June 8th 2023 marked a momentous occasion. One World Together – and our vision to build a new people-powered and community-centred funding system – was born. What a year it has been! Our One World Together community grew to 130 Global Citizens from across 15 countries, and a special partnership with The University of Manchester that means every student can join as a Global Citizen for free!
Alongside the launch of our very first Annual Report we’re happy to reflect on our funding and finances since launch and what this means for our future. Highlighting our challenges as well as our successes is important to us. We believe in radical transparency: that taking our Global Citizens and supporters on our journey will build the solidarity that we need for our future success.
Our core income streams from launch to date are:
| Global Citizen membership and other income (Annual membership fees and other fundraising, minus payment transaction fees). | £2,194.10
*This income supports our operational costs. |
| Solidarity Fund income (minus payment transaction fees and including £170.00 from OWT Student’s Union Society fundraising activities,) | £3,396.34
*Every penny of our Solidarity Fund is split equally across our four partners each quarter. |
At our current level of operations, our operational costs (e.g. include salaries, accountancy services, web-hosting, software requirements, and community space platform costs) come to around £25,000 per year. Through our membership-based model, we need around 4,000 members to reach our goal of becoming a financially-sustainable organisation. This is our ultimate goal. Not only would it free us from a long-term dependence on fundraising and the high costs and insecurity that accompany this, it would represent the a huge community of global change-makers committed to a community-centred future!
While we are a long way from this dream of a financially-sustainable future, every new member takes us one giant step closer to achieving this vision. We know we can do it! In the meantime we continue to draw gratefully upon the £45,000 starting capital we won in the 2022 Aspect Research Commercialisation (ARC) Accelerator and continue to raise income where we can through events and merchandise sales.
So we celebrate this one-year milestone with mixed emotions. Excited by everything we have achieved and by the giant steps forward we have taken towards a more equitable, impactful and community-centred future. Filled with deep gratitude by the response of our partners and Global Citizens in sharing our vision and dream for a better future. Humbled by the fact that we’re actually doing this. Together.
But we are also conscious of the big and important questions confronting us. It’s clear that building a new system is a long-term commitment, not an overnight success story. We’re pushing against decades of deeply entrenched interests and “business as usual”, including millions of well-tuned marketing campaigns that have shaped us to believe that ‘charity’, not solidarity, is what it will take to change the world.
How can we get our messaging out there to let future Global Citizens know what we’re doing and where to find us, when we have such a limited budget? How can we build alternative income streams to cover our operational costs as our membership grows? These questions must be framed within our constrained capacity – we have one part-time (0.5%) Operations Manager supported by two Chief Stewards. Our Chief Stewards are 100% committed but are working on an entirely voluntary basis, both employed in two awesome, but demanding, jobs.
So, here’s our thinking for the year ahead – can you support us?
Strategy 1: Getting our messaging and communications right to attract new Global Citizens.
We’ll let you in on a secret. Behind One World Together are a small team of people who are completely new to this. We launched One World Together motivated by our frustration at existing funding systems and our passion and commitment for a genuinely community-centred alternative. But while we know there are way more than 4,000 around the world who would want to support a community-centred future, we have learned that we don’t know where or how to find them. We’ve been working with The Donor Whisperer this year, learning what motivates our Global Citizens, the language that speaks to them, the basics of digital marketing, and finding out what doesn’t work on our website. You may notice some changes to the website and our communications as we refine things.
How can you support us?
We know that we have a lot of followers that recognise and support what we’re doing. If that’s you, please take the additional step of joining us from as little as £5.00 – because we can’t do it without you.
And please spread the word – tell your friends and family how they can become a part of building a community-centred future, emphasising our belief in the mightiness of ‘micro’ donations. Yes, donations of £1.25/month to our Solidarity Fund can make all of the difference when we come together at scale.
If you have a small business, work for a socially-minded business, or want to support us at a greater scale, then Strategy 2 is for you!
Strategy 2: Expanding our membership types
Since it will take several years to grow our individual memberships, this year we have been building the foundations for new forms of institutional memberships that give our new partners the opportunity to play an important role in building a community-centred future while supporting our income-generation and building our reputation and brand.
This year we joined The Movements Trust who provide fiscal sponsorship for us. We are a legally non-profit social enterprise rather than a charity, so this is important. It means that people or organisations can fund us through The Movements Trust, making their donations tax-deductible and open to Gift Aid. We have a brilliant team working on a Business Strategy over the summer, inspired by our first institutional partnership with the University of Manchester.
How can you support us?
If you’re a socially-conscious business (or working for one), and would like to bring your organisation and all of your staff into the process of building an innovative new funding system for communities in the UK and globally, then please get in touch! We’d be delighted to discuss and find a membership option tailored to your size and requirements that can help you play an important role in shaping a community-centred future.
If you would like to make an individual donation that can benefit from Gift Aid and be tax deductible, do reach out and we can guide you through this very simple fiscal sponsorship process (we take all admin off your hands).
Strategy 3: Continuing to nurture a new generation of supporters of global development who put communities first
Emerging from three decades of University of Manchester teaching and research and supported by our Youth Board and Students’ Union Society we are constantly inspired by the commitment of young people to a better future. We know that young people are passionate about change – genuine change that redresses deep inequalities and injustices and that centres, respects and gives power and resources to low-income people and communities. That makes us particularly excited about our new partnership with the University of Manchester, because it removes any financial barrier to students and welcomes them into our online community space and the learning journey that we benefit from there.
In the coming years we would like to deepen these investments through developing a curriculum for Global Citizenship. We are delighted to have received a small grant from The University of Manchester’s Civic Engagement funds to develop and pilot this in partnership with a local Manchester-based secondary school.
How can you support us?
If you’re passionate about nurturing young change-makers then please drop us a line. We’ll be actively fundraising over the next year to support the significant time investment that it will take to build and embed a scale-able curriculum and delivery model, so any small or large contributions to this would be welcomed.
If you’re involved in activities that can inspire and illustrate to young people about the positive and tangible changes that we can make in the world, whether local or global, then please also let us know. We’ll be looking for examples of innovative change-makers to spotlight across many areas, including sustainability, community development, diaspora for development and youth politics and democracy.
As we reflected on our year’s successes and achievements through putting our Annual Report together, we laughed and said ‘one thing we’re not short of at One World Together is ambition’. We, our partners and our Global Citizens are all united by a dream of a better future. We can end on a quote from Margaret Meade that has motivated us since One World Together was nothing but an idea. We reflect on this regularly on those days when we ask ourselves, ‘can we do it?’.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has”.
That group is now a community and we are growing. Can you join us and make that change happen?
Note: This article gives the views of the author/academic featured and does not represent the views of the Global Development Institute as a whole.
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