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Choose Love
Getting funding to refugee-led organisations in Lebanon
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In brief, Choose Love is part of a collective of funders and experts in refugee leadership who came together to get money to refugee-led organisations (RLOs) in Lebanon and to strengthen the refugee-led ecosystem in the region. This meant rethinking the grant-making process and ensuring that refugee leaders are key actors in defining and driving programmatic, advocacy and funding agendas based on their communities’ needs. Making a strong case for support, offering unrestricted grants, creating meaningful space to hear the views of RLOs, hiring local consultants, and investing substantial time are the key ingredients for success.
Who should read this?
If you’re a funder who’s looking to help further advance the role and decision-making powers of refugee-led organisations through funding and organisational strengthening, then this is for you.
Why should you read this?
Refugee-led organisations are some of the most effective, experienced and impactful organisations that a funder can support. But these same organisations are profoundly under-resourced and miss out on funding. This structural inequality has to be addressed. Funders big and small must come together to re-think the flows of money.
What’s the take-away?
The status quo won’t cut it. Funding RLOs equitably requires co-designing the grant-making process with organisations on the ground. Funding should be unrestricted, long-term, flexible and straight-forward. Funders should provide non-financial support by amplifying RLO’s advocacy messages in international communities, providing relevant organisational development support, and minimising administrative burdens.
What’s the story?
The Collective for Refugee Leadership in MENA is a collective that came together with the aim of shifting power to refugees and strengthening refugee-led organisations across MENA to advance the rights, well-being, and security of refugees and their communities. The Collective is supported by 6 philanthropic donors, including Choose Love who also acts as the intermediary donor to coordinate the grant making process, and the Resourcing Refugee Leadership Initiative(opens in new window). So far, the Collective has operated as a pilot in Lebanon. The process followed 6 steps:
Getting interested donors together and establishing ways of working together. The most important aspect here is to make a case for why it is important to support RLOs and what are the benefits.
Based on the experience of supporting RLOs for a number of years across several contexts, the Collective was able to build a case for support by emphasising the importance and value-add of RLOs. Refugee-led organisations are able to collaboratively, and cost-effectively address their communities’ needs whilst having a nuanced understanding of local contexts and challenges. Around the world, RLOs are running innovative and flexible programs with the networks, trust and knowledge necessary to represent their communities and facilitate long-term, sustainable solutions. However, RLOs are profoundly under-resourced, receiving a tiny fraction of humanitarian aid budgets. Community-driven solutions are being deprived and therefore so too are the communities they serve.
The Collective set three main goals that they wanted to achieve through this initiative:
1) prioritise funding to refugee-led organisations with local operations,
2) minimise administrative pressure on key partners and 3) optimise impact & amplify refugee voices.
Establishing an intermediary donor is important to help ease the administrative burden on grantees by streamlining grant processes and making them more accessible. Donors within the Collective pooled their funding and selected Choose Love as the intermediary to facilitate the grants so that grantees would only need to make one application. Key characteristics necessary for an intermediary donor are fast and flexible processes and the resource and experience to provide grantees with practical support and guidance through the due diligence processes. In addition, in many cases, donors are not able to directly fund RLOS, meaning that they are required to go through intermediaries that can help distribute the funds.
From the communities that are being supported, and with an in-depth knowledge of RLOs in Lebanon, local consultants offered legitimacy to the Collective and have helped broker relationships with new grantees. The local consultants built strong and trusting relationships with every partner, as well as facilitated spaces and collaborative discussions between donors, partners and members of the local community. The role is important also on a very practical level as the consultant helps to translate and communicate with new partners who are navigating due diligence processes for the first time. They are also able to share updates to both donors and grantees in a way that is fast and accessible.
The Collective’s strategy and grant-making process was co-designed in consultation with refugee leaders and experts with lived experience of displacements. RLOs worked collectively to identify solutions to shared challenges, while donors and international actors organised their programs, advocacy, and funding in alignment with the priorities laid out by RLOs. When a donor visit was arranged, it facilitated meetings with RLOs to establish fluid communication channels between partners and donors, particularly addressing urgent funding requirements and gaps. It is important to highlight that the co-design and consultation process requires considerable time and coordination. Having a realistic timeline is key to success. It’s important to give time and space to build strong foundations for the work and allow more donors with shared values to join the coalition.
Sharing capacity and including RLOs in the learning process ensures that organisations can continue their operations in the future, irrespective of continued investments from the Collective, because they are not dependent on one resource. Choose Love supported partners to develop sustainable organisational policies which in turn helped to further demonstrate the growth and development of the organisations to prospective donors. In addition, capacity-building workshops with partners were arranged. These covered topics such as safeguarding, an area that’s essential for organisations to have embedded in their work, primarily for ethical and safe work practices but also for covering due diligence with other donors.
What’s the impact?
The flexibility of the support, often for operational core costs, has resulted in grantees delivering high-quality and crucial services. The ability to invest in long term and sustainable ways of working and operational capacity has provided stability to the grantees and allowed them to focus fully on service delivery. The support to grantees to navigate due diligence processes has also resulted in organisations having registered bank accounts, robust safeguarding policies and strong procedures that are necessary to survive. It also increased their ability to diversify their funding going forwards.
What’s next?
Choose Love and the wider collective aims to further leverage funding for increased grant-making. The consortium of donors engaged with the Collective for Refugee Leadership continues to grow and develop with the goal of bringing more funding to RLOs in the region. Depending on funding secured, the plan is to roll out similar schemes across other countries in the MENA region, such as Turkey and Egypt.
What should you do next?
You can read further stories of good practice here. You can also follow and get in touch with Choose Love to find out more here(opens in new window). As a funder, have a look at your process, are there any approaches from the above case study you could integrate or discuss internally?
