Director’s Blog: Formidable Trust: The plan for 2025

Frontline humanitarian services and rights-based advocacy across Europe are eroding in real time. The deeper crisis is not vanishing funding - it is the growing needs, isolated responses, and the breakdown of the civic scaffolding that has held this movement together until now. Our response is Strategic Mutualism.

This is not a call for better communication, branding or tighter partnership. It is a call for transformation. In a sector marked by urgent needs met by fragmented responses, we are committing to a new model of shared responsibility. Risk, infrastructure and visibility, can and should be more equitably distributed among those doing the work we do and transparency, collaboration and solidarity should be the foundation. No single entity can provide the full spectrum of services, advocacy, and effort that is required to turn the tide of current pressures. The future of every actor in the sector and the wider movement is already bound together by interdependence. We cannot afford to plan to operate in silos and we cannot afford to compete for visibility, resources, or legitimacy. Forward momentum must come from collective knowledge, effort and service - built strategically, deliberately, and in solidarity.

This is how we intend to build a more resilient, more just, and more honest civil society response.

I. Why this? Why now?

Our analysis is blunt. Humanitarian services and rights-based advocacy across Europe are on the brink. Legal hostility and political pressure are not new, but what is new is the scale of funding cuts and the astounding pace at which civic space is being eroded across Europe. Where in previous years we once discussed innovation, improvement, and growth, our sector and our overall movement is now asking more urgent questions: What happens if we disappear? Who will carry our work forward? What keeps civil society standing when the scaffolding falls?

Collective Aid is navigating most recent funding crisis thanks entirely to our team. Like many others we have come dangerously close to buckling, but we have made the necessary changes to make it through. And I think that making these changes has reminded a lot of us here that essential fact at the core of the work we do. When services fail, it is not the organisation that experiences the loss. It is the people we serve. That is the deeper crisis. Needs are continuing to grow and while advocacy and services shrink - it is the people we serve who are losing support structures.  We cannot control the financial landscape. But we can choose how we respond. For too long, too many organisations have clung to imaginations of heroic independence, brand-fragile alliances, and zero-sum calculations. Responses to recent threats and pressures have not changed this. It is a type distrust that will not survive what we are facing and it will not address the deeper crisis we are facing. Collaboration is not a virtue when needs and rights are at stake. It is our responsibility. 

In this regard, it is our analysis at collective Aid that this year, we must play our part in building systems of effectively shared risk, shared infrastructure, and shared legitimacy among the wider ecosystem of organisations, collectives and civil society across the areas we work. This is an expression of solidarity - choosing to acknowledge the interdependence of our effort and strengthening it.

II. What is Strategic Mutualism?

No one needs reminding that collaboration matters. The problem is not failure to partner - it is that we continue to partner badly.

Of all corners of civil society, the humanitarian sector is perhaps the most crowded with alliances. MOUs abound. Logos stack up on reports. Grants get co-authored. And yet, decision-making power rarely moves. Too often, collaboration becomes a matter of optics management. Small organisations seeking proximity to big names. Big names seeking grassroots credibility. Shared visibility with no shared risk - everyone wins, but nothing truly changes.

Real partnerships, it has been said, start with the admission of vulnerability. And vulnerability demands a transparency that most of us - rightly - find uncomfortable. Fear of seeming weak or losing control. We can certainly admit that at times we have let that fear shape our own decisions. But when partnerships are built on strengths alone - polished reputations and strategic payoff - they fail their partners precisely when they are needed most.

At Collective Aid, we have certainly been guilty of holding our methods close. But we have also been among the first to name our blind spots. And that is why we have agreed as a team the same conclusion that an increasing number of organisations are already realising. Too many organisations are unprepared to build partnerships rooted in mutual survival. That has to change.

Parallel programming. Defensive branding. Strategic secrecy. These tactics do not scale in moments of political or funding crisis. They fracture. When alliances are built on convenience, they collapse under pressure. And when alliances collapse, services and advocacy disappears.

What we are working towards then, is not just greater partnership - but a different ethic entirely. On paper, it might be defined as “strategic mutualism”: shared risk, shared infrastructure, shared trust. In practice, this means that we are opening ourselves completely to any partner who seeks deeper and renewed collaboration. We are offering total transparency, with the end goal of building partnerships not interested in scale or income, but in proximity, capacity and commitment. This type of resilience is what our sector is missing.

“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Our work and our solidarity must reflect that. No single actor can offer the full spectrum of service, advocacy and solidarity that our collective network is already capable of. If we truly believe in the values that we profess - solidarity across all issues and all borders for all people - then we must practice the mutualism that honors it. Whether we like it or not, our fate is bound to the fate of the ecosystem of organisations, collectives, and grassroots networks. We believe that interdependence is our greatest strategic opportunity. Every single actor in this movement knows something that we don’t. The question is whether the sector will preserve and pool that knowledge - or whether we will hoard it in our own silos and watch it disappear.

At Collective Aid, we are already building deeper partnerships across our network, especially with our existing trusted local civil society partners. If we don’t yet work together yet and you would like to have a conversation about building partnerships then please reach out. 

III. Mutualism must embody Solidarity

It is neither easy nor comfortable to say - but in order to realise our vision of strategic mutualism, we must confront the seriousness of what is at stake - including the harm we risk reproducing, even when our intentions are in solidarity.

At Collective Aid, we are learning to name the gap between what we want to achieve and what we are structurally capable of enacting. Like many NGOs, we are a majority Northern European team operating in regions that are marked by deeply intricate history, conflicts we do not understand and ongoing political tensions around migration. This is not incidental - it is structural and any forward looking strategy must acknowledge we are embedded in power dynamics that we have not always addressed adequately.

Framing that in a way that defines our goals is not simply a matter of describing the context - it requires us to interrogate our position. Responsibility is the typical frame NGOs use to acknowledge such matters and discuss this imbalance. But responsibility alone often obscures the simple fact that we are operating services and delivering outputs that may cause harm if they are not entirely informed by context, consent, and solidarity.

We have made mistakes in this regard. We have spoken on issues we were simply not equipped to speak on. At other times we have failed to speak about essential cultural and historical issues and lacked nuance. We have over-prioritised urgency. Like much of the humanitarian sector, we have been shaped by a crisis logic - a belief that urgency, scarcity, and pressure can exempt us from reflection or restructure. This is a logic that overall weakens the political, ethical, and social foundations of our work and at times it can reproduce the very harms we aim to redress.

Acts meant as solidarity too often become extractive across our sector when insufficient attention is given to power, authorship, and consequence. Testimonies are ‘taken’, displacement stories ‘get platformed’, emergency mechanisms are ‘imposed.’ Stories are told only when they effectively aestheticise a certain harm, narratives and testimonies get handpicked and chosen depending on how much detail gets recalled, apologies are issued for mistakes without involving those that have been harmed.

So as we embark on a year that will be defined by our goal of mutual support - we now ask ourselves: Who gets invited to speak in this movement? Who gets to make decisions in this movement? Who benefits from the efforts of this movement? Who is getting silenced?

When organisations traditionally enter partnerships - visibility is treated as the key currency. Afterall visibility confers legitimacy, it ideally attracts funding, and often accumulates influence. However, this paradigm must change. Partnerships are not equitable while visibility is hoarded or transacted. Our proposition for strategic mutualism includes a shared commitment to distribute visibility fairly. We want to build a sector and eventually a movement that promotes a fair and informed distribution of visibility. Not all of our work needs to be made visible. No single partner needs to be more visible than the other. Our work can be strengthened without hoarding visibility because we are not a cluster of competing businesses or brands. We have the joy and privilege of being able to work within an ecosystem of interdependent actors, each carrying a vital chunk of our overall collective knowledge and legitimacy. Right now, the fact that visibility, influence and decision making is unevenly distributed across that ecosystem is a problem, and as we seek to build partnerships that strengthen our partners and the wider sector - we hope that our partners share our commitment to ground this strengthening in greater solidarity and more equitable pathways.

Solidarity is the only acceptable foundation for strategic mutualism. It is the element that makes a partnership more than the sharing of logistics and infrastructure, but the sharing of voice, visibility and influence. The shift from value delivery to co-authorship must continue across our sector and our movement. While there is no singular path to doing this well, and we will continue to make mistakes in achieving this, we will nonetheless continue. Committed to pursuing better action that is deliberate, structured, and united.

IV. How will this happen practically?

As we implement this process practically, we want to address the myth that merging services, capacity, or infrastructure signals weakness and demonstrate how this can be a blueprint for durability. That is why all of our partnership efforts are starting from the premise that we can jointly work with our partners in all contexts to scale shared mission legitimacy, reduce duplication, and share resilience building. Many organisations have survived this far through these exact mechanisms and we believe that pooling all of this infrastructure is the central value that we can offer.

Our teams are especially interested in exploring this path with local partners. This is not about branding or shallow collaboration - it is about exploring shared infrastructure, open value sharing networks and clear safeguards in a way that ensures local services and advocacy survive the most recent pressures. In building replicable relationship structures, we hope to establish widely informed ideas for building diversity, promoting accountability, and making political and operational resilience possible. Economies of scale are easy to build. What will be complex is building mutual protection. That will be the true goal. Although it may not always be convenient, we know that our partners share our vision.

However, this vision is not entirely about our organisational partners. The legitimacy and strength of our work does not trickle down from the structures or organisations around us. It rises from the individuals in our movement.

Across all the regions we operate in, we have always relied on the work of individual community leaders, activists, and independent reporters who hold the knowledge, trust, and reach that we simply cannot replicate. Particularly in certain contexts, individual thought leaders often find themselves facing institutional obstruction, operating on limited or no funding, and therefore have far shorter margins for error. Nonetheless they continue to carry their work - often with more credibility than larger actors ever could.

If we are serious about building mutualism from a place of solidarity, then it must be reflected in our structural intentions. Civil society leaders, activists and journalists are not simply “local partners” or “local experts.” They are co-strugglers and co-designers. Failing to involve such expertise is not just unjust - more simply it is a strategic error.

For that reason, we are also going to be building out our experts by experience programme - not as an optional feature of our partnership approach, but as a core principle of our organisational structure. Those with lived experience of displacement, marginalisation, or civil society activism must shape how our strategies evolve and help us to determine what knowledge is centred, what services are needed, and how accountability is enacted. In the interest of creating space for co-authorship, not instruction as the path to sustainability - we are building a more sophisticated vision than simply inviting lived experience into our board and our leadership roles. What is needed is power-sharing - in who gets involved in our agenda-setting, in our budgeting, our design, and our independent evaluations. 

We are currently exploring how this can be built internally and with our partners - and we actively welcome any input from individuals with suggestions.

IV. To you our supporters

To those who have stood with us through every crisis and every emergency - as volunteers, donors, advocates, and first responders to our emergency calls - you know that Collective Aid has always believed simply doing better is a sufficiently effective goal for us to create profound good in our work. That belief is what guides us in this next phase. 

Better collaboration is not just a nice idea - those of you who know our programmes know that it is the core infrastructure of our impact, our legitimacy, and the long-term survival of services and advocacy across the regions we work. We cannot - and will not - survive this year alone. And the movement around us will not survive without your continue support.

Many of you will share our view that a sector shaped by political volatility and financial scarcity requires organisations to build partnerships that foster resilience without rigidity. This concern for the wider ecosystem of organisations, collectives, and networks has long defined Collective Aid and with your support, we are so excited to push that ethos further than ever before, in service of those who we are serving.

We are not scaling up or hedging ourselves for security. We are truthfully responding to what we see: that people across this region need more stable and sustainable services than those that currently exist. To build that - within today’s hostile political and financial climate - mutualism is essential. Coordination, transparency and mutual accountability must be cultivated. Your support now will enable us to build that pooled infrastructure that will close these gaps - clarify information, and strengthen regional advocacy. In return we look forward to providing clearer financial oversight and increasingly unified reporting from us and our esteemed partners.

In a region where civic space is shrinking, we firmly believe that true collective aid - aid that is collectively facilitated - is only possible through this vision of solidarity and mutualism. I’ve written at length about what that means at the point of service and advocacy - but the less glamorous truth is that none of that will be possible without the continued generous funding to sustain it. Regular givers, institutional funders, individual donors - you are not just our supporters, you are the engine of all the work that we do. While we continue to report on what we are doing, how we are responding to rising political pressures and how we are navigating the deepening funding crises - I feel I should be clear: your support this year will determine not only whether we continue our services, but whether we can carry our partners forward with us.

Supporting Collective Aid this year means standing behind not just the services you all know and love - but helping us to build a pathway forward as part of a movement. With your support we will be louder, we will be more resilient, and we will be more united. 

V. Solidarity must prevail

We are all here doing this work because we share one resolute conviction. Solidarity must prevail in the face of political violence, harm, and hostility - active, durable, effective solidarity. 

This is not a moment for simple consolidation. It is the time to begin the long term determined effort to listen more deeply, act more collaboratively, and bring others into conversation with our work. It must be built on everything we have learned: that structural integrity starts from our internal values and principles; that inclusive standards are not built by decree but assembled through conversation; and leadership, if it is to matter, must be taken from local expertise and lived experience.

In this regard, we are not scaling up - we are outstretching our palms. This is a strategic choice to build alignment and unity as a credible priority above the defence of a name or brand. It is not just a necessary response to the pressures we currently face - it is an invitation to those around us to shape what comes next.

Solidarity is a commons. It is a formidable trust that is shared, defended, and built together.

Words by Noah Hatchwell