginning to understand that we need everyone involved in the just transition to clean energy, it makes sense that our work and our projects are getting more attention.
This brings me to the subject of today’s post. Red tape. Everyone is abuzz with all the funding opportunities that will be coming available in the next few months as a result of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. Serious dollars will be flowing to expedite our transition to clean energy and this is exciting. But, going back to our small nonprofit status, I have to say, I have major beef with the process side of the equation. The big bucks could make a huge difference to organizations like Climable, and by extension, positively impact the communities we serve. (Spoiler: most of the communities we work in have an environmental justice designation.) Yet, the amount of legwork needed for people to produce attractive grant applications is staggering. In fact, a federal or state grant application can be so onerous it often prevents us from even applying. AND, if we were to even secure grant monies, the bureaucratic requirements associated with grant reporting and accounting would crush our lil org.
A few years ago we spearheaded the effort to apply for a major federal cooperative agreement. (Cooperative agreement is like a fancy type of grant where you have to provide some matching funds. Whatever.) It took weeks to pull together the team of applicants and get their billing rates, including overhead and fringe benefits- complicated, time-consuming stuff! We had to track down an accounting firm with experience administering cooperative agreements since we certainly didn’t have that expertise in-house. Our concept paper was encouraged so we spent multiple weeks working 16+ hour days to pull all the paperwork and project narrative together. And we didn’t get that money. If we ran the numbers on how much time we put into that application…actually, I don’t even want to know. Still, I shudder to think what kind of pressure we would have been under if we actually had gotten that grant!!
What I’m trying to say is that the eligibility and compliance requirements associated with federal and many state grants are cumbersome. What does this mean? It effectively ensures that dollars will keep flowing to the big organizations that have the people power to meet the unwieldy reporting and accounting practices associated with these pots of money.
As one of my favorite internet personalities, Vu Le from Nonprofit AF wrote recently, “Equity requires the moving of resources to the communities that are most affected by systemic injustice, and to the organizations led by these communities.” By reinforcing existing funding practices, “then most funding will continue to flow into larger, and thus more likely white-led, nonprofits... That is the complete opposite of equity.” [Emphasis his.]
If the government is committed to Justice40 and if people truly want to bake equity in to start fixing some of our systemic mess, then we need to also shift the way money gets allocated through these new grants. What we and so many other nonprofits do is incredibly valuable. People who control how money is distributed should reconsider the position of orgs like Climable, rethink how the current application process perpetuates the business-as-usual that got us here, and come up with a way to let folks use money where it is most needed, with a LOT less of all this red tape! This is where you come in; we’d like to come up with ideas on how to make these types of funding opportunities more manageable (and thus equitable) for recipients. We’d love to hear your suggestions for reducing the headaches around grant applications and administration. Let us know!