Where the money comes from
Our work is paid for from three kinds of source. All three have been used since the start, and all three are still in use.
Grants and partnerships
More than twenty since 2019, from many funders. Among them are United Nations Volunteers, Search for Common Ground, Peace Direct, IREX, USAID through Global Communities, Lenovo, GIZ, the United States Embassy and ChanceMaker.
BOOKBRIDGE, which incubated DreamSpace Academy (supported us as a new organisation) in 2018, gave a loan rather than a grant.
Earned revenue
Money from selling services, training and goods, including client projects done by the media lab and the software lab. That income has paid to run the organisation, and has paid for work that no funder was covering.
The founders’ own capital
The co-founders have put their own money into the organisation.
We do not call ourselves grant-led, or independent of grant funding. We are working out how much of our money comes from each source, and will say so once we know.
We call ourselves a social enterprise. That describes how we are organised. It does not say how the work is paid for.
In Sri Lanka, money for very young organisations is scarce, support is concentrated in Colombo, and there is little local venture capital. So young organisations here run on their founders’ own money, small private investors or foreign grants[60]. That limits the choices open to anyone working here.
What the funding model is meant to become
We aim to pay for a growing part of our own work, instead of raising the same money again every year. Four parts are meant to build on each other, each one feeding the next.
Units that earn
A community unit sells services and products to local people, at prices they can pay. BOOKBRIDGE expected its loan to us to be repaid this way.
Ventures that trade
Ventures that come out of our venture-building pathway create local business. Some of that value comes back as mentoring, partnerships and demand for our work.
Capital that recycles
Loans as well as grants. When a founder repays a loan, the money funds the next founder, and the relationship carries on.
Alumni who return
People we have taught come back as trainers, mentors and directors. This is the one part of the cycle that can already be seen happening.
We already earn money, from our training and from client projects done by our media lab and software lab. But we do not yet pay for ourselves (self-financing), with earned revenue and a share from franchise partners covering all of the work.
One part of the work has got there. The media lab paid its own way, and only then was DreamSpace Productions set up from it as a separate venture. The cycle above does not describe how the whole organisation works today.
How we describe our role
Two of our largest early programmes came to us through other organisations. The funder paid one organisation, which passed the work on, and so on down a chain. We were third in one chain and fourth in the other. In neither case did the funder give the grant to us directly.
That leads to two rules:
- We do not describe work done for another organisation (sub-contracted) as our own programme. We say we took part as the incubator, or as the partner that ran the work on the ground.
- We do not write that we ran a particular funder’s programme when that funder did not hire us directly.
We have been on the receiving end of the same arrangement we now plan to run: incubated by one organisation, sub-contracted by two others. That is useful experience, but it does not yet show that we can run the arrangement from the other end.
Bridging: different arrangements behind one word
Bridging means connecting people and work here with people and work elsewhere. We use the word for four different arrangements. Each one has different money, a different partner on the other side, and different ways it can go wrong.
We do not add them up into one number. Only one of them shows whether our way of working can be copied in other places.
| Arrangement | What moves | Who is responsible if the work goes wrong | Does it show the work can be copied elsewhere? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trainer placement | An individual. | The funder’s own programme. We play no part in running the work. | No. It is income for one person. |
| Devolution to local organisations | The work in a group of schools (a cluster) or a district. | A local organisation, employing its own staff. | Yes. This is the only arrangement that works like a franchise. |
| Venue and convening | The use of our premises, and our name to bring people together. | Whoever runs the event. | No. It is hosting, not running a programme. |
| Exposure | Access to the contacts and networks we are part of. | Nobody. No programme is being run. | No. And the people who gain from it are often our own staff. |
Devolution: local organisations deliver school programmes
In this arrangement (devolution), we hand the running of school programmes to local organisations. Each one runs a cluster of schools with its own staff. Local people do the work, which is what was missing where one of our hubs closed.
Handing work to local organisations does not show that our way of working can be copied elsewhere. There are three reasons:
- We did not build those organisations. We handed work to groups that already existed, and handing work on is not the same as incubating a new organisation.
- Our name is on work we do not control, which puts quality at risk.
- No terms are written down for any of these clusters: not the agreement, not the money, not the quality check.
We can name the local organisations we hand school programmes to. We do not count their clusters as units we built.
Replication: taking a site somewhere else
To open a physical site somewhere new, we use the MakerSpace, run as a social franchise:
- a local partner provides the space for a unit rooted in its community
- we provide the unit’s design, a shared brand, shared quality standards, and a licence to run our programmes there
The programmes themselves do not need a franchise to travel. They also run in schools, at partner sites and online.
Any money left over after costs (surplus) is meant to go back into the work, not be taken out of it[48, 49, 51]. Before designing, costing or opening anything, we first study the place and the community it would serve (a site diagnosis).
Replication explains this in detail: what stays the same everywhere, what must be adapted locally, and what the quality standards ask of each site.