By: Selina Pedi-Smith, Pellere Foundation
With how much I’ve been going on about heavy equipment over the last several weeks, you’d be forgiven for thinking that I’ve shifted priorities. You might be looking for the announcement of my new business venture! And…you wouldn’t be completely off, but I’ll leave that for another article.
No, my priorities haven’t shifted, but I’ll share something rather painful that happened earlier this year, which led to my summer adventures in excavating. In February, a small technical assistance award Pellere had received was canceled. Then, a couple months later, a $150k funding program we were in line for was canceled. Then, a very, very large funding program ($3.5M!) we were in line for was canceled. And…I admit, I was left a bit disheartened. My team, our project partners, and I had all worked our butts off to line up these seed funding opportunities. We were gonna do such good with them, and we had painstakingly planned our projects to illustrate Pellere’s stance that grant funding should ONLY be seed funding. And, in the blink of an eye, those seeds were no more.
Now, it’s fair to say “easy come, easy go.” And I understand the viewpoint that grants are free money, so…what’s so bad about canceling them? I even understand the viewpoint that our society doesn’t need more handouts of any kind. If you’ve ever heard one of my rants about the grant system, you’ll know I think it could use a serious overhaul. (Okay, maybe several overhauls.) Of course, my choice wouldn’t be to just pull the plug on entire existing programs. I would have liked to have seen some deep work to realign protocols and streamline systems. But, I’m not the one running things.
So, I took the lumps, and sat with them for a while. I had some heart-to-hearts with my team and our project partners. And, just so you know, we were some of the lucky ones. We haven’t yet started work on these larger projects, unlike other affected organizations. We don’t have a large payroll to fund, unlike other affected organizations. Pellere is a young, small organization, so we’re still extremely nimble. Previous funding and private donations were sufficient to keep us moving forward, albeit at a much-reduced pace and scope.
Quite honestly, after that $3.5M knock-back, I didn’t have it in me to immediately jump back into the funding search. That one hurt. Bad. Still does. Plus, I figured every other organization out there would be scrambling to find new funding. So, while I did what I needed to do to keep ongoing projects moving, I otherwise took a break from the paperwork grind and took a step back to let the non-profit ecosystem weather this storm.
And then my husband told me he found a used skid loader. And my spare time became an opportunity to learn a new skill (or several) and focus some energy on my own little patch. Which, as it turned out, had its own lessons for Pellere – and the people behind it.
