Our Approach
Practitioner-led funding, built on 20 years of direct experience
Photo: Stairway Foundation
Most funders come to this work from the outside. Firetree's team members have spent decades founding, running and governing nonprofit organisations across Southeast Asia simultaneously alongside the funding work.
This is what we mean by practitioner-led funding. We assess organisations not against an arbitrary rubric in isolation, but against direct experience of doing the same work ourselves. We know what good looks like because we have had to build it, defend it, and sometimes rebuild it. Over more than 20 years and $130M deployed, that practitioner judgment has shaped every partnership we have formed and every decision we have made about where resources can do the most good.
Photo: Baan Dek Foundation
.png)
We operate, not just fund
Tondo Community Initiative in Manila is our child protection initiative, serving one of the Philippines' most marginalised urban communities. Starfish Education Foundation in Thailand is our education innovation initiative working directly with public schools, teachers and government agencies. We fully fund and run both.
This matters because it keeps us grounded. We know what rigorous child protection looks like from the inside. We know what governance under pressure feels like. We know what it costs — in time, talent and resources — to deliver quality work at the community level. When we assess a partner organisation, we are not working from a framework. We are drawing on direct experience of doing the same work ourselves.
We've been in the room
Fund are making now — about programme pivots, team management under pressure, and moments where the right path forward is genuinely unclear. When we sit with a partner, we are not offering an outside perspective. We know what it feels like to hold an organisation together through difficulty, to balance what a community needs against what the resources allow, and to manage the gap between what looks good on paper and what is actually happening on the ground.
This is what it means to work as peers. Board experience across more than 20 organisations in Southeast Asia deepens that: it means we have seen how leadership teams behave when things are hard, not just when things are going well. But what positions us as peers is more than what we have been and are in those chairs, and we bring that into every conversation we have with a partner.
Photo: Mith Samlanh
We are in it for the long run
Before we fund anyone, we spend significant time with the leadership, the team, and the communities they serve. We watch how decisions get made and how the organisation behaves when things are hard. We provide untied grant(s), specifically to create the time and space for that vulnerability to develop, on both sides. By the time an organisation enters our fund portfolio, we know it the way a colleague would.
Our funding relationships span multiple years. Short funding cycles consume the energy that leaders should be spending on their work. When an organisation knows its funding relationship is stable, it can plan properly, hire the right people, adapt and evolve as they see the need to and do all of this in a timely manner, without the distraction of worrying about where the next resources are coming from. Leaders also trust that a funder will not exit the first sign of difficulty, are more likely to share the real challenges they face. That openness is what allows us to be genuinely useful not just as a source of funding, but as a thought partner when situations are complicated.
We have worked with some of our partners for over 15 years.
We talk about who we fund
Every organisation in the Firetree Fund portfolio is one we currently fund ourselves — and intend to keep funding. These aren't recent discoveries. They represent some of the most effective and operationally mature organisations in their field, and they have been through years of real partnership with us before being introduced to fellow funders.
Organisations with demonstrated impact, strong leadership and established accountability mechanisms are considered for inclusion in the Firetree Fund portfolio. Before reaching this point, each has been through rigorous validation within — assessed for financial health, leadership resilience under pressure, learning agility and a proven ability to deploy resources effectively.
We believe successful organisations should not be heavily dependent on a single or very few donors. The organisations we bring to the Fund maintain diversified funding bases — we would fund them more expansively if that principle didn't hold us back. They are ready for more, and we know it.
