Better Boulder — YIMBY 2016

The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $37,000 to Better Boulder to support a conference of land use reform advocates from around the U.S. and Canada.

Land use reform is one of our focus areas. We are aware of, and have supported, several organizations that advocate for more permissive housing policy in key metro areas around the U.S. However, as far as we are aware there has never been a national conference to bring these advocates together. This grant will support YIMBY 2016, to be held in Boulder, Colorado in the summer of 2016. (The conference is named for the “Yes, In My Backyard” movement, which refers to the better-known acronym “NIMBY“.) Grant funds will primarily be used to subsidize participants who might not otherwise be able to attend.

This is a “no-process” grant. For no-process grants, the grant investigator (in this case Alexander Berger, our Program Officer for U.S. Policy) can recommend the grant without needing to go through our normal process of providing their reasoning, discussing with the team, and providing input on and review of our public page. These grants are limited to a relatively small proportion of our grantmaking, and some other stipulations apply to what types of grant are eligible. The overall aim is for us to be able to move forward on relatively small and low-risk grants, based purely on the judgment of a single staff member and with minimal delay. In keeping with the lack of process, we don’t plan to publish in-depth pages about the reasoning behind these grants.

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