Building Civic Resilience: From Insight to Action

At this year’s UNGA, Accountability Lab, Ban Ki-moon Foundation, Civic Strength Partners, and UNDP convened leaders from civil society, philanthropy, and multilateral and development organizations. We met to shift the conversation about civil society’s future from diagnosis to actionable steps that strengthen the ecosystems we work in and proactively build resilient civic infrastructure.

We asked three questions: What does civic resilience mean? What kind of infrastructure does it need? And what can we borrow from adjacent fields to build it? We reviewed case studies to map key characteristics across three domains—organizational, financial, and relational—to understand how organizations respond to shocks, and then assessed which shocks we can already see coming to build resilience against future pressures.

Key themes

Organizational, financial, and relational factors determine whether an organization bends or breaks under pressure. Many organizations may be strong in one domain while weak in the others. The most common break we identified in our conversation was overdependence on a single leader or a single funding source. Diversified, multi-year funding; new income streams; and real knowledge transfer from essential staff to other team members, among other things, allow organizations to adapt to changing realities.

Repeatedly, trust came up as foundational infrastructure, not just a “nice to have.” Trust between philanthropies, organizations, and communities cannot be rushed. When organizations move too fast into parallel or redundant systems, or skip trust-building entirely in formal and informal collaborations, the work becomes harder. Funding locally led and locally legitimate organizations, peer-to-peer solidarity, and low-touch relationship-maintenance mechanisms are critical. In a similar vein, collaboration needs its own funding and is deprioritized without a conscious effort to build it with deliberate resourcing.

There was widespread agreement that the philanthropy, CSO, and development silos must be better connected. The entire field runs as separate networks when it is—or should be—one large ecosystem. Development is a collective effort that is currently being treated as individual work. The room kept returning to the same ideas: we must bridge these networks, get them talking to each other, and build unlikely alliances across sectors that do not already collaborate by default.

Throughout the exercise, we asked participants to think proactively about building for predictable disruptions. Several of the named disruptions are no longer in doubt—for example, future funding cuts, climate disasters, and pandemics. Funding changes are also affecting how much money is available, who decides where it goes, and what comes with it—from reporting and compliance to whose priorities the work serves. Preparedness means planning for these shifts now, as near-certainties, rather than scrambling to respond to each shock or opportunity as it arrives.

From insight to architecture

Participants identified concrete building blocks across the three domains—organizational, financial, and relational—that we already recognized. Organizationally, CSOs are shrinking and redefining roles, with implications for knowledge retention. Financially, flows have declined, philanthropy is shifting towards new sectors, and new, non-Western funding sources are emerging. Relationally, trust is strained when networks are too informal to hold up in a crisis or when top-down, enforced formality overtakes relationships. These relationships are further challenged by coordinated attacks and legal threats, and widening generational and ideological splits across the sector.

Building blocks

• Organizational: A one-stop resource library—templates, case studies, and a navigator tool rooted in local contexts—ecosystem mapping, trust-based philanthropy standards, larger multi-year grants, and faster, more flexible disbursement.
• Financial: Sectoral or regional endowment funds managed by CSOs, stronger local-government coordination, financial-policy reform toward accessible systems, and deliberate alliances across sectors that don’t collaborate by default.
• Relational: Intergenerational spaces and capacity building, community databases to preserve local knowledge, and multi-stakeholder coalitions that reduce duplication through better cross-network coordination.

Across all three, almost every building block sought to connect what is currently siloed: knowledge, money, generations, or whole sectors. From pooled funds and shared resource libraries to intergenerational coalitions, the ideas in the room pointed to a common need: infrastructure that serves as connective tissue across the field.

That is the work ahead: building the connective infrastructure for civic resilience. Civic resilience is ultimately a public good, dependent not only on strong organizations but also on connected ecosystems, enabling institutions, and meaningful opportunities for participation.

If that is work you are already doing, or want to do, we would love to hear from you!

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