There are only so many dollars. Eventually, somebody has to decide.
I read forty-two pages of somebody’s biggest dream today and gave it a two.
I keep my own scoring system when I review grant applications. Nobody asked me to. I started doing it while working as a federal grant reviewer, and it’s the only way I make sense of stacks where almost everything deserves funding, and only some of it gets it.
Someone hands you their plan for making a corner of the world better. The after-school program. The youth mentors. A budget line for snacks, because they know the kids won’t show up hungry and stay.
Then you decide how good it is.
Four years in, I thought I’d be more detached by now.
Last month I reviewed a proposal for a grief program for teenagers. One line said some of the kids had lost someone. Never once said the word died.
I stopped reading.
It wasn’t an outcome or a persuasive piece of grant writing. Just a small, terrible human detail sitting in the middle of a form.
Then I kept reading, because the budget still needed a number.
That’s the strange thing about reviewing grants and giving away money for a living. You’re allowed to be moved. You just can’t let being moved make the decision.
A heartbreaking story doesn’t fix a bad budget. Good intentions don’t create organizational capacity. An organization can be doing genuinely important work and still not be the best place for the next dollar.
People outside philanthropy don’t always get how rarely the choice is between something worthy and something unworthy. It’s between worthy and worthy.
A food pantry can need the money. So can the program keeping teenagers occupied until their mothers get home from work. So can the woman trying to keep an 82-year-old in his own apartment instead of a nursing home.
Now rank them.
That’s where the language gets strange. Impact. Outcomes. Cost per participant. Sustainability. All useful. All necessary. Also a remarkably clinical vocabulary for talking about whether somebody gets to eat.
There are only so many dollars. That’s the fact sitting under every scoring rubric, every strategy meeting, every moment somebody finally says, “What if we funded them at a lower amount?” Scarcity doesn’t disappear because everyone in the room has good intentions.
So you learn to look past the part of the application that makes your chest hurt. Check the numbers. Ask whether they’ve done what they said they’d do before. Notice when an organization wants you to pay for something another funder already covers. Wonder what happens the day the grant ends.
And sometimes you recommend no.
That was harder when I first started. I came from the other side. I knew what it meant to need the grant, to stay up late moving sentences around, trying to make a program sound on paper as necessary as it felt standing inside it.
Now I’m the one reading it. Some days that feels like power. Other days it feels like being handed somebody else’s hope and told to use it efficiently.
The grief program had strong outcomes. The budget made sense. The organization knew what it was doing.
I gave it a nine.
Then I opened the next application.