Civil society financial sustainability is becoming one of the defining challenges of our time. As funding shrinks and civic space narrows, organizations must rethink how they sustain their mission while preserving independence and impact.

By Jennifer Gaspar Founder, Director, Araminta

In 2006, I received a copy of the just-published book Values-Driven Business by Mal Warwick and Ben Cohen. I was living in Russia at the time, working closely with local civil society organizations, and had a front-row seat to witness the systemic problems faced by NGOs entirely dependent on grant funding. The complete absence of community financial support had created a dependency system that constrained organizations in fundamental ways. The work of civil society groups was often restricted by administrative requirements and donor priorities, language barriers, and the competition for a finite pool of funds created Hunger Games-like conditions for groups that should have been working in cooperation with one another.

I read the book cover to cover. While the optimistic, glowing American business cases it described couldn’t have been further from the context I was working in, the underlying concept planted a seed that hibernated in me for many years under layers of Russian frost. The idea that social values and business were not mutually exclusive had taken hold.

Araminta began its work four years ago with the intention of creating a consulting group of like-minded human rights experts from Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Our plan was to design a non-profit corporation that reinvested its profits into human rights support. But those modest plans were put on hold when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine caused us to pivot to our practical areas of expertise: emergency support and protection for human rights defenders. In other words, our work became classic, grant-funded human rights defender protection and crisis response. We hoped that the war would be short. Instead, the speed at which authoritarianism and impunity have spread globally, has made our work a crucial bulwark for open and free societies amid unprecedented geopolitical instability.

In a short period, we have grown to a full-time team of 16 exceptional seasoned experts from 12 countries supporting human rights defenders and civil society across Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia, and increasingly beyond our core region in countries newer to the phenomenon of authoritarian repression. In these regions, civic space is closing at a precipitous rate – as is available financial support. So where can we go from here? Today feels sadly like NGO Hunger Games 2.0.

The question I have been musing over for 20 years has become urgent. How will we survive financially and continue our work given the cascading crisis caused by the closure of USAID and the unprecedented scarcity in our sector?

The questions of both what can be done and how we should work need to guide our thinking here. Specifically, to financial sustainability: how can our organization stay aligned to its mission while working in the commercial sphere? It is one thing to sell books, tote bags, or open a café, but is mission-aligned business activity possible for a human rights organization? Is there a way to generate commercial revenue while achieving our goals?

Mission-aligned revenue as a resilience strategy

Here in Europe, our position of privilege is our main resource. We have security, rule of law, and functioning markets. These give us the opportunity – and in our view, the ethical obligation- to think creatively and proactively about how to generate the revenues we use for our overheads instead of paying ourselves out of funds intended for regions experiencing far greater turbulence than our own. This is a difficult and uncomfortable shift in thinking about roles, responsibilities, and practices for those of us who reap the benefits of security, economic prosperity, and rule of law.

We cannot imagine ending our protection, accountability, and resilience work because of financial scarcity. But we have come to understand that we need to find new ways to fund that work so that we can continue our work and meet rising demand with clarity and agility.

As an organization based in Germany, we have discovered that our host country, for all its prescriptive bureaucracy, offers structural possibilities. Non-profit corporation status here allows not only for the pursuit of commercial activities, but also the establishment of subsidiary commercial enterprises, giving organizations like ours corporate options to pursue earned income while keeping the revenues inside of our non-profit structure for distribution to fund our own activities or those of other NGOs and partners.

It is high time to try new things and take big risks. We need to imagine new systems and ways of working. The old models still serve their purpose, but they are insufficient in the face of today’s crises. We have seen what happens when civil society groups are solely dependent on the goodwill of governments and foundations whose priorities shift or shrink with political winds and market turbulence. A balanced portfolio of flexible revenue along with flexible thinking is needed for civil society responsiveness in the face of urgent need.

Moving beyond grant dependency

Through our work in the commercial space, we hope to demonstrate possibilities of new systems of financing. We also know that the expertise of human rights defenders both on our team and in the broader NGO sector is of great value, most notably for working with companies for whom protection of human rights in their supply chains is becoming an ever more important priority for both regulatory and corporate responsibility reasons.

In the coming months, Araminta will be unveiling our new efforts designed to address these questions. And no, we won’t be ending our ‘classic work.’ Instead, we are creating the engines to finance what we are already doing. It is an ambitious goal, but we hope that our efforts will produce a promising model of financial sustainability for human rights work. We do not have all the answers, but in learning by doing, we are committed to finding them and to sharing what we learn along the way.

This is an invitation to other organizations to start asking the same questions: How do we sustain ourselves? How do we maintain our independence? How do we ensure that our survival does not depend on forces beyond our control? Then to dream big and make a plan for that to happen. And please, share your experience!

Will our plans work? We don’t know. But as the poet-playwright-dissident-president Václav Havel once wrote, ‘hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.’ Exploring new ways to sustain human rights makes sense.

This article is art of the ARAMINTA SERIES – Rethinking Revenue: Earned Income Strategies for Civil Society

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