Growth fund? It’s more like a slave fund

The growth fund rain has begun. The millions are falling like manna from the sky for many projects, from agriculture to astronomy, with futuristic names like CropXR (43 million), NXTGEN HIGHTECH (450 million) and the revolution of molecular thinking systems (97 million). At the same time, I am trying to fix a shortfall of several tens of thousands of euros in a budget for a subsidy application. A year ago I was seduced by a government fund that aligned beautifully with our citizen science ambitions to free microbiology from the impregnable fortress of the university and make it accessible to ordinary people. Until then, our project ran on enthusiastic volunteers, such as myself. We were helped by donors, companies and laboratories. They did analyses, helped us with IT and sometimes paid an invoice.

If we were to receive a subsidy, we would be able to pay people and companies for their work. Then we could hire an employee, plus one day of employment for myself. Then we could buy equipment. But it turned out not to work that way. It started with that one device that we no longer had to borrow, but could buy, with this subsidy. Beginner’s mistake in the fund world. Equipment can only be written off, not purchased. Result: no device.

Then the employee. The subsidy provider forbade people in permanent employment to pay from the subsidy. It had to be ‘fresh’ and temporary staff. For every year that the employee works on the requested project, someone somewhere has to request a new project for a year.

By the way, that will become the standard in government spending. There is an abundance of short, heavy money downpours that you have to spend at lightning speed because it ends abruptly after that. Then the application cycle starts again. Stimulating the panting economy. Structural money is becoming increasingly rare. The ditch of the growth fund is a one-time investment, just like the 8.5 billion euros that went to education last year to quickly make up for arrears. The schools were allowed to spend it on anything, except for what they really need: permanent staff. Meanwhile, the tutoring cowboys filled their pockets.

Growth fund? You mean you’re going to have a squeeze fund. It doesn’t fit, but we push on, because we don’t miss out on a pot of money. So we wrote a preliminary application, we organized a workshop, we were prominently celebrated on the website as an example project, we did interviews, we wrote budget forms, data plans, contracts and commitment letters, we answered questions from financial controllers, partners, lawyers, subsidy desks. And because this grant was a public-private partnership, we looked at turning our foundation into a private partner – which reduced our chances of receiving any money other than this grant.

The project is almost in the mold. We cut off a number of limbs and three fingers, took a day off the staff and canceled travel budget, publication budget, data management budget, chemicals budget. We changed the form, changed ourselves. And soon we will start, but not after every spark has been knocked out in this exercise: from the project and from ourselves. All kinds of smart creative ambitious people are only busy with one thing: jumping through the hoops of the state. No growth fund. Servant Fund.

Do you know what is not eligible for subsidy? Depreciation of the fun of the game, all the man hours that went into the unsuccessful applications (because for every successful there are three failed), the parallel economy of companies that help researchers in this competitive madness to ‘burn’ their project in such a way that it has a chance of success.

We are almost there. And if things still go wrong, we may be able to convert the project into a CropXR project or Green Power II. Or we undergo a metamorphosis into a molecular self-thinking system. Or we are forced to join one of the other 28 organizations that now spend millions under the conditions of the growth fund. Maybe after some amputations we’ll fit into their mold.

Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.