Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
Paul Barnes, who leads the Zoological Society of London’s EDGE of Existence program, has spent the past few years listening to the frustrations of early-career conservationists. The stories are rarely about fieldwork itself. They’re about making rent, juggling unstable contracts, harassment in remote sites, and the steady grind of burnout. After four workshops held across several regions, he returned to an inbox with 1,700 applicants for roughly 10 fellowship slots. It’s a familiar ratio across the sector. Demand is soaring, while funding pipelines sputter.
In a commentary for Mongabay, Barnes argues that conservation is entering an “opportunity bottleneck.” The talent exists. So do viable projects, from species recovery to community-based monitoring. What is missing is the capacity to absorb these people and ideas into workable, durable careers. The larger funding world, dependent on slow disbursements and heavy reporting requirements, has not adjusted. And recent pauses in major government aid programs have revealed just how fragile big pipelines can be.
Small grants, he writes, are proving unexpectedly resilient. They are quick to deploy, accessible to emerging organizations, and flexible enough to respond to local realities. Evidence from long-running funds supports the claim: modest sums have helped establish protected areas, advance species recovery, and strengthen locally led conservation in ways that larger donors often struggle to achieve. They act as financial “capillaries,” keeping local systems functioning when larger arteries clog.
Yet the small-grants model needs more than praise. It needs reform and significant scaling. Barnes outlines recommendations for how that might happen:
- Radical expansion of small-grant opportunities, increasing supply at least tenfold.
- Better pooling mechanisms among donors to improve scale, diversity and visibility of support.
- Funding people and organizations directly, including salaries, caregiving and insurance.
- Making multiyear grants the norm, aligned with ecological and political timelines.
- Strengthening regional or thematic regranting hubs to reduce risk and administrative burdens.
- Light, outcome-focused reporting using standardized templates.
- Maintaining rapid-response funds of about $15,000 with decisions within two weeks.
- Dedicated duty-of-care budgets covering legal, safety and mental health support.
- Lowering access barriers through local language applications and flexible eligibility.
- Hedging against currency volatility with FX buffers and staged payments.
- Publishing short, evidence-based notes on both successes and failures.
Barnes’s argument is blunt: the next generation of conservationists is ready, but the funding architecture is not. Small grants, he says, “must step forward, not as charity, but as infrastructure for resilience.”
Read the full commentary by Paul Barnes here.
Banner image: Early-career conservationists take part in the 2025 EDGE Conservation Tools Course, part of a global fellowship program that supports emerging leaders to drive locally led conservation. Image courtesy of Paul Barnes/EDGE of Existence, Zoological Society of London.
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