Working in the fields of social innovation and social impact, a long-standing concern keeps returning. How can we build a sustainable ecosystem that operates on its own, without relying on the one-time dedication of a few outstanding leaders, specific investors, or famous donors? What is needed for organizations doing good to go further and grow into good organizations themselves?
Over the years, we have established numerous programs and organizations under the banners of capacity building, intermediary support, and ecosystem building. Looking back, considerable effort and resources were invested, and there were certainly tangible results. Nevertheless, talk is heard from all around that a fundamental piece is missing. Why is this? Could it be because, while intermediary organizations performing similar roles spring up here and there and projects are created and disappear repeatedly following the interests of those with funding, the foundation that the entire ecosystem truly needs remains weak?
Professional research and the accumulation of knowledge, the continuous influx and cultivation of talent, the natural sharing of experience and know-how, and infrastructure, incentives, and culture that enable connection and collaboration. These are shared assets and functions that are necessary for everyone but are difficult to attribute to any single organization or individual. Everyone needs shade and willingly enjoys it, yet few actually plant the trees to provide it. While everyone agrees on the necessity, the answer always becomes unclear when faced with the question of who will bear the cost, time, and responsibility to plant and nurture those trees for the long term.
The problem lies, paradoxically, in the fact that the moment a single individual or institution once again takes the lead in solving this difficult challenge, the same structure could repeat itself. Perhaps what is needed now is not another program, an intermediary support organization, or a new leader to shoulder the responsibility. It may be time to question not just shade or a single tree, but the structure of the roots and soil that enables those trees to continue growing.
Capacity Building: From Support to Autonomy
Foundations, large corporations, and government agencies possessing substantial funding and resources are now fully aware of the importance and necessity of capacity building. The issue lies not in what is provided, but in how it is provided. In Korea, the commonly referred to “capacity building support” generally involves support agencies designing education, consulting, mentoring, accounting and legal advice, and leadership enhancement programs, and then delivering them to organizations in need. However, as our ecosystem has grown rapidly, the forms and characteristics of organizations—including non-profits, social enterprises, social ventures, cooperatives, and welfare institutions—have become incomparably more diverse than in the past. Every organization differs in its people, culture, strengths, weaknesses, and circumstances. Yet, why is it believed that the organizations targeted for capacity building can grow similarly through a few prescriptions designed externally?
Now, a paradigm shift is needed from the mindset of “supporting capacity building” to “creating conditions that allow organizations to invest in their own capabilities.” The key is autonomy. Of course, this does not mean entrusting all resources unconditionally. The important point is that the authority responsible for diagnosing the need for capacity building and setting priorities must gradually shift from supporting agencies to beneficiary organizations.
The start is not bad. According to the ‘Doing Good Index (DGI) 2026‘ released by CAPS in June of this year, 26% of Korean nonprofits responded that “it is difficult to secure funds because most donors are unwilling to provide undesignated donations.” This is significantly lower than the Asian average of 47% and an improvement from the 2024 figure of 33%. At the very least, there is room to view this as the threshold for funding sources that organizations can decide how to use themselves gradually lowering.
However, the story changes when it comes to the specific costs required for capacity building and organizational operations. 39% of Korean nonprofits responded that donors provide no support for employee capacity building, which is higher than the Asian average of 29%. Responses indicating no support for administrative and operational expenses stood at 46% (Asian average 27%), IT and digital costs at 45% (33%), and impact measurement costs at a staggering 50% (32%). While attitudes toward non-designated donations are becoming slightly more flexible, organizations remain stingy when it comes to the actual costs necessary for growth into better organizations.
Why does this gap exist? I believe there are three main reasons intertwined. The first is the issue of trust. Our society harbors a deep-seated wariness toward the organizations that receive and execute donations. In the ‘DGI 2026’ survey, when asked about the reasons for the lack of domestic donations, 42% of Korean respondents answered, “Because people do not trust us.” This is exactly double the Asian average of 21%. For donors, the more discretion is given to internal organizations regarding the funds, the greater the anxiety inevitably becomes about where the money is being spent. This is one of the reasons why organizations remain hesitant to spend money on internal capacity building, even though non-designated donations are gradually increasing.
The second factor is the regulation on indirect costs, which institutionally reinforces this distrust and social pressure. Among the 17 Asian countries surveyed by ‘DGI 2026,’ only six have governments that restrict the indirect costs of non-profit organizations, and South Korea is one of them. In essence, we hold contradictory expectations: on one hand, we demand that organizations become specialized and sustainable, while on the other, we consider keeping the costs required to operate those organizations as low as possible to be a good donation.
The third point ultimately boils down to the difficulty of investing in people. The core of capacity building is, after all, people. However, investing sufficiently in internal personnel necessitates being mindful of external pressures; even if one manages to overcome these concerns and invest, institutional and customary constraints regarding indirect and operating costs once again hold them back. For example, consider the AI capacity building that every organization is currently grappling with. While providing the same AI training curriculum to all organizations might seem like the best approach, some organizations may need long-term basic digital training for existing employees before AI, while others might find it far more effective to properly hire a new technical talent at least on a startup-level salary scale. External support agencies cannot uniformly determine who needs to learn what, whether to hire new people, or whether to utilize external experts. Ultimately, the essence of capacity building lies in making investments beyond what is necessary, going beyond mere compensation.
The core of strengthening ‘autonomy’ capabilities does not lie simply in spending money as one pleases. It is about creating a structure, culture, and fundamental improvement that allows the organization performing good work closest to us to diagnose its own weaknesses and needs, invest in people and systems, and sometimes fail and readjust.
Prerequisites for active transparency and autonomy
However, it must also be made clear that autonomy is difficult to operate without a foundation of trust. Just as they demand greater discretion and autonomy, organizations in the field also have a responsibility to build the trust themselves that enables such autonomy.
Among the 121 domestic organizations that participated in this year’s ‘DGI 2026’ survey, only 20% felt sufficiently trusted by society, 14% by the government, and 20% by corporations. All three categories fall significantly short of the Asian average.
In that case, the answer cannot be a mere demand to “trust us more.” Trust is also an asset that the ecosystem must collectively build, and its starting point must be a culture in which organizations themselves proactively explain, disclose, and communicate what they are doing, for whom, and how they are doing it.
The need for such proactive transparency is also evident in other indicators. In ‘DGI 2026,’ 42% of domestic organizations assessed media coverage of the social sector over the past two years as negative. This figure is more than four times the Asian average of 10% and the highest among the surveyed countries. A similar gap was observed in impact measurement. Only 38% of domestic respondents stated that they measure the impact they have created. This is less than half of the Asian average of 74% and the second lowest figure among the surveyed countries.
The approach to responding to negative media exposure should not stop at merely publicizing more success stories or acts of kindness. The social sector, too, must not remain confined to legally mandated information disclosure and public announcements. It is necessary to first enter the daily lives and worldviews of ordinary citizens—who initially have no interest in this field—through more creative content and familiar, entertaining methods.
The same applies to impact measurement. Numbers are stories in themselves. What matters is not merely calculating numbers, but having the will and capability to articulate what those numbers mean. In this sense, impact measurement should not be viewed as measurement for the sake of measurement or a means to satisfy external demands, but rather as a tool that translates to society what our organization is doing, what changes it is making for whom, and what it is learning.
As a brief example, a friend recently asked for advice regarding donation. My friend abruptly remarked, “Isn’t donating just shopping in the end?” The point is that while they want to choose the cause they consider most valuable with their limited funds, there is often insufficient product description, pros and cons, reviews, or follow-up information. If donation is indeed similar to shopping, what efforts should social sector organizations make to help donors understand and persuade them? Proactive transparency begins with becoming an organization that answers this question.
Making collaboration experience an asset to the ecosystem
Korea is by no means a country lacking in collaboration. In the ‘DGI 2026’ report, 80% of domestic responding organizations stated that they collaborate with other domestic non-profit organizations. This figure is higher than the Asian average of 73%. There were also a significant number of responses indicating collaboration with local governments or companies.
In that case, the absolute number of collaborations may not be the truly important factor in the recent frequent calls for “more collaboration.” What is noteworthy is another aspect of collaboration. Among domestic organizations, the percentage that responded they collaborate with academia and research institutions was 27%, significantly lower than the Asian average of 43%. Furthermore, only 20% of domestic organizations cited “research” as the reason for collaborating with other groups, which is considerably lower than the Asian average of 38%.
Are we investing as much effort into preserving the experience and knowledge derived from a collaboration for future collaborations, and are we making an effort to refer to such intellectual property in advance, as we do in successfully concluding a collaboration? While there are many collaborations where people meet for a common purpose to conduct business, the task of recording and analyzing what succeeded and failed, why that happened, and under what conditions synergy occurred, and passing this information on to the next person, has received relatively less attention.
Ultimately, what matters is not the quantity, but the recording and accumulation of the legacy itself. In this context, the knowledge accumulated from past collaborations can serve as a shared asset that prevents future collaborations from starting from scratch. This process can begin within an organization by faithfully documenting evaluations and retrospectives after collaborations conclude, summarizing the causes of success and failure and their implications, and leaving them for others to utilize. What is important is not stopping at the fact that “we did it together,” but establishing a culture and system that ensures the shared experience becomes a starting point for someone else.
Let’s lay down the rifle and cultivate the soil.
Once again, the previously mentioned issues of capacity building, talent, and trust return, intertwined. However, one thing is clear: creating yet another ecosystem-building program under the pretext of growing the ecosystem, or establishing another intermediary support organization to expand its scope, is not the answer. Instead, the stakeholders already comprising this ecosystem must naturally internalize this perspective while carrying out their core duties.
Foundations and individual donors should sometimes be able to proactively say, “You can use this money for impact measurement, or to replace outdated office software.” Nonprofit organizations should not stop at merely meeting the reporting standards required by superiors, but should instead consider, “How can we explain our work more actively so that more people understand, trust, and participate?” Executives and leaders should be able to ask themselves whether they need to invest a little more in employee treatment and growth for long-term sustainability, instead of just looking at how much donations and beneficiaries have increased this year.
The same applies to collaboration. We must consider what went wrong and what went unexpectedly well, and how to record and analyze those experiences to share with neighboring organizations. Ultimately, what is needed before grandiose new solutions may be slightly different questions asked from our respective positions and a shift in perspective. Perhaps a sustainable ecosystem filled with trees and shade is not created by someone new, but rather its soil is naturally and gradually formed through the process of each person performing their primary duties in a slightly different way.
This article was first published in Korean in The Butter and is part of Heesu Jang’s monthly opinion series Asia Philanthropy Inside.