The Iris Project has been supporting young people working to protect and restore nature for the past five years. As the number of applications to The Iris Prize grew each year, so did a bigger question: what else could we do to help young leaders access the support they need?
In 2026, we launched the Youth Funding Toolkit – a practical guide to fundraising covering proposals, budgets, donor mapping, and long-term partnerships. Within weeks, it had been downloaded by thousands of people.
Creating the toolkit was one part of the journey. The next step was understanding what happens when that knowledge meets the everyday realities of young people trying to fund their work.
And this is how I came into this picture – hi, I am Alicia Amancio (Brazilian, 29yo), and I have been working on climate policy, focused on youth, for the past eleven years. Throughout my career, I have led many fundraising efforts for climate and nature initiatives. So I joined The Iris Project team to bring the activation of the Youth Funding Toolkit to life through a 3 part workshop series for young people.
Going into these workshops, I knew the landscape, the pieces of the puzzle, and a thing or two about how to break the bubble. But listening to young people reminded me that fundraising is much more about systems than writing skills.
The workshops were designed as spaces for discussion, reflection, and honest conversation. We expected questions about writing stronger proposals or finding the right grants. Those questions certainly came. But what emerged most often were conversations about the culture of fundraising itself: who gets access to information, what people feel comfortable asking for, how transparent organisations should be about money, and what happens when things do not go according to plan.
Fundraising is a skill that can be learned. Trust is the real challenge to overcome here.
The system often teaches us that funding is scarce, and so knowledge must also be scarce. If I tell you how much the grant I received was, or introduce you to a donor, or share my budget, maybe I’m reducing my own chances.
This mentality then creates secrecy. So when we planned this three-part series, I would always begin by saying, “There is nothing you can’t ask me.”
Then we would begin pressing on the questions people often avoid asking each other. Do you get paid to do this work? How much does a project like this actually cost? What size grants do organisations receive?
Once those questions entered the room, the tension began to dissolve. People stopped trying to perform perfection and started trying to learn from one another.
The thing here is, the world we inherited was never perfect, and the challenges we are trying to solve exist precisely because of that. We would not still be facing some of humanity’s greatest crises if perfection had ever been the standard. We would not have spent thirty years holding international climate conferences and still be far from solving the climate crisis. Yet here we are, buckling up to attend COP31.
We are imperfect people living in a truly complex world.
This lesson became even more visible when we took the conversation into in-person spaces. At the Marmalade Festival during the Skoll Forum in Oxford, UK, we partnered with the Global Fund for Children to host a session on the risks of not funding youth-led projects and how we can rethink the idea of risk altogether.
What surprised me most was how quickly the atmosphere in the room changed when we moved from theory to people. As participants heard directly from young leaders about the realities of their work, the room became warmer. People stopped asking whether support was justified and started asking how they could help make it happen. The focus moved from evaluating risk to collectively finding ways through it.
Perhaps that is what trust looks like in practice. Not certainty, but a commitment to show up anyway.
And this lesson travelled.
Our Iris Project Advisors, Nii Noi and Misati Gichana, brought the Youth Funding Toolkit to the Global Landscapes Forum Africa in Nairobi, facilitating an interactive workshop with over sixty young leaders. But more than a workshop, it became a moment of reckoning.
Participants spoke openly about underpricing their work, excluding salaries from budgets, and feeling uncomfortable asking for funding that reflected true costs. These are not just individual habits – they are patterns that keep young leaders undervalued and under-resourced. Naming them is the first step; challenging them is the next.
As Nii noted, many young leaders know the impact they want to create but struggle to translate that vision into clear budgets or funding asks. Instead of a traditional presentation, participants worked through a real funding challenge using the toolkit, exploring storytelling, budgeting, impact measurement, and donor engagement through a real-world case study. In doing so, they began to practice something deeper than fundraising: they practised claiming the value of their work.
Regardless of geography, we kept returning to the same idea: we need funders and donors to value young people and our work as much as we value them. Fundraising is, ultimately, a relationship. And like any healthy relationship, it requires trust in both directions.
If there is one message I would leave with the philanthropic sector after these workshops, it is this: young people are not asking for shortcuts. They are asking for trust.
They are asking for funding that allows them to pay themselves fairly, build healthy organisations, and learn from mistakes. Like all of us, young people grow through experience. Within our families and communities, we are trusted to make mistakes, learn, and improve as we go. Young leaders deserve that same trust.
The risk is often framed as funding youth-led work, but perhaps it is time for a wake-up call to reimagine what we mean by “risk” in the first place. What if, instead of seeing youth-led initiatives as inherently risky, funders viewed them as opportunities for learning that can strengthen future funding cycles? Even projects that do not go as planned can teach us something.
But after listening to hundreds of young leaders, I believe the “greater” risk is failing to fund them at all.
Every time a promising idea is abandoned because its founders burn out, every time a community solution goes unsupported, and every time a young person leaves the sector because they cannot afford to stay, we all lose.
The Youth Funding Toolkit started as a resource about fundraising. It ended up becoming a reminder that funding is not only about money. It is about what and who we choose to believe in.
I can say it with all my heart: I believe in young people. I believe in us.
