By typical standards, Creating the Future looks like a tiny organization. But our revenue and expenses do not come near to telling our story. That story started at the beginning, during our formative years.
Because we did not intend for Creating the Future to live on in perpetuity – but to instead be a project with a limited lifespan – we knew we had a choice when it came to funding.
We could seek operating funds from the start, doing the typical grant-funding that most startups attempt. Given the breadth of experience of both our founders and our founding board members, we knew this posed several problems.
First, startups are not generally funded with lots of money. Second, this wasn’t a direct service startup, but an experiment, rooted in social science theory and practical experimentation. Nothing about this new effort was going to be easily funded.
This meant that the best we were likely to receive would be small grants, perhaps $5,000 or $10,000 at a time. That meant we would be spending an inordinate amount of time trying to raise enough money to fund this effort in the typical way.
Given the short-term nature of this project, we didn’t have that time to spare.
We chose the alternative. We would instead just get to work, raising funds through our education programs and demonstration projects. On the expense side, the founders would self-fund, receiving only small stipends for their more-than-full-time work.
Since then, Creating the Future has operated from a place of mutual aid / Collective Enoughness, that together we have everything we need. Our cash budget therefore barely reflects the thousands of volunteer hours and thousands of dollars of shared resources, with fellows around the world spreading the mission in their own way.
Standard accounting practices do not provide a simple way to show such non-cash resources. As a result, describing our work in dollars alone does our work a significant disservice, as the community resources we are activating to do that work are far more applicable to accomplishing our mission within our 10-year timeframe.
As we move into the final phases of the mission, we know we will need to raise significant funds to document what we’ve learned, and to share those learnings with those who are helping changemakers succeed. We are no longer a start-up; we are a seasoned organization, ready to tell the story of over 30 demonstration projects. And we hope you will join us, as we continue to build radical inclusion, radical possibility, and radical strength into our work.