Funders want scale. I understand why. When the need is enormous, and resources are finite, you want every dollar to go further. You want good organizations to grow, strong ideas to reach more people, and successful approaches to grow beyond one program or one community.

But I keep coming back to a different question: What exactly are we scaling?

Because if we aren’t intentional about the process, we risk scaling organizations without scaling opportunities. We can build sophisticated infrastructure for communities while withholding power from the same communities we intend to support. We can get very good at funding solutions for people while leaving the people closest to the problem outside the rooms where those solutions are designed.

Growth is most meaningful when the people we hope will benefit from that growth have a real role in shaping it.

Funders bring important expertise to the table: data, networks, research, and experience evaluating what works. 

Communities bring expertise too. They know who shows up when there is no grant available. They know who people trust. They know which organizations collaborate and which programs look great on paper but struggle in practice.

That community knowledge should not come in at the end, after the strategy has already been built. Community should help shape where resources go, what success looks like, and how the work gets done.

Scarcity Changes The System

There is another piece of this that I think deserves more attention: the way we fund work shapes how people behave.

Funders have limited dollars and nearly unlimited demand. Organizations know that. If ten groups are competing for one grant, the elbows can get sharp. Organizations that could be sharing ideas may end up protecting them instead.

That tendency doesn’t make them bad actors. It makes them human.

We cannot build systems that reward competition and then be frustrated when people compete.

If we want collaboration, we must create conditions that make collaboration possible.

That starts before a grant application arrives. Funders can spend more time understanding the ecosystems they hope to strengthen. Who has been doing the work for years? Who does the community trust? Who collaborates when there is no money attached? Who shares information, relationships, and credit?

This community due diligence gives funders information that is difficult to capture in an application, and it helps shift the question from simply “Who should we fund?” to “What are we trying to strengthen?”

That is a much bigger question with a more impactful answer.