Making Projects Sustainable

The management of a projects is always challenging - ensuring that the partners are all committed to the tasks and activities planned in the original proposals and above all, that the project complies with funders’ guidelines. But what happens when the funding stops? Too many projects are frozen at that moment and the results are left to wither away. Sustainability is one of the most challenging aspects of every project, and was one of the drivers for establishing the Cascade Foundation in the first place. Increasingly, we are expected to plan for a project’s sustainability even at the proposal stage. 

Questions around sustainability often revolve around finances and how a project could be self-funded by commercialising its outputs or seeking alternative funding. However, it might be more practical to consider how the consortium can build more permanent networks especially by combining with other projects and sharing results. Ensuring outputs are open source and made available for further exploitation through other arenas can open up new opportunities for new partnerships and a long-term sustainability of project results. In the past, we have used platforms that combine outputs and link up partners from across the world to build a wealth of experience that can be applied to new projects. For example, the resources that were compiled into an E-Book as part of our European-based project, Social Enterprise through Virtual Environments and Remote Entrepreneurship was used to train trainers for a project based in South Africa and Ghana, Supporting Youth Entrepreneurship (SYSE). 

So, how can Cascade help? We invite all members of our Community in Action to send us links, reports and outputs of their projects so that we can create a pipeline for sharing best practice. It doesn’t cost anything to share and if the outputs are good enough they may be adopted by other partnerships and organisations to help support what they are doing.