From Survival to Resilience: Civil Society Is Meeting the Moment. Now Philanthropy Must Do the Same.

About the author

*Jessica Corredor Villamil is the Director of the Better Preparedness Initiative (BPI). The initiative brings together funders from the human rights, peace and security, and humanitarian sectors with social movements to mobilize resources for those on the frontlines of intersecting crises and closing civic space. She brings an intersectional lens, deep research experience, and a commitment to care-centered, long-term approaches to movement resilience.

From Survival to Resilience: Civil Society Is Meeting the Moment. Now Philanthropy Must Do The Same.

This year, the Better Preparedness Initiative (BPI) attended International Civil Society Week (ICSW), the largest global gathering of civil society and social movements. What became immediately clear is something many of us working at the intersections of crisis and civic space have sensed for a while: civil society is meeting the moment with a clarity, urgency, and adaptability that philanthropy has not yet matched.

While funders continue to reorganize their strategies, committees, and portfolios, civil society – especially movements closest to the frontlines – is already responding to crises that simply cannot wait. And they are doing so with far fewer resources than they’ve had in the past.

Civil society is already acting… and acting fast

Across ICSW, three things stood out:

1. Youth leadership is shaping the agenda.

From the Youth Assembly to the closing plenary, Gen Z was setting the tone, not simply participating in it. Youth leaders showed a level of political clarity that reflects a generation unwilling to inherit old structures. Their approach is collaborative, intersectional, disruptive, and grounded in lived experience.

But we must avoid the easy narrative that “youth will save us.” We’ve seen youth organizing for change – largely through protests – from Bangladesh to Kenya, Indonesia to Nepal. However, they should not carry the burden of change alone. The responsibility of change and of building the future that we want lies across the entire ecosystem, including funders: are we supporting movements for what they are, not for what we wish them to be?

2. Civil society is innovating faster than philanthropy.

In sessions on civic-space futures, foresight, resourcing, and movement organizing, it was evident that civil society is already experimenting with new forms of coordination and collaboration. Across regions, these collaborations are practical, creative, and grounded in community needs. In Thailand, exiled human rights defenders from Myanmar are building informal protection networks and peer-support structures. These local movements have launched community food-exchange programs that double as safe spaces for mutual care, information-sharing, and collective strategy. Others from Myanmar have turned to creative activism, such as satirical “pesticide for dictatorship” labels and artistic campaigns that transform repression into powerful storytelling tools.

The Youth Assembly demonstrated another form of coordination: a dedicated space for young people to connect, deliberate, and co-develop solutions. Their Youth Manifesto stands as a symbolic but meaningful example of collaborative agenda-setting.

Some funders are also rising to this moment, including women’s funds, human rights defenders funders, and a handful of private foundations that have strengthened their crisis models, increased allocations, or activated rapid-response mechanisms, as we saw during COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. But these examples, while important, remain the exception. Across the wider field, many funders are still constrained by internal processes and risk calculations that do not match the pace or urgency of today’s crises.

3. Civil society is generating the solutions philanthropy is looking for.

Our BPI session at ICSW, From Crisis to Preparedness: Co-creating Principles for Funders and Civil Society, co-hosted with the Packard Foundation and Humanity United, made this particularly clear. Participants named, without hesitation and with openness and honesty, what works and what doesn’t in times of crisis.

They pointed to pooled and crowdfunded funding mechanisms that distribute risk, reduce administrative burden, and allow funders to contribute to collective impact even while remaining within their own grantmaking scopes. These models make it possible to move resources faster, with more flexibility, and in ways that reflect the complexity of crisis response.

They also spoke to the importance of shared early-warning coordination that goes beyond information exchange, and contributes to collective sense-making and joint analysis. Early coordination helps align priorities before a crisis unfolds, builds trust between actors, and prevents the duplication and fragmentation that so often undermine timely response.

Participants emphasized the need for provisional, rapid, and flexible funds that allow civil society to act immediately. These funds recognize that the first days of a crisis are often decisive, and that bureaucratic systems delay support when it is most essential. Flexibility in crisis is a condition for survival.

And they underscored the value of a willingness to share risk and experiment. Civil society actors live with risk every day; funders do not experience it in the same way. Participants stressed that real partnership in crisis means funders must take on more of that risk and enable bold approaches rather than stifling them.

Those who attended the session also named what consistently undermines collaboration. They pointed to mismatched expectations, particularly around what is realistic under pressure. They highlighted how burdensome processes slow down responses and drain time away from urgent action. They called out the lack of shared principles that make coordination ad hoc rather than strategic. And they noted the reluctance to stay accountable once the crisis moves off the front page, leaving organizations to navigate the long-term fallout alone.

In other words, civil society already knows what effective crisis response requires and they have been clear about what needs to change.

Philanthropy must step up and meet the moment and BPI is here to help make that possible

HRFN’s latest data shows a projected decline of up to $1.9 billion in human rights funding through government foreign aid. This is not an abstract figure. It represents protections, interventions, organizations, and communities in low and middle-income countries that will be left exposed. The gap is structural but solvable. What is required is to move beyond analysis paralysis and move to immediate action.

Civil society is already operating at crisis speed. Much of philanthropy is still moving at a committee’s pace. As long as this mismatch persists, civil society will be forced to operate in survival mode, when, with better alignment and timely support, it could instead be resourced to build lasting resilience.

Throughout ICSW, the message from civil society was consistent: funders must expand their risk appetite, coordinate earlier, make decisions closer to those on the frontlines, and reduce the procedural burdens that slow down urgent action. These are clear, actionable expectations and philanthropy already has tools to meet them.

This is precisely where the Better Preparedness Initiative comes in. BPI exists to help funders meet the current moment and prepare for what comes next. Preparedness is not only about anticipating crisis, it is about creating the conditions for coordinated, strategic action before, during, and after a crisis hits.

The road ahead

Civil society is moving from survival to resilience, not because conditions are favorable, but because the alternative is untenable. They are reinforcing and focusing on the already existing, but long-time-ignored, locally rooted models that are more agile, humane, and suited to this political moment than many formal systems built to support them.

Change is possible. In fact, it is already happening.

The question is whether philanthropy will choose to match the pace, courage, and clarity with which civil society is acting.

Civil society is meeting the moment.
Now philanthropy must meet them.
This is the work BPI exists to make possible.

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