Let’s Get Ethical: Keeping It Clean in Grant Writing and Management

Both the Grant Professionals Association and Association of Fundraising Professionals dedicate an entire month to ethics. Not because we need a designated month to remind us to behave well, but because it gives us a moment to quasi-officially pause, reflect, and gird our collective loins to some important and most likely uncomfortable conversations within the nonprofits and local government agencies we serve as grant professionals.

For those of us who live and breathe grants, ethics isn’t a once-a-year checkbox. It’s the foundation of what we do every day. Each proposal, report, logic model, and budget line carries an ethical weight that most people outside the grants field don’t fully see. It’s part of our job to help educate them, something I didn’t understand when I first starting writing grants nearly 30 years ago.

The current turbulent funding landscape makes leaning into the GPA Code of Ethics more important than ever.  I want to highlight a few sections that feel especially timely.

• Using grants according to their intent and reporting accurately (Standard 11). With increased and frequently changing federal and foundation oversight, proper stewardship of awarded funds isn’t just ethical — it’s existential for many organizations.
• Disclosing conflicts of interest (Standard 4). Transparency builds trust, and trust is the currency of the grants world. Even the appearance of a conflict can derail relationships that took years to build. Remember, it’s not the existence of a conflict of interest that is the damaging thing, it’s how your agency openly addresses that conflict whenever it may appear in governance, procurement, evaluation, or any other related activity.
• No finder’s fees or percentage-based compensation (Standard 19). This one surprises many people new to the field, but contingency-based grant writing is widely considered unethical. Period. The Association of Fundraising Professionals agrees with this standard too in their own code of ethics, by the way. And, grant writing compensation is very rarely an allowable or allocable cost in most grants agreements.

What matters most right now in grant ethics? Educating up. The majority of nonprofit staff and local government employees who work with grants, or supervise those who do, are not trained grant professionals. They may have the best intentions and zero awareness of these standards. Executive directors, program managers, finance staff, and elected officials all make decisions that intersect with grant ethics, and many of them may be operating without a clear understanding how mismanagement can affect current and future grant funding and the needs of the communities served.

It’s great to have a designated month, but every day should be Grant Ethics Day.