And that's what we've tried to do. We've created structures that enable us to tap into voluntary networks of advisors that in turn help us reduce the transaction costs associated with administering a grant. Our per-transaction cost is generally in the neighborhood of $1,000 per grant, which means we can make a $2,000 or $3,000 grant that isn't more expensive to make than it's actually worth on the ground. At the end of the day, it's also a strategic decision on our part to support an important component of civil society in developing countries that otherwise has no access to outside resources, and that U.S.-based funders find prohibitively expensive to support.

PND: It sounds as if you're suggesting that a key factor in return on investment is the level of grassroots engagement. What do grassroots groups, which by definition are under-resourced and have limited political clout, bring to the table that more established, better-funded nonprofits or NGOs don't?

CT: A good question. I'd say there are two primary reasons for pursuing this kind of strategy. The first, as you suggest, is return on investment. Simply put, a $5,000 grant to a grassroots group in China or Indonesia or Nigeria goes much further than it does in the U.S. For instance, if your primary goal is to protect biodiversity or reduce pollution of groundwater sources, you can actually accomplish a whole lot more if you put your money to work outside the U.S., for all the obvious reasons. A small grant might fund a director's entire salary for the year, and the cost of almost every aspect of the organization's work is likely to be a fraction of a U.S. group's cost. And in so many places there is a vacuum of financial support, so a small grant can energize the work of community members and volunteers. These grants provide tremendous leverage in places where the gains can be dramatic, unlike the U.S. where gains are now more incremental, thanks to decades of environment progress. In fact, philanthropic investment in developing countries is one of the best opportunities a foundation or individual donor has to make a little go a long way, so long as the money ends up in the hands of trustworthy people who are accountable to their peers.

The second reason is that grassroots organizations, especially in developing countries, are an excellent counterweight to large nongovernmental organizations, which often are criticized for being undemocratic, for defining the public interest in ways that are not necessarily representative of that interest, and for serving their own needs first. Because grassroots organizations are, by definition, attuned to the interests of the little guy, supporting them is a terrific way to minimize the institutional biases of large NGOs. Yes, grassroots organizations often rely on those very same NGOs for skill building and networking and representation in the centers of power, but the relationship is often less one-sided than you might think.

PND: Most Americans probably have a sense that good information and formal reporting requirements are the exception rather than the rule in developing countries. How does Greengrants identify and do due diligence on prospective grantees in the countries in which it works?

CT: Well, the first thing I'd say is that with small grants, the amount of money involved, even though it can have a big impact on a good group, is usually not enough to create corruption; that's another advantage of our approach. A $2,000 or $3,000 grant really isn't worth stealing or lying about, the way a larger grant might be.

That said, the way we identify prospective grantees has a lot to do with the way Greengrants was developed in the first place. As I mentioned, we grew out of existing networks of environmental organizers who had, in many cases, learned to depend on each other for information, help, and even protection in some of these places. They're people with integrity who also know the lay of the land in their home countries and regions. They know who they can and can't trust, and they depend on each other for informal feedback and mutual support. So when we ask them to help us identify new and emerging groups and individuals as prospective grantees, they tend to suggest groups and individuals that they have faith in and that are in a position to strengthen and advance their specific causes as well as the civil society movement in general.

We try to make their job as simple as possible. You know, grantmaking isn't as easy as it seems; you need to be wise and at the same time understand what it means to be a responsible gatekeeper to money. So, over the last ten years or so, we have managed to identify a network of about a hundred people who, while they may not always see eye to eye — and, in fact, often have very different views about the issues they are working on — are mutually respectful and willing to help us by recommending grants that we would never otherwise think about making.

That's another important thing to understand: Greengrants doesn't accept unsolicited proposals. We only accept recommendations from advisors whom we know, and we identify the best candidates using the same model. In other words, we start by asking our trusted allies on the ground to recommend an individual or individuals with a certain kind of knowledge to be on an advisory board. Our advisory boards range in size from two to eight people, with the average being about five. We've found five to be a pretty good number in terms of the group being able to reach a consensus.

PND: Do you pay your advisory board members?

CT: No. They do it because they're committed to the cause. Typically, they're working as volunteers or paid staff for another nonprofit or NGO — sometimes it's local, sometimes national or international. But their work for us is done as volunteers, and because their time is valuable and we depend on them, we try to make their job as easy as possible. Often, these are folks who are living on the margin, so we cover their expenses — we'll reimburse them for phone calls, faxes, that sort of thing. And we provide them with the opportunity to travel and meet face-to-face with each other once a year. We've even begun to use paid coordinators in some countries to facilitate the discussions of the advisory board, but those are people who typically work part-time, sometimes just a few hours a month, and maybe earn a few hundred dollars for their work.

PND: Do you require formal reports from your advisory boards and/or the grantees they've selected?

CT: Yes. The advisory boards are asked to supply notes from their face-to-face meetings, and for specific grant requests they're asked to fill out four pages of information, including a nonprofit equivalency form for each recipient. They're also expected, regardless of the size of the grant, to file an interim report after six months and a final report after a year or upon completion of the project, whichever comes first. In terms of that requirement, we accept a lot of different kinds of things, including newsletters, press stories, and educational materials, along with a brief cover letter explaining what they did or didn't accomplished, what may have changed during the course of the grant, and so on. In general, we prefer to give general operating support so that if adjustments need to be made in the course of a project, the grantee doesn't have to come back to us to get permission. We appreciate it when they do, but we also let them know that the money is for general support and we understand that it can be hard to predict the outcome of certain kinds of projects, so just let us know how it goes and what you learned in the process.

But yes, we get one formal, written report, and, increasingly, we are aggregating the results of these reports and doing analyses of the overall impact of our model. By that I mean, the strategic focus of our advisory boards is often different from region to region or country to country. In China, for example, the strategic focus — actually, it's more of a tactic — is to support campus-based student groups. Those groups can be working on anything from recycling chopsticks, to protecting the Tibetan antelope, to addressing the pollution of a local river. Whereas in India the focus is almost exclusively on issues of toxic pollution. That's just the nature of grassroots environmental movements, and because they tend to work on different issues at different times with varying degrees of intensity, we have to be adaptable and have a lot of tolerance for those differences.

So, one of the key challenges in trying to analyze the impact of our model is accounting for those differences — and not only differences that can be quantified numerically, but cultural differences. For example, one of the things we've learned is that the cultural norm for reporting one's achievements varies widely from country to country. In some cultures, the norm is to understate your personal achievements, which certainly doesn't correspond with the expectations of many Western funders, who are conditioned to and make allowances for a certain amount of hyperbole in grantee reports. In other cultures, a certain amount of exaggeration might be perfectly acceptable. But if you were to compare reports from those two countries, it might seem, if you didn't know better, that a whole lot more was being accomplished in the latter than in the former.

PND: Are U.S.-based donors sensitive to those kinds of cultural differences? Or, with all the talk of grantmaker effectiveness, have you found that they're more interested in benchmarking and results?

CT: We face that pressure, and I've come to see the growing emphasis on metrics and benchmarking as a problem. An emphasis on measuring outcomes presumes, first of all, that we know how social change happens. I don't believe we really do, although some people have more experience with and insight into the dynamics of social change than others. But in my opinion, there are no truly meaningful metrics for measuring the impact of small grants as a driver of social change. In fact, it's an area where Greengrants sort of stands in opposition to the current trend of applying metrics to everything, regardless of whether it's appropriate or not.

Which isn't to say that we're not interested in learning about specific outcomes. I do think, however, a fair amount of hype has attached itself to the outcomes-and-measurement movement, and I'm especially concerned about the effect it could have on goals. If you've got to prove to a funder that you achieved certain goals, you're likely to pick pretty specific, achievable goals. And that, in my view, can undermine the work of visionary leaders who see fundamental social change in big-picture terms. In a situation where outcomes and measurement are stressed, vision tends to get shelved because it doesn't lend itself to accurate predictions or concrete, time-delimited outcomes. And that's a shame — and something, in my view, that funders who are interested in bringing about fundamental social change should avoid.

PND: Collaboration and peer learning, both of which seem to be at the heart of your model, are two other things that would seem to be hard to measure. What have you learned about collaboration in situations where language and cultural barriers, at least at first blush, seem to be insurmountable?

CT: Well, I think it's fair to say — and it's probably a fair criticism of our model — that despite our best efforts to be truly multicultural and multilingual, most of our advisors operate in English. But even though the mix from one region to another is great, the peer learning we've experienced so far is one of the really positive upsides of what we try to do. In the beginning, we really underplayed those kinds of collateral benefits; all we wanted to do was move money in the form of small grants to grassroots environmental groups. But each time we get a group together, whether it's a regional advisory board or a global meeting of our advisors — which, by the way, we rarely do because of the costs involved — the collateral benefits have proven to be so great that we've started to try to do it more frequently. The things they are able to share and learn from each other by virtue of the fact that they share certain fundamental values — an appreciation of the environment or of the power of grassroots organizing — has really been one of the most delightful aspects of our work for me.

I'll give you an example. The student groups we've been working with in China for the last five or six years have found that, compared to most Western donors who work in China, Greengrants, because of its experience in Russia — what the Chinese call "a former socialist state" — has some insight into what it's like to live and work in a transitional socialist state. Now, I didn't know that was happening, but apparently it's incredibly valuable to the people who benefit from it, our advisors and grantees.

So, again, the peer learning aspect of our work has ended up becoming far more important than any of us thought it would be, and the main benefit of it, I think, is the social and political networking that comes out of it. I mean, it has implications well beyond what we've begun to consider. The big hope we have in this regard is to connect them all electronically. As I mentioned earlier, we depend heavily on the Internet and e-mail for communication, and something as simple as introducing certain kinds of translation software and office applications so that, for example, an advisor can fill out a grant recommendation form in Chinese or French or Russian and return it to us and have it automatically translated could make a big difference in our productivity and overall effectiveness.

We also dream about connecting our advisors and grantees via some kind of Web site, of creating a place on the Internet that they could use to stay in touch with one another and share knowledge about what works in one community or what might work in another. Initially, the interaction could be as simple as, say, an organizer in Korea deciding to take a vacation in Thailand and going online to research and ask different Thai environmental groups if he could visit. Eventually, however, we believe advisors and grantees would use it to build their own social networks.

Finally, we know the jury is still out with regards to online fundraising, but our feeling is that anything that has the potential to cut costs further is something we have to look at. I mean, what could be more tempting?

PND: Have the voluntary antiterrorism guidelines promulgated by the Treasury Department changed the way your organization works?

CT: Certainly. We are in compliance with the guidelines, and we're quite proud of that because it has involved a lot of work and expense, which is somewhat ironic when you consider that we're all about simplifying and lowering the costs of our grantmaking. One of the key components of the voluntary guidelines is that you check the names of your grantees' executives and board members against lists of suspected terrorists, and because there are several lists maintained by different federal agencies and departments, it's an arduous, time-consuming process — even the Treasury Department thinks it's probably not feasible to check all the names against all the lists. But we've tested several of the new software programs that exist for this purpose and are making a good-faith effort to check names against the lists on a regular basis.

We've also educated all of our advisors about the guidelines. And we've given constructive feedback to the Treasury Department about which aspects of the guidelines are the most time-consuming and might be impossible for funders to comply with if they became mandatory. Some of that feedback has been given collaboratively with other small re-granting foundations like the Global Fund for Women and the Fund for Global Human Rights, in part because our situations and perspective is a bit different than that of some of the major foundations or even a group like Grantmakers Without Borders. When grant size and cost per transaction are critical factors in what you do, you become especially sensitive to additional regulations that have the potential to drive up your costs.

PND: Do you think widespread compliance with the guidelines will make us safer from future attacks?

CT: I don't. We've been using these guidelines for almost two years now, and we have yet to find a match — and neither have any of the other international grantmakers we know of. I mean, everybody's doing this, and you'd think that sooner or later someone would find a match or could point to something concrete that prevented someone from moving money to a terrorist organization. Absent that, you have to wonder whether we're really just wasting a lot of time and money. But again, we'll continue to do it and try to help the Treasury Department improve the system.

Having said that, I will say that what's more important to me in terms of homeland security then checking names against a watch list is the kinds of things that make us all safer: showing more compassion and generosity to the world's poor and dispossessed, encouraging more private philanthropy, in culturally appropriate ways, in developing countries, the kinds of things that help people and, at the same time, reduce the odds that they'll be easy recruitment targets by terrorist organizations. Those kinds of things would go a lot further to making us safer than the steps that grantmakers are being required to take now.

PND: Although it can be difficult to plan ahead in uncertain times, where would you like to see your organization in five years?

CT: Actually, we've laid out a pretty clear plan that calls for us to continue our pattern of growth over the next several years. We'd like to reach a point where we are doing approximately a thousand grants a year in the seventy or so countries that we now work in, at a total cost of about $5 million, with some operating expenses on top of that.

We're also in the process of helping to cultivate indigenous philanthropy in three countries: Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia, all of which seem ready to take their existing philanthropic infrastructures to the next level. If that works like we hope it will, Greengrants-like organizations in each of those countries — and perhaps two more within five years — may each be raising a million dollars apiece and re-granting the money to the same kind of environmental grassroots groups we support. The combination of the two — the $5 million a year we hope to raise, plus another five countries doing a million dollars each, mostly with money raised domestically — would make roughly $10 million dollars a year available, in small grant amounts, to the kinds of grassroots groups we think can help build and stabilize civil society in emerging democracies that, in many cases, are still quite unstable. We don't necessarily think that's enough, but for our own organizational purposes it's the goal.

Further down the road, what we'd like to do is partner with other re-granting foundations like the Global Fund for Women and the Fund for Global Human Rights to cover other sectors and social movements, where appropriate, and, at the same time, help cultivate new sources of funding through the replication of our model. As I've already mentioned, our strategy is driven by the costs associated with grantmaking overseas. If we can continue to minimize those costs, our strategy will succeed. Most social scientists and social change theorists will tell you that in almost all social transformation situations, change starts with small groups in many places starting to do similar things at about the same time. Eventually, they begin to build networks among themselves and then larger structures that transform society in lasting ways.

That's the final point I'd make. What's important about that as a social change strategy is also what gives the model stability. It's not just about policy change, or about short-term change that reverses itself as the political mood shifts. It's about social change that last for generations.

PND: So, despite the rocky start it's off to, you remain optimistic that the 21st century will see humanity working collectively to solve global environmental problems and bring equality and social justice to all those places where those things are just a dream today?

CT: Yes, I do. You know, most of us are, by nature, either optimistic or pessimistic. I'd have to say I'm an optimist by nature. I'm also a realist, however, and as a realist I see real evidence, despite the rocky start you alluded to, that progress is being made, both in terms of environmental sustainability and social justice. One can minimize or ignore it, but the fact of the matter is that the standard of living for many people in Asia has improved considerably in the last twenty years. It's also true, and it's impossible to ignore the fact, that the standard of living for many people in Africa has declined in the last twenty years. But, at the same time, I think there's a new understanding about we can avoid and resolve conflict, how we can bring justice and improve all kinds of social conditions by doing things as simple as networking and improving the status of women. In fact, improving the status of women improves almost every other social problem we face as a species. And while, yes, we still have a long way to go, I do believe the situation is improving.

Now, there are a few wild cards out there — weapons of mass destruction and AIDS, among them. But we're doing our best to manage those. And technology can help. In fact, alternative energy technology — fuel cells, wind and solar power, hydrogen — is one of the wild cards, and it's beginning to deliver on its promise. It may be a while yet before we wean ourselves from our dependence on fossil fuels, and we'll probably travel a bumpy road before we get there, but I am optimistic; I don't think we're doomed. On the contrary, I think the more people at the community level we are able to empower with the appropriate resources to solve their own problems, the sooner we'll get there and the happier and healthier we'll be. And that's exactly what we're trying to do at Global Greengrants Fund.

PND: Well, Chet, thanks for your time this afternoon. It was a pleasure speaking to you.

CT: Thank you.

Mitch Nauffts, PND's editorial director, spoke with Chet Tchozewski over the summer. For more information on the Newsmakers series, contact Mitch at mfn@fdncenter.org.