Long-term Vision

a strategy for self-sustainability

More self-sustainability means having more autonomy and less reliance on external funding, expertise or decisions. It means having a larger capacity to choose and negotiate with other initiatives what’s best for your project and what’s not. It means an increasingly equitable participation, which will lead to development models that are more comprehensive and relevant for all, that is, more sustainable. Know more

A strategy that several development projects use to become more self-sustainable for the benefit of future generations is to concentrate efforts both on what can be done in the short term, and also on what can be prevented or even planned ahead in order to enhance the self-sustainability of their initiatives in the long term.

To do this, many projects raise and answer questions such as:

What kind of impact do they want to have on future generations?
What obstacles (situations, people, problems or conditions in general) make their initiative less self-sustainable in the present or might make it difficult to scale up with increasing self-sustainability?
What role can they adopt to make better use of their time, resources and efforts to try to eliminate these obstacles in the short, medium and long term? (i.e., local capacity builder, network orchestrator, creator of demonstration models, etc.).
What institutional profile would best suit them to build self-sustainability in the future? (i.e., social enterprise, NGO, network of initiatives, etc.).
What type of development model should be promoted to meet their long-term self-sustainability goals? (one of cooperation or one of competition).
Where and how are funds being allocated? And to what extent will this help reduce dependency in the future?

With the intention of creating better conditions for their projects in the future, some initiatives invest in education programs for their beneficiaries, collaborators or for society at large. Others manage their resources efficiently in order to prevent possible setbacks in the long term (by creating stability funds or drawing on more local resources, for instance). Others try to influence legislation and decision-makers to change the root causes of the problems they are working on. Some try to make their projects as comprehensive as possible to address the problems they work with on several fronts at the same time. And some others form and train local stakeholder organizations so that the projects can eventually stand on their own two feet without the initiative’s help.

Actually, there are many different ways to make a project more self-sustainable by adopting and working with a long-term vision. Take a look at how these initiatives have done it!

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