“I don’t want to be resilient, I am tired of this word”. Hearing this I turned my head to Julie Ward, an always cheerful, unbelievably energetic lifetime activist and politician and a former European Parliament member. I didn’t immediately understand her. “Resilience is what you need when bad things happen constantly, like someone tries to break me again and again, but I withstand it. I do not want this; I want to thrive,” Julie explained.

This short encounter opened my eyes to something I had preferred not to know. We cherish survival instead of working towards a happy and stable future. To an extent, this makes sense. It is true that organisations and activists, particularly those working in the progressive space or on politicised topics like migration or human rights, often suffer blows: from the abrupt closures of funding programs, attempts to limit the advocacy work of NGOs in Brussels, more and more frequent SLAPPs and the increasingly selective implementation of human rights conventions even in Europe.

In such difficult political environments, it’s normal to prioritise survival and resilience, rather than thriving. But it is not just political challenges that keep CSOs in survival mode. For years we have talked about flexible funding and trust-based philanthropy, and yet such grants remain a marginal share of overall assistance. The same is true of multi-annual grants. What happens in the absence of those is, indeed, “resilience”: the ability to operate despite being uncertain about your future and having to improvise at the very limit of your resources.

In the meantime, donors can do a lot to help organisations reach the next level. We all know that philanthropy alone cannot supply organisations with sufficient resources. This scarcity is becoming only more apparent with governments phasing out civil society support programs (the USAID effect), while new conservative boards of the foundations walk away from politicised or progressive topics. With this in mind, we need to think how to widen the funding ecosystem for CSOs. What other relations can be built to allow CSOs to thrive?

Read the full article about what comes after resilience by Nataliya Novakova at Philea.