Awarding Grants: One Author's Personal Guide to Ethical Participation in the Act of Giving Out Money

Abstract

Sitting on a not-for-profit or governmental board or advisory group that reviews and awards grants is not easy. Your personal opinions, your employer's needs, or your own professional agenda can sometimes conflict with the financial decisions and grant work of the board or advisory group. Participating in one of these boards or groups is professionally challenging and rewarding work for a librarian or information professional to do, but, when awarding the grant, you can find yourself confronted with situations of real or perceived conflicts of interest, or a lack of clarity on how you make a productive, ethical decision. A conscious ethical consideration is often required in order to make a good decision on how and to whom to give money. This article is written to communicate one author's personal guidelines for ethical participation on a grant awarding board or advisory group. It includes the following:* A brief description of the types of boards and groups available for participation* A proactive process check on the ethics of your personal participation* How to select boards and groups for successful and ethical participation* How to tell when it is best not to participate on a board or advisory group* How to follow a practice of do no harm as a board member* The last ethic: The work ethic.A Brief Description of the Types of Boards and Groups Available for ParticipationThere are several types of grant-awarding boards and groups that are available for your participation. How grant-awarding boards are defined is an extremely complex legal topic. The brief description that follows is highly simplified. If you require more information, Anheier (2005) has produced a very readable textbook, Nonprofit Organizations; Coffman (2001) has an overview, Just what are public charities and private foundations, anyway? at the Guidestar.org website; and the Internal Revenue Service (2005) offers a very clear introduction to the most common nonprofits and not-for-profits known as 501(c) 3s on page 16 of the publication Tax-exempt status for your organization. This article considers these three general types of grant-giving boards and groups:* Not-for-profit organizations operating under the United States Internal Revenue Code, 26 U.S.C. Section 501(c)* Governmental boards or groups operating with public tax funding* Private foundations' boards and groups.Not-for-profit organizations operate under United States Internal Revenue Code, 26 U.S.C. Section 501(c). This section, 501(c), includes a great variety of organizations referred to as nonprofits and not-for-profits. These can range from small community-based organizations like charitable or fraternal groups that fund community literacy projects, a local public library's friends group, regional or county incorporated library consortia for resource sharing, to large professional associations such as the American Library Association. Governmental boards or groups operating with public tax funding can be a small city's library board, a large county public library's trustees' committee, state libraries operating as state governmental departments, or the United States' federal library agency, called the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Private foundations can be private non-operating or operating foundations. They can include boards and groups affiliated with very specific organizations such as museums, privately funded academic institutions and their libraries, or private trust funded projects involving education and learning.These organizations can all be involved in direct grant giving and scholarships, with boards and groups responsible for awarding the funds. For example, state governmental bodies such as state libraries or education departments will often have competitive grant processes for awarding federal funds to libraries received through the Institute of Museum and Library Services (http://www. …