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A few months ago an organisation called Wildlabs launched what might be the best named grantmaking programme ever, “The Boring Fund”. 

Deploying funds from giant microchip company Arm, the purpose of the Boring Fund was to support “the essential but overlooked aspects of conservation technology”.

Explaining their decision to run their cheekily named programme, Wildlabs laid out a problem that readers may recognise, “Our community has shared countless stories of struggling to find financial support for the indispensable parts of their work that don’t fit into the flashy, attention-grabbing proposals that attract funders”. 

We’re grateful to Wildlabs for daring to name this issue, and for putting their grantmaking money on the table to prove that they really care about it. Because there is no doubt that grantmaking as a whole does often lean towards the new, the shiny, the glamorous.

Part of the reason we are broadly pro-unrestricted grantmaking is because upon receiving unrestricted funds, the first thing that many recipient organisations will do is use that money to pay for stuff that some funders might consider to be a bit boring: the rent, the replacement laptops, the wage bill, the rainy day fund. This revealed preference shows that this ‘boring’ money is often the type of money that a lot of nonprofits and universities value the most, whatever they may be induced to say by funding programmes which encourage celebration of the new.

Now, our endorsement of the Boring Fund might sound like we’re appealing to you, our grantmaking readership, to take fewer risks with your grantmaking.

 

Quite the opposite. We are normally in favour of funders taking rather more risks than they do now. But - counterintuitively - you need to be willing to fund stuff some funders might consider ‘dull’ or ‘uninnovative’ to be good at taking certain types of worthwhile risks. 

Consider any really serious effort to change the world. It might be a values based activism campaign like marriage equality or it might be a scientific attempt to find a vaccine for malaria.

By definition you don’t know if such an initiative is going to work at all, and by definition you’re going to have to spend a lot of money over a long period of time to find out if it can succeed. But this is exactly the sort of risks that funders should take, because history shows that funders sometimes do back the right horses, and the world moves forward.

But what sorts of funding do these long term, world changing initiatives need? Well… ‘boring’ funding, quite often. Really long term, relatively unrestricted funding that lets grantees pivot to opportunities without having to chase whatever funders think is cool this week. Funding that some people might consider boring, but we actually consider incredibly exciting, because it’s the stuff that can really make a difference.

So here’s to you, Wildlabs. Long may you fund the ‘boring’ stuff that can change the world. 

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