Funds Dissemination Committee/Additional Information and Analysis/Interviews/Siska

Interview date: 5/17/2012

What are your thoughts on the board resolution around funds dissemination?

• I don’t have strong feelings about this. I know it exist and it happened.
• I’m not sure about the plan to establish an FDC – some of the chapters didn’t like the idea of this, but it is going to happened anyway.

What are the strengths of the current grant-making processes?

• I included some additional thoughts on my chapter survey
• The timeline of the GAC process doesn’t work
• Also, the use of the volunteers for the GAC is not effective
• The way we do it in Indonesia seems to work. I manage a grant process – and I only make a recommendation on the grants, and a neutral body makes the final decision.
• The grant process is too difficult and hard to manage—there are too many decision-makers. I’d rather go to other channels to get funds.

If you could change the GAC process, what would you do?

• I would use a process similar to that of WM Indonesia.
• The GAC should be a more decisive process. If you include volunteers they should be able to decide.
• The most complicated process is during implementation – to make sure that the grant is reported on and that the grant fund used was effective. If this isn’t incorporated into the grant process, it might have a long term effect where it lower public trust to the organization.

What are your thoughts on:

WMF budgeting?

• WMF should be neutral. The core should be decided by the board, but this should be made clear to the rest of the organization and and should have a logical limit in terms of "how much". Core is routine. For example, the whole legal team should not be deemed “core” because they are too expensive. The budget for the legal team should be more “reasonable.” This goes for all of the functions as well (e.g., finance, HR). We should look at other organizations of the similar size to make sure WMF departments are reasonably sized.
• Special projects (e.g., increasing contributors in India) – should be non-core and should have to submit applications.

Large chapter budgeting?

• Overhead budget for chapters should be fixed, but low.
• Budgets should not be very detailed, because it is not possible to know how much you’ll spend. There should be flexibility around how money is spent, but there should be accountability around the outcomes.

Criteria for how funds should be disseminated

• Initially, the FDC should look at 1) What the money is being spent on, and 2) how “successful” is the money being spent
  • Successful is a hard word
  • I wouldn’t differentiate the big grants and the small grants in terms of procedure implementation. They usually the same.
  • At the minimum, these grants need to be distributed throughout the movement where it’s needed most – for capacity building for smaller organizations. But the funding cannot be too much for the organization without capacity building support. Is the capacity building in the grant itself? Or is it in a separate funding pool? If we don’t provide capacity building, to the organizaation/ chapters/ community that identified didn't need more money, giving the money is wasted.
• You’ll only know if the money is being well spent after the money has been granted
• You need to look beyond the surface and dig deeper to understand if this is true

How FDC members should be selected?

• If the role of the FDC is decision-making, it’s a no-brainer. It doesn’t have to be difficult.
• However, if the FDC also has people that are also investigating how funding will be used, it is much more difficult. If the entities are being transparent about what they are achieving, even evaluation is fairly easy for some entities. But you can’t just look at their reports, you have to dig deeper
• FDC should be doing more capacity-building, so that entities don’t have to raise money from the movement year after year
• The FDC staff cannot do the evaluation process because they are WMF staff. It’s not neutral, because WMF also going to be there asking. The staff evaluate another staff? But, at the same time, volunteers wouldn’t have time to do these evaluations. And if the FDC members don’t have time, they will automatically go with the “evaluation” already provided of the FDC staff. In any case, nobody at the WMF staff is experienced to do grant investigating for big spending chapters
• Who would be able to do this? An independent entity of paid staff could be doing these evaluations. I’m not sure what this entity would look like, perhaps reporting to the board.

Reimbursement for FDC members?

• If FDC members are volunteers, they should be treated as volunteers. Don't asks too much from them, it's not fair. However they need to communicate between the group. Reimbursement includes communication expenses, and they can have bigger travel / conference expenses reimbursed

Overall, our recommendation to the board?

• Leave room to make changes in this recommendation about the FDC– for example, leave room for the FDC to go from volunteer to paid staff. Or leave room for the FDC staff to report through the board / FDC versus the WMF.
• In the short term, the FDC should just be able to make decisions—it’s okay if the decisions are wrong, but it should be actionable. The FDC will learn from those mistakes. By the second year, the FDC can be more careful and make sure to learn from the mistakes – they should not just repeat their actions.
• In any case whatever recommendation I say about FDC is only valid for this year (beginning), it might be obsolete on the second year since we will have data whether the expectation matches what actually happened (impact/ result). When that happend the next decision should weigh the records obtained from the previous year.