By Julia Rios.
Working in finance within the philanthropic ecosystem means seeing much of the sector through numbers and indicators. In that sense, budgets, audits, financial reports, grant agreements and payments can provide an essential lens into how resources move, but those can only tell part of the story. A spreadsheet can show how much was spent and whether an expenditure adhered to an agreed budget. Still, it can’t easily define what financial stability (or its absence) means for the people and organizations behind those numbers.
Another side of this ecosystem also shapes my perspective. I am also an activist working to advance women’s and girls’ political rights and address gender-based political violence in Brazil. Moving between these two spaces has made the relationship between funding and organizational sustainability much more tangible to me.
Participating in spaces such as the AWID Forum in Bangkok in 2024 and, more recently, the Women Deliver 2026 Conference in Melbourne, created opportunities to meet FRIDA grantee partners, activists and movement leaders from different regions. These opportunities to step outside the back office have reinforced my perspective that numbers alone can’t tell the entire story of an organization. Groups are not only trying to deliver activities and demonstrate impact, they are also constantly struggling to retain people, strengthen internal structures, and imagine a future, while facing financial cuts, uncertainty, and even serious security risks.
As an activist in Brazil, this uncertainty doesn’t feel distant to me. Project funding can make extraordinary work possible, but it can also leave an organization wondering how to maintain its team, preserve institutional knowledge or plan beyond the current project budget.
The sense of scarcity and uncertainty was present in many of the conversations I had at AWID and Women Deliver. And it kept me wondering: how can organizations build for the long term when so much of their funding remains short-term?
This contradiction becomes even more shocking when viewed in the context of the global wealth distribution. The World Inequality Report 2026 estimates that the richest 10% of the global population hold around 75% of the global wealth, while the poorest half holds only 2%. The scarcity experienced by many civil society organizations, therefore, exists in a world that is absolutely not short of financial resources. The challenge is also about how those resources move, who can actually access them and under which conditions.
Traditional grantmaking remains structured around a project-based perspective, in which organizations are burdened with heavy paperwork, expected to define activities, budgets, indicators and expected results within a specific timeline. These structures can have legitimate purposes, particularly around accountability, but funding activities is not necessarily the same as sustaining the organization that makes those activities possible.
A project grant may finance a campaign, a training program or a series of workshops while providing limited room for all other “invisible” organizational needs that are there to keep the “engine” running. Mostly admin activities, financial systems, governance, capacity building and team wellbeing are barely funded under project budgets.
In that regard, it is interesting to draw a parallel with household caretakers: women have historically been the ones behind the care. The multitasking burden of paperwork, admin, logistics and finance that needs to be done for each budget activity to be delivered seems to be invisible work that is not considered by project-based restricted funding.
When the project ends, another proposal must be prepared, and another anxiety cycle begins as you wait for a funding decision. This dynamic becomes especially visible when the same people responsible for implementing programs are often also responsible for fundraising, administration, communications and keeping the organization functioning.
This is where the perspective of an intermediary fund can be particularly valuable. FRIDA intentionally challenges the traditional grantmaking dynamics by creating space for young, emerging and informal feminist groups, combining participatory decision-making with flexible core funding and longer-term financial and non-financial support. Under FRIDA’s grantmaking, resources can support not only program activities but also salaries, organizational systems, capacity strengthening, collective care, and unexpected risks.
It is important to highlight that FRIDA’s 2022 Call for Applications received more than 1,000 applications. In its 2025 grantmaking plan, FRIDA earmarked USD 120,000 for 24 new grantee partners while continuing to support 188 existing partners through their Grantee Partner Journey. In this context, there is clearly no shortage of groups developing ideas, organizing communities and seeking to create change. The scarcity truly lies in the resources available to reach them.
The meaning of flexibility, however, also changes based on which side of the ‘back office’ one is standing on. From a purely financial perspective, flexibility typically means the ability to reallocate resources between budget lines or adjust expenditures as circumstances change. However, from an activist’s perspective, flexibility can mean something much more fundamental. It can mean retaining a person who carries years of community knowledge, responding to an unexpected political moment, or having enough stability to plan strategically rather than continuously adapting to the priorities of the next funding opportunity.
What also needs to be noted here is that none of this requires abandoning accountability, because strong financial management, together with flexibility, can foster hope and confidence, showing that trust and responsible practices can coexist without compromising each other. Trust does not mean removing responsibility, it means recognizing that those closer to their own communities need enough autonomy to respond to realities that can’t always be anticipated in a proposal or predicted by a grants officer miles away from their reality.
That said, in a world where wealth is heavily concentrated among a few, the philanthropic debate should go beyond just the amount of money donated to achieve specific thematic goals. While single projects can create remarkable short-term effects, they alone can’t sustain broader movements. Movements require proper resource allocation, not just exploration.
Seeing philanthropy both as a finance person and an activist makes this particularly clear to me: impact depends not only on whether an activity can be funded, but on whether the organization behind it has the conditions to remain strong enough to continue its work over time and fulfill its theory of change. With that focus in mind, it becomes clear that greater flexibility and longer-term support can give organizations the space to strengthen their teams, deepen their strategies, learn, adapt and plan beyond individual project cycles. Over time, that stability can become part of the infrastructure that enables social change to actually happen.
