By Archana Deshpande and Ellen Sprenger1
It’s time for a profound reset in our thinking about how rights and justice work is funded. For years, alarm bells have been warning us that a storm is brewing in foreign aid and philanthropy. Today, billions of dollars in aid are on the chopping block and philanthropic giving is increasingly at risk from democratic backsliding. With lives and livelihoods in the balance, philanthropic funders and civil society organizations alike must reimagine how to fund the work.
“The scope and the speed of what's happening in foreign aid is unprecedented, as is the global nature of this right wing capture of the state that directly attacks human rights and justice movements,” says Kellea Miller, Executive Director of Human Rights Funders Network (HRFN), who spoke to us in April 2025 in a conversation with Ikal Ang'elei, Indigenous leader and co-founder and executive director of Friends of Lake Turkana.2
Funders and movements must work together to fill very real and vital funding gaps (such as in hard-hit health services), while also nurturing longer-term visions for collective financial resilience. Can we turn the deep pain of this moment into a catalyst for more sustainable and transformative ways of funding social and climate justice work?
In this primer, we explore key shifts in the funding landscape along with essential takeaways for building financial resilience in this time of intense transition. We aren’t all in the same boat, but we can row in the same direction to build the collective strength needed to weather these times.
👉🏾 A sea of change in the global funding architecture
👉🏾 3 opportunities for philanthropy to steady the ship in rights and justice funding
👉🏾 3 principles to help rights and justice movements weather the storm together
There were signs that the tide was turning: international development offices folding into foreign affairs bureaus, trade priorities snaking around bilateral aid, and the ever-changing funding strategies and priorities. Some of what the field is experiencing today is familiar, notes Ikal.
But economic instability after covid-19 and rising authoritarianism have deepened the cracks in the political consensus about official development assistance (ODA), shifting it away from traditional priorities and reorienting it toward delivering wins at home. This has meant funnelling aid toward transactional geopolitical goals, the war in Ukraine and donor-country costs associated with hosting refugees.
Whether you see the shifts in today’s foreign aid landscape as “tectonic” or evolutionary might depend on what tables you’ve been invited to (or not invited to) over the years. What is clear, however, is that the scale and pace of the changes have reached a tipping point.
Calculations on the back of the dismantling of USAID in early 2025 and aid reductions announced by eight other countries in 2024 show that global ODA flows are set to see a 31% (or more) reduction by 2029. Despite countries like Norway stepping up, this isn’t just a blip, warns Kellea; it’s a rupture in the traditional funding infrastructure for rights and justice work. Analysis by Kellea’s team at HRFN shows that $1 billion of the estimated $7.8 in ODA currently earmarked for global human rights work is likely to be cut annually by 2027. This is a very real gap that will need to be filled alongside clear shortfalls in critical health and environmental services.
On top of this, philanthropic organizations are braced for attacks that could revoke their tax-exempt status and limit their ability to grant internationally. As Kellea writes in Devex, while legally dubious, “efforts to stop US foundations’ international grantmaking would be cataclysmic.” Of the foundation grants tracked in HRFN’s annual analysis, the US accounts for 88% of foundation spending on human rights globally (that’s $4.3 billion out of the roughly $4.9 billion total). The US administration’s hostility toward diversity, equity and inclusion at home and abroad may have a chilling effect on philanthropy and restrict the global funding environment further.
But we’re now seeing glimmers of a united response from philanthropy. Initially focused on emergency grants and increased flexibility, philanthropic coordination is gaining momentum. By the end of April 2025, close to 150 foundations had signed the “Meet the Moment” pledge to increase trust-based gifts and support. Plus, a number of funders have announced increased endowment payouts (MacArthur, Freedom Together Foundation, Hewlett, and Skoll, for instance). With philanthropy in the crosshairs of the US administration, we have also witnessed more than 500 organizations sign onto the Council on Foundations’ statement reaffirming their right to give and invest in communities as part of their freedom of expression.4
Still, the collective response from philanthropy to today’s threats is more muted than it was at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, 800 grantmakers signed a Ford Foundation-led pledge to ease grant restrictions. In the year after the pandemic, grantmakers enacted the kind of flexible, creative, and trust-based funding that many movements have advocated for over the past two decades. A surge in support for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder also showed how quickly they could mobilize. More recently, with a growing number of countries enacting foreign agents laws and limiting external support for civil society, we’ve seen funders think outside the box and work with local re-granting organizations to resource movements operating under repressive regimes.
So, how can we all move forward? We can start by drawing on past strategies for handling funding crises and political crackdowns, but we must also envision new ways of responding to the potentially catastrophic fallout of what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor term “end times fascism”. Both funders and civil society organizations have a role to play charting a course through the difficult times ahead. Like ships steering toward the lighthouse on the shore, we can find bright spots of hope to guide us through the storm.
Rights and justice organizations will likely be sailing through stormy waters for years to come, so what can funders do to help steady the ship?
As noted above, some funders have been boldly galvanizing the sector. Others, Kellea shares, are engaging behind the scenes. But too many funders—even the majority, she worries—fall into the “silent” camp; they are retreating in what has been termed pre-emptive compliance or they’re waiting to see where funding cuts and executive orders land. At times like these, funders can learn from movements’ longtime practice of leveraging an inside/outside strategy, which can help funders understand the impact of potential cuts, collaborate with peers, keep moving money to movements and share the risks amongst others in the funder ecosystem.
“We have a huge amount of power in this moment if we come together. We can push back very deliberately on the assault on our ability to move resources to movements and the assault on human rights and social justice,” Kellea reminds us. “We must all deeply resist the temptation to turn inward, but rather actively and vigilantly continue to build coalitions.”
Kellea has a clear call-to-action for funders and it starts with seeing time as a justice issue. Private philanthropy, she believes, can come up with the $1 billion needed to halve the coming deficit in human rights funding.3 The next two years will be a crucial period of adjustment. And while Kellea is frank that philanthropy can’t cover the whole foreign aid funding gap, it can buy time for movements to do their immediate work while figuring out how to restructure.
Money should be directed to spaces where movements are already organizing, where funders can support leaders to come together to discuss collaborative models and income diversification, including (and especially) beyond grant dependency. They can also support the process of dreaming up the different ways civil society groups might need to organize and operate under global far-right authoritarianism. While individual organizations may not survive, movements can rise up resiliently.
Ikal gets even bolder: legacy foundations want to exist forever, she observes, and that often means assuming the problem will go on forever, so they don’t spend down endowments to address the current crisis. She challenges funders to look at the whole pot of money they have now, both their investments and grantmaking budgets, and take a long view of the change they are trying to make in the world. They should ask, “Where do we put the resources now, so that we can reap the investments later?”
This is also a time for funders to learn from movement groups. These groups know firsthand how it feels to have funds and relationships dry up when donor priorities change. Many also know what it’s like to operate under repressive regimes.
“Foundations are looking for answers internally, but maybe they need to be looking at Indigenous movements who have actually already fought back against repression in their contexts,” says Ikal. She encourages funders to listen deeply to grantees.
To tackle today’s disruptive, complex and emergent problems collectively, there is a strong argument for opening up the more rigid philanthropic practices of project-based granting in line with the long-standing calls for multi-year grants, flexible funding and trust-based philanthropy. A push like we saw during covid-19 is needed. This will be especially important if a loss of 501(c)(3) status or foreign aid income drives non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to explore other organizing structures and financial models to continue their work. How are funders prepared to move money outside the NGO-ized civil society space?
“Make bold moves that support co-conspiration with grantee partners,” Ikal urges, even if it means having to throw away yesterday’s strategies.
“Civil society will survive beyond aid,” Ikal affirms. Movements are a reflection of people fighting for their lives and rights.
But as nation-states adopt increasingly transactional approaches to international relations, movements will need to respond with transformational approaches to their relationships with one another … and the work itself. Community must be at the heart of this in three crucial ways.
“There is going to be a shift in how we are structured,” says Kellea. “Organizations will be closing or merging. That is undeniable. It is going to happen.”
How can organizations face this with courage, compassion and also strategic vision for how the work can endure? In one CIVICUS survey, for example, 44% of 400 organizations reported having less than 3 months of financial reserves. Not all organizations will continue to exist and do the work the same way they have been until now. But, if leaders think in terms of the resilience of the ecosystem, and not institutional self-preservation, they can form powerful alliances across organizations and movements, restructuring the work in an intersectional way that reweaves a strong civil society.
The days in which organizations can subsist on grants from one or two key donors are fading fast. It’s becoming increasingly clear that organizations must look to income generation, peer-to-peer funding and other revenue streams to power their missions. Grants aren’t going away, but the signs are increasingly clear that organizations need to look beyond them to bolster their resilience to shocks.
Rights and justice groups have been experimenting with non-grant income since before this new tipping point in traditional funding—from income-generating services run by the Social Media Exchange in Lebanon to a cryptocurrency digital auction run by The Tor Project and many more examples. Strong collaboration is always at the heart of the innovation and success these organizations have experienced.
However, this is a huge reorientation for many groups and the hundreds of organizations affected by USAID cuts who have not found alternative funding. Since changes to the financial model often require staff investments, it’s vital that organizations join forces and imagine ways of working (such as sharing resources and staff) that can support this kind of robust income diversification.
How can organizations and movements create economies that keep money in the communities they serve? How can essential service provision, like health care and advocacy for the rights inherent in it, be thought of as work that can be done together?
This is a huge question. “We really need to put our heads together to work on this,” says Ikal. “We’ve got to think outside the box and be nimble, but at the same time keep the lights on.”
It's worth thinking about covid-19 again, when organizations combined advocacy with mutual aid and humanitarian support (community kitchens offering political education and more in Argentina, for example). Service provision, memberships, individual small giving, volunteering, resource sharing and other community-based approaches can strengthen rights and justice work by offering a more palatable mission to a public wary of advocacy organizations. It can also deepen relationships with constituent communities to support advocacy that is developed with community members and directly responsive to their needs and concerns. Groups from the Global South have historically been leading community-based resilience, already innovating beyond grants and leading system-changing work with less than a tenth of foreign aid and barely more foundation funding.
Ikal points to the unique postcolonial possibilities of the moment: “We've got to create a social justice economy, a feminist economy, a people economy,” she urges, drawing attention to the big picture goal of rights and justice work.
“Democracy faces serious and growing challenges,” as CIVICUS notes in 2025, “but it has significant capacity for renewal.” The same can be said about funding for social and climate justice work. With a clear-eyed understanding of the shifting tide in funding, along with renewed commitment to community accountability, organizations can build greater resilience.
For some, this may mean a process of mourning and “hospicing” their work (in its current form) in as careful and dignified a way as possible. For others, the task will be to reinvent their models collaboratively. As we put to rest the aging infrastructure of international development, who we work with, and how, will look different. What possibilities can you imagine taking root in place of the old system?
This storm will eventually pass, and our world will be changed when the clouds clear. But the work will go on. Organizations and movements able to navigate the ever-shifting landscape with a sense of purpose, clarity about their role in the ecosystem, and a spirit of financial versatility will be better positioned to find new pathways, money and resources—and to weather whatever comes next.
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1 Archana Deshpande and Ellen Sprenger are co-CEOs of Spring Strategies. This article was developed with the research support of Erin Hohlfelder, as well as research and editorial support from Jesse Firempong.
2 Contributions from Kellea and Ikal were gathered as part of a conversation about the changing funding landscape for rights and justice work on April 22, 2025. This was the first in our three-part conversation series, Reimagining Resilience: Sustaining our Mission in a Changing World.
3 HRFN predicts that the funding deficit for human rights will be $1 billion per year. If funders mobilize now, $1 billion would cover half of what's needed in the next two years (2025-2027).