# What are the alternatives to grants? It’s easy to point out deficiencies and hard to propose concrete solutions. I’m going to list some potential alternatives[^1] to avoid the moral hazard that, on the margin, calling out the limitations of grants might just decrease the money and effort going into them without directing it somewhere productive. I beg forgiveness for how sketchy these alternatives are — I plan to make much more structural later. If any are particularly interesting, let me know. * *Patronage/Fund people not projects*. Instead of a one-off grant focused on an objective, pledge to support someone for an indefinite time. You don’t need to be absurdly wealthy to do this — you can pool money with a number of other folks: it takes less than a thousand people each giving $10 a month to give someone an incredibly reasonable stipend. You can go one further and be a “lead patron” giving more money and publicly rallying people to give. A long-term source of funding can start to abolish some [[Shadows of the Future]]. Yes, this is nominally what the [[Patreon]] platform is for, but it has a number of limitations — the biggest being that it requires people to hit at least some level of local fame, filtering for people who do flashy work and are willing to ask for money in public. Do the work to find people you think are doing great work and ask what level of funding would make a discrete difference in their ability to pursue their research. * *Give fewer bigger grants, not more small grants*. Big grants can be very different from small grants (see above) — they enable entire classes of activity (hiring people, buying high-quality equipment, actually quitting a job or education). It’s true that smaller grants can be incredibly transformative, require less [[Trust]], and allow you to build a more diversified portfolio. But if the majority of grants are small, we’re going to see primarily work that can survive or get started on small grants, slicing off a whole chunk of potential work. * *Give money to incentives/fund organizations not projects*[^2] Instead of seeing grants as a mechanism for filtering specific projects or outcomes, you can think of them as delegating to organizations that encode a process, vision, or theory of research management. This approach is the one-level-higher version of “fund people not projects”. Because institutional structures enable or constrain different activities, supporting the *existence* of an institution can lead to good work that doesn’t necessarily fit into a grant-shaped bucket. At their core, new research organizations like [[Convergent Research]], [[Actuate]], or [[Dynamicland]] are attempting to shift the incentives around research and enable sets of activities that wouldn’t otherwise happen.[^3] * *Create soft landing sites.* If you are in a position to do so, you can give talented people an indefinite open offer of a role they would want should they ever decide they want it. An option on a job, if you will. This move addresses shadows of the future by creating a ‘soft landing site’ — the knowledge that their career isn’t completely destroyed if they try something irresponsible for a long time and it crashes and burns. Yes, this creates some risk for you: it’s another way of putting your ‘money’ where your mouth is. The world needs more people willing to stick their necks out for awesome without expectation of direct upside. * *Front status*. Many times, status can far more valuable to a project than money. People and organizations lend each other status all the time, though endorsements, introductions, titles, etc. Typically, high status people/orgs want to see a significant chunk of evidence that their status won’t be lost (and in fact will probably get good ROI on it) before they’re willing to lend their status to a person or organization. If you are a high-status individual or org, you can buck the trend and front people status. If you work for a high-status organization, give someone you want to support a title like “fellow” even if they aren’t on payroll — it’s shocking how many doors it can open. Signal boost things you aren’t yet convinced you want to be involved in. Tell your friends about it. Make intros. Create a [[Legitimacy cascade]]. * *Do tranched funding*. Understandably, most people don’t want to give a huge chunk of money to an unproven idea and team. However, the difference between vague noises of support with the potential of money in the future and an extremely clear set of conditions under which a specific amount of money would be available is *huge*. It not only provides a goal to work for but enables someone to turn around and rally support by saying “if I can just get this much to get to milestone X, I will unlock Y” — it effectively lets them project some fraction of that future money into the present without lying. Many times, a large chunk of clearly-conditioned money in the future can be more valuable than a small chunk of money now. Like so many of these suggestions this one does require work on your part and reduces your optionality. Let’s celebrate people doing work and reducing their optionality to enable awesome things! * [[Tranched money is often more important than actual funds]] * [[Development Tranches and Tranched Funding]] * *Offer non-monetary support*. For someone doing research or running a research organization, time really is money. If you don’t have the money to give significant grants and don’t want to pool your money with others but have valuable skills — legal, accounting, design, engineering, literature coming, internet searching — volunteering them can be far more valuable than a grant. Not only does the person not have to pay someone to do them or spend their own time doing them but they also save the time looking for someone or . The trick here is that *you* need to lower the transactions costs as much as possible — don’t say “I want to help, use me.” Instead, proactively say “I’ll help you file your taxes” “design you a logo” or “build you a system that does this thing I suspect you need.” * *Proactively find people doing good work and fund them/nudge them to do something different*. Grant applications are a demoralizing pain, even if you make your application straightforward. If you’re working on something weird, you face an exhausting stream of people asking you to make it legible and justify what you’re doing, trying to predict which framing will work on whom. You also need to know about a grant in order to apply for it. Instead of putting the work on other people, if you want to enable more awesome things, you can proactively go out and find people/organizations who are trying to do what you want to see more of in the world. This mode takes more work and doesn’t have the same satisfying counterfactual impact as grants (“I enabled this thing that wouldn’t have otherwise existed!”) but can be just as important. You can go one farther and find people who you think *could* be doing great things but are not and nudge them with money towards the things you want to see more of in the world. Do this with multiple people! Get them to work with each other! Coordination! * *Proactively match other allocators.* If you see someone who you think has good taste either supporting or offering to support something, publicly +1 them. This move enables researchers to leverage their fundraising time but more importantly, it could solve the coordination problem where nobody is willing to be the first mover. Matching does happen to some extent ([[Funders want to follow other funders]]) but it is usually quiet and the onus is usually on the person raising money to negotiate it. Do we want to filter for researchers who are also master politicians? * Give people money to work on *someone else’s project*. Grants tend to encourage a fractal scattering of projects, with everybody working on their own thing. Often, someone can have more impact by joining an existing weird project. This kind of grant exists in the traditional academic system in things like the [NSF Graduate Research Program](https://beta.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/nsf-graduate-research-fellowship-program-grfp) where funding is attached to a grad student, instead of a lab or project. This move also addresses the coordination problem by making it easier for projects to scale without raising additional funding themselves. The common themes here boil down to proactivity, supporters taking on more risk, being more opinionated about what is good but less opinionated about what is going to succeed, giving up filtering specificity, and planning. Basically the inverse of the limitations of grants. ### Related * [[Grants only go so far]] * [[People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible]] [^1]: You’ll note that some of these are tweaks on grants. Remember, I’m not saying grants are bad, there are just many other things to explore. [^2]: This idea of giving money to a process and not a specific goal is related to the idea of Pay-it-forward tithing that I still need to write up officially. [[Pay-it-forward tithing is underrated]] [^3]: [[The Overedge Catalog]] is a great collection of such organizations [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+are+the+alternatives+to+grants) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+are+the+alternatives+to+grants)