What kind of funding are youth activists asking for?

Welcome to our new philanthropy digest bringing you the latest insights, ideas, and discussions about innovative ways we can reimagine our sector; supporting and platforming the communities who can drive real change for a fairer, more sustainable, and stronger future.

Given the importance of youth voices at the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) COP16 in Colombia this week, today’s issue features an interview with our Youth Affiliate Swetha Stotra Bhashyam . Serving as the Global South Focal Point for the Global Youth Biodiversity Network (GYBN) from 2018 to 2023, Swetha has played a pivotal role in representing and amplifying the voices of youth in the Global South.

With over a decade of experience collaborating with grassroots and international organisations, she has been instrumental in building a powerful youth movement for biodiversity.

What kind of funding are youth activists asking for?

Funding youth has never been more important; Swetha tells us how environmental philanthropy can best support the growing youth biodiversity movement.

“The youth biodiversity movement cannot just run on passion,” she says. “If you can see that young people are doing great work, know that this has all been achieved on minimum support. There is so much potential that can only be truly realised if we are funded. Trust that we know how to best spend our money, and then… talk to other funders. You are the ones who can best convince others to start supporting youth work, and that type of support, in the places we can’t reach, is so valuable.”

Unrestricted: Trust young people

Looking back on preparing for the last CBD COP15, Swetha says “There was so much work to be done, we needed to give one last push.

“We needed young people to be able to go to their governments and engage with them in country before the big United Nations meeting, so the governments already know what young people are pushing for and are more inclined to support it. But in order to do this, you need to be able to take a train, pay for food, and even though young people are doing this work and have for a long time, we still struggle to receive funding for it.

“So, when Synchronicity Earth asked us what we needed, we asked for a grant to support this work… and they just said ‘Okay’. We’d never received an unrestricted grant before [where the organisation receiving funds decides how it can be used]. It was the least complicated grant we’ve ever had, and it was actually healing after the many traumatising fundraising experiences we’ve had for many years, because for the first time, a funder just trusted us.”

Trusting the organisation’s track record with delivering their work is a huge part of reimagining philanthropy to address the power imbalance between funders and their partners.

Providing unrestricted funding, which enables the organisations to identify their priorities and use funding to plan, often including vital but under-funded costs such as salaries and training.

Sustainable: Respect their time

GYBN aims to ensure that youth decisions and priorities are reflected in the goals and targets of the CBD and that youth remain a key stakeholder (along with Indigenous communities, women, and children) in biodiversity conservation.

The CBD COP15 in Montreal was a huge success for GYBN, which managed to influence six key policy demands that they had asked for.

“We couldn’t have done it without all the preparation before,” says Swetha. “By the time the young people arrived at COP15, they already knew the negotiators and were talking to them as pals, so we were able to push them to get what we all wanted and it was a far greater success than we had expected, getting everything we asked for.”

Funders need to take this preparation time into account; the achievements by the youth movement at big, global events like COPs are not made in the days at the conference – they have been worked towards for years beforehand. This is why supporting young people and youth organisations needs to be beyond expense payments for events. It needs to be all year around.

It is also important to think about how much (unpaid) time young people have to invest to access the funding in the first place. Time taken on funding applications and chasing funders to meeting funding commitments is valuable time lost from their advocacy work.??

Empowering: Let them lead

Ultimately, young people and youth organisations need to be empowered to do what they have already proved they are more than capable of. Supporting the youth movement means trusting them to identify their own priorities and adjusting funding practice to fully support them.

Swetha speaks about the ‘ladder of youth engagement’ as a tool to figuring out how to support young people beyond tokenisation:

“At the bottom of the ladder is inviting a young person to come to an event. This kind of tokenisation is to say we have a young person, we have an Indigenous person, we have a woman, we’re inviting them to speak, and that’s it…

“The final step is, of course, letting young people lead the work. What you’re saying then is that you’re committing to running a/the project, especially those aimed at engaging young people, and telling us what you would like to do but giving us agency to then lead on it.”

GYBN is at COP16 this week! To find out more about youth priorities for the CBD meeting and the events young people will be speaking at, visit ‘Youth participation at COP16 ’.

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