FIP participates in an exchange of business experiences in regions affected by violence and armed conflict. Credit: FIP/Ford Foundation.
The Fundación Ideas para la Paz (FIP)1 was founded 25 years ago with a simple yet powerful conviction: thinking about peace is the best way to build it.
At the time of its creation in 1999, peace negotiations between the government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), Colombia’s largest guerilla group, were at a critical point: mistrust, uncertainty, escalation of war, and deteriorating security defined the situation. Against this backdrop, a group of business leaders—convinced that their sector could contribute to ending the violence—decided to act. They created FIP.
Emerging first as a traditional think tank, FIP evolved into a center for thought and action. Today, as a “think-and-do-tank”, FIP continues to support efforts to build a peace grounded in the country’s territorial realities—without abandoning the desire for real transformation.
When it comes to its mission and its financial resilience, the team sees new possibilities on the horizon.
The emergence of new conflicts on an international scale, migration crises, and changes in foreign policies have brought significant changes to global peace and security agendas.
In Colombia, these developments have exacerbated a downward trend in international cooperation, following the country’s classification as a “high-middle-income economy” by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In 2023 alone, foreign aid to the country dropped by 37% compared to 2022. More recently, the closure of USAID—one of the main funders of the Peace Agreement signed with the FARC in 2016—led to the cancellation of all its projects in the country.
Anticipating these changes, FIP has spent the past few years strengthening its institutional capacities (with partners such as the Ford Foundation and Humanity United), increasing its visibility and impact, and making important decisions about its structure and sustainability.
Through a BUILD grant from the Ford Foundation, the team participated in Spring's Financial Innovation and Resilience (FIRE) program in 2024 during a period of relative institutional calm and low external pressure. This allowed them to continue reflecting on the organization’s identity, mission, and strategy.
While many of the issues addressed in FIRE were already part of internal conversations, the program helped to enrich ongoing processes with new perspectives and tools. FIRE strengthened FIP's team in three key areas, leading to a more consolidated and sustainable organization.
Effective communications help potential supporters understand the importance of FIP's work, such as developing a guiding handbook for relations between Indigenous peoples and business sector, as pictured above. Credit: FIP/Ford Foundation.
Realizing that its narratives tended to be overly technical, FIP adjusted how it tells its story. It adopted a more home-grown approach, based on actively listening to different audiences and telling stories about how peace is built in the Colombian context.
What does FIP’s work look like in practice? Sometimes it means boosting capacities for action and advocacy, or strengthening community organizations and their leadership. Other times, it involves creating innovative alliances between business and communities, as well as engaging the business sector in territorial transformation or supporting businesses to adopt human rights standards. The organization also generates knowledge needed to understand and transform local environments.
To communicate this complex work, the team made three important changes in its storytelling: (1) more frequent communications, (2) simpler language in reports and publications, and (3) putting a human face on the foundation’s work (its researchers and local, national, and international partners).
Audience-centered communication is an essential part of the FIRE program because it allows teams to sharpen the rationale for resources in ways that drive their missions forward and resonate with funders, partners and other allies.
For FIP, leveraging communications to bridge the gap between technical knowledge and the experiences of people living in violence-affected regions has allowed the team to cultivate more authentic relationships with current (and potential) allies.
This communication refresh stems from FIP’s commitment to being more than a source of information. By creating digital spaces that reflect its role as a think-and-do tank, the organization has positioned itself as an active player in conversations about peace, security, and sustainable development.
The team now amplifies the voices of the people it supports through its national and local initiatives, and hopes that these new communications will help expand its network and spark new collaboration opportunities.
How can a strategic budget support key programs, such as strengthening dialogue capacities between Colombia's Empresas Públicas de Medellín and its labor unions, as the FIP team does in the above photo? Credit: FIP/Ford Foundation.
For years, FIP’s budgetary approach focused on the immediate needs of its projects and initiatives. This way of operating has evolved into a more comprehensive and strategic approach centered around the development of a strategic, organization wide budget.
One of the most important achievements has been aligning FIP’s financial resources with its strategic priorities, including its goals for long-term sustainability.
A strategic budget is a tool from the FIRE program that allows organizations to easily capture and understand their full direct and indirect costs by program each year, along with how the expenses will be financed.
With this tool, an organization can rapidly visualize funding gaps or surpluses, funds that are restricted or unrestricted, and how diversified its income is. This enables leadership teams to make strategic decisions that align funding with the organization’s true needs, ensuring that expenditures advance the team’s mission and financial sustainability goals. This makes the strategic budget an invaluable tool for tracking, forecasting, and scenario planning.
For instance, with the support of Spring’s financial health dashboard, board members are able to quickly assess FIP’s financial health. This information allowed the team to decide to further diversify its funding sources and reallocate unrestricted resources according to current needs—a proactive decision that mitigated the impact of USAID’s funding cuts in early 2025.
This work has also opened the door to important conversations about mobilizing greater amounts of unrestricted resources to support essential institutional operations.
FIP’s work evolves with the times. Above, a trip to Putumayo with FIP's Steering Committee to bring them closer to the work with local entrepreneurs and responsible business conduct. Credit: FIP.
The most recent topic on FIP's financial resilience agenda is exploring alternative financial models (beyond traditional grants).
The team is exploring how it could offer services based on its expertise and capabilities. They are also analyzing the potential of innovative financial mechanisms, such as impact investing, blended finance, and fiscal sponsorship. The goal is to strengthen FIP’s institutional base and diversify its income without losing sight of its mission and strategy.
These alternative financing models often require a different type of expertise than those typically found in non-governmental organizations. With this in mind, the team is prioritizing conversations about the internal capacities it must develop to move forward with the most promising ideas.
Today, FIP is strengthening its relationships with the business sector and renewing its identity as a strategic partner for companies that promote peace and sustainable development.
It does so with the conviction that the challenges of peace are deeply connected to those of development, and that lasting peace is only possible with a strong state and citizenry, and with a thriving business sector that uses its potential to generate wellbeing and inclusion in the territories.
Another challenge on the horizon, according to the team, will be communicating the organization’s purpose and impact in ways that mobilize new allies and resources. There is no single formula for building peace. It is an interdisciplinary field that can take many forms. In 2024 alone, FIP managed 52 projects in 84 municipalities. Leveraging its new communication strategies—and the fact that, since 2014, it has been one of Colombia’s most admired organizations by opinion leaders—FIP is well-positioned to keep communicating its work with creativity and depth.
Just as FIP’s role has evolved over time, its financial model will continue adapting to the world around it. Financial resilience, like peace, is a process built over time, every day, by people and organizations working together.
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Notes
1. Fundación Ideas para la Paz (FIP) translates to "Ideas for Peace Foundation"