The Wellspring Philanthropic Fund recently announced that it would close its doors in 2028. Though much about the Fund’s work has always been conducted in relative obscurity, it is well-known as one of the major funders of human rights.

Dozens of organisations I have worked with have been funded by Wellspring, whose human rights work has a particular impact on women’s rights and especially children’s rights worldwide. The loss of this one funder on the global field will be profound.

But what is much worse is that it is only the latest in a string of decisions that have scaled back human rights philanthropy.

It appears to be a trend. Can human rights advocacy survive in a shrinking human rights philanthropic environment?

Not too long ago, I attended celebrations for the 75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the Ford Foundation. Ratified in the wake of a horrific war waged to stop Nazi aggression and genocide, the declaration was a remarkable achievement: Most of the nations of the world, all with long histories of riding roughshod over their people, came together in agreement that every human being has certain inalienable rights, and that we have a collective duty to protect them.

If the loss of Wellspring leaves a significant crater in the landscape of human rights, it was already beginning to resemble a lunar landscape, with more craters than smooth ground.

It was fitting that Ford hosted this event; their early engagement and consistent funding made two generations of human rights norm-building possible. The US Civil Rights Movement, for example, benefited enormously from the funds and opportunities for strategic thinking that Ford created. The expertise they brought together was equally important. For years, Ford employed some of the best thinkers in the human rights movement, ensuring. Ford Foundation program officers were among the first to identify what has become known as ‘closing space for civil society,’ organising a 2006 conference on the issue in Kampala where, one organiser shared with me, the Minister for the Interior told the audience point-blank that governments like his would be using counterterrorism measures to keep NGOs and activists in check.

But ironically, by the time of the UDHR conference, Ford had become something of a bit player in human rights philanthropy. In a restructure that concluded in 2017, the foundation shifted its focus to an overarching theme of challenging inequality, and many of its human rights experts had left. The argument was that the inequality work would shore up an increasingly embattled human rights movement from a new direction, and while there is a compelling case for this, of the sixty-odd human rights organisations I have worked with over the past decade, few are supported by Ford today.

Around the same time, similar changes were afoot at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Over forty-one years, beginning in 1978, MacArthur’s Human Rights Program provided over $350 million to roughly 600 human rights defenders around the world, with a particular focus on Mexico, Nigeria and Russia. In 2016, after the government enacted a second foreign agent law which included criminal penalties, MacArthur closed its Russia program, citing the dire risk to employees in their Moscow office. I do not know if this had an effect on their thinking on human rights more broadly, but in that same year, they began a phase-out of the Human Rights Program. The last grants were made in 2019.

The Open Society Foundations remain committed to human rights today, though it is uncertain, after a four-year restructuring process that drastically cut staff, what that will mean. The foundation has decided to take a more opportunistic approach, focusing not on broad support to maintain robust civil society, but on more specific, narrowly tailored issues. This will likely mean the end of support for at least a substantial minority of the human rights groups they support.

And now, Wellspring. The announcement said only that the foundation would cease grantmaking in four years, and wanted to signal the news well in advance. Rumor, at least, suggests that the reason is that Wellspring’s donor will be shifting the funding to support efforts to mitigate climate change.

This is an important issue, of course, though many critics have pointed out that climate change and human rights are intertwined. In places like Honduras, we have seen that contempt for human rights goes hand in hand with unchecked resource extraction, deforestation and other actions that may accelerate climate change. And climate change poses risks to human rights in a hotter future that mean that some part of mitigating the effects will be building stronger rights protections. To abandon human rights in order to double down on climate change is short-sighted.

Even if some of the funding through the new vehicle goes to support work at the rights-climate nexus, the damage is hard to overestimate. Like OSF, Wellspring has funded the field broadly, supporting an array of human rights organisations, a diverse mosaic of different actors defending different rights for different communities. In this, they supported not just individual grantees or work on specific problems, but an entire ecosystem of advocacy that is mutually reinforcing. Neither Wellspring nor OSF will continue to play this role. Ford, too, continues to support human rights through the inequality lens, but narrow, single-issue approaches ultimately leave many human rights groups in the cold, and by giving primacy to advocates of the cause du jour, they undermine the principle that our rights are universal.

If the loss of Wellspring leaves a significant crater in the landscape of human rights, it was already beginning to resemble a lunar landscape, with more craters than smooth ground. There are still significant global foundations that are committed to human rights – the Oak Foundation, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, Humanity United and the Fund for Global Human Rights, for example. But the loss of some of the oldest and most steadfast human rights funders will have a profound and lasting impact. What is clear is that the groups who depend on Wellspring, many having lost other funders along the way, will need to find new sources of support for their work. As more of us compete for fewer grants, there will be winners and losers, and in all likelihood, better-resourced groups that can afford dedicated grantseeking staff will win out, to the detriment of grassroots groups the world over.

The impact will not be confined to those left out in the cold. Scarcity breeds uncertainty, and the trend I outline here might reasonably lead activists and civil society leaders to be pessimistic. Worries about declining pools of funds will make some of us more risk-averse, less willing to invest in new staff when it is needed, less likely to take on the most controversial issues, even when those are the greatest threats to human rights.

If the old-guard human rights philanthropies are moving away from our work, perhaps the future depends on our ability to cultivate a new generation of human rights funders. These foundations may not even exist yet; the task at hand, as our traditional supporters become less reliable, is to coax new funders into being. In my experience, with a few exceptions, most human rights groups have limited success in cultivating individual giving. But perhaps the way we rebuild is to find wealthy individuals who can commit to our cause, and create the institutions that will, once again, stand beside us well into the future. Many of our first funders emerged from concentrated pools of wealth dating back to the Gilded Age. The emergence of similar conditions in recent years may, oddly enough, provide a beacon through dark times for the movement.