Someone Always Pays: Why Nothing Is Really "Sustainable"

One of the most common phrases I hear in philanthropy is people seeking "sustainable interventions." However, I think this term is both confused and monstrously overused. It vaguely refers to programs that don't require further resources, but we must ask: further resources from whom?

Too often, "sustainable" translates to "still has an impact when it's not funded by me." It sometimes broadens to mean "not funded by anyone like me" (e.g., other charitable foundations). But when we think about this more closely, we must ask: "Who is paying then?"

A clever gadget that appears to achieve perpetual motion, but actually contains a hidden battery-powered magnet at the base. This magnet provides the necessary force to keep the ball circulating, exemplifying that external energy is indeed being supplied rather than created from nothing.

At the end of the day, someone always has to pay. Consider the common case of foundations passing around grantees. If one foundation covers the first year, a second covers the second year, and a third covers the third, has the charity ever become sustainable? Mostly, it has just been handed around (often traded with other charities at considerable evaluation cost for grantmakers and fundraising costs for the charity), constantly seeking funding from each new foundation. The foundations might feel proud they only funded one year of a charity that operated for many years, but in reality, each foundation is only funding one year of the project.

What if the project moves outside the foundation space? Say its support no longer comes from philanthropic dollars but from government funding. If we think a step further, who is paying? It now comes from a government's budget instead of a philanthropist's. Different pools of funding and mechanisms, yes, but the cost doesn't disappear—it's paid for by someone else. It's only "sustainable" insofar as a government covers it (both can afford and chooses to), and it's only effective insofar as it's better than the next thing a government would have funded otherwise. And where does government money come from anyway? Ultimately, government funding comes from taxation. Particularly with interventions in lower and middle-income countries (LMICs), this means we've shifted the cost from fairly high-net-worth individuals in the Global North to lower-income governments in the Global South—maybe the right call, but not clearly so.

What about shifting to a for-profit model, having costs covered directly by users? Of course, by this point, you can guess the pattern: who are the users? How are they paying? Does that really make an intervention "sustainable" by shifting the cost to those who benefit? It might make it highly scalable (if the target population is large and wealthy enough to pay for the intervention), but again, like the government example, this is just pushing costs to another payer. Sometimes this might be the right approach; maybe the users are the perfect long-term payers. But it's not clear this is always the case. There are many areas where governments cover costs indefinitely (think education in most of the Western world) or where problems affect large numbers of people indirectly (think climate change). Some charitable areas support those who will never speak out or have the power to help themselves (think animal-focused charities).

There might be a few charities that solve problems definitively—if a disease gets eradicated, maybe the solution is "sustainable" (although in that case, the charities that achieved this likely shut down or move on to the next most pressing problems, so the organizations themselves aren't sustainable). But this is relatively rare in the charity sector. Many problems might take lifetimes to solve or make sense to be funded by philanthropic actors for the indefinite future. It could be that governments, private individuals, or philanthropy are the best long-term funding mechanisms, but it's rarely clear-cut that one sector is far better placed to cover all the work in an area.

"Sustainable" seems to me a bit like infinite energy: a nice idea but practically much less feasible than it sounds in theory. Good work takes consistent and long-term time and funding. Sometimes we might just have to support something long-term and drop our fantasy of projects gaining "sustainability." We must realize that for most problems, someone has to pay. In some cases, the best solution is philanthropy paying long-term.