This blog was written by the 2025 Budgeting Committee: Rachel Boere, Asmita Rawat, Odhiambo Otieno, and Zuhura Ahmadi Shaweji
As a youth-led organisation, building sustainable financial systems is vital but can also be a challenging task. We, like many youth leaders, do not always have the years of practical experience on how to tailor budgets that better suit our needs, nor the long-term perspective for financial decision-making or the highly structured processes that our external partners and systems require. Simultaneously, many of the mainstream financial models we encounter reflect the top-down, extractive, and capitalist systems that we are actively working against.
Despite this, over the past six years, our financial infrastructure at Youth4Nature has flourished, both in terms of stability and in how it embodies our values. We are proud of how far we have come, and how we have harnessed some of these challenges into unique opportunities to build financial systems that work for us, the lived experiences and knowledge of our global team and communities, and the world we are trying to grow. So often, this work happens behind the scenes, but today we want to highlight our top tips for you! If you are a youth organiser, leading a climate or nature project, or just interested in how a global, youth-led organisation is grounding its financial operations, here are four practices that have helped us over the years.
1. Dreaming big & being Realistic (Dream + Floor Budgets)
We love to dream big! Always envisioning what the ultimate version of a project can look like. This often left us with very large budgets for projects that were hard to fundraise for, stalling projects that could still have an important impact even at a reduced scale, so we initiated a tiered approach to budget development:
Floor budget: This is the minimum needed to run a meaningful version of the project
Intermediate budget(s): For very large projects, we choose how to adapt and what to prioritize with each upscale
Dream budget: Our upscaled version - what we’d love to have if resources were unlimited, really making a splash
The idea is to dream big and reach for the sky while still keeping our feet on the ground. This ensures we are prepared no matter the availability of resources, which changes so much and so drastically depending on political, economic, and social landscapes. This practice has benefited us in many ways, including:
illustration from peopleiveloved
Encouraging our youth team to reflect on what is needed vs. what is wanted to deliver a project, harnessing an abundance perspective.
Relieving pressure from our fundraising team, who can focus on meeting floor fundraising goals for various projects before chasing dream budget goals.
Preparing us in advance, if additional funding and resources are secured, we already know how, where, and why we are using those resources as the project shifts into dream mode!
2. Transparency through collaborative decision-making (Budgeting Committee)
““My experience at the BC, and Y4N overall, allowed me to move from being controlled by money anxiety and scarcity, to be more in control of it. Understanding that even in the harsh scenarios of produced scarcity, we can dream and can resource our initiatives and projects.” ”
Making financial decisions just for yourself can be difficult and scary. Now imagine making 6-figure budget decisions that impact a team of 20-30 people and all of our project delivery. What if you make the wrong decision? How do you accurately consider all the projects and all team members' needs? When is information useful to share, and when is it too technical? Those were just some of the questions we were grappling with until we introduced our Budgeting Committee.
The Y4N Budgeting Committee is a group of staff and volunteers representing different global regions and projects at Y4N, who share the responsibility of making financial decisions that align with our organisational values, meet our team’s needs, and help us grow sustainably. The main tasks the Budgeting Committee is responsible for include:
Making decisions about how and where to allocate incoming (unrestricted) funding
Co-creating our annual organisational budget
Developing internal financial policies to support our team
Supporting financial capacity-building initiatives for the wider team
Managing the Global Ambassador Support Fund (more on that below!)
Over the last three years, the Budgeting Committee has built trust, accountability, and transparency into our financial practices, solidifying the “why” behind every financial decision. Additionally, with rotating membership on the committee, different team members have the opportunity to practice these financial skills, which they can then apply in their own local initiatives and communities.
3. Removing barriers to access for global volunteers (Global Ambassador Support Fund)
As a horizontal, international organisation with more volunteers than paid staff, many of Y4N’s projects and programs rely on the engagement and contributions of unpaid volunteer members (known within Y4N as “Global Ambassadors” or “GAs”). We recognise the systemic barriers that can prevent youth - especially those from the Most Affected People and Areas - from engaging and participating in the global climate and nature space and meaningfully contributing to projects and programs. One way we address this is with our GA Support Fund, which encourages, supports, enables, and recognises the work that GAs do for and on behalf of Y4N. From a financial perspective, the GA Support Fund is a core organisational function and is placed alongside core staffing and administrative needs in our budgeting and fundraising.
“The GA Support Fund has helped me to feel valued and seen within the team. Getting this support shows how I am recognized as an important part of the work we do at Y4N”
What makes this unique? The GA Support Fund is rooted in trust and recognition of the lived experiences and local leadership of our team members. It enables young people to act on the frontlines of nature and climate action in ways that are context-specific, community-driven, and inclusive—all central principles of Y4N’s mission. By encouraging and supporting GAs, the fund empowers youth not just as participants, but as decision-makers and change-makers within Y4N and beyond. By centering funding for GAs in our budgeting, we promote accountability and visibility of youth leadership, and practice just one way of unpacking the invisible power imbalances between staff and volunteers.
4. Shared understanding for equity & care (Financial Policies & Processes)
The global nature of our team provides different scopes that help us to approach budgeting and financial matters from a wide variety of lived experiences, ways of knowing, and cultural and economic backgrounds. However, in the early days of Y4N, this meant that our projects, being delivered by different team members all over the world, were using different baselines or expectations for making budgets, financial decisions, and spending/reconciling. We also became aware of the risk of learning being lost as team members transition out, due to the inherent turnover that a youth-led team faces. To address these challenges, we created some key financial policies & practices, like:
Per Diem/DSA Policy: to outline what per diems are used for, who is eligible, and how to access them.
Honorarium Policy: to explain how much Y4N offers as honorariums and how much our team members can (and should!) ask for honorariums from external partners.
Project Budgeting Guide: to help team members draft well-designed and researched budgets that reflect real project needs and Y4N’s values.
We know, we know, this sounds stuffy and boring. We like to think of these as our guiding principles of shared understanding for finances. This shared understanding helps us to:
Practice equality across our communities, for example, providing the same honorarium rates to youth speakers in Canada and Sri Lanka, Ukraine, and Colombia.
Reduce the knowledge gap that leaves youth underestimating or undervaluing budget needs and approaching budgeting from a scarcity perspective.
Increase access to information, which builds transparency across our team and empowers youth leaders with financial literacy to bring to local nature and climate initiatives as well.
So - what do you think? We certainly are not perfect, but we are doing our best - incorporating our learnings as we go, and instilling trust and care at the centre of our finances. What financial practices are you using that model the regenerative, just world we are trying to build? Tell us in the comments below!