Beyond resilience – what comes next?

“I don’t want to be resilient, I am tired of this word”. Hearing this I turned my head to Julie Ward, an always cheerful, unbelievably energetic lifetime activist and politician and a former European Parliament member. I didn’t immediately understand her. “Resilience is what you need when bad things happen constantly, like someone tries to break me again and again, but I withstand it. I do not want this; I want to thrive,” Julie explained.

This short encounter opened my eyes to something I had preferred not to know. We cherish survival instead of working towards a happy and stable future. To an extent, this makes sense. It is true that organisations and activists, particularly those working in the progressive space or on politicised topics like migration or human rights, often suffer blows: from the abrupt closures of funding programs, attempts to limit the advocacy work of NGOs in Brussels, more and more frequent SLAPPs and the increasingly selective implementation of human rights conventions even in Europe.

In such difficult political environments, it’s normal to prioritise survival and resilience, rather than thriving. But it is not just political challenges that keep CSOs in survival mode. For years we have talked about flexible funding and trust-based philanthropy, and yet such grants remain a marginal share of overall assistance. The same is true of multi-annual grants. What happens in the absence of those is, indeed, “resilience”: the ability to operate despite being uncertain about your future and having to improvise at the very limit of your resources.

In the meantime, donors can do a lot to help organisations reach the next level. We all know that philanthropy alone cannot supply organisations with sufficient resources. This scarcity is becoming only more apparent with governments phasing out civil society support programs (the USAID effect), while new conservative boards of the foundations walk away from politicised or progressive topics. With this in mind, we need to think how to widen the funding ecosystem for CSOs. What other relations can be built to allow CSOs to thrive?

The corporate sector and individual givers are often named as groups that can help CSOs develop more sustainably. Besides the financial aspect, these groups are important as engaging with them widens the ecosystem non-profits operate in and opens interaction with wider groups of societies, promoting the ideas of democracy and participation beyond traditional activist circles. There are some examples here: for instance, Citizens Network Watchdog Poland who has slowly turned individual giving into a major source of funding, or the many orgs (like Bulgaria’s GLAS) that have collaborated with corporates on trainings. Sometimes public attention to a social problem can help to attract corporate donations: for instance, in 2022 Czech NGO SIMI drew over half its annual income from corporate and individual giving during the Ukraine solidarity wave.

Most of the CSOs do not take serious steps towards building these relationships – and not because they do not want to. Short-staffed and overburdened by day-to-day activities, they just don’t have the resources. To build something new, CSO leaders need time. The lack of even medium-term stability means they often don’t even get started. Finally, there is a serious shortage of experts who can help CSOs to build those relationships: people who understand both non-profits and corporates and can translate CSO missions into a successful pitch.

Donors can facilitate this shift by moving from project-based grants to long-term commitments, and by funding the capacity NGOs need to hire communications and business expertise, engage the corporate sector and build real relationships with businesses and individual givers. What we need are pioneers of new models, successful cases creating new types of professionals operating at the intersection of the non-profit and for-profit worlds. And we need trust and courage from donors: to imagine a world where non-profits can thrive because the circle of their partners has finally become wide, diversified and truly sustainable.

Sometimes it feels that when we collectively frame the goal as a resilient civil society, we program the future into our language: where the CSO community is expected to regularly absorb external shocks and carry on with their missions regardless. What if, instead, we dare to design our best future? One where civil society is widely recognised and supported by multiple stakeholders: philanthropy, states, businesses (large corporations, as well as SMEs) and individuals. A civil society like that will be truly embedded in the social fabric, able to influence debate and promote democratic values through the relationships they’ve built with these various groups. For that future to become possible, we must dare to dream – and to invest in the first supportive steps that help the sector transform beyond resilience into thriving.