On Funding Agencies and the Third Sector

The gruelling applications, tens of pages long and unnecessarily complicated and repetitive, were clearly meant for insiders and I soon realised that this was precisely what was being assessed - how ‘insider’ I was.

When every project has some funding agency’s logo on the footer, this is what is communicated, there is an officialisation of a sector which is, by definition, unofficial, a sector which arose to bridge the gaps of officialism. That’s when I made the ‘NOT in partnership with’ banner.

[When funding is normalized as a kind of approval, the agencies become filters who thwart anything that challenges their preferred narratives, while simultaneously supporting those narratives through their agents.]

People on the inside of these organisations are just ordinary people - some with the strength to see but not the awareness, others with the awareness but not the strength, and fewer with both. Many begin with genuine dreams to change the world, others to be seen in the image of someone who is doing just that.