Eight types of stress that weigh on grantmakers

Most grantmakers feel guilty about ever complaining about our jobs. We know that it’s an enormous privilege to be on the side of the table that has the money, rather than the side of the table that lacks it. And we know that the people who work for the organisations we support are often doing jobs where the workplace hazards can vary from profound stress to actually being killed for their work.

But this reticence to grumble means we often don’t talk enough about the psychological pressures that grantmakers experience. These pressures are real, often fierce and have consequences. Here's eight sources of stress that think should be talked about more:

Exhaustion - A lot of grantmakers regularly work themselves to the point of exhaustion. We often do this willingly on the basis that our work is so important and the needs so urgent. But none of this takes away from the fact that exhaustion is real, has a range of spill-over consequences, and after a while makes us worse at our jobs.
Isolation - Many grantmaking foundations are tiny, with perhaps just one staff member supporting a set of trustees. This leads to grantmakers in smaller funders routinely feeling isolated, something exacerbated by the next item on this list. Even the CEOs of medium or larger foundations often feel lonely, trapped between boards above and teams below and not necessarily able to share everything they’d like to say with either.
Half-truths - When people know that you are a gatekeeper to money this often changes how people talk to you. The prospect of funding often makes conversations stilted, artificially flattering, and spun to be as optimistic as possible. To correct for this distortion, grantmakers have to constantly read between lines, and question the veracity of things said. This can make us distrustful, which is a stressful feeling in its own right, and even more stressful if you are committed to working in a trust-based way.
Fear of getting it wrong - Most people will go through life without ever having to make a choice about which one of a set of competing causes deserves ten thousand pounds, or a million dollars. Comparing and choosing between multiple candidates for money can be extremely demanding because we’re worried about what it would be like to find out later that we made the wrong call. Many people enter grantmaking because they want to make these choices only to find out the weight of responsibility is much heavier and less pleasant than they expected.
The pain of rejecting people - Almost all funders will have to reject applicants, either occasionally, or every day. This means crushing the dreams of people trying to do great things. It often feels awful and for some grantmakers they will be doing this far more than saying ‘congratulations!’ to the lucky ones.
Being treated as a means not ends. Almost nobody approaches a grantmaker in the first place because they want to be our friend. People approach grantmakers because they want the money that we control. This means we’re treated as means, not ends, on a routine basis. Back in the 18th century the philosopher Immanual Kant noted that this habit was a source of great harm in the world. So when you find yourself thinking “I wish people didn’t just see me as a human cash machine” you’re feeling what it is to be treated as a means, not an end.
Guilt - Most grantmakers are routinely working with, and making decisions about people whose lives are more difficult, poorer and more dangerous than their own. Some grantmakers grow hardened to this, treating it as a sad side-effect of an unequal world. But others are really eaten up by the unfairness of it. This is one of those feelings that is both entirely justified, but also not conducive to personal happiness.
Representing decisions we disagree with. Nobody doing any job enjoys being the face of organisational decisions or policies that we don’t actually agree with. Grantmakers feel this too, and perhaps more acutely than average because we feel that by joining a funder we’re giving the organisation our moral endorsement, not just our labour. If our employer makes choices we really disagree with, it can feel personal and compromising.

So if you’ve experienced any of the above types of stress, the first thing to say is that there’s no shame in acknowledging it. Just because this job is privileged and powerful doesn’t mean it can’t make us unhappy or even sick, too.

The next step, having acknowledged that these stresses are real, valid things, is to talk about it with our colleagues, our families, or our peer grantmakers. Starting these conversations is the first step to coping with and adapting our jobs so we can be good at them, and happy in them, at the same time.

If you don’t feel there are people you can talk to easily on hand, we suggest meeting more grantmakers through networks like the Grant Givers’ Movement (if you’re in the UK). If you’d like more international suggestions of networks where you can talk abou these things, or you’d like us to talk to us about it, please get in touch.

Image credit: jeshoots.com

Put away your tiny violin - grantmaker stress is real and important