Fund for Global Human Rights

Case Study

Sustaining Frontline Human Rights Through Strategic Resource Mobilisation

Overview

Global Leaders Consulting worked with the Fund for Global Human Rights to strengthen its ability to secure long-term, flexible funding for grassroots movements.

Our support

Institutional Fundraising Strategy: Aligning resource mobilisation with the Fund’s values, operating model, and commitment to flexible, movement-led funding.

Donor Portfolio Design: Supporting a balanced mix of institutional, philanthropic, and aligned partners to reduce risk and improve predictability.

Funder Research & Opportunity Development: Identifying donors with a genuine appetite for long-term, core, and trust-based funding.

Narrative & Case Development: Articulating the Fund’s distinctive role as a partner to frontline movements in complex and restrictive contexts.

Pipeline & Process Strengthening: Building practical tools and systems to improve prospect prioritisation, relationship management, and proposal development.

The Challenge

The Fund for Global Human Rights plays a critical role in supporting grassroots organisations and activists working on some of the most sensitive and high-risk human rights issues worldwide. Its model, providing flexible, long-term funding to locally led movements, is both its greatest strength and one of its greatest fundraising challenges.

Many mainstream donors favour short-term, project-restricted grants with tightly defined outputs. By contrast, the Fund prioritises core support, accompaniment, and trust in local leadership. As global political pressures increased and civic space narrowed, demand for this kind of funding grew sharply, while competition for values-aligned resources intensified.

The Fund wanted to strengthen its financial sustainability without compromising its principles. In particular, it sought to:

Build a more resilient funding base that reduced dependency on a limited number of institutional donors.
Attract partners who understood and supported flexible, movement-centred funding models.
Improve internal systems so that fundraising activity was strategic, coordinated, and scalable, rather than reactive.

Global Leaders Consulting was engaged to help the organisation navigate these challenges and position itself for long-term sustainability.

Our Approach

Rather than beginning with external positioning, we started from the Fund’s operating philosophy: trust, long-term partnership, and accountability to movements. Our role was to translate these principles into a coherent, fundable strategy.

We worked closely with senior leadership to ensure that the Fund’s approach to resource mobilisation reflected its core commitments. This included:

Clarifying what types of funding were genuinely aligned with the Fund’s model — and which were not.

Defining internal criteria for assessing not only donor eligibility, but also strategic and ethical fit.

Reframing fundraising success around sustainability, flexibility, and quality of partnership, not only volume of income.

This process created a shared internal understanding of what “right-fit funding” meant for the organisation.
Rather than focusing solely on new income, we supported the Fund to think about its overall funding architecture:

Analysing concentration risk and the implications of over-reliance on specific funding streams.

Designing a more balanced donor portfolio across foundations, institutional funders, and aligned partners.

Identifying opportunities for multi-year and core funding to increase predictability and reduce administrative burden.

This portfolio-based approach strengthened financial resilience while preserving strategic independence.
We undertook detailed research to identify donors with demonstrated interest in:

Trust-based and participatory philanthropy

Movement building and systems change

Gender justice, civic space, land rights, and other core thematic priorities of the Fund

Rather than producing long, generic prospect lists, we developed a focused set of high-potential opportunities, with clear rationales for fit, entry points, and engagement strategies. This enabled the Fund to invest time where alignment, not just availability of funding, was strongest.
A central part of our work was helping the Fund articulate its role in language that resonated with sophisticated donors while remaining grounded in its values. Together, we refined a narrative that:

Positioned the Fund as a long-term partner to grassroots movements, not simply a grant-maker.

Made the case for flexible funding as a strategic tool, not an administrative preference.

Connected individual grants to broader movement outcomes and structural change.

We translated this positioning into donor-ready materials, strengthening both core messaging and proposal frameworks.
To ensure sustainability beyond individual opportunities, we also focused on process and systems, including:

Improving how prospects were prioritised and tracked.

Creating clearer pathways from research to cultivation to proposal development.

Supporting internal alignment between programme and fundraising teams, ensuring that donor engagement was informed by real-world movement needs.

This helped embed a more intentional, disciplined approach to resource mobilisation across the organisation.

Outcomes

Through this engagement, the Fund for Global Human Rights strengthened both its strategic direction and its operational fundraising capacity:

Greater clarity on funding alignment, enabling more confident decision-making about which opportunities to pursue.
A stronger, more balanced donor pipeline oriented toward long-term and flexible support.
Improved donor communications, with clearer articulation of the Fund’s distinctive model and impact.
More robust internal systems, supporting better prioritisation, coordination, and follow-through.

Together, these changes enhanced the Fund’s ability to secure resources that matched both its mission and its way of working.

Why It Mattered

For grassroots organisations operating in high-risk environments, funding is not simply a transaction, it is a question of trust, continuity, and survival. By helping the Fund for Global Human Rights strengthen its fundraising strategy without diluting its values, Global Leaders Consulting contributed to the long-term sustainability of movements working at the frontlines of justice and accountability.

This case reflects our broader practice: supporting mission-driven organisations to build funding models that are strategic, resilient, and aligned with the change they exist to create.