3 minutes read
In the world of social impact, organisations rarely stand still. Local needs evolve, new challenges emerge, and opportunities arise to deepen or expand their work. Yet with growth comes a critical tension: how can an organisation broaden its impact without stretching itself too thin, diluting its mission, or losing effectiveness? Scaling impact isn’t simply about doing more—it requires navigating complex ecosystems, ensuring alignment with organisational strengths, securing sustainable funding, and building the right partnerships to create lasting change.
For The Fred Hollows Foundation (FHF), this question was central. Known globally for its work in eliminating avoidable blindness and restoring sight, FHF has successfully expanded its impact beyond direct service delivery to strengthening surrounding healthcare systems. At a recent AVPN Academy Learning Circle, hosted on 19 Feb 2025, Laura Lee, Chief Representative for Hong Kong and ASEAN at FHF, shared how the organisation navigated this journey.
Recognising the Need to Expand Approach
Most nonprofits begin by focusing on their core expertise. For FHF, this meant tackling avoidable blindness through surgeries and treatments. However, over time, the organisation recognised that sustainable impact required more than just individual treatment—it also meant ensuring long-term access to quality care, advocating for supportive policies, and strengthening community-based support networks for healthcare.
Many communities within FHF’s operating areas lacked the infrastructure to sustain eye care programmes, while governments struggled to integrate vision care into public health strategies. Without broader systemic change, the same challenges would persist long after FHF’s interventions ended. The path forward became clear: to create lasting impact, FHF had to expand beyond direct service provision and invest in strengthening healthcare systems.
Navigating the Challenges of Working at a Systems Level
Shifting to a systems-strengthening approach often comes with both practical and strategic hurdles, such as:
- Avoiding mission drift: Expanding into adjacent areas brings the risk of overextension or diverting resources from core expertise.
- Securing the right kind of funding: Many funding structures are rigid, tied to specific projects rather than adaptive, long-term systems change.
- Gaining partnership or government buy-in: Governments often hesitate to embrace external interventions, either due to skepticism about sustainability or political shifts that disrupt long-term commitments.
For FHF, overcoming these challenges required patience, trust-building, and a strategic approach to partnerships and funding.
Building Trust and Working Within Government Structures
A key challenge raised in the Learning Circle was the difficulty of securing government buy-in. Governments often hesitate to embrace external programmes unless they see clear alignment with national priorities. FHF’s work in China served as a case study for how nonprofits can embed themselves within government systems for sustained impact. Rather than functioning as an external service provider, FHF collaborated with the government to establish a rural eye care model across provinces such as Yunnan, Anhui, Xinjiang, Gansu, Hebei, and Guangxi. The foundation trained local health workers, and equipped hospitals to integrate eye care into the public health system in a more systematic manner. By working within existing structures, ensuring capacity-building efforts were locally led, and designing programmes that could complement government policies, FHF built credibility as a trusted partner.
Leveraging Partnerships to Expand Reach and Unlock Capital
Another key takeaway was the power of partnerships in unlocking resources and driving large-scale impact. For scaling organizations, strategic alliances can accelerate progress beyond incremental growth. FHF exemplified this by securing an AUD 20 million (USD 12.5 million) grant through collaboration, demonstrating how partnerships can unlock significant funding for systemic change. Attendees reinforced this, emphasizing that effective partnerships go beyond project funding to leverage complementary strengths for broader, long-term impact.
The Role of Flexible Funding in Driving Innovation
A crucial theme was the importance of unrestricted funding. Unlike traditional project-based grants, which often come with stringent conditions, unrestricted funding allows organisations to test new approaches, pivot when needed, and invest in long-term capacity building.
FHF used unrestricted funds to pilot new models of care—ensuring that before expanding into new areas, they had data-driven insights to support the shift. This flexibility proved essential in scaling up effective interventions without compromising core focus.
The Path Forward: Expanding with Intentionality
The Learning Circle underscored a shared reality: organisations in the social sector are constantly balancing the need to deepen their impact with the risks of overextending themselves. As Laura aptly put it,
“In a complex world, only complex solutions work.”
The experience of FHF offers valuable lessons for those navigating this space.
- Expansion should be strategic, not reactive. Growth must align with an organisation’s strengths and be backed by data and experience rather than external pressures.
- Collaboration is essential. Whether through government partnerships, cross-sector alliances, or funding coalitions, working together multiplies impact.
Funding models must be flexible and dynamic. To sustain systems-level change, social investors and philanthropists must increasingly prioritise flexible, long-term funding mechanisms.
