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Open Briefing at 15: lessons in regeneration and resilience (part 3)

PART 3: BUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE

Physical protection, digital resilience, and wellbeing support are essential to sustaining social and environmental change. But the organisations that provide protection also need the resources, relationships, and resilience to keep doing their work as needs grow and circumstances change.

In the first two instalments of this series, we explored why protection must be grounded in trust, local knowledge, and shared power, and how care, specialist expertise, and collective approaches can help people and movements sustain action under pressure.

Read part 1: protection starts with people

Read part 2: protection sustains collective resilience

The final five lessons turn the focus to Open Briefing itself: what we have learned about building a resilient organisation, making disciplined strategic choices, managing our finances, investing in our people, and contributing to a stronger protection ecosystem.

11. RESILIENCE HAS TO BE BUILT, NOT ASSUMED

We cannot credibly talk about sustainability while ignoring our own. For 15 years, Open Briefing has worked to build a financially and organisationally resilient organisation while staying focused on our mission. That has meant investing in strong organisational systems, and being disciplined about how we use our resources.

We have learned that resilience is not something you achieve once. Our recent external impact evaluation has provided an opportunity to reflect on our progress, identify areas for improvement, and consider how we can continue strengthening our approach. Building resilience requires continual attention, a willingness to learn and adapt, and sometimes difficult decisions. These foundations help us respond to changing needs and continue supporting defenders and movements over the long term.

12. MISSION COMES BEFORE OPPORTUNITY

Not every opportunity is the right opportunity. We’ve learned to distinguish between work that advances our mission and work that simply generates income or visibility. 

That means understanding what we are good at, what our clients and funders genuinely need, and where we can add value. It also means having the discipline to walk away when something does not align with our purpose, values or capacity. Saying no protects our people, safeguards our reputation, and creates space for the work that matters most.

13. FINANCIAL STEWARDSHIP CREATES FREEDOM TO ACT

Better financial resilience is not just about surviving difficult funding periods. It creates options.

Our social-enterprise model has allowed us to generate income from services directly aligned with our mission, while reducing our dependence on any single source of funding. In 2025, consultancy contributed 20% of our total income; in some years it has been as high as 40%.

This approach has given us greater flexibility to invest in our work, respond to emerging needs, and continue advancing our mission as the wider funding environment becomes more uncertain.

14. OUR PEOPLE ARE OUR GREATEST INFRASTRUCTURE

A resilient organisation depends on the people who make it work. Investing in people is not separate from organisational sustainability; it is one of its foundations. 

We support our staff with fully funded coaching and counselling, comprehensive healthcare for them and their families, enhanced annual leave, gender-neutral family leave, and provision for menstrual health, menopause, and gender transition. We also provide additional paid leave for colleagues taking part in climate and civic action or wishing to use sustainable travel options.

These commitments also shape who we are and how we work with people leading change: human capacity is infrastructure, and it needs to be protected and renewed. 

15. WE ARE STRONGER WHEN WE WORK AS AN ECOSYSTEM

No one organisation can protect the people leading change alone. The challenges facing civil society are interconnected, and so should the response. Community, national, regional and international actors each bring different strengths – from proximity, local knowledge, trust, and lived experience to specialist expertise, and international networks.

For Open Briefing, our role is to complement these strengths by providing specialist support, cross-context learning, backstopping, surge capacity, and strategic thinking that help strengthen the wider protection ecosystem.

Our next chapter is therefore not simply about what Open Briefing can do ourselves, but how we can contribute to stronger, more connected protection support for people and movements leading change. Protection is not something one organisation delivers. It is infrastructure we build together.

PROTECTION IS THE FOUNDATION FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION

Fifteen years of work have reinforced a simple lesson: protection is not peripheral to social change. It is foundational to making collective action possible.

People and movements leading change need more than protection from immediate threats. They need the relationships, care, specialist support, resources, and organisational capacity that allow them to keep acting under pressure, adapt to changing circumstances, and sustain their work over time.

The people and movements we work with already have the knowledge, ideas, and determination to create change. Our role is to help strengthen the conditions in which they can do so safely, sustainably, and on their own terms. That belief has guided Open Briefing for 15 years and remains central to our 2026–29 impact strategy. 

We are extremely proud of what we have built, but we are also conscious of what remains to be done. The pressures facing defenders and movements leading change are growing rapidly. So too is the need to invest in the protection infrastructure that enables them to continue. 

There is no change without changemakers. No truth without truth-tellers. And no rights without rights defenders. Protecting and renewing their capacity is how we sustain the infrastructure for collective action, and create the conditions in which hope can become change.

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