Popular yet fringe: Reflections on funding organisations, like EENET, that don’t fit the mould

By Ingrid Lewis.

I attended a meeting recently. It was a room full of ‘big names’ and ‘big organisations’ in the field of disability-inclusive education. The two-day event’s budget would probably have funded EENET for two years! Needless to say, EENET was one of the smallest entities represented. Yet numerous people approached me to say how often they visit our website and use our resources, and how much they value what we do. Each time I spoke on an issue that others seemed to avoid, someone would later come to me in private to say, “thanks for your intervention, I’m not able to say these things in my organisation”.

EENET has always been and remains “small but mighty” when it comes to supporting inclusive education innovation and hard-hitting debate. But the funding for our free-to-use inclusive education information, influencing and networking activities is dwindling fast.

As EENET’s Director, I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Will we survive? We have not been in such a financially precarious position since 2004. Then, a Norwegian organisation withdrew its funding with no notice because we suddenly didn’t fit their latest strategic direction. We survived that knock back. Will we weather the latest storm?

Why are we in this situation?

There are lots of possible reasons why we don’t have much money at the moment, including:

• We are a team of educators, networkers and human rights experts who have chosen to focus our scarce resources on our core information and influencing activities.
• We don’t charge for access to our information collections because that would exclude our primary audience.
• Funding is increasingly hard to get these days for everyone. Reading posts on social media support groups for UK domestic and international NGOs is like an extreme group therapy – everyone seems to be just weeks away from financial and emotional collapse.
• We’re stuck in the same loop that a lot of small organisations face: we need funding; we can’t get the funding without hiring expert fundraising help; we can’t afford to pay for that expert help until we can get some funding!
• Our information, influencing and networking activities, and status as a Community Interest Company (CIC, social enterprise) don’t fit the eligibility criteria for many funding opportunities.
• Our efforts to diversify income (e.g., providing consultancy and training services) worked fantastically for 15 years but have been impacted by global funding challenges.
• We are strategic (i.e., fussy!) about which consultancies we will do, insisting they align with our own ethics and theory of change.
• We are outspoken and critical, often highlighting system failings and what donors or big organisations could be doing better. In other words, we are quite likely to bite the hand that feeds.

EENET is an interesting paradox

On the one hand, we are very popular. The number of people using our website and online library increases every year, and they span the globe. Over the years, a lot of our work has popped up in high profile resources published by big entities (not always with the necessary credit given, but we don’t hold grudges!). In short, EENET is wanted, needed and used by all sorts of people striving to improve education in their school communities and countries.

On the other hand, we operate on the fringes of our ‘industry’. We refuse to squeeze ourselves neatly into a typical NGO organisational structure or funding mould. And we won’t quietly and politely collude with systems or practices which we think are flawed or unethical.

In short, we are popular yet fringe.

I’d argue there are much worse places to be situated!

But it’s not an easy position to be in when it comes to securing funding. I think most funders prefer giving their money to entities and activities that are conventional, regardless of how popular, valued or useful they might be.

Conventional work is safe, predictable, controllable. It probably won’t deliver earth-shattering results, but it’s not too risky either. Funder and implementer can plod on, look effective, and deliver visible and countable outputs. They can pretty much know from day one of the project what everything will look like on the last day of the project. No surprises, neatly spent budgets, reports filed, job done.

Innovation is risky, get over it!

Most funders fundamentally don’t like risk, and many feel they need to control or remove any risk of risk. In the recent meeting I mentioned above, a donor representative stated simply, “we are giving them our money, so we have to ensure they spend it properly, how we expect it to be spent” (or words to that effect).

But because they don’t like risk, inevitably most funders don’t like supporting innovative, unconventional work or work on the fringes.

Of course, they will say they want innovation. They’ll encourage it in their funding calls. But in reality, if you hit most funders with a really innovative proposal and/or an idea from the fringes, they’ll find a reason to reject it. Innovation challenges funders’ comfort zones.

Here are some funder excuses for rejecting or trying to dilute innovative or fringe proposals that I’ve seen or heard over the years:

• “You haven’t provided enough proof that it will work.”
  • Err, no, it’s hard to get historical evidence for something that has never been done before! Innovative ideas might not work perfectly first time, but we still need to try them and learn from them.

• • “You did not include XYZ activities which we think are the norm in this area of work.”
    • We’re being innovative which means we are deliberately NOT just doing the same things that everyone else always does in this area of work.

• “You should have aligned your proposal / organisational structure more with how we do it, and then we might consider giving you a grant.”
  • Great, so you might want to fund our work but only if we stop being us and start being more like you?

• “We need your timeline and budget to be much more rigidly plotted, more predictable. Tell us exactly what you will do, when and at what cost.”
  • This reason to reject comes straight from page 1 of the funders’ guide on how to stifle experimentation and creativity.

• “You need to show us how you will document what your ‘beneficiaries’ do with the information and resources you give them.”
  • When a supermarket stock buyer proposes to their line management about adding a new cheese product line, do you think they are asked to prove what the customers will DO with that cheese?! EENET can give you general distribution data, and we might receive some exciting ad hoc user stories. But – just like the supermarket can’t find out what every customer does with their new range of cheese after purchasing it – we can’t tell you what all our users do with the information after we’ve given them access to it. That doesn’t make the cheese or our information any less tasty and useful to the customer!!

Is there a new generation of funders out there?

EENET exists to ensure that education stakeholders in low- and middle-income contexts can access relevant inclusive education information and debate without a paywall. Our operating costs for running this free-to-use service may not seem obvious. Yet every resource downloaded carries its own small share of the costs for website hosting, security, technical management and maintenance, library curation and quality assurance, document editing and formatting for previously unpublished materials, and more.

Until last year, we also distributed free hard copies of materials to those with limited internet access. Sadly, the huge rise in international postage costs – and the increasing unreliability of the service – finally forced us to end this service.

The many people who tell us they benefit from EENET’s information, influencing and networking support motivate us to keep going, despite the funding difficulties. As EENET’s Director, I wish I had an easy solution to these challenges. “Reform the whole fundamentally flawed development funding system” is obviously top of my wish list, but that might not happen in time for our 2027 budget!

What we need is a new generation of ‘brave’ funders willing to ‘risk’ supporting a popular but outspoken fringe information and influencing network.

We need funders who want to help us think and stay outside the box, because once we climb inside the box to search for money, we lose the power and freedom that makes us uniquely EENET.

EENET is not alone in seeking funders with the courage to support genuine innovation, experimentation and disruption. Inclusive education for all will not happen without a revolution in our education systems. But the current obsession among most funders to force education programmes into predetermined boxes and timelines will not support a revolution. It will just keep people busy, looking like they are trying to achieve change, while repeating the same old stuff endlessly.

Do you know any funders who genuinely value the work of innovators and disruptors? Are you one? We’d love to hear from you!

If you’re not a big funder, you can still show your appreciation for EENET’s innovative information and influencing work by making a small personal donation. You can use our Buy Me A Coffee page for that.

 

If you are brimming with funding ideas for EENET, want to learn more about our work, or just join me in a mutual rant about ‘the system’, feel free to contact me at: ingridlewis@eenet.org.uk