By Grit, Mission & Numbers host, Lucía Carrasco

Behind every budget and grant application is an untold human story.

I'm thrilled to announce the launch of Spring's new podcast, "Grit, Mission & Numbers", which digs into the challenges and approaches that finance leaders for rights and justice don't talk about often enough. Hosted by me, Lucía Carrasco, the podcast will be available in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Each episode, I sit down with special guests to hear what they’re actually trying as they rethink organizational resilience—from building capital reserves in adverse contexts and leading teams through catastrophic funding losses to scaling sustainably and everything in between.

👉🏾 Find all our episodes here.

Why a podcast? Why now?

After six years running Spring's Financial Innovation and Resilience (FIRE) program, and working more closely alongside Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local leaders across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, I realized the same themes kept coming back in different languages and contexts.

It wasn’t just the disparity in access to resources (financial, technical) that caught my attention—it was the isolation. In many of these communities, there isn't any other "finance" person to exchange with.

Through FIRE, Spring has worked with more than 500 organizations operating across more than 60 countries. In program evaluations, we kept getting one request from FIRE participants, over and over: more real-life stories from finance leaders. As one participant, Joaquín Tovar of Foro Nacional por Colombia, put it “[We need] more spaces for dialogue and sharing of personal experiences—both triumphs and failures!”. 

Through feedback like this, I realized that finance teams rarely benefit from holistic training or exposure to other ways of doing things. Yet, their role in the organization's sustainability is crucial (and they haven't been vindicated enough for the wisdom they hold!). Filling this urgent knowledge gap is what compelled me to take on the challenge of documenting these stories from the Global South and East in a way that was digestible and relatable. Being able to do it in multiple languages, to make it truly accessible, was especially important to me.

Listen in—Episode 1: Bouncing back: Leading your team from panic to pivot with Ganesh Ramachandran

Peer learning is pivotal.

The importance of the kind of peer learning we do on the podcast rings especially true at a time when the global funding landscape is in a major state of flux and we need stories like this more than ever. By sharing the context-specific constraints, adaptations, innovations, and best practices—like our guests do on the podcast—we can teach each other so much. It inspires colleagues, breaks silos, and gives us the courage to implement financial health strategies that make the most of the opportunities we find (spoiler alert: operating reserves can be grown more easily than you might think ... and unqualified auditor opinions do happen 😉).

Leaders don’t want more theoretical manuals; they want to know how their peers are actually surviving and thriving. That's why this podcast matters.

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