In an article published by OpenGlobalRights in April, Natika Kantaria describes the growing crisis faced by non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—as governments around the world slash foreign aid, increase legal constraints on civil society, and stigmatize human rights in general—and outlines the steps that states, foundations, and international organizations can take in response. While Kantaria argues that NGOs require urgent support, they need not wait for others to act. They also have agency to redefine the Global North and Global South’s balance of resources and agenda-setting power.
It’s time to radically rethink how human rights and social justice NGOs are resourced.
Toward autonomous and independent funding
Philanthropic foundations and government donor agencies based in the Global North have long served as the primary funders of human rights NGOs. The Ford, MacArthur, and Open Society Foundations and their peers have historically centered human rights and social justice in their missions and created relatively stable funding ecosystems for advocates. Yet studies have demonstrated that these funding relationships result in NGOs becoming more accountable to donor requirements than to local constituencies or the broader social justice infrastructure.
Moreover, flexible funding for NGOs to invest in their own organizational development or innovate their business models remains relatively scarce. While foundations tend to encourage grantees to diversify their funding sources, decades of dependency have shaped organizational structures, skill sets, and mindsets in ways that make change difficult. Stable foundation funding allows human rights organizations to achieve their advocacy goals, but it leaves them vulnerable when that funding is threatened or cut off. For instance, NGOs engaged in social justice solidarity now have to navigate a barrage of restrictions to receive funding from US-based foundations
To secure the future of social justice work, NGOs urgently need autonomous and independent funding. We see the following as viable options:
Constituency building and membership models cultivate a community of supporters around advocacy NGOs. Beyond generating individual donations, they can help develop grassroots engagement and strengthen the civic participation that helps sustain democracies.
Mutual aid, solidarity economics, and community philanthropy prioritize horizontal relationships and collective ownership over hierarchical donor-recipient dynamics to create more equitable and resilient funding structures. Moreover, mutual aid can complement grassroots engagement strategies.
Earned income and social enterprise generate unrestricted revenue while broadening organizations’ appeal to new audiences. However, in developing fee-for-service programs, consultancies, or saleable products, NGOs must carefully balance commerce with their larger human rights missions.
Strategic partnerships, mergers, and other collaborative models can include sharing administrative expenditures and office space, collaborating on programs and projects, aligning advocacy goals, and even combining entire organizations. These pragmatic cost efficiencies are more than survival strategies. When organizations act together, rather than in fragmented and competitive ways, it strengthens the sector as a whole.
Underemployed strategies: a culture gap
Non-grant revenue streams like those detailed above are not new, but human rights and social justice organizations have been slow to adopt them. The lack of flexible funding for organizational development helps to explain why, but we also see deeper cultural issues in play.
First, the human rights field has historically struggled with measuring impact, which makes alternative funding models challenging to implement. Unlike organizations that can count children vaccinated or wells drilled, human rights advocates work toward policy change, norm shifts, power redistribution, and the prevention of harms that may never occur—all outcomes that are inherently difficult to quantify, nearly impossible to attribute to single interventions, and slow to materialize. NGOs' principled resistance to oversimplified metrics, however, poorly positions them to adopt new funding streams.
Second, human rights advocates often harbor deep suspicions about monetizing their work. Advocates trained as academics, lawyers, or activists often have little exposure to business principles, and they face cultural barriers to adopting entrepreneurial approaches. Moreover, a palpable ideological discomfort with market mechanisms is built into the human rights ecosystem, a frequent critic of market outcomes and corporate power and advocate for those excluded from capitalism’s benefits. Many human rights advocates fear that profit incentives will fundamentally compromise their work's moral authority and political independence.
Third, human rights organizations have hesitated to consider mergers as a strategic tool for growth and sustainability. NGOs often maintain distinct approaches and constituencies built over decades, and leaders may worry that mergers will dilute their focus or compromise their principles. Furthermore, nonprofit mergers often require navigating deep emotional connections to beneficiaries, partners, and community members. As a result, human rights NGOs often operate alone even when strategic consolidation could alleviate resource constraints and expand their reach and impact.
A space for dialogue and experimentation
Overcoming the entrenched assumptions that hamstring NGOs’ ability to explore alternative funding sources requires deep reflection and the ability to experiment and take risks, as Ed Rekosh pointed out a decade ago. There are no quick fixes or easy answers, and only NGOs themselves can decide which alternative funding streams will work best for them and their contexts. Moreover, NGOs and human rights advocates have few opportunities to ask difficult questions about resourcing models or engage in unguarded dialogue among colleagues and partners.
The Alternative Resourcing for Change and Solidarity (ARCS) Roundtable seeks to fill this gap, complementing existing initiatives and toolkits. We curate small group conversations on alternative resourcing with participants from NGOs, philanthropies, and support organizations working in various contexts and fields. Through these conversations, we reconsider past assumptions and reimagine alternative forms of support and solidarity.
In her article, Kantaria asks “What’s next for civil society?” We would answer that civil society must experiment with new models to build long-term sustainability. NGOs can explore the alternatives that work best, and philanthropic supporters should make funding available for such experimentation. It is bitterly ironic that when the world needs strong civil society organizations most—to address democratic erosion, human rights abuses, climate change, and growing inequality—these organizations find themselves struggling to survive, let alone thrive.
The transition to new resourcing models will not be easy, but it is essential for creating a civil society sector capable of meeting the challenges of our time.