one reason for microgrants: assuming you can somehow substantially reduce the admin cost, it obviously makes sense to give more small grants than one big one, for the same reason that giving to the poorest people is better than giving to only kinda poor people. $10k for a well-funded university lab is such a small grant that might not be worth bothering with; $10k is a pretty meaningfully large amount of money for a struggling grad student in a less-well-funded lab, buying a month or two of runway to try something new; $10k is a career altering sum of money for someone living in like romania or whatever, helping them go from zero runway to 6-12 months of runway.
most people don’t give microgrants because the admin costs are high. but maybe it is possible to optimize to reduce the admin costs!
it obviously makes sense to give more small grants than one big one, for the same reason that giving to the poorest people is better than giving to only kinda poor people
I don’t think that follows. Giving to the poorest people is better due to diminishing marginal utility of consumption. But grants aren’t for personal consumption and utility doesn’t diminish along the same curve.
thanks for the link, i find it helpful to see what other people have done.
some things I’m doing differently: I’m planning on giving away way more money than previous microgrants, mostly by giving many grants. I’ve already approved more than $40k in grants. afaict, my condition that grantees must not use my grant to get other grants is novel too.
microgrant thoughts
one reason for microgrants: assuming you can somehow substantially reduce the admin cost, it obviously makes sense to give more small grants than one big one, for the same reason that giving to the poorest people is better than giving to only kinda poor people. $10k for a well-funded university lab is such a small grant that might not be worth bothering with; $10k is a pretty meaningfully large amount of money for a struggling grad student in a less-well-funded lab, buying a month or two of runway to try something new; $10k is a career altering sum of money for someone living in like romania or whatever, helping them go from zero runway to 6-12 months of runway.
most people don’t give microgrants because the admin costs are high. but maybe it is possible to optimize to reduce the admin costs!
I don’t think that follows. Giving to the poorest people is better due to diminishing marginal utility of consumption. But grants aren’t for personal consumption and utility doesn’t diminish along the same curve.
Yeah, even smaller sums can still be trajectory-changing, cf. Nadia Asparouhova’s Helium Grants ($1.5k average):
Nadia also has advice on starting a microgrants program (including plenty of logistics advice, to your point re: optimising to reduce admin costs) and a list of other microgrant programs on GitHub.
thanks for the link, i find it helpful to see what other people have done.
some things I’m doing differently: I’m planning on giving away way more money than previous microgrants, mostly by giving many grants. I’ve already approved more than $40k in grants. afaict, my condition that grantees must not use my grant to get other grants is novel too.