Human Rights Progress Depends on Trust-Based Funding

If this were true, it would be very welcome. Flexible funding — or general support — enables organizations and movements to set their own agendas and to invest in critical operational costs, all without the onus of heavy reporting requirements and administrative or financial burdens. For grassroots movements, this means increased responsiveness to community needs, innovation and sustainability — all critical factors in achieving real and lasting change.

The data, however, tells a different story. Philanthropy data hub Candid indicates that general support accounts for a mere 20 percent of overall funding. Other resources suggest that while flexible funding may have once been on the uptick, it has actually declined in recent years.

As peer fundraisers, we can anecdotally say that this discrepancy is likely even more pronounced than it appears. In many cases, even funding opportunities that are contractually classified as unrestricted can bear specific restrictions defined through verbal or “good faith” agreements. When it comes to flexible funding, there seems to be more talk than action.

This presents challenges for both grantmakers and grant seekers. Funding that has onerous and burdensome restrictions can produce tangible harms in terms of costs, labor and obstacles in advancing our missions to build effective social justice movements and advance human rights globally. Grantmaking organizations such as ours, which play an important role in bridging large sources of funding and grassroots movements, are stuck between donors with rigid requirements and unbending targets on one side, and movements with vast, varying and evolving needs on the other.

We understand that there are reasons why donors may struggle to lift restrictions. Occasionally, restrictions may even be useful, such as when there is dedicated funding for care and wellbeing. But it is critical that donors understand how highly restricted funding — when it is the norm instead of the exception — can hinder and even undermine the intended impact of their investments, especially at the grassroots level.

As a group of peer fundraisers from a diverse set of global human rights funds, we are raising our voices and leveraging our unique perspectives — as grantmakers and grant seekers with strong ties to both grassroots activists and large donors — to illustrate how restricted funding negatively impacts both the movements we support and the organizations we work for.

Human Rights Movements Need Flexible Funding to Survive and Thrive

In our capacity as funders who work directly with movements, we leverage our close relationships to build portfolios of organizations that we know are best positioned to advance social justice and human rights. Large donors come to us because we can bridge the gap between them and the grassroots.

But restricted funding is not conducive to strengthening or supporting community and grassroots movements. Instead, it drives competition and makes collaboration more challenging — undermining the change we want to see in the world.