We can’t fund the future with yesterday’s models: How we build “the new”

Co-written by Ellen Sprenger (Spring Co-EO) Jesse Firempong (Communications Co-Lead) and Archana Deshpande (Spring Strategies)

Originally published on LInkedIn

This piece is based on our takeaways from the multiple convenings we hosted over the past year for hundreds of funders and social justice leaders from around the world. We’re excited to share our thoughts below, with much gratitude to each of the brilliant groups and people mentioned for sharing their time, stories and ideas with us!

It’s no secret that the global funding system for social and climate justice is breaking down. Webinars and dialogue circles are awash with this information, as funders and NGO leaders grapple with the fragility of the current model.

We are truly at an inflection point.

One thing is abundantly clear: philanthropy as we know it—anchored in short-term grants and donor-driven accountability—cannot be the solution.

In response to this challenge, we hosted several convenings, including getting together with the Human Rights Funders Network (HRFN), Solidaire and more than 70 players for a funders-only session to discuss what is next for philanthropy. To ground this conversation in achievable, ambitious possibilities, we invited visionary leaders from different parts of the world to share the stories behind their innovative financial models.

Too often, brilliant work already underway in resource-constrained and politically challenging contexts flies under the radar. But if funders and NGOs can collectively act on the underlying wisdom of these unique financial approaches, we believe they can build a more just and resilient funding ecosystem.

A time for courage, imagination, and co-creation

The disruption we’re experiencing offers a space for reinvention—an opening for funders and movements to co-create new financial relationships that share risk, reward creativity, and center collaboration.

For funders, this means reframing the familiar concerns such as, “Will grantees become too financially dependent on us?” and “What will be the impact of the work we are funding?” into a more collaborative question: “How can we be the co-architects of a more generative financial ecosystem?"

For civil society leaders, it means expanding focus from “Where will our next grant come from?” to “How can we be more financially healthy, now and in the future?” This requires carving out space for imagination beyond the daily pressures of managing grants, including learning from peers and organisations outside the NGO sector.

We cannot afford to leave any form of capital—financial, relational, creative, or intellectual—untapped.

We’ve witnessed how painful it has been for groups trying to play by the rules in a collapsing aid system. As part of a team that has spent years supporting funders and NGOs to stretch new financial and fundraising muscles, we know that both groups must challenge entrenched assumptions, legal structures, and norms that limit and direct how resources flow.

Letting go of old mindsets

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Funders must become wealth transformers.

Becoming wealth transformers begins with funders harnessing the power of seeing themselves as part of civil society. Recognizing this interconnectedness unlocks more creative and collaborative ways to deploy resources, as detailed by Kellea Miller and Ikal Ang'elei during a conversation last April.

As full partners in civil society, funders can collaboratively resource a bridging period for rights and justice groups. Research by the Human Rights Funders Network shows that, by 2026, official development assistance (ODA) is projected to plunge by nearly a third, putting millions more lives on the line. And while mission-driven organizations are born to adapt, adaptation requires time and space. In acting as bridges to new financial realities, it’s crucial that funders support “interface periods” that allow NGO and movement leaders to strategize, map futures, and experiment with context-specific models to replace shrinking grant flows.

Yifat Susskind, Executive Director of MADRE, told a group of funders we convened this past September that a bridging period is “the single most important thing for philanthropy to do right now”. It’s crucial to avoid losing more ground. “We all know that movements pre-date philanthropy and ODA; they will survive this crisis,” Yifat said. “But what folks are lacking is adaptation time because of the pace of the crisis.”

The big question for funders, now, is how to fully leverage the catalytic potential of their wealth. Grants are one tool among many, and funders can deploy all financial assets (both grant money and their much larger investment portfolios) to de-risk innovation and fuel transformation. To paraphrase Dimple Abichandani, this moment invites funders to see themselves not as “grant givers” but as participants in systems change— turning wealth, privilege, and structure into something generative and healing.

It's time for a transformative, systemic, and relational philanthropy that creates new possibilities and futures. Excellent examples of what this might look like include:

Alfanar Venture Philanthropy's work, which provides catalytic capital to social enterprises across the Arab World, injecting fresh funds into communities via new, sustainable patterns.
Ise Bosch at Dreilinden gGmbH work channeling her inherited wealth into programs that enable queer communities to purchase their own properties, rewriting the status quo of who is able to own high-value assets and accrue intergenerational wealth from them.

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NGO leaders must champion financial health, not just fundraising.

We see a growing number of collective endeavours that cross-pollinate ideas and explore what a more expansive approach to “resourcing” might ignite. One example is the recently-formed Alternative Resourcing for Change and Solidarity (ARCS) Roundtable (of which Spring is a member), a space for re-imagining how human rights and social justice NGOs gain resources to achieve their missions.

This more comprehensive notion of financial health for purpose-driven organizations has been a cornerstone of Spring’s work for decades now.

We’ve seen that if NGO and movement leaders begin to diversify their funding mix, they will start to become more resilient. Grants remain essential, but an over-dependence on grants leads to fragility—as many organizations are currently experiencing. Blending grant income with community-based or market-linked revenue can create a foundation for organizations to become healthier and more financially independent. Plus, building support from a broader cross-section of society can increase the social and political legitimacy these organizations enjoy.

Community fundraising in Mexico, for example, has been a crucial lever for mobilizing unrestricted responsive funds for Fondo Semillas. In other examples, Akili Dada has leveraged alumni circle giving, while the Kota Kita Foundation has turned staff expertise into mission-aligned consulting income.

You don’t have to do it alone. (We can’t say this enough!) If leaders can make financial health their whole organization’s collective agenda, they’ll go further. This is not the job of a couple staff—it’s a shared mindset and collaborative agenda.

The creative fundraising moves and financial acumen we’ve seen demonstrated by SMEX, the The Tor Project and the Legal Resources Centre , for example, have come from a commitment to thinking outside the box, bringing the whole team to the table, and movement-level collaboration.

Rights and justice leaders have the power to transform how money flows in their financial ecosystems—and beyond. The ultimate goal of this work is to reshape economies and financial systems so that all financial flows, not just grant funding, serve people and the planet.

This pivotal moment offers an opportunity for our values to not only shape programs but also the financial models that underpin our institutions. It’s something visionary leaders in the field already know, among them USHA (South Asia’s first banking co-op by and for sex workers) and the Queer and Allied Chamber of Commerce of Africa (QACC Africa). Both organizations have built non-grant-dependent models focused on sustaining the resilience of entire communities, while transforming banking and business sectors in the process.

These examples demonstrate how alternative funding approaches can spark broader economic and political transformation.

As Nobel laureate and chemist Ilya Prigogine suggested, the ripple effect of “small islands of coherence” can influence, and potentially transform, the entire system.

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Co-architects for a generative future

The future of funding is being written now.

We believe it will be shaped not by philanthropic or market transactions, but by relationships, and the courage to imagine, take risks, and build together.

“I think what philanthropy can do most is really invest in innovation and experimentation,” Hakima Abbas of the Black Feminist Fund told us. “Social movements need to have the space to really figure out what works and what doesn't for them. It’s not going to be one size fits all. What we're talking about is an ecosystem. What would it be like to invest in that?"

The origins of philanthropic capital are not neutral; they carry historical power imbalances that still shape who gives and who receives, and under what terms. It’s time for a post-colonial flow of money that embodies deep transformation and relational repair.

When funders and civil society leaders see themselves as co-architects of this new financial ecosystem, they move beyond efforts to sustain what already exists and can begin to imagine and catalyze what we know is possible.