Reimagining sustainability for human rights struggles

Nicolette Naylor, Director of South Africa-based Ubuntu Global Philanthropy & Gender Justice Consulting, talks here about the need to revamp our fundraising to ensure autonomy and independence. International funding is shrinking, forcing organizations to compete more fiercely for resources. But this crisis may offer a chance to break with the conditionalities of a system with entrenched power and narrow Western notions of philanthropy.

Are we witnessing the beginning of a paradigm shift in cooperation and funding for human rights work?

I think the shift started a few years ago. In the 1990s, there was a climate of abundance with a lot of funding for civil society and human rights work. Now we’re seeing widespread restrictions by the U.S. government, by European governments, by the development world and the private philanthropy world. So today there is a climate of scarcity.

Also, I don’t think we realized just how dependent we were. The loss of funding is resulting in a shutdown of institutions and a decimation of civil society infrastructure that we imagined would have been fairly robust. The humanitarian sector has collapsed, which no one ever expected since the end of World War II. The decline started gradually, but this is the tectonic moment where the world is coming off its axis, and it’s affecting the whole civil society infrastructure.

Has the current cooperation model constrained activism in defence of rights?

Absolutely. Civil society has become so overly dependent on donor funding that a group of U.S. donors have been driving the agenda. And this has impacted whether movements are organizing for their own organizations to survive, or whether they’re organizing for a revolution and a change in power structures. Donors have placed restrictions around acceptable forms of advocacy and which issues you can organize civil disobedience on.

There was a lot of ground lost in terms of the ideological underpinnings of when we challenge power and how we challenge power.

The dominant fundraising model seems focused on investment return, demanding constant impact and indicators of success. What effect has that had?

I think the language of success and impact forced civil society to develop very simplified analyses of the problems and change in society, where they had to say, “I’m going to solve the problem of gender-based violence, say, in 5-year or 2-year grant cycles” – which was completely unrealistic. And everyone bought into lying about what the change agenda was and coming up with unrealistic benchmarks for success.

But I also think it failed to acknowledge no single organization can bring about social change, and so forcing single organizations to develop theories of change and impact metrics based on how brilliant they are is a very Global North way of thinking about the world. And there wasn’t enough pushback around, well, this isn’t how change happens, it’s much more collective. And what we want to do is going to take 10 to 20 years.

Also, we have bought into a system that says money brings about change – and without money, we’ll never bring about change. We really have to interrogate that as a sector. At this moment of crisis, the human rights movement can take a clear ideological position about its relationship to money and power, and on what terms it will take money.

How can the movement and donors move towards another paradigm?

Both at the philanthropy and the civil society side of the equation, there needs to be deep introspection around what are we trying to do? And what is our political and ideological basis for existence? I think we’ve lost the politics of the work, and there’s been a fear of engaging with the politics of human rights work. We’ve sanitized it and made it more palatable to a donor audience.

We need to ask, what constituencies are we accountable to? Is our constituency donors sitting in the U.S.? Or is it communities, and are we making a difference at that level? Where are we trying to build trust and legitimacy?

There’s this myth that in the Global South, you can’t raise money from individuals. There is money in the Global South, and in the diaspora, and they will fund advocacy and political organizing and social movements – if there is trust. We’ve all bought into the idea that wealthy people in the West are the only people that give. And that’s made us lazy about studying local philanthropy and what touches the hearts of middle-class people locally.

Collectively, there could be power in the human rights movement coming together across borders and strategizing around how it wants to approach fundraising and philanthropy, and having joint positions around what trust, legitimacy, accountability, power and privilege looks like, versus one organization trying to resist the system. Because the system will perpetuate itself with the same power structures, unless we come up with a different way of thinking.

How can our organizations reimagine sustainability?

People need to imagine a world where they’re not dependent on U.S. funding, that’s the starting point. And then they need to ask, where else are we going to get resourcing and what have others done in this position? There are lessons to be learned from people in countries that lost development aid long before USAID shut down. And from Russia, Hungary, China, Ethiopia, when foreign agent laws were passed. The reality is some organizations didn’t survive. But where people came together and collectively strategized and merged, and really focused on building trust and legitimacy with local constituencies, that has been successful.

I think the answer lies in local. The same way we’ve said that we need to move to communities and grassroots-led work, we need to focus attention on that in the philanthropy and funding space. International funding should merely supplement what is already happening.

The structure, form and politics of who we are and what we are as a sector has been very driven by what donors want, and the financing has flowed from that. I think we should blow it all up and reimagine it. We’ve got nothing to lose at this stage.

Download the complete series of interviews Hard Conversations for the Future of Human Rights here.