Cleaning up your funding
Guidance on ethical fundraising and sponsorship
Use our Decision Checklist on Assessing Potential Funders
This supports you through four sets of questions:
A: What is their responsibility for harm?
B: What influence do they want to have?
C: How ethical is their governance?
D: What is the value of their funding to us?
Then we suggest that you use the Precautionary Principle, asking: can we be absolutely sure that our decision won’t cause harm?
If you decide to accept the funding arrangement despite causing some harm, or being linked to historic or potential future harm, how will you communicate this?
Social licence to operate
The breached planetary boundaries, particularly climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, are a direct result of human industrial activity. Companies have been given licences to extract resources, exploit people, pollute and destroy ecosystems to accumulate profit. This licence is obtained through finance, law, politics, military force and through social acceptance. Fossil fuel companies in particular have known that their activities were having catastrophic consequences for decades but they have concealed the science and sown doubt so as to escalate their harm and profit. They use sponsorship of culture, sport or education as a means to obtain social licence to continue their operations, to expand into new territories and to be seen as benign innovators.
The cultural sector has great power to disrupt this licence, to decouple social and cultural capital from destructive practices. This disruption can happen through direct creative activism, reimagining post-carbon and post-colonial models, and amplifying positive efforts at structural or systemic change.
Some further steps to take
- Make a pledge to be Oil Sponsorship Free. The pledge says: “We do not take any oil, coal, or gas corporate sponsorship for our cultural work. We call on our peers and institutional partners to refuse fossil fuel funding too.” Put the badge on your communications.
- Look at all your funds and financial partnerships to divest from fossil fuels, if you have any. Set a date by when you will have no financial ties with fossil fuel companies or funds.
- Look at exemplary ethical fundraising policies. See Artsadmin’s ethical fundraising policy
- Investigate and communicate how companies obtain social licences through sponsorship. How do they conceal their harm and manipulate public discourse to lobby for more freedom? Use resources provided by Culture Unstained
- Be democratic and transparent: invite the views of staff, stakeholders and audiences about how you should be resourced. Do they have alternative ideas for more ethical and beneficial ways to save money and generate revenue? Do they think that the benefits of a problematic funder will justify the partnership?
- Explore alternative revenue: proactively work with communities to shift towards a local, circular economy which benefits your organisation. For example, can you support participatory forms of entrepreneurship, such as plant-based food businesses, heritage crafts or planet-kind technologies?
- Please tell us about your good practice, so that we can amplify it. We want to celebrate and show what good looks like. Share it with #CultureTakesAction
Some further questions for discussion
- Who holds power within our organisation to shift the ethical stance on funding, and what are the obstacles to creating shifts?
- How can we work with other organisations? What are the strategies for building agency between ourselves to create change?
- How do we go through this process in a collaborative, affirmative way?
- If we are not in a position to contribute to these discussions, what can we do to raise your concerns? (Can a union help? Can we form an action group?)
- If you are a senior manager or trustee, what more can you do to ensure that all staff and stakeholders are heard, and feel safe to express their views?
Model text from Culture Unstained
This is an extract from the ethical policy of Culture Unstained, in a section ‘Who we accept funding from’. You might use this as an example for your own statement.
Culture Unstained is a small organisation and we primarily seek funding from charitable foundations or similar bodies. We acknowledge that in a capitalist system many of the sources of funding available to us may be tainted by a degree of exploitation and environmental harm. Our responsibility is to exercise the agency we do have in order to avoid perpetuating or exacerbating any harm, and to put the money we do accept towards addressing the pressing problems we exist to challenge.
However, we do have clear red lines around sources of funding we would never accept. We will not take money from funders who make their income from activities that abuse human rights, contribute to climate change, cause environmental destruction or depend on the depletion of finite resources. We recognise that endowments and funds will often have historical ties to unethical activities.
In these cases, we may accept funding from those that have taken comprehensive steps to confront, learn from and address the origins of their funds. We will not accept funding that could be used to “cleanse” the reputation of the funder where the original source of the funds goes against our core values. We make these decisions on a case-by-case basis, guided by our due diligence questions, below. We reserve the right to review and revise our approach, and reject or return funding, if new information about a source of funds comes to light.