By Archana Deshpande and Ellen Sprenger1
Could there be unexpected opportunities in a post-aid world?
In 2024, it became clear that the tide was turning on foreign aid, as eight wealthy governments announced projected cuts of USD $17.2 billion. The abrupt dismantling of USAID in 2025 has been a painful and unprecedented acceleration of this emerging trend.
These shocks come amidst changing philanthropic priorities, deepening economic inequality, a worldwide crisis in democratic norms and proliferating armed conflict, all of which have left civil society organizations struggling to hold the line in increasingly volatile and authoritarian contexts. At a time when the world urgently needs their work, rights and justice organizations are grappling with the increasingly challenging question of how to finance the work—should they be changing strategies, downsizing, merging with allies or face closing down altogether?
To move through these challenges, leadership teams will need to think more creatively about their financial models—even as philanthropy and other funders re-evaluate the important role they still play in supporting movements and protecting civic space. These are rough new waters, but this isn’t the first time that crises have come knocking at our doors. So, what can we learn from the past about how to prepare for this uncertain future?
From our years accompanying hundreds of organizations on financial resilience journeys, we’ve learned that many leaders are already thinking outside the grant dependency box. In this blog, we’re sharing stories from three of them.2 We hope these short narratives ignite your own thinking and contribute to a more dynamic collective imagination for financing global social and climate justice work!
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“Shock has been a constant for Lebanon, and hence any organization based in this country,” says Lucie Doumanian, a feminist digital rights activist and Deputy Executive Director at Lebanon’s Social Media Exchange (SMEX). While advocating for digital rights across West Asia and North Africa, the team has operated through revolution, hyperinflation, the collapse of the banking sector, a devastating port explosion, and ongoing war.
In recent years, one of the first things SMEX did in response to restrictive currency controls in Lebanon was register a legal entity abroad so that it was easier to receive international funding. They now operate a 501(c)(3) in the US. “That alleviated a lot of the mental pressure we had as an organization,” Lucie remembers.
She and her team then prioritized reducing dependency on two foundations. This meant proactively building capital reserves, nurturing a culture of donor prospecting, and looking at SMEX’s strengths differently. For example, they were able to leverage their expertise conducting digital safety assessments as an income-generating service. The entire team continues to be involved in donor communications, routine scoping for new opportunities, and mapping digital rights trends in the region so they can stay responsive.
The steps SMEX took to diversify its funding (once heavily reliant on US grants) became a crucial buffer that mitigated the impact of recent USAID cuts to just 15% of its budget. “We were saved by looking not just at different funders but also different types of funding. We have project and core funding that is ongoing, and that is what kept us afloat.”
What’s next? “We’re looking at fellow global majority partners,” says Lucie. Having achieved deep internal transformations, SMEX is now looking outward. “How can we support each other? How can we work together as a movement?”
In late 2018, Isabela Fernandes became Executive Director of the Tor Project, a global digital rights organization protecting internet users against surveillance and censorship. Soon after stepping up into this role, she learned that the organization could only cover salaries for the next few months, so she had to jump into action.
Isabela’s first decision went against convention: asking for help and having an honest dialogue with donors about the cash-flow crisis. She asked for (and received) access to fundraising training for her team. This led to their adoption of a “waterfall” prospecting strategy of segmenting and tracking different tiers of donors, from imminent incoming funds to partnerships in negotiation to reach-for-the-sky dream donors.
Like Lucie, Isabela led an all-hands-on-deck approach to fundraising that allowed the Tor Project to turn things around quickly. For example, in just three days, the team launched a cryptocurrency NFT auction. After some quick research to identify an auction house, contacting an artist over social media to design a unique NFT, establishing a mutually beneficial collaboration process with the artist, and generating buzz to secure bids, the team raised 500 Ethereum (roughly $2 million USD). Later, seeing a tweet from a philanthropist pledging to fund organizations working towards a decentralized internet, Isabela suggested reaching out—“to remind him we exist and also deserve support,” she laughs—and now that individual is their biggest individual donor.
“I created a Money-Machine Team with people from fundraising, programs and finance and other areas of the organization, and we meet every week,” says Isabela. “We’re now diversifying our funds, we have reserves and we are in a much better place.” The team’s agility, skill and discipline enabled the Tor Project to create a diverse portfolio for its funds that helped decrease the dependency on U.S. government funds to only 22% of its budget.
By staying open-minded, keeping their fingers on the pulse of a unique ecosystem and daring to be unconventional, Isabela and the Tor Project were able to take advantage of unexpected, high-value “unicorn opportunities.”
Within a month of joining the public interest law organization The Legal Resources Centre (LRC) in 2018, Executive Director Nersan Govender discovered that the 40-year old South African institution with a storied anti-apartheid legacy was virtually bankrupt, and all funders were walking away. Nersan’s immediate question to the board, team and partners was: is there still a need for the LRC?
“The answer was a resounding yes,” he says. So, he and the team set to work fixing what was broken. Nersan focused on breaking down silos to better align programs, operations, and finance teams around clear objectives. This required tough decisions to reduce duplicative staff roles and streamline programs to the strongest areas. Key to this process was staying transparent, strategic and proactive in communicating impactful stories to funders.
A few donors said they would fund the LRC if the team could demonstrate it was turning the ship around. “It took about eighteen months,” Nersan says. “During that time, covid-19 happened. We were all in lock down and there was a crisis in South Africa’s informal settlements. But the LRC was on the ground, rolling up its sleeves and investigating people’s legal rights in these settlements. That’s when donors really noticed we weren’t sitting on the sidelines. We were able to build our financial resilience with very focused work and giving everyone confidence that we knew what we were doing.”
While the organization has not been directly impacted by recent foreign aid cuts, the LRC team knows what it’s like to have to reinvent itself when crisis strikes. Looking ahead, and building on its ongoing funding diversification efforts, the LRC is cultivating a national individual giving pipeline to build reserves. It’s also exploring collective fundraising opportunities, such as joint proposals, new partnerships with like-minded organizations in BRICS countries, and collaborations with universities. Read more about the LRC’s journey here!
Visionary leaders like Lucie, Isabela and Nersan remind us that we have what it takes to reimagine financial resilience in our organizations, from rapid response to medium-term adaptations to long-horizon shifts. Because of the innovations they undertook to diversify their funding—and the strong, internal collaboration that made it possible—these three organizations are better able to weather the coming changes to how rights and justice work will be funded.
While leaders cannot ignore the pain that comes when their communities and work are under threat, neither can they afford to be frozen or overwhelmed by it. A decade ago, amid changes in the funding landscape, we wrote about how organizations must rethink the financing of their work and imagine a future beyond grant-dependency. With compassion, courage and creativity we can build the collective strength to find inspiration in disruption, and move through these challenging times together.
1 Archana Deshpande and Ellen Sprenger are co-CEO’s of Spring Strategies. This article was developed with the research support of Erin Hohlfelder and editorial support from Jesse Firempong.
2 These stories were shared during a March 25th 2025 virtual event held in partnership with the Ford Foundation, titled “Innovating Together Through Funding Shocks”, that brought together civil society organizations from around the world to make sense of the recent unprecedented cuts to foreign aid and explore actionable strategies for financial resilience.