For forty-nine years in Brazil, Coordenadoria Ecumênica de (CESE) has been providing financial support to groups that promote and defend human rights. The work we do serves many populations including women, youth, Indigenous people, and rural and peasant communities. From 2010, the organization began to work to improve its financial policies and standards in order to become more stable. When we joined the FIRE program in 2020, the priority of the CESE leadership was to maintain its financial sustainability.
The FIRE program helped CESE realize how our own fears and assumptions were preventing us from building greater financial strength. The notion that ‘questioning funders is risky’ kept us from recovering our full costs, especially indirect program expenses, or ‘overheads’. The principles of FIRE inspired a new organizational culture at CESE, breaking down silos between different functions and departments.
This Impact Story is the sixth in a series of seven stories. Spring launched the Kota Kita, Akili Dada, ProDESC, LRC and Action for Hope stories earlier in the year and will be sharing the last one in this series (Indonesian Corruption Watch) in the coming weeks.
The purpose of this series is threefold:
– To deepen FIRE learnings for the story-tellers themselves and give visibility to their work and impact
– To inspire civil society organizations globally by showcasing a wide variety of financial innovation and resilience approaches and journeys
– To help funders better understand what financial resilience may look like and how to best support
Here is the link to the BLOG, VIDEO and SCRIBE of the CESE story.