Philanthropy needs to fund strong organisations, not just strong programmes

Civil society organisations (CSOs) are being asked to do more in a world that is becoming harder to navigate. Yet philanthropy still too often funds the programme while overlooking the organisation that makes the programme possible. If we want to move things, that has to change.

This is the conviction behind the updated publication that Philea’s Organisational Development Community of Practice is launching. The work began in 2020, when Oak Foundation, PeaceNexus, MAVA, Mercator and Laudes Foundation came together around a simple ambition: to encourage foundations to look beyond funding programmes alone and invest in the organisational capabilities that make impact possible.

Our first publication, Funding Organisational Development, was intended to start a conversation across philanthropy. It set out the different models our five foundations were testing and invited others to consider how they too could support the strength of the organisations they fund.

Six years on, the context has changed dramatically.

CSOs now operate amid geopolitical uncertainty, tightening funding and growing demands on their people, systems and leadership. They are expected to remain resilient while responding to crises, sustaining their teams and delivering results.

At the same time, CSOs have pushed philanthropy to rethink how it works. Locally led development, trust-based philanthropy, equity and inclusion have moved closer to the mainstream. These ideas are changing not only how grants are made, but also how organisational development (OD) is understood and practised.

More foundations are confronting two essential questions: what is our role in supporting organisational resilience, and how can we do so in ways that strengthen our partners rather than burden them?

The updated publication is our contribution to that debate. It responds to an evolving understanding of what effective organisational development requires.

But it is important to acknowledge that foundations are not starting this conversation from scratch. Organisations and practitioners around the world have been leading, experimenting with and evolving approaches to organisational development for decades. There is no single right way to approach OD, and neither the community nor the publication is trying to prescribe one.

The practice of OD is moving away from isolated interventions towards a more systemic view of organisations, recognising that leadership, governance, culture, strategy, learning and internal systems are deeply interconnected. Foundations are also increasingly looking beyond questions of efficiency and programme delivery towards organisational resilience and health.

A further shift concerns power and agency. Traditional approaches often focused on identifying organisational “capacity gaps” and bringing in external expertise to address them. Increasingly, however, foundations and practitioners are recognising organisations as the owners of their own development journeys. OD support is becoming less about prescribing solutions and more about accompanying organisations as they navigate change on their own terms.

This work requires constant judgement about power, ownership, capacity and timing. Meaningful support is defined not by avoiding those choices, but by making them thoughtfully and with partners.

At the same time, attention is expanding beyond individual organisations to the wider ecosystems in which they operate. Peer networks, collaborative infrastructures and field-building efforts are becoming an important part of OD practice, reflecting the reality that many of today’s challenges cannot be solved by a single organisation acting alone.

The publication also reflects on areas receiving growing attention across the sector, from crisis preparedness, leadership transitions and financial resilience to staff wellbeing, digital transformation, AI, safety and security. These are not intended as a new checklist for organisations to follow. Rather, they reflect the expanding range of issues that organisations themselves are identifying as critical to their resilience and long-term effectiveness.

At Laudes, we have been on this journey since 2020, and in some respects even longer. We are still learning, still refining our approach and, most importantly, still listening to what our partners need.

I will not pretend that it becomes easy. It does not. But for foundations beginning to think seriously about OD, the work is worth doing.

Time and again, we have seen that investing in people, institutions and wider ecosystems helps organisations do more than weather challenges. It enables them to seize opportunities in ways that programme funding alone cannot.

That is why this publication should not be read as a guide. It is an invitation: to learn from others, critically examine our own practice and design approaches with partners rather than for them.

If it helps spark better conversations about OD and encourages foundations to experiment more thoughtfully, it will have done an important job. But the larger task belongs to all of us.

Philanthropy should stop treating organisational strength as peripheral to impact. The question is not whether foundations can afford to support organisational development. It is whether we can afford not to.