Traditionally in our district we have given every club the same district grant because we wanted to be fair to the clubs. But while giving a flat amount to each club may be fair to the clubs, it is not fair to all concerned. Our job is to be fair to the donors who gave the money, not the clubs. Our District’s obligation to the donors is to do the best job we can picking the best projects that will have the biggest impact on the communities in our district. Allocating a fixed amount to each club without considering the relative merits of the different projects is not likely to fulfill that obligation. And it is atypical within Rotary. All the other districts I know about have some process for awarding grants based on the merits of the grant. Nobody gives a flat amount to each club regardless of merit.

This year we adopted a more typical approach: let the best projects win. We empowered the clubs to get creative in their grant requests, letting them apply for any amount between $1,000 and $10,000. We then appointed a committee of past district governors and representatives from the most generous clubs to choose the best projects from the bunch and make sure they got funded.

But when it came down to evaluating the requests, the committee found it extraordinarily difficult to come to a consensus. Even individual committee members found it hard to rank projects from best to worst. It was just really hard to satisfy yourself that request A deserved to be funded, but request B did not. They could tell the great projects from the less great, but when it came down to deciding whether project A was number 50 and project B was number 51 or was B 50 and A 51 ... it was hard.

Their compromise solution was to fund all the smaller grant requests at 100% and, to stay within budget, reduce the funding of the large grant requests by a uniform percentage. The solution they chose was reasonable and yielded a great result: every club got what they requested or considerably more than they would have gotten under the old system. And, overall the process had the desired result of bringing new energy and innovation to our district grants. The process yielded more thoughtful and creative grant requests, and some clubs collaborated on new project ideas.

But, we did not make the hard choices. And if the clubs think we will use the same approach next year, then they will all apply for the $10,000 maximum. To meet the budget we will haircut each request by the same percentage. And all the clubs will get the same amount. And there we are, back at square one.

By picking all the projects, by definition we did not pick the best. The other districts in Rotary have figured out how to make the tough choices. Thousands of grant-making philanthropies in Georgia have figured out how to make them. We owe it to our generous Rotarians to work toward a better process to make the hard choices and choose the best projects to the best of our ability and not just distribute the money pro rata without regard to merit.