Over the last decade, I have helped raise more than $200 million for charities. I have worked alongside extraordinary people. I have watched campaigns move mountains, build hospitals, feed millions, and reach children that no one else was reaching.
And yet, in the middle of all of it, I found myself asking a question I had not expected to ask: was any of it built to last? Sitting with that question, after ten years of effort, was a kind of despair.
That question is what led me to build Evergive. And it is the question that I want to put forward to you here.
The heart of charity is not broken. Donors still give. Causes still matter. But charities are still operating inside a financial architecture built for a different world, and the organisations we hold in trust are paying the price.
The treadmill, in numbers
In 2022/23, the Charity Commission removed 4,146 organisations from the UK register. UK charities collectively spend approximately £6.6 billion a year on fundraising activities, a figure that has nearly doubled since the turn of the century. Trustees across the sector are stewarding organisations that spend more, every year, simply to raise what they need to spend.
This is the give-spend-repeat model. Charities raise, they spend, and they return next year to do it again. The model gives them no way to accumulate, no mechanism to compound, and no reserve that can outlast a single campaign. Under it, every year is treated as an emergency, because under this structure, every year is.
The people working inside these organisations are not failing. The model they have inherited is.
The ground has shifted
Fewer donors now give more of the money. Mid-level givers are giving less, squeezed by the same cost-of-living pressures every household is feeling. Charities are losing the real value of their cash reserves to inflation, year after year, in a way no donor ever consented to.
Trustees who set financial policy a decade ago set it for a global order of stable currencies, predictable trade, and modest inflation. That order is shifting beneath us. They are watching their donor base concentrate. They are watching their costs rise. They are watching their reserves erode. None of this was visible in 2015. All of it is visible now.
The question is not whether what we have built has been manageable so far. The question is whether what we have built is fit for what is coming.
What financial resilience would require
Set aside, for a moment, every existing option. Ask the question from first principles: what would a financially resilient charity actually look like?
It would hold reserves that hold their value across decades, rather than eroding each year.
It would generate reliable monthly income that does not depend on the next campaign.
It would let trustees plan in decades rather than in quarters.
It would compound, so that today's generosity becomes tomorrow's foundation.
And it would, crucially, not ask the organisation to choose between meeting today's needs and building tomorrow's resilience.
These are not idealistic requirements. They are the minimum conditions for any organisation to survive a generation of structural change.
Consider what trustees actually have in front of them. Cash reserves lose real value to inflation, year after year. Conventional investment portfolios were built for institutional risk tolerances, not for organisations whose mission is, in principle, perpetual. Grant dependency concentrates risk in a small number of relationships. Donor cultivation, even when it is executed beautifully, sustains the fundraising treadmill but does not break it. None of these options compounds. None of them solves the structural problem. Trustees who survey the landscape honestly are not lacking effort; instead, they are lacking an architecture.
There is no point building resilience on shoddy foundations
Here is the truth I would ask trustees to sit with: financial resilience is only as strong as what it is built on.
Money is not a neutral instrument. The 11th-century philosopher Al-Ghazali observed that debased money is a form of betrayal of the trust on which a society's commerce depends. He saw, long before any modern economist, that the character of a society's money shapes the character of the society itself. We have inherited that insight whether or not we have acted on it.
The primary threat to civil society today is the money it holds. The monetary environment we operate inside is increasingly hostile to the long-term preservation of capital in conventional form. The architecture most charities still rely on was designed for an era of stable currency that has ended.
If we are serious about building the financial backbone of civil society, we have to be serious about what we build it on. Sound, scarce, transparent foundations matter. There is no other honest way to construct something intended to outlast its donors.
When giving compounds
In 1936, Henry Wellcome left his estate to a trust. That bequest has compounded into a foundation now worth £39.9 billion, one of the most powerful engines for health research in the world. A year later, the family of Eli Lilly did something similar with a modest gift of company stock; the foundation now holds assets of approximately $80 billion. The artisans who broke ground on Notre-Dame de Paris in 1163 never saw the cathedral completed. They built it anyway, because they understood that some things are worth doing across generations.
The model is not new. Evergive only makes it accessible to everyone. For most of history, this kind of compounding has been the privilege of a few families wealthy enough to establish foundations of their own. Evergive opens it to every donor, on behalf of every charity, on foundations designed to hold their value across generations.
The logic is simple. A donation that is spent dies. A donation that is invested lives on, maybe forever.
Evergive is built on this logic. We transform one-time gifts into a permanent funding stream, delivering lasting value to the charities that donors care about. We give trustees the ability to plan beyond the fundraising cycle, and we give donors the experience of watching their generosity compound rather than disappear.
We also understand that charities have immediate needs. Evergive was built with both time horizons in mind. We are not asking you to sacrifice today for tomorrow. We are offering both.
The trustee's question
Trustees carry a fiduciary duty to the organisations they steward. That duty has always meant more than governance and compliance. It means asking, honestly, whether the organisation is financially equipped for the future it is likely to face.
I would put it more strongly. In the environment we now operate in, financial fragility is mission risk. The question is no longer whether the model we have inherited remains fit for purpose. The question is what we are going to do about it.
The options most charities rely on were built for a steadier era than ours. Trustees who continue to rely on them are being optimistic. And the world is no longer rewarding that particular form of optimism. We believe that fundraising is a bug, not a feature.
Evergive exists to offer something different. We are building the financial backbone of civil society on foundations designed to hold.
If you feel that is a conversation worth having, I would welcome it.
Ismael Dainehine, Founder, Evergive
¹ Charity Commission for England and Wales, Annual Report and Accounts 2022–23, HC 1458, July 2023, p. 9. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charity-commission-annual-report-and-accounts-2022-to-2023/charity-commission-annual-report-and-accounts-2022-to-2023
² NCVO, UK Civil Society Almanac 2023, "Spending – Financials" (2020/21 data). https://www.ncvo.org.uk/news-and-insights/news-index/uk-civil-society-almanac-2023/financials/spending/
³ Charities Aid Foundation, UK Giving Report 2026, March 2026. https://www.cafonline.org/insights/research/uk-giving-report
⁴ Al-Ghazali, Ihya Ulum al-Din, as translated in S. M. Ghazanfar and A. A. Islahi, "Economic Thought of Al-Ghazali," King Abdulaziz University, Islamic Economics Research Centre. https://www.ghazali.org/articles/economicthoughtofghazali.pdf
⁵ Wellcome Trust, Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024/25 (investment portfolio value at 30 September 2025), January 2026. https://wellcome.org/insights/articles/wellcome-annual-report-and-financial-statements-202425
⁶ Lilly Endowment Inc., "History and Founders" (assets of nearly $80 billion at the end of 2024). https://lillyendowment.org/about/history-and-founders/
