The funding cliff: What happens when support ends?
Funding relationships are ending across climate, housing, human rights, and development as funders sunset programs, shift strategies, or respond to a harder political and fiscal climate. The language around these moments is almost always soft: “transition,” “sustainability,” “exit support.” The experience underneath often isn't.
This conversation starts from an uncomfortable premise: a lot of what gets called “transition planning” can feel like organizations being asked to absorb a funder's decision quietly. Meanwhile, funders rarely receive honest feedback about how their exits actually land. What gets lost when the sector relies on polite language to navigate decisions with very real consequences for organizations, staff, communities, and the work itself?
This session won't try to resolve that tension. Instead, it will put it in the room, out loud, with people who are actually living it. Funders, grantees, and the intermediaries caught in between will compare notes on what happens when support ends: what help has genuinely mattered, what has felt performative, and what people wish they had been able to say at the time.
The conversation will make room for questions that can be difficult to discuss across a funding relationship. Is “sustainability” sometimes a more comfortable way of saying “you're on your own now”? What would it take for a grantee to give a funder honest feedback about an exit, and why does that so rarely happen? And whose responsibility is it to say when an organization's model no longer fits the moment?
Humentum will bring a perspective on planning for what comes next, but as a provocation to react to and argue with, not a framework participants are expected to adopt. The aim is a more candid conversation about endings, power, responsibility, and what better practice might actually look like.
What to expect
A structured, candid discussion built around reflection prompts and participants' own experiences. Rather than a panel presenting answers, the session will create space for people on different sides of funding relationships to surface perspectives that are often difficult to share publicly.
Expect some discomfort, disagreement, and reflection. Participants will be invited to examine both exits that were handled well and those they would approach differently, with the goal of learning from what actually happened rather than prescribing a single model for transition.
Who this is for
This session is for funders, grantees, nonprofit and civil society leaders, intermediaries, and others navigating shifts or endings in funding relationships across climate, housing, human rights, development, and adjacent fields.
What you will get out of it
A more candid understanding of how funding exits are experienced from different sides of the relationship
Perspectives on what meaningful transition support looks like, and what can feel performative
Space to examine the power dynamics that make honest feedback between grantees and funders difficult
Practical lessons from funding transitions that participants would repeat, or handle differently
New language and questions for approaching endings with greater clarity and responsibility
Hosted by
Kim Kucinskas, Humentum
Shelly Helgeson, Connective Impact
Topher Wilkins, Opportunity Collaboration