FIRE | Spring Strategies

Our internationally acclaimed Financial Innovation and Resilience (FIRE) program is a comprehensive training with multi-month accompaniment that helps social change organizations build greater financial strength.

It teaches the fundamentals of financial resilience and equips teams with new tools and strategies to better respond to an increasingly volatile and rapidly changing political and funding landscape. We also collaborate with funders, governments and corporations in service of civil society, seeking to deepen understanding of what it takes for movements to be financially healthy. We deliver the FIRE program in English, Spanish and Portuguese as well as in other languages through simultaneous interpretation.

Who’s it for? Executive directors, board members and senior staff who lead in the areas of finance, resource mobilization and strategic communications, as well as foundation staff providing financial support to these leaders.

You can see a list of organizations that have gone through FIRE on our partners page.

What to expect

You'll join a global cohort of social and climate justice changemakers to:

Build a customized action plan using new tools from Spring
Develop a budgeting strategy that accounts for income, costs and full cost recovery
Anticipate and respond to changes in the funding and financing landscape
Monitor progress with a user-friendly dashboard of key financial health indicators
Evaluate and pursue opportunities for income diversification
Create messaging that shapes powerful engagement, action and resource mobilization
Practice new prospecting techniques for building relationships with funders
Access an international community of peers to learn alongside

Our FIRE programs

Get hands-on practice with up to 36 other participants from around the world by joining one of our
public programs, or get in touch if you're looking for more tailored support for your team.

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Woman participating in the FIRE program happily holding a cup of coffee with a US dollar design as part of a dynamic

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FIRE journeys

Want to understand how FIRE works in practice? Check out what our clients have to say as well as
these impact stories from our partners. You can find more details on our impact here.

The FIRE Journey of Indonesia Corruption Watch

Read Impact Story

The FIRE Journey of Coordenadoria Ecumênica de Serviço

Read Impact Story

The FIRE Journey of Action for Hope

Read Impact Story

Testimonials

Speaking of finance in visuals, the financial health dashboard made the information really accessible. I loved the small group sessions; that created an opportunity to know participants. Even though the workshop was online, there was a great sense of community.

It was great knowing that we are not alone in the challenges we face as an organization and dispelling the belief that we are in competition with other organizations. I absolutely loved that.

As a CFO, the strategic finance section was my favorite part. I've been working in nonprofit finance for over 20 years and this was by far the most helpful way of thinking about financial health and the mix of funding sources.

Undergoing the training together taught us how our team’s finance, communications, and program departments can be developed and presented to donors as moving parts of one machine. When coordinated, they result in a stronger strategic plan and a team that is more in sync to move toward a common goal.

The program was immensely valuable to every team member who participated and we learned so much. We are more comfortable with the fundraising process, especially asking for core funding; we have more direction in terms of capital reserves and have created new financial policies. The FIRE program also, crucially, provided the language with which to engage non-financial and non-communications team members as well as material for re-training.

Non-profits often come into the fund-raising space with guilt. They believe funders have the power. And you don’t want to ask for too much in case the answer is ‘No’. The FIRE Program gave me the tools to be vulnerable to funders. To say — this is where I am, and this is what I need.

We learned what a reserve fund could do and how we could invest our money. Now thanks to FIRE we have an operational reserve, an emergency reserve, and a staff protection reserve.

FIRE helped bring us forward. The program created structure, gave us benchmarking and helped us understand where we need to do and what needed attention.