The Fragility of Doing Good

A grant for nonprofit work is an investment, and a proposal is the initial draft of a contractual agreement among the parties. Ryan Meyer and Evan S. Michelson’s thoughtful discussion of grant proposals, “Proposals as Partnerships” (Issues, Spring 2025), highlights the negotiation between those who seek support and the donor providing financial backing for a project.

A lay reader might have benefited by knowing what the authors consider to be successful projects. At the international level, one might think of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which has played a prominent role in dramatically reducing child mortality. In the United States, the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative brought together citizen groups and donors to work with government in the creation of an ambitious network of 124 marine-protected areas in California’s state waters. And the evolution of building codes favoring energy-efficient designs, often advanced by nonprofits, provides many exemplars at the community level.

A project is a process, in which a call for proposals is only an initial step. A proposal written in response, Meyer and Michelson observe, is a boundary object—something whose meaning is interpreted in multiple contexts but which has a significance shared across them. In order for a proposal to be funded, the parties need to articulate shared objectives, which are linked but not the same. (Oddly, the authors do not discuss external reviewers, who are often engaged to assist in the selection of proposals to fund.)

For projects undertaken in dynamic settings, as most are, the proposal may turn out to be dysfunctionally static, committing grantees to courses of action that no longer fit the situation assumed when the proposal was funded. As with change orders in the world of commerce, periodic reports from grantees to funders can record the shifting but shared objectives and schedules of grantees, donor, and their partners. In these ways, the differences in goals and values of donors and grantees can be managed as they move from aspiration to outcomes.

Yet the goals of donors, grantees, and partners necessarily remain in tension. The goals are economic to a degree: Grantees and their partners must be able to pay employees and contractors. But philanthropic projects are not motivated by profit. This means that outcomes are usually difficult to identify in quantitative terms, and the most significant results may be intangible. (The latter can often be said of a successful business as well, of course.) As a consequence, measuring success, even in the relative metric of cost-effectiveness, is a persistent challenge.

A corollary is that the worth of civil society itself remains open to question. The surprising actions taken by the current administration to slash federal funding in areas related—often only distantly—to activities with which it disagrees on political grounds demonstrate the fragility of what most people think of as doing good. Meyer and Michelson’s ideas about how grant proposals can serve as an avenue for institutional change may need to wait, sadly, for a less contentious time.

Kai N. Lee

Working at the intersection of science, sustainability, and community engagement, I read Ryan Meyer and Evan S. Michelson’s essay with great interest. The authors reframe the grant proposal from a transactional chore to a tool for establishing trust, clarity, and shared vision. The Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, where I work, finds this to be true. We use the proposal request process as a mechanism to share power, engage more stakeholders, and surface promising ideas from less-visible applicants, including early career grantees. The process, if properly positioned, provides a tremendous opportunity to find these new stars.

For us, the proposal is the last step, not the first, in engagement with a prospective or established grantee. We avoid an onerous proposal process, which is especially important for small nonprofits or new researchers. If we have done our work leading up to a proposal, consensus is built in on an initiative’s goals, strategies, and budget.

Meyer and Michelson’s reflections on proposals as boundary objects are particularly intriguing. These tools are only as effective as the infrastructures that underlie them. If administrative, legal, and cultural systems in philanthropy and academia are not reformed, we risk reinforcing the very limitations we seek to overcome. In this way, the proposal becomes not just a document, but a test of institutional readiness for collaboration.

This process begins inside foundations. Collaboration must be practiced internally before it can be expected externally. Yet philanthropy often fails in this regard due to operations and strategy misalignment. Siloed workflows, unclear decision authority, and different evaluation criteria contribute to friction. Cross-programmatic processes can either magnify internal tensions or become spaces for integration. When a funder aligns its priorities, and processes, we model the collaboration sought from grantees.

Beyond funders, the full collaborative triad—funder, university, and community—brings essential and equal strengths. Funders bring resources but not always deep field expertise. Universities bring expertise but often from afar. Communities bring urgency and lived experience but limited capacity. All are indispensable but power among them is rarely balanced. Thoughtfully designed proposals can help share—not just deploy—power.

These relationships can be fraught. We have seen cases where a funder’s strategy does not align with a university’s stance, or a community partner takes on issues that make partners uncomfortable. What if the proposal process itself created alignment from the outset—not by avoiding disagreement, but by facilitating shared purpose around complex issues? The proposal could be a structured space to work through controversy by clarifying values, expectations, and areas of principled compromise.

I applaud the authors’ thoughts on innovation: relationship-first funding, community-authored requests for proposals, shared budget authority, and adaptive timelines. These adjustments foster durable, values-driven partnerships. This is not just a practical benefit—it’s an ethical imperative.

Let us begin to see proposals not as vehicles for funding, but as instruments of shared governance, trust building, and institutional reform. That shift in mindset may be what is needed to build the muscle memory for more equitable, enduring, and useful science.

Marilu Hastings

Ryan Meyer and Evan S. Michelson describe how the codevelopment of research proposals between scholars and nonacademic partners offers an opportunity to broaden the aperture for what effective research and research funding can look like. As a researcher who has participated in such collaborative projects, I agree that the codevelopment of proposals is an important, complicated, and ultimately rewarding process that can enhance the real-world impact of academic research.

One of the most important lessons from my experience is that researchers must be willing to cede a significant amount of control over the project at various stages, including proposal development, to maintain a constructive relationship with collaborators. Unlike research carried out by a team in a laboratory or a sole investigator hunched over a laptop, collaborative research projects are complex relationships that can resemble, in some ways, the relationships with friends or family. To keep those relationships healthy, give-and-take is the norm, and dialogue needs to be frequent and honest.

These collaborative projects don’t just happen. As the article describes, they require months or years of trust-building and mutual learning. But time is precious. With tenure clocks ticking for academics and everyday concerns imposing on nonacademics, creating the conditions for collaborations to develop is rarely a priority for funders or potential collaborators.

How can funders, researchers, and nonacademic partners build the connective tissue to make collaborations more frequent and productive? One option would be for funders to support nontraditional convenings of a range of stakeholders. For example, the Resilient Energy Economies initiative, which I help lead, regularly brings together academic researchers with policymakers and economic development practitioners to learn from one another, develop relationships, and lay the groundwork for future collaborative research and policy development.

Another option would be more support for researchers (especially those early in their careers) spending time in the places that their work touches. For example, the Sloan Foundation supported a project about 10 years ago in which I traveled extensively to oil- and gas-producing regions. The research question was relatively narrow, but the time I spent meeting local government officials, industry workers, environmental advocates, and others laid the groundwork for years of continued engagement.

This type of fieldwork would be especially valuable for scholars who do most of their work on a computer screen. Spending time in affected communities where you can learn about the concerns of local residents not only makes it more likely that a collaborative research effort could develop; it also improves research questions and adds nuance to analysis by providing context that can’t be found inside the proverbial Ivory Tower.

As Meyer and Michelson note, some funders and researchers already operate along these lines. In my experience, however, that’s the exception rather than the rule. If we want research to tackle real-world problems more effectively, laying the groundwork for more collaborative research would be a useful step. But it will require a shift in norms and expectations among funders, researchers, and—ultimately—tenure review committees.

Daniel Raimi

Ryan Meyer and Evan S. Michelson’s essay is prescient for our time. In an era where traditional streams of funding for both discovery and solutions sciences are being scrutinized and eliminated, we must seek new, innovative ways to advance and sustain the sciences. As the authors point out, proposals are an opportunity for innovation that catalyzes creative and deep partnerships. Indeed, collaborative partnerships are a must. We can no longer rely on individual efforts and ideas because challenges affecting communities are diverse and complex. Concurrently, community engagement is no longer “nice to have,” but rather is necessary, not simply an add-on to existing proposal ideas.

Authentic, equitable partnerships with communities must begin from collaboration at inception. Typically, writing proposals with communities and other nontraditional partners is arduous. As Meyer and Michelson explain, it involves navigating complex relationships, operational realities, and funder priorities. For effective community engagement to occur, all entities involved need to have time to build trusting relationships and understand each other’s needs. Institutional structures within universities and nontraditional partners can be at odds with one another, further pointing to the need to recalibrate academic institutions to ensure that they maintain high standards while removing unnecessary barriers to outside partnerships. While more funders have developed interdisciplinary calls citing the importance of community engagement, the process could be improved by seeking out boundary-spanning organizations, communities, and academic institutions to provide insight and input about the potential barriers and challenges such interdisciplinarity could have upon successful proposals. The authors state that there is concern that funder calls can impede innovation in the sciences. To mitigate this impediment, interdisciplinary calls for proposals require collaborative input.

The authors discuss some of the issues of equity versus operational realities. While it is admirable to desire equity in these collaborations, interdisciplinary operational realities are challenging to navigate. Rather, understanding each partner’s strengths and weaknesses can ensure a stronger collaboration. From my experience, there certainly is a need for funders to better understand the nuances of what it takes to implement and run an interdisciplinary collaboration—particularly with entities whose structures are very different (e.g., universities vs. community organizations vs. scientific societies)—and the importance of building in project manager support to streamline efforts.

Although there are many higher education institutions, including Meyer’s, experienced in working in and with communities, many more are still not. So as more funder calls seek to involve communities, it is essential that academia evolve rapidly to meet this moment. The urgency is compounded by the additional funding restrictions many institutions are facing and the growing student interest in community-engaged work, such as community science. For interdisciplinary collaborations to work in practice, proposal development should include purposeful time for nontraditional partners and academia to build trust, learn about one another, and develop processes to ensure that science is done with communities so that science remains robust and impactful for humanity.

Natasha Udu-gama