How three global organisations are innovating traditional funding models

In season three, episode two of our Reimagining Government podcast, hosts Adrian Brown and Saumya Shruti discuss traditional funding models and how they can be reimagined to encourage more innovation, experimentation, and learning. They highlight:

• How traditional funding works

• The problems and challenges with traditional funding models

• How the Red Umbrella Fund, Global Fund for Women, and Climate-KIC are doing things differently

• What needs to change to drive more effective methods of funding

• And more

The episode features Ankit Gupta (​​Programme Officer at Global Fund for Women & Co-Chair of the Red Umbrella Fund), Will Wade (NetZeroCities Pilot Cities Programme Orchestrator at Climate-KIC), and Tom Pruunsild (Learning Experience Lead at Climate-KIC) to talk about their experiences with funding models. 

In this article, we’ll explore how the Red Umbrella Fund, Global Fund for Women, and Climate-KIC are reimagining traditional funding models, as highlighted in the episode. Listen to the full episode below or click here.

Here’s how three global organisations are reimagining traditional funding models, as highlighted in season three, episode two of Reimagining Government.

Red Umbrella Fund

The Red Umbrella Fund is the first and only global fund dedicated to supporting the human rights of sex workers. During the episode, we spoke to Ankit about how the organisation approaches funding methods differently. He started:

“The Red Umbrella was established in 2012, and was a result of several years of dialogue between funders and sex workers. At the heart of our organisation, our values and principles support the autonomy of sex workers in every area of decision-making that impacts the lives of sex workers. We fund groups at local level and regional level, because we see value in both.”

Ankit then talks about why the Red Umbrella Fund is focused on sex workers’ rights. He added:

“We’re talking about a community that has systematically and institutionally been kept out of systems - be it health or legal. And in most countries, sex workers still can't report rape or violence. In fact, they still report high forms of violence coming from police brutality and legal systems. They also report an extremely high level of discrimination when they try to access health care. They’ve been stylized because a lot of providers see them as a nuisance. This needs sustainable funding and core support. So for us at Umbrella Fund, we believe that by catalysing funding to sex workers, we can contribute to a stronger sex workers’ movement that means they’ll be able to advocate for their own rights and counter stigma and discrimination, providing them access to dignity and respect.”

But how are they approaching traditional funding methods differently? Saumya said:

“The Red Umbrella Fund gives sex workers the power to fund what they see most valuable. This is a practice known as ‘participatory grant making’. It gives autonomy to the community affected rather than relying on a group outside the community to make choices for them. This method of funding has already seen drastic changes in the sex workers' quality of life and safety.”

Ankit added:

“The idea behind shifting the power and empowering communities to make decisions is about asking them what they would like and how they would like to be involved. It’s not about telling communities what they're supposed to do. It’s about asking what works for them.”

Global Fund for Women

Founded over 30 years ago, the Global Fund for Women is the leading funder of gender justice organisations, initiatives, and movements worldwide. The episode moves on to explore how they’re reimagining traditional funding methods. Ankit begins:

“Here at the Global Fund for Women, learning is very important for us. We prioritise learning a lot, and we’ve developed two learning tools our partners can use. The first is The Movement Capacity Assessment Tool, which anybody can download from the website. It helps movement assess - so, what are their strengths? What are their challenges? What should they be looking at? How can they have a stronger movement?

“And then we have a Movement Mapping Tool, which helps us (and movements) map who the key actors are in a movement. From there, they're able to form a network of organisations and activists to see who they’re not talking to. What are the gaps in their movements? Who should they be talking to more? Are they involving LGBTIQ movements enough? Are they involving sex workers movements enough? These are two learning tools that have helped us a lot in the organisation.”

He goes on to speak about how the Global Fund for Women, like the Umbrella Fund, are advocates for the participatory grant making model of funding. He said:

“In some cases, it has worked really beautifully for us. We have a participatory grant making process in Western Balkans, which primarily looks at the rising anti-gender movements that have had such an impact. We have a committee of sixteen people from the movements, and we've been able to reach groups we didn't already know about and haven’t funded before. But I also think just asking movements what they want, and how they would like to make decisions, is so important.”

Climate-KIC

Co-funded by the European Union, Climate-KIC is Europe’s leading climate innovation agency helping cities, regions, countries, and industries meet their climate ambitions. During the episode, Will and Tom explain how they’re using funding experiments to combat the climate crisis. Will said:

“As we were starting to design what it was we wanted to do, we started to question our assumptions about how funding has to happen. We started thinking about how to write the documentation for a systems experiment. So, what does that even look like? And how can you do something that’s the same for every different context? We decided to take this as an opportunity for us to experiment with deconstructing the paradigm of funding - whether that's to do with the process of designing a call, or running an evaluation process of selecting projects in a kind of portfolio logic.

“How does this increase or enhance outcomes? How does this increase understanding within the systems, within local context, within funding? Effectively, what happens? It was a bit of an experiment and exploration ourselves.”

Tom added:

“We figured out that we needed to devise a community of purpose that shared a common inquiry towards understanding how to do funding. We then devised this community by opening a call for interested parties to come and join us in this co-design. We got to a group of fifteen community-grant makers, as we called them, who then with our facilitation helped us co-design the funding mechanism, even down to what the application forms looked like.

“Now we're connected with seven of these experiments all over the world, guiding them through or facilitating this learning journey with them. We then sort of established this multi-directionality of learning as a process throughout the organisations and communities they're working with.”

The full conversation about reimagining traditional funding models is available now on all major podcast listening platforms. To listen, use the player below or click here.