# Small grants are different animals from big grants Small grants aren’t just miniature versions of big grants — they’re cats and lions, related but entirely different beasts. (What entails “small” and “big” obviously varies, but generally breaks down on whether the grantor *feels* like the amount is “significant” or not). [[People have different and unknown caring money thresholds]]. A small grant can generally buy a piece of equipment or enable a one full-time person project. That sort of work is very different than the multi-person, capital-heavy work that needs a large grant. In addition to enabling very different flavors of work, small and large grants require drastically different amounts of trust from the grantor. This difference is (I suspect) is why so many new, fast, low-reporting-style grants are small and have an upper size limit. Ideally, people could use a small grant to do trust-generating work that they could use to get larger grants. However, the difference in kind between the types of work can make this difficult. “How can I [[Trust]] that you can coordinate a team when haven’t done it before because you haven’t had the resources to do it?” As a result you see many projects start with low-overhead small grants but either putter along forever or die because the criteria for larger grants are so much more stringent. ### Related * [[Grants only go so far]] * [[§Misalignment between funders and nonprofits in research]] [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Small+grants+are+different+animals+from+big+grants) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Small+grants+are+different+animals+from+big+grants)