Why funding and partnership agreements?

To create any form of public benefit means collaborating with others - no single individual nor organisation can embody all the plural perspectives, skills, approaches, mindsets and talents needed. Funding and partnership agreements underpin this collaborative process.

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When we set up our partnerships, a funding or partnership agreement provides a set of written terms within law that then govern that relationship and its work, particularly when things don’t go to plan.

These agreements are often written by the party with more resource (in funding relationships, normally by the funder) and are commonly coded with responsibility and accountability predominantly to money, rather than to the shared intention, mission or outcome of the partnership.

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The agreements can undermine even the best-intended partnerships, encoding precariousness, mistrust, unbalanced power and/or one-way accountability from the outset and, in turn, can undermine the conditions for the work that the partnership is intended for. Even organisations or groups actually wanting to change their agreements are often thwarted to by the lengthy process and investment required to do so.

And increasingly, we are recognising that bi-lateral relationships are insufficient when seeking to transform extractive systems. We need multiple forms of resource being moved by multiple actors towards outcomes, but our craft and practice of organising and governing together on that basis is, on the whole, under-practiced. Our common (legal) agreements are not wired for these forms of alliance.

We consider open resources that can enable a systemic rewiring of these governance approaches and structures to be an important contribution towards more systemic, effective and just ways to organise for public benefit, together.