The Funder or Donor Sees Him or Herself:

As a donor I see myself as a character in a play. A play called development. To see myself as a character is reassuring. I play a certain role, I fulfill a certain function. Others play their roles of implementer, trainer and recipient.
It is reassuring because it creates a safe distance between me and other people.

There are strong forces that make me do it this way. I deal with money which is not my money. And it is a huge amount of money, totally foreign to my personal experience with money. At home I decide on buying necessities for 50 or 100 euros. At work I decide on or influence decisions on millions of euros. I was responsible for subsidy requests totalling 450 million euros. It’s just a number for me, not real money.

For my work I meet hundreds of people each year from more than thirty countries. It is impossible to develop personal relationships with all these people.

I am also confronted with the question of power. This is troubling because to use power is difficult. I dislike power because I see all the exploitation and abuse that result from power. I secretly wish that the explicit use of power will not be necessary. That there is self-evident logic to the process relieves me of some of the responsibility that power brings.

To see myself as a character in a play protects me from the consequences of my decisions as a donor, such as the disappointment of organizations and persons I know well when their funding proposals are turned down.

I feel comfortable in my values and intentions. I am truly inspired by doing the right thing. I believe in the work I am doing. This is not just a job, to earn a living. It is a way that I can contribute to a better world. I want to be part of a caring society.

I have a general idea of what is meant by “a good society”, and I have a theory of change that goes with this. This idea informs my policy and funding decisions. However, I rarely express or reflect on it. It is like my private story of development.

To see myself as a character in a play reassures me but it also troubles me. It troubles me because reality bites. Reality is indefinitely more complex than a play.

When I am working there is the real me, not the character. Self-deception has its limits. This provokes strong tensions within me. These are questions I live with. And I haven’t found answers for them yet.

As a person I strongly value the importance of relationships. It is though my relationships with my wife, children, family and friends that I define myself. Where my happiness lies is where my value lies. And I experience the same in my work. I intuitively know the importance of relationships in my work.

But at the same time I am confused, unable to exactly place the relationships that sustain me. Am I a part of the process, or a distant funder? What does my involvement entail? Am I listened to because I am a participant in the process, orbecause I am a donor? How do I address the power differences that arises from the donor-recipient relationship?

Reality constantly challenges my private story of development. It is always changing, and not always in a coherent fashion. In a play the roles and outcomes are fixed, no amount of soul searching can change the end of the play. And self-reflection is not supposed to be part of the role that I play. But I do it anyway because reality forces me to question my assumptions and beliefs.

Here is power again. It cannot be escaped. I need to honestly face the way I use power. This means looking again at the rules of the game.

I am not alone in the play. Other people also play a role. When I visit an organization they see a donor and not me. They don’t see a person, they see a bureaucrat whom they want to influence. They are careful to choose the right words to say to me, and to show me the right things they think a donor would like to hear and see. And they expect me to play my role. Which I do.

 

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