From Crisis to Practice: What We’ve Learned About Holding the Ecosystem Together

A year ago, we launched Civic Strength Partners, a platform to support transitions in the social sector, in the middle of a crisis. Here is an honest account of what worked, what didn’t, and what we think it means for the organizations and funders trying to navigate what comes next.

It feels important to start with the context. When Accountability Lab, Development Gateway: An IREX Venture, and Digital Public came together to form Civic Strength Partners, we weren’t operating from a position of strength. We were watching organizations around us lose funding, furlough or lay off staff, and, in some cases, quietly begin to shut down. The immediate question wasn’t strategic, but rather practical: could we do anything useful right now, and if so, what?

What made us functional in that moment was not a plan. It was a combination of things we had built — sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident — over years of working together. Our relationships and joint creativity didn’t require formal agreements to activate. We were lucky enough to have modest financial reserves that bought us weeks, not months, but enough to think rather than just react. And we had a pre-existing commitment to the ecosystem, not just our own organizations, which meant our instinct was to ask what others needed rather than retreat into self-preservation.

We also had something special: a shared culture of transparency. Each of our organizations had, over time, developed the habit of being honest with staff, partners, and funders about where things stood, including when things were hard. That transparency, when the crisis hit, meant people trusted us quickly, and that trust allowed us to move fast.

What we actually did

The first thing we did was run a survey. More than 1,200 organizations responded across various rounds of data collection. Nearly 60% said they might close within six months. That data grounded everything that followed – it gave us something concrete to bring to funders and partners, and it meant we weren’t speculating about the scale of the problem. CSP was the result: an effort to help social change organizations plan strategically for organizational succession, mergers and partnerships, and asset protection. We hoped that CSP could preserve the lessons, tools, and relationships that drive the mission and impact of civil society organizations globally.

We were transparent from the beginning about what we didn’t have. In our early intake calls with organizations, we told people directly: we don’t have funding yet, we don’t have all the answers, but here is what we’re building. That honesty consistently disarmed people. It turned out that organizations didn’t need certainty; they needed someone prepared to take action. 

None of what followed would have been possible without the people who took a bet on us before we had much to show. A few small donations for data collection and initial scoping gave us the confidence to act. Those early investments came at the moment of highest uncertainty, when most funders were waiting to see how things settled. The trust embedded in that early funding was itself a signal: it told other donors that serious people had looked at what we were doing and decided it was worth backing. Early funders at Skoll didn’t just provide resources; they provided the social proof that unlocked the next round of relationships and, with them, the ability to scale. In a crisis, being able to move in weeks rather than months is a structural advantage. Those first investments made that speed possible.

We built a draft toolkit in April and started sharing it before it was finished. We refused to offer consulting services we couldn’t back up — a constraint that became an asset: it meant we weren’t competing with established consultants and we weren’t promising things we couldn’t deliver. We showed up with something tangible at a moment when many were still processing the shock.

“The organizations that got to us early weren’t looking for a polished product. They were looking for someone to think alongside.”

What was harder than we expected

By autumn, the work had grown significantly more complex than we had initially framed it. The funding model that made sense in the first phase needed to evolve. The program had expanded into areas – transitions beyond mergers, legacy planning, asset protection – that required different kinds of expertise and a different kind of infrastructure. Communicating what we were doing, clearly and consistently, became genuinely difficult.

There was a period of real exhaustion. Maintaining the creativity and energy that the work required, while simultaneously managing internal organizational dynamics, was harder than any of us had anticipated. The “messy middle”, the stage where the scope of what you are building has outpaced your ability to explain it simply, is real, and it is easy to underestimate how much it costs people. It’s where we dwell with organizations we’re working with, and we can relate to the discomfort there.

What moved us through were two things: the discipline to write things down and to operationalize what we were doing and learning, rather than just accumulating insights; and the decision to be explicit about the transition into a new phase, rather than letting the work drift. Deliberately naming our decision to enter Phase Two, not just continue Phase One, turned out to matter more than we expected.

Where CSP is now

CSP has grown into its own initiative, and in doing so, we’ve had to get clearer about what we are and what we are not. We are not a consultancy. We are not a matching service. We are not neutral on values, even when we are neutral on outcomes. What we are is an accompaniment initiative: we walk with organizations through the full arc of transition – mergers, affiliations, strategic partnerships, pivots, funding model shifts, and responsible endings – holding the emotional, relational, and cultural complexity alongside the strategic and operational.

That distinction matters because most transition support is either too technical or too transactional. It arrives after the crisis has forced a decision, focuses on legal and financial mechanics, and leaves the organization to carry the human weight on its own. We begin upstream, before decisions are locked in, and we stay through the arc. Leaders come to us carrying more than a structural question. They are navigating identity, power, fear, and sometimes grief alongside the practical decisions about timing, readiness, and what comes next. Our role is not to guide them toward an answer but to make the full terrain visible, so they can see their options clearly and move with integrity. That integration of the strategic and the deeply human is what organizations tell us they need most – and haven’t found elsewhere.

Our practice is majority-world-anchored, not as a geographic footnote but as a design principle. Roughly 75% of the organizations we support are based in Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. That shapes who is in our advisor circle, how we think about power and context, what “good process” looks like across different organizational cultures, and what equity actually requires in practice. We are not parachuting in expertise. We are working towards building and deploying it from proximity.

We remain free of charge to the vast majority of organizations we support. That is not a marketing choice; it is a structural one. Transition support should not be available only to organizations with resources to pay for it. The organizations that most need accompaniment are often the ones least able to access it. Equity-based access is built into our model, funded through pooled resources, and it shapes who we can reach and how.

We are firmly in Phase 2: consolidating what we’ve learned into replicable standards, clearer tools, and more consistent delivery so that the quality of support an organization receives does not depend on luck or proximity to the right network. We are also building toward something broader: a shift in how the ecosystem thinks about transition. Not as failure, private shame, or last resort. As a normal part of organizational life that can be navigated with clarity, care, and integrity – and supported accordingly.

What we think this means more broadly

As we gather at the Skoll World Forum a year on, we want to make a straightforward argument: the organizations that survived the last twelve months did so not because they were bigger or better-resourced, but because of things that are genuinely buildable. Diversified funding. Financial reserves, even modest ones. Cultures of transparency that retain team trust under pressure. Leadership that has learned when to shrink in order to grow. And deep, resilient, and reciprocal relationships with peers across the ecosystem.

None of this is mysterious. But it is also not accidental. It requires investment, often in things that are hard to cost and harder to report on in grant applications. The ecosystem needs funders willing to support these foundational capacities before the next crisis, not in response to it. And it needs transition support that is accessible, contextual, and human, not just technically competent.

We also want to say something about speed. In a crisis, the organizations that could make decisions quickly because trust was already high, because their teams didn’t need to relitigate every choice, operated at a categorically different pace from those that couldn’t. Speed is not just operationally useful. It is, in some circumstances, the difference between staying relevant and becoming part of the problem you were trying to solve. Preparedness is the precondition for speed. And preparedness requires accompaniment that starts before urgency does.

We will emerge from Phase Two more structured, more honest about what we don’t know, and more convinced than ever that this work matters. Not because every organization should survive; some transitions are responsible endings, and those deserve as much care as any merger. But because the missions, relationships, and institutional knowledge those organizations carry should not be lost simply because the sector had no infrastructure to hold them.

That is what we are building. We are not the only ones who should be building it. If this resonates, as a funder, a peer organization, a network, or a leader in the middle of your own transition, we want to hear from you.

About Civic Strength Partners

Civic Strength Partners is a civil society accompaniment initiative founded by Accountability Lab, Development Gateway: An IREX Venture, and Digital Public. We support social change organizations navigating transitions, including mergers, affiliations, partnerships, succession, funding model shifts, and responsible endings, with the goal of preserving the missions, relationships, and institutional knowledge that sustain impact. Our services are free to the vast majority of organizations we work with. We are majority-world anchored, values-filtered, and upstream by design.

This piece was written for the Skoll World Forum on the occasion of the initiative’s one-year anniversary.