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Beyond Grants
Non-profit Funding Model Is Breaking.
Here's What Comes Next
Your organization was built to serve a mission, not to chase grants that may not exist next year. If you're watching funding dry up and wondering what a sustainable path forward actually looks like, you're in the right place.
THE PROBLEM
The international development sector has a dependency problem. Not a funding problem.
For decades, the playbook was simple: write grants, win grants, repeat. It worked when USAID was flush, and donors were generous. That assumption is gone. USAID has been gutted, bilateral aid is contracting, and organizations still waiting for things to "stabilize" are the ones most at risk of closing their doors. This isn't a temporary dip. It's a structural shift.
There's also a cultural problem. The sector has long treated profit as a dirty word, and the "Profit" taboo is costing organizations their futures. The leaders figuring this out aren't abandoning their missions. They're funding them differently: through social enterprise, corporate partnerships, and blended finance structures that mix grants with investment capital.
Beyond Grants exists to document what's working, challenge what isn't, and give development leaders the tools to build something more durable.
WHAT IS BEYOND GRANTS?
Beyond Grants is a platform for development leaders who are done waiting for the funding environment to improve and are ready to build something that lasts. It brings together a podcast, a weekly blog, and live events to make practical, experience-backed thinking on sustainable finance accessible to the people who need it most.
Components
Beyond Grants has three parts
Podcast
Real conversations every week with practitioners who have moved beyond grant dependency — NGO leaders, impact investors, and corporate partnership executives sharing what they actually did, what failed, and what's replicable.
Blog
Published every week, the blog covers the funding crisis, the "P-word" taboo, NGO-corporate partnerships, and what earned revenue models look like in practice. No consulting-speak. No donor-speak. Just clear thinking.
Convening
An invitation-only convening that brings together senior practitioners ready to have the honest conversations the sector usually avoids. The first is April 14, 2026, at InterAction HQ in Washington, DC.
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