What if the lasting deliverable of a grant was an income stream?

Philanthropy typically measures what a grant enables an organisation to do. We count people served, services delivered, campaigns launched, and policies changed. But what if we also measured what that grant enables an organisation to earn?

Grants are temporary by design, yet the work they support rarely is. Across the NGO sector, organisations must continually raise money simply to sustain essential work their communities depend on, and even flexible, multi-year grants eventually expire. At that point, the organisation starts over: another proposal, another set of deliverables, another attempt to persuade a funder that the work still matters.

But what if a grant did more than fund the work? What if it helped build the means to keep funding the work?

Revenue as a Deliverable

Independent Revenue Generation (IRG) treats revenue itself as a philanthropic deliverable. IRG encompasses how a nonprofit can raise funds through internal income streams that are independent of external sources, such as grants. Through IRG, funders help communities build or acquire assets, infrastructure, services, and systems that can produce recurring income under community control.

The question stops being ‘how long will this grant last?’ and becomes ‘what could this grant build that will keep generating income after the funding ends?’

To be clear, IRG is not a demand that every nonprofit becomes a business. Rather, it expands the range of outcomes philanthropy is prepared to finance and challenges the assumption that organisations doing essential work must remain perpetually dependent.

A grant might fund a year of programme delivery. It might also help establish a community-owned enterprise, purchase an income-producing asset, create a product or service, or build a system through which members may contribute on terms that reflect their economic realities.

Notably, the defining feature here is not earned revenue alone—it is ownership.

Read the full article about revenue as a funding strategy by Elias Hakim and Mary Coleman at Alliance Magazine.