Can we save our vital social impact infrastructure?

In the impact movement, we talk a great deal about market and field-building: creating shared language, strengthening partnerships, growing evidence, and shifting practice across the global social economy and beyond. But we spend far less time talking about how the organisations tasked with doing this work are actually supposed to survive and ultimately thrive.

We know it’s a tough time right now, in our sector and beyond. Many field-building organisations – regional, national and international sector support bodies – rely on fragile and narrow business models. In our first article in this series, we considered the role of events and conferences in income generation. Membership offerings are another dominant source of income. These activities are visible, marketable, and relatively easy to monetise. They also create steady pressure to prioritise scale, profile and numbers of participants over quieter, longer-term infrastructure work.

• Read more: Are social impact conferences a waste of time and money?

As audiences become more time-poor and more sceptical of so-called ‘talk without traction’, even these revenue streams are becoming less reliable. The result is a familiar pattern: field-building organisations pivot towards events, membership and, ultimately, consulting and advisory services, because fee-for-service work is one of the few ways to secure predictable income, especially in the current climate. This shift is understandable. It is also consequential.

A shift in focus

When organisations designed to serve whole sectors and markets become dependent on client contracts, incentives change. Staff time follows paying partners. Research agendas become shaped by funder priorities. Outputs become customised rather than openly shared. Work that should strengthen collective capacity gradually becomes professional services delivered to a few.

Often, this shift is not named explicitly. Organisations continue to present themselves as neutral field-builders, even as their operating models increasingly resemble consultancies. This lack of transparency makes it harder to have honest conversations about power, accountability and whose interests are really being served.

The issue, then, is not that consulting is inherently problematic – indeed, it’s understandable, given the changing nature of this space and the world right now. But we are using consulting to compensate for missing infrastructure within and across the social impact ecosystem.

We are using consulting to compensate for missing infrastructure within and across the social impact ecosystem

Some field-building functions though clearly are not saleable services. They are public goods, such as shared learning platforms, impact standards and methodologies, and spaces for collective sensemaking. These functions benefit many actors at once and do not generate proprietary value. Expecting them to be sustained through project fees or ticket sales is structurally unrealistic.

If we take field-building seriously, we need to take its economics seriously too. But we also need to be honest about the hard questions: what is and isn’t realistic.

When consultancies can incubate or spin out for the public good

At TSIC [co-author Bonnie’s consultancy], this tension has been confronted head on. As a for-profit consultancy there is no illusion that its B Corp certification changes the underlying incentives of being a professional services business. Consulting continues to be shaped by contracts, deliverables and client priorities.

At Cambio [co-author Peter’s consultancy], the origin story from back in 2019 was that the organisation launched to fill the gap of genuine person-centred, internationally informed and targeted support for social impact across the entire economy, not simply limited to the social economy. This model was always, unashamedly, a targeted form of consultancy as it established itself, but has since grown, with a more recent, deliberate focus on ecosystem-building as the geographical focus has diversified and widened, and the potential to give back has been increasingly realised through the success of the model.  

When both our organisations encounter work that is clearly about field-building rather than client service – building shared knowledge, community power or long-term learning and funding infrastructure – we have increasingly chosen not to keep that work inside the consultancies. Instead, we incubate projects where possible with partners, sometimes even spinning them out as independent organisations, often with charitable or non-profit models, so that they can serve a public good rather than purely a client base.

This is not because we are uniquely virtuous. It is because the consulting model is not designed to hold that kind of work responsibly over time.

Incubation and spin-offs are imperfect, risky and resource-intensive. But they are also an acknowledgement that some of the most important functions for systems change should not be structurally dependent on billable hours. That said, the entities that we have incubated and spun off continue to face questions around their own financial sustainability, as do many of us.

Creating the ideal field-building organisation

So what might more appropriate models look like?

One direction is to treat core field infrastructure bodies more like research institutes, or even think tanks and public-interest journalism, with multi-year, unrestricted or lightly restricted funding, and governance structures that protect independence. This requires funders to invest in capacity that does not deliver immediate, attributable outcomes, but instead underpins the quality and coherence of an ecosystem over the medium term.

A second option is the use of explicit hybrid models, where consulting revenue subsidises open field-building work, but with formal safeguards. This means that clear internal rules become crucial about how surpluses are reinvested, what knowledge must remain public, and how decision-making authority is shared. Without such structures, cross-subsidy could easily become mission drift.

A third approach is consortium funding, where multiple funders or institutions jointly invest in shared learning and coordinated infrastructure rather than commissioning duplicative projects. This shifts power away from individual commissioners and towards collective governance, but it requires greater willingness to collaborate and relinquish control.

A further, less discussed option is structured integration, merger or acquisition between organisations with complementary strengths. Funders are starting to think about this with the recent announcement of a $1m Collaboration Fund from the Sorenson Impact Institute to enable field-building initiatives to explore mergers and acquisitions. In fragmented fields, this can be a way to reduce duplication, stabilise finances and combine delivery, research and field-building functions under shared governance rather than through loose partnerships. 

At its best, this kind of integration is not about growth for its own sake, but about creating institutions that are large enough to sustain infrastructure work, attract long-term funding, and hold multiple functions without forcing everything into fee-for-service models. While complex and culturally demanding, mergers can offer a path towards organisational forms better suited to long-term systems work than perpetual collaboration between small, under-resourced entities.

In the current economy, these mergers may not simply be desirable but in fact necessary, as there is an ever more limited supply of resources. The legacy of all this important work should also be safeguarded for the next generation.

Why we need to fund the right infrastructure

None of these models is simple. All require trade-offs, leadership and political will, as well as changes in how funders consider risk and accountability. But without rethinking the economics of field-building, we will continue to rely on professional services firms to carry responsibilities that they were never designed to hold.

Without rethinking the economics of field-building, we will continue to rely on professional services firms to carry responsibilities that they were never designed to hold

That has consequences for who shapes agendas, whose knowledge counts, and how power circulates across the world of social change.

If we want ecosystems that are genuinely collaborative, diverse and capable of learning, we need to fund the infrastructure that makes these things possible – not just the projects that look good on paper. Therefore, rethinking business models for field-building is not simply an administrative concern. It is a core systems question. And it is one we can no longer afford to ignore.

Bonnie Chiu is a serial social entrepreneur and managing director of TSIC, a global network driving systemic change for a fair society. 

Peter Ptashko is a social entrepreneur, funder and sustainability expert. He is CEO of sustainability consultancy Cambio: House of Social Change.