Why the Foundation funds boring work.

The first question almost every prospective grantee asks is whether the Foundation funds keynote travel. The second question is whether the Foundation funds a small overhead pool for capacity building. The third question, much later in the call, is whether the Foundation funds anything specific the grantee actually does. The answer to the first two questions is no. The answer to the third question is almost always yes. This essay is the long version of why that ordering is deliberate.

The Closed Ladder Capital Foundation funds the unromantic infrastructure of justice work. Postage budgets for pen-pal anthologies. FOIA filing fees for small newsrooms. Transcript-mailing programs into facilities. Replacement cassette tapes for read-aloud programs. The renewal fees on a state corporate registration for a 501(c)(3) press that almost forgot to file. Toner cartridges for a defender's office that prints discovery for indigent clients. A roll of ninety-cent first-class stamps for a volunteer who corresponds with eleven incarcerated writers and keeps running out at month's end.

None of that is the work that gets photographed at a conference. None of it makes a deck. The Foundation funds it on purpose. The thesis is that the marginal grant dollar that goes to the unphotographable work produces more output, per dollar, than the same dollar going to the photographable work. The thesis is testable. We test it.

The cassette-economics argument.

Here is the version of the argument I have made out loud, more than once, to people who think we are being twee.

A volunteer in Los Angeles reads a short story onto a cassette tape. The tape is mailed into a federal facility. The man on the inside listens to it on the player he checked out of the library, three times, before mailing the tape back. The tape is recorded over with a new story for somebody else. The cycle takes about a month. The cost per cycle, after a tape is purchased, is the postage. Postage round-trip is about $1.40. A single tape will run about a hundred cycles before the magnetic coating fails. That is fourteen cents of postage per hour of literary fiction delivered to a man who otherwise would not have access to it.

I am embarrassed by how much more efficient this is than anything else I have tried.

The number on the other side of the comparison is not a hypothetical. A two-day conference about prison literacy, with three keynote speakers, a Friday evening reception, and a Saturday-afternoon panel, costs the convening foundation somewhere between $180,000 and $260,000 once you have added up venue, A/V, honoraria, travel reimbursements, the catering, and the staff time. That is not a criticism of conferences. Conferences do real work. They are not, however, an efficient delivery mechanism for literary fiction to incarcerated readers. The dollar per reader-hour at that conference is not within an order of magnitude of fourteen cents.

What we fund and what we don't.

The Foundation's stated practice list is short. We publish it on purpose so that grantees self-select before the call.

We fund.

• Postage. Direct mail into facilities. First-class stamps in bulk. Approved-vendor shipping accounts.
• Filing fees. FOIA fees, court-record fees, certified-mail fees, state corporate-registration fees. The fees nobody else will reimburse.
• Print runs. Riso, zine, anthology, pen-pal collection, defender briefing book. The dollar that becomes a paper artifact in somebody's hand.
• Replacement equipment. The transcription pedal that broke. The reader's cassette deck. The defender's printer.
• Small honoraria for incarcerated writers. Cash on the books, or commissary credit, or a paid stamp account. Not "exposure."
• Operating support. Multi-year general operating with no reporting burden beyond an impact conversation. We are not a traditional foundation.

We do not fund.

• Conference travel. Two talks per year per organization is enough; the Foundation will fund neither of them.
• Branding refreshes that are not in service of a specific funded program.
• Sponsorships at galas, dinners, or networking events.
• "Capacity building" that is not labeled as something specific.
• Consulting fees for the staff of organizations we do not also operate alongside.
• Studies, surveys, or research that the field already has six of.

This is a real list. We turn down grants on the second list every month. We have lost relationships with grantees who wanted help with the second list and could not understand why we would not pay for it. The understanding is mutual; the answer is still no.

The four grantees the list has changed.

Four current grantees illustrate what the list looks like in practice. The grantees themselves have not consented to be named on the dollar amounts in any single sentence, so the figures here are rounded and the entities are kept in plain language. We will confirm specifics on request to qualified press.

A Michigan corrections-data newsroom running on a two-person budget. The Foundation funds the annual FOIA filing fees and one paid month per year of an investigative editor's salary. Output that year was eleven long-form pieces and a 142,000-row public dataset behind insidemichigan.org. The cost per long-form piece was lower than at any commercial newsroom we benchmarked.

A national prison podcast that records and produces weekly audio with incarcerated correspondents over the prison-phone system. The Foundation funds the per-minute prison-call charges, which are large, and the production assistant who edits and transcribes. The grant does not fund the host's salary; the host is funded elsewhere. Output: roughly 48 episodes per year and an archive at prisonpodcast.com that runs without a paywall. Cost per produced episode-hour is competitive with public radio.

An independent press that mails approved-vendor paperbacks into facilities and edits a pen-pal anthology with about 110 contributors a year. The Foundation funds postage and the print run. Output: roughly 1,400 books mailed in the last twelve months and one anthology print run of 800 copies. The marginal book costs the Foundation under $11 to put in a reader's hand inside a facility. The reading happens; we have the letters.

An academic publisher at outcome.pub that releases peer-reviewed research on reentry outcomes under an open-access license. The Foundation funds open-access fees for a small number of articles per year, so that the research is freely readable by counsel, by reporters, and by the people the research is about. Output: between four and seven open-access articles a year. Cost per downloadable peer-reviewed article in the field is the right benchmark; we beat the median by about half.

What the boring work compounds into.

The unromantic conclusion is that the work most of philanthropy spends its money on is not in this list and most of what is in this list does not appear in conventional philanthropy's program reports. The Foundation is small. The Foundation is going to stay small. We are not trying to scale; we are trying to apply the marginal dollar where the marginal dollar moves the most reader-hours, the most filed-record-hours, the most produced-audio-hours. Almost every time we run the comparison, the answer is the same. The boring work wins. The cassette beats the conference. The stamp beats the gala. The Foundation funds the boring work because the boring work compounds.

If you are running an organization in our categories and have read this far and your work is, by your own assessment, boring in the right way, you can write us. grants@closedladdercapital.org is monitored. Letters of inquiry are not currently open in a structured cycle, but a short, specific note about your postage line item is read.