Sustaining the Connective Tissue of Change: Rethinking How We Fund Philanthropic Infrastructure

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Across philanthropy, there’s a quiet contradiction we rarely talk about. We expect funders to collaborate, learn from one another, take risks together and build stronger relationships with movements. But we invest surprisingly little in the organizations that make much of this possible.

There is a real disconnect between how much the sector says it values collaboration and how willing it is to resource the infrastructure behind it.

Funder networks and alliances do a lot of work that is difficult to see from the outside. They bring people together, hold relationships through disagreement, create space for difficult conversations and help knowledge travel across organizations and geographies. They can also provide the continuity that is often missing in a sector where priorities, staff and funding strategies change frequently.

Funder networks and philanthropic infrastructure organizations do this in different ways. They create spaces where funders can think critically about power and redistribution, experiment with collective approaches, learn from movements and from one another, and sometimes challenge practices within philanthropy itself.

And yet many of these organizations operate with significant financial uncertainty.

Part of the problem is how this work is funded. Infrastructure organizations often rely on short-term or project-based grants, even though much of their value comes precisely from work that cannot easily be packaged into a project: maintaining relationships over time, creating trust, facilitating exchange, responding when circumstances change and holding a community together.

There is also an assumption that membership organizations should eventually be able to sustain themselves through membership fees. I understand where that assumption comes from. Membership income can provide independence and accountability to members, and it should absolutely be part of a healthy funding model. But expecting membership fees to carry the full cost of a network is much more complicated in practice.

At EDGE, for example, our membership contributions follow a sliding-scale solidarity model. We want organizations with very different financial capacities to be able to participate in the network. That is important to us politically, but it also means that membership income is inherently variable. Members’ circumstances change. Budgets shrink. Organizations move between contribution levels. Some need flexibility about when or how much they can pay.

This is particularly difficult at a moment when many foundations themselves are under financial pressure and discretionary budgets, which are often where membership contributions sit, are being squeezed.

There is a tension here that I don’t think we talk about enough: the more seriously a network takes accessibility and solidarity, the harder it can be to maximize income from membership. If financial sustainability depends primarily on charging members more, networks can end up creating barriers to precisely the participation and diversity they were established to foster.

There is another reason philanthropic infrastructure can be difficult to fund. I think some funders are understandably uncomfortable with the idea of directing philanthropic resources back into philanthropy itself. When communities are facing repression, displacement, democratic erosion or climate disaster, spending money on a funder network can seem difficult to justify. Wouldn’t that money be better directed straight to movements?

I think this is an important question, and infrastructure organizations should be able to answer it seriously rather than defensively.

For me, the answer is about what this infrastructure actually makes possible.

A strong funder network should not exist simply to make funders better connected to one another. It should help improve how resources move, whose knowledge shapes philanthropic decisions, how funders understand their own power and how effectively they can act together in support of movements.

Those relationships matter enormously during moments of crisis.

We have seen how quickly funders can be asked to respond to political emergencies or changing conditions. But moving quickly is not the same as responding well. If relationships have not already been built, if funders do not know who to trust, if knowledge is fragmented across institutions and if there are no spaces where people can speak candidly with one another, rapid response can easily become reactive.

Networks can provide some of that continuity. The relationships, knowledge and trust already exist before the crisis happens.

This feels especially important in the current political environment. Human rights philanthropy is operating under increasing pressure in many places, and some funders and organizations have less space to speak or act openly than they did even a few years ago. In that context, trusted networks can offer spaces where people are able to talk honestly about what is happening inside their institutions, share concerns that may be difficult to raise elsewhere and learn how others are responding. Without those spaces, there is a risk that philanthropy becomes more isolated and less transparent. Decisions move behind closed doors, organizations respond individually to shared problems, and valuable knowledge stays within institutions rather than circulating across the field.

This is also why I don’t think funder networks should be understood as neutral service providers. The choices they make matter. Who is invited into the room? Who sets the agenda? Which forms of knowledge are treated as expertise? How are movements involved? Who participates in governance? What happens when members disagree?

Networks can reproduce the power structures of philanthropy, or they can create opportunities to challenge them. Participatory governance, transnational relationships and stronger connections with movements can shift who influences conversations and how accountability is understood. That work is political, even when it happens quietly.

And much of it is relational.

We often describe infrastructure through the language of administration and coordination. Of course, there is plenty of that. Someone has to organize the meeting, manage the budget, facilitate the call and keep the systems functioning. But reducing infrastructure to administration misses much of what actually makes a network valuable.

Someone also has to notice when a relationship is struggling. Someone has to create enough trust for people to disagree honestly. Someone has to remember what was tried three years ago and why it didn’t work. Someone has to connect two organizations working on the same problem in different places. Someone has to make sure that people who traditionally have less power in philanthropic spaces can actually influence the conversation.

That work takes time, skill and continuity. It also requires staff who are not permanently operating at the edge of their capacity.

When infrastructure is chronically underfunded, the consequences are very practical. Staff burn out. Organizations become dependent on a small number of people carrying institutional memory. Collaborative projects become difficult to sustain. Networks spend disproportionate amounts of time fundraising for their own survival rather than supporting their members or developing their work. Promising collaborations disappear when nobody has the capacity to coordinate them.

Meanwhile, philanthropy continues to create new initiatives, working groups and collaborations, sometimes without adequately supporting the organizations that could provide continuity between them. We end up repeatedly building new structures while existing ones struggle to survive.

I don’t think the answer is that philanthropic infrastructure should receive unlimited funding or be protected from scrutiny. Quite the opposite. Networks should be able to explain what value they create, whom they serve and how they contribute to meaningful change. They should also be willing to question whether existing structures are still useful.

But when infrastructure is valuable, we need funding models that recognize what it actually takes to sustain it.

That means more flexible and multi-year support. It means recognizing that relationship-building and community stewardship are legitimate uses of philanthropic resources, even when they do not produce an easily measurable output every quarter. And it means accepting that membership fees can be an important part of a network’s income without expecting them to carry the entire organization, particularly when the network is intentionally trying to make participation accessible.

It also requires us to reconsider what we dismiss as “overhead.” For organizations built around relationships, a great deal of what looks like overhead from the outside is actually the work. Facilitation, coordination, communication, governance, relationship-building and institutional memory are not peripheral to a functioning network. They are what allow it to function.

We already understand this argument when we talk about movement organizations. We know that movements need flexible funding, strong institutions, time to build relationships and space to think beyond the next project or grant cycle. There is no reason to assume that the infrastructure connecting philanthropy can be sustained without similar investment.

None of this means resources should be diverted away from movements. The question is how we build a philanthropic ecosystem capable of moving more resources to movements, doing so more thoughtfully, and continuing to learn and act collectively over time.

At a moment when many institutions are becoming more cautious, fragmented and stretched, the relationships between them matter. They cannot be created overnight when a crisis arrives. They have to be built, challenged, repaired and maintained over years.

That work is easy to overlook because, when it is working well, much of it is invisible. But anyone who has watched a collaboration fall apart because the relationships underneath it were not strong enough knows how important it is.

If we want a philanthropic sector capable of acting collectively and staying accountable to the movements and communities it seeks to support, we need to take the infrastructure behind that ambition seriously. And that includes being willing to fund it.