When funding ends, what remains? That is the question at the heart of a three-and-a-half-day Financial Sustainability Workshop with a focus on Fundraising underway at Maanzoni Lodge, Machakos County, bringing together 21 faith-based and community leaders from Kenya.
The workshop, facilitated by Faith to Action Network (F2AN) and DevProsperity (DevPro) – both partners of Bread for the World – is a direct response to a shared crisis: the shrinking donor space. As traditional funding priorities shift, many local organizations are facing the loss of core donors.
“We are not teaching this because we have figured it all out. We are teaching it because we have experienced the consequences of financial vulnerability, learned from them, and are committed to sharing those lessons.”
For Faith to Action Network, the experience of bringing long-term programme to an end after five years reinforced an important lesson: financial sustainability is not optional organizational ambition. It is central to resilience and survival.
Five principles for sustainable fundraising
The workshop is organised around five interconnected pillars:
Relevance. Understanding what matters to communities, partners and potential supporters.
Credibility. Building the trust that gives people confidence to invest in an organisation’s work.
Visibility. Making the organisation’s contribution, evidence and impact visible.
Relationships. Moving beyond transactions to build meaningful, long-term partnerships.
Call to Action. Making it clear how people can contribute and why their contribution matters.
Participants also confronted some of the challenges affecting organisational sustainability, including dependency in communities, slow localisation, weak governance and resource mobilisation capacity, competition for limited resources, inflation and over-reliance on restricted funding.
One of the workshop’s key reflections was simple:
Donors don’t give to needs; they give to trust.
This shifts the fundraising conversation from “What does our organisation need?” to “What motivates the people and institutions we want to engage?”
As workshop concluded, each participating organisation will develop an action plan to translate these lessons into practical approaches for strengthening its financial sustainability.
The initiative is supported by Bread for the World as part of its commitment to strengthen local partners beyond project funding. It also means investing in the organisational capacity, relationships and resilience needed to sustain locally driven action beyond the life of a grant.
