The biggest risk in philanthropy is not funding youth

Guest Blogger | 4 September 2026 | Blogs

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• funding
• Law / policy
• Youth

“Young people are leading the way, you are the ones who will solve this,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres told young biodiversity leaders at a 2022 Global Youth Summit.

On Kenya’s coast, young people became concerned about the disappearance of local mangrove forests. Initially dismissed by elders as “rebellious”, they did not walk away. Instead, they gathered maps, photographs and community testimony to document what was being lost. Slowly, the conversation changed. Young people and elders began working together to find ways for healthy mangroves and local livelihoods to coexist. The result is Youth Pawa, which has since planted over 30,000 mangroves in three different degraded sites.

This is not an anomaly. Across the globe, today’s youth are carrying out vital work to protect the future of the planet: restoring wetlands, defending territories and influencing global policy. Yet despite widespread recognition of their contributions, the funding available to support youth-led biodiversity action tells a very different story. That question sits at the heart of Ecologies of Empowerment, new research by the Global Youth Biodiversity Network, Synchronicity Earth, the Global Landscapes Forum and The Iris Project. Drawing on 161 youth-led youth-led biodiversity initiatives across 57 countries, the research set out to understand not only how much funding reaches young people, but what kinds of funding, support and wider conditions enable youth-led environmental action to thrive. What it found was a striking disconnect between the contribution young people are already making and the systems available to sustain them.

How much funding reaches youth-led initiatives?

Eighty-five per cent of the youth-led initiatives surveyed said they lacked adequate funding. Forty-four per cent operated on less than $1,000 annually in 2024, including 20 per cent with no income at all. And yet, these organisations continue to deliver.

Young people are already doing the work, often in their evenings, weekends and spare time. Across the initiatives surveyed, 93 per cent of contributors were volunteers. Passion and commitment have sustained these efforts for years, but passion is not a funding model. Volunteering can be a powerful act of commitment and solidarity, but conservation cannot depend indefinitely on self-sacrifice. Burnout is not a sustainable model for environmental impact.

Triple glass ceiling

Most available funding exists under what the report describes as a “triple glass ceiling”: grants are too small, too short and too restricted, making it near-impossible for young people to not only access funding, but sustain it. The report found that 62 per cent of average grants were under $10,000, 58 per cent lasted less than a year and 88 per cent were project restricted.

Risk is at the heart of any conversation surrounding the funding of youth initiatives. There are legitimate, increased risks of funding smaller, newer and informal organisations, with less experience and evidence of impact readily available. Underdeveloped financial systems, capacity needs and compliance obligations are, in many cases, mandated considerations for funders. But these risks are not unique to youth and come with investing in any emerging movement.

What does chronic underinvestment produce?

Instead of asking whether youth-led organisations are too risky to fund, we should ask what happens to biodiversity and nature outcomes if the people already leading environmental action cannot afford to continue doing it.

The larger risk is what chronic underinvestment produces: burnout, talented leaders leaving the sector, and a conservation movement increasingly shaped by those who can afford to work unpaid.

Every sector needs a regeneration layer. New growth can look fragile compared with established trees, but a forest without seedlings has no future. Young people are not only the beneficiaries of conservation. They are already conservationists, organisers, scientists, educators, advocates and community leaders – while also forming the regeneration layer the sector will depend on in decades to come.

Without investment, fewer people stay and fewer organisations survive. Without a steady pipeline of new leaders, ideas and organisations, the conservation sector becomes less adaptable and less resilient in the face of complex environmental challenges.

A volunteer-dependent movement favours people with financial privilege, actively excluding those with less money. Leadership and environmental action should not be limited to those who can afford it. This narrows perspectives, leaving conservation increasingly shaped by those who can afford to do unpaid labour, rather than those with the closest experience of the issues movements are attempting to solve.

Many of the barriers funders cite are themselves symptoms of underinvestment. Limited organisational capacity, governance structures and track records are often reasons not to fund youth-led groups. Yet these organisations frequently need funding to build the very capabilities that funding requires. This creates a paradox: organisations are denied support because they lack systems that only support can help them develop.

Conservation does not have a youth leadership problem; it has an investment problem

Conservation does not have a youth leadership problem; it has an investment problem. Young people have already demonstrated what is possible when they are trusted and supported. Across the world, youth-led initiatives are restoring mangroves, preventing plastic pollution, facilitating community conservation programmes and shaping biodiversity policy.

If philanthropy is serious about protecting biodiversity over the long term, it cannot afford to treat youth investment as optional. This does not require every funder to completely redesign its approach overnight. Meaningful change starts with practical steps: simplifying application processes, ensuring reporting requirements are proportionate to an organisation’s size, providing more flexible core funding, or working through trusted intermediaries that already understand the landscape. Sometimes, it is simply about taking the time to build a relationship with an emerging organisation before demanding a five-year track record from it.

The question is not whether funding young people carries risk. All funding does. The greater risk is continuing to overlook leaders who are already protecting ecosystems, organising communities and building solutions, simply because our funding systems were not designed to recognise them.

Millie Edwards, Director of the Iris Project

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