MacKenzie Scott has revolutionized philanthropy and the civil society and development sector by rapidly awarding more large grants faster than any other philanthropist: almost 1,600 grants totaling more than $14 billion since 2020. Among the recipients are more than 220 organizations operating globally, half of which are based outside the United States.
Scott’s windfall grants have few or no strings attached and center on race, gender, equity, and localized decision-making. We’ve looked at the impact of these grants with the ambition to share lessons with other windfall gift recipients and to inspire other funders on how to localize, decentralize, and shift power from elite corridors of development aid to the community level.
Even as the philanthropic funding discourse is gradually shifting toward localized and decentralized decision-making, funding practice hasn’t kept up. The choices, experiences, and reflections of Scott’s global grant recipients provide valuable insights to understand where global development aid has fallen short and how to improve philanthropy in order to advance systems change.
This is why Panorama Global launched the Collaborative Learning from Impact Philanthropy, CLIP, initiative, which includes several peer learning cohorts designed for Scott grant recipients at their request.
The pilot cohort, which ran from May to November 2022, included 22 global development and human rights organizations based in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the U.S. These organizations work in agriculture, civic engagement, community-led development, access to education and health, gender equity, legal empowerment, and poverty alleviation. The Scott grants provide them with breathing room, flexibility to make strategic choices, and the opportunity to focus on systems change work.
“Where Scott grant recipients chose to spend their unrestricted grants offers clues about the areas of global development that have historically been underfunded.”
—Here are some deeper insights from our pilot cohort of Scott grant recipients for the global development sector:
Global development organizations are redefining scale to decentralize and localize decision-making
Global recipient organizations are redefining the notion of scale and increasing impact by reaching more people in ways that give communities greater agency. This shift in the locus of decision-making is critical.
As one organization put it, "We should be building local organizations because they will be there longer than us and will have more credibility." They are tackling questions of power head-on by:
• Building local leadership and capacity.
• Scaling community mobilization.
• Decentralizing boards and staff.
• Exploring clustering/regional hubs rather than centralized headquarters.
For some, scale has meant closely partnering with governments to enhance their capacity to support community-led efforts and leverage the potential that already exists locally. While many donors want scale, few offer space to experiment and learn or to deepen community impact. And even fewer support organizations to restructure and shift control closer to the communities they support.
Donors can follow the money to see where global development aid has fallen short
Where Scott grant recipients chose to spend their unrestricted grants offers clues about the areas of global development that have historically been underfunded. The organizations invested in their sustainability put the grants toward areas such as programmatic innovation, operations and infrastructure, reserves, salaries, new recruitment, and staff and leadership development. This highlights the need to give organizations the freedom to build muscle for resilience, as they see fit.
For global south organizations in the cohort that had rarely received unrestricted funds, using this grant to build stronger, more flexible and more diverse revenue streams was a top priority.
Additionally, the funds were used to invest in systems that would outlast the founding leaders and teams. We learned that organizations navigated tough decisions around saving vs. spending — balancing the need to create financial sustainability vehicles, such as endowments and setting funds aside for innovation, alongside urgent spending to attend to growing needs amid the pandemic.
Windfall grants elevate entire ecosystems
A large, unrestricted grant can shift an organization’s position — providing greater visibility, more opportunities to influence the field’s direction, and greater legitimacy with donors. However, in a field already torn apart by competition and a scarcity mindset, this can create tensions between those that received Scott grants and others that didn’t. To address this, cohort members used their Scott grant to elevate their entire fields, by prioritizing collaborations with peers and strengthening capacities among their communities.
This can include advocacy to push a cause forward, convening peers for knowledge exchange, introducing new funders to locally based peers, and organizing to regrant to more grassroots organizations. The unrestricted grants offered organizations space to learn and experiment — lessons that can be shared to uplift an entire field.
Global south organizations proved they can deliver — and shifted the narrative
While a windfall grant can boost organizational legitimacy, organizations and donors must intentionally craft a strategic message around organizational impact and priorities. Otherwise, the windfall gift can take the limelight, shifting the prevailing narrative to become that these organizations no longer need donor funding, which is problematic and erroneous.
Several global south recipients used the grant to hone the message that they are the experts and could stop working as subcontractors on the ground under the large INGOs that otherwise often get the big grants.
Organizations focus on staff and organizational culture to increase impact
Large global development organizations adopted remote and distributed approaches to staffing long before the pandemic. In the last few years, they have ramped up attention to organizational culture and health to achieve maximum organizational impact. Many of the cohort organizations experienced rapid growth related to the grant, which in some cases was accompanied by growing pains and staff burnout.
They addressed these challenges through:
• People-centered measures for recruitment and staff wellness, training, and retention.
• Documenting their founding principles and values.
• Intentionally communicating about evolving organizational norms in both directions between leadership and staff.
• Creating space for fostering staff agency, risk-taking and ideas generation among both the board of directors and staff.
A new road for development funding
Unrestricted large grants help push the global development field forward with opportunity for increased growth, sustainability, and innovation. The development community can learn about how to fund internationally from the choices, questions, and experiences of Scott grant recipients.
By enabling organizations to explore power dynamics, redefine scale in a way that empowers communities, and invest in organizational resilience and sustainability, funders can support them to chart new terrain and advance systems change across global development.
About the author
Bipasha Ray
Bipasha Ray is vice president of scalable solutions at Panorama Global, where she designed and facilitated the pilot peer learning cohort of Panorama’s CLIP Initiative. Her work focuses on supporting social entrepreneurs and social change leaders to implement their work through fiscal sponsorship and other partnership models, and co-leading efforts to deepen learning and knowledge sharing across the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors.
