As a not-for-profit, much of our energy has to go into fundraising in order to sustain the work we do. As anyone who has worked in the charity or NGO sector, or indeed anyone who has tried to raise money at all, knows, this is a challenging and time consuming process. We look for funding which is aligned to our values, and will allow us to work in the way that we know we need to, which is often quite different from traditional development. As we grapple with the joys and challenges of running a small organisation, dedicated to working differently, and continue to search for funding for it, other structural and systemic challenges continue to rear their heads.
Funding Requirements
Part of what makes us able to do the work we do is our small team and agile approach to work. We often hear from donors who claim to want to support smaller, grassroots charities, but in reality their bureaucratic or application requirements are too great and represent a barrier to access: they might want bigger budgets, more audited finances, or more developed evaluation systems. Donors who say they want to support smaller organisations need to actually adapt their processes and requirements to enable those organisations to apply and be successful.
Lack of funding for women’s and feminist organisations
A second barrier is the availability of funding for gender-equality organisations which are women-led, particularly those led by women of colour, and feminist. Despite upticks in gender equality funding the latest figures show that only 1.3% of gender equality funding goes to women’s organisations. Of gender equality funding. We are an all woman team, we were founded by a woman, all our staff, board and facilitators are women. We live and breathe feminist values in our organisation and we know that this helps our work be even more impactful, but when it comes to funding, it’s a barrier.
Lack of funding for organisations led by women of colour
In addition to this our founder and the majority of our team are women of colour, which comprises an additional structural barrier. Research shows that organisations led by people of colour, and particularly women of colour received less funding with more strings than those led by white people. According to a report by Bridgespan and Echoing Green, who looked at Echoing Green’s applicant pool, on average the revenues of the black-led organisations were 24 percent smaller than those of their white-led counterparts. The report continues:
“When it comes to the holy grail of financial support—unrestricted funding—the picture is even bleaker. The unrestricted net assets of the black-led organisations are 76 percent smaller than their white-led counterparts. The stark disparity in unrestricted assets is particularly startling, as such funding often represents a proxy for trust.”
Funding Structures
Funding for the NGO space is often dominated by funds who give based on their own priorities and desires. The power is where the money is, so a top-down aid approach can continue to serve the powerful. In development studies you constantly hear stories of the donor that wanted to build a shiny new hospital rather than fund community health care or local nurses (because everyone wants to say they built a shiny new hospital) only to see that hospital unused, inaccessible or unstaffed. Development money often doesn’t communicate or work effectively with the populations they claim to serve. The What Went Wrong? project on Failed Aid found “a consistent failure to clearly communicate the status of aid projects to members of the communities where they were being implemented.” We work differently to this; we work in close local partnership and at the core of our organisation is the belief that solutions to the most pressing social issues and global challenges will come from within, and much development funding is not willing to fund such a decentralised approach.
We are doing work which needs to be done, in the way our partners say it needs to be done, but we are up against huge structural barriers which need to be addressed before we can see the equality donors claim they support.