For decades, conservative and far-right movements have been building a talent machine of institutions, pipelines and narratives that turn grievance into durable political power. While progressive civil society has been focused on short-term responses to crises, the right has been investing in people, belonging and long-term strategy. That should be a wake-up call for all of us.
Our new report Building Power, created in collaboration with Intertidal Lab, proposes that civil society’s talent crisis is not accidental, it’s structural. Short grant cycles, issue silos, weak shared infrastructure, missing mid-career pathways and a funding culture that rewards delivery over development.
The result is devastatingly simple. We are losing people faster than we can develop them, and we are trying to meet a period of democratic erosion, climate breakdown, backlashes on rights and rising authoritarianism with a talent model built for burnout rather than building power.
What long-term investment in people looks like
Over the past four decades, conservative and far-right actors have built dense, well-funded and vertically integrated talent ecosystems that identify people early, shape their worldview, train them, connect them, place them and keep them circulating through institutions of power. These pipelines do not begin when someone applies for a job. They begin with identity, belonging and narrative, then move through student organising, media training, leadership development, legal networks, policy shops and government placement.
The machinery is not subtle. It is not a loose collection of organisations. It is an ecosystem. We identified at least a dozen major conservative organisations in the US playing coordinated roles across recruitment, ideological formation, skills development, alumni networks and long-horizon placement. It is backed by stable, deep-pocketed donors and institutions operating on 30 to 50 year horizons rather than election cycles.
Turning Point USA alone reported annual revenue of US$85 million in 2024, PragerU around US$70 million, the Federalist Society around US$33 million, and the Leadership Institute around US$49 million. These are not marginal investments. They are deliberate bets on who will shape culture, law, government and public debate.
This matters because power reproduces itself through people. The right has made talent development part of its political strategy, not an optional extra. Progressive civil society, by contrast, has too often treated talent as overhead and career development as something to fit around the “real work.”
The far right has not just out-messaged progressive forces. It out-built them. It invested in long-term infrastructure while much of progressive civil society remained trapped in fragmented, issue-based, short-horizon funding models that make serious talent development almost impossible.
Talent starvation cycle
Across movements for climate, democracy, labour, gender justice and human rights, organisations are being asked to do more with less while facing burnout, churn and shrinking civic space.
This is not simply a US story, it is a story about who gets to shape the next generation of organisers, communicators, lawyers, policy thinkers and leaders around the world.
Far-right actors are not only recruiting earlier and retaining longer, they are also exporting their methods globally. Our report highlights how networks like the Atlas Network have helped spread conservative infrastructure, narratives and training models to the Global Majority where they are adapting the same playbook to local contexts.
This is not a moment for surface-level fixes or single-issue thinking. It demands we build differently, with deeper roots, longer horizons and a genuine commitment to the people at the centre of change.
Unfortunately talent development in our sector is often treated as overhead. Historically, only around one percent of philanthropic grants have been designated for talent development. Most of what gets funded is tied to projects, which means it disappears when the project ends.
In our benchmarking survey of NGO talent development:
- 92 percent of respondents said limited financial resources were among their biggest challenges
- 80 percent expected to be affected by funding decreases or increased competition, and
- only 13 percent tracked participant career progression even though 86 percent collected participant feedback.
That means progressive civil society is not only underinvesting in people, it is under-measuring the impact of that investment further hampering the case for long term investment in people.
This nonprofit starvation cycle is a vicious loop in which funders’ aversion to overhead spending leads nonprofits to chronically underinvest in infrastructure, which makes them less effective, which reinforces funders’ skepticism. The cycle has proven stubbornly durable. And it applies to people just as much as to systems.
The gap is not just one of resources. It is a gap of imagination, infrastructure and patience. Conservative and far-right movements understood something that much of progressive civil society has not: if you want lasting influence, you do not just fund campaigns. You build talent ecosystems.
The consequences are visible everywhere. Entry-level activists may get fellowships. Senior leaders get executive programmes. But practitioners in the middle, those with three to 10 years of experience who are ready to step into strategic leadership, get almost nothing. Bridgespan reports that only 30 percent of senior nonprofit roles are filled through internal promotion, roughly half the rate of the private sector.
This is not a small design flaw. It is a structural failure. We are building movements that cannot hold onto their own future leadership.
And because civil society still too often frames careers in this sector through sacrifice, urgency and depletion, it is becoming harder to compete for the very people movements need most. Young people are looking for meaning, agency, belonging and a future. The right offers all of that, however cynically and dangerously, through a coherent ecosystem. Progressive civil society too often offers a short-term contract, emotional overload and no clear pathway forward.
This is one of the hardest truths in our report: we cannot keep expecting movements to build long-term power with short-term money, narrow metrics and institutional habits that burn people out. If talent development remains categorised as overhead, if shared infrastructure remains nobody’s job, and if talent investment remains episodic, then the far-right will keep widening its advantage.
That should be unacceptable to all of us who understand what is at stake.
Foundations we can build on
None of this is an argument for doing what the far-right does. The values, the ends, and the communities being served are different. But the structural lessons are available to anyone willing to look clearly at them.
Through our benchmarking survey of 119 civil society organisations, interviews with practitioners and a review of more than 130 talent development initiatives, one pattern came through clearly: extraordinary work already exists, but it remains fragmented, underfunded and disconnected.
Progressive civil society has extraordinary raw material. Movements with genuine popular energy, causes with deep moral force, and a generation across the Global Majority (and increasingly in the West) refusing to accept a broken future. What is often missing is the architecture to develop that energy into durable leadership over time. Open-access entry points that channel people in. Clear pathways from first engagement to sustained responsibility. Cross-organisational coordination that hands people on rather than losing them between silos. And the long-term investment horizon that treats talent development not as a project, but as infrastructure.
The far-right spent forty years building that architecture quietly and patiently. The question for progressive movements now is whether we are committed to doing the same.
It is uncomfortable admitting we have a lot to learn from the far-right. They do not share our values. Many of their goals are ones we actively oppose. And some of the tactics they use to build power would be incompatible with the principles of equity, justice and democratic participation that underpin the work that many of us have dedicated our lives to.
But they have built something we have not. Looking honestly at what the right has built is not an act of admiration. It is an act of strategic intelligence. Understanding it is not about imitation. It’s about taking the question of talent and leadership development as seriously as the far right has for the last four decades.
Bold investment is needed to build lasting power
The good news is that the solutions are already visible in practice. Feminist and healing-centred fellowships, training-of-trainer cascades, peer networks, hybrid learning journeys and locally rooted pathways that build both capability and belonging.
The task now is to stop treating these as isolated bright spots and start building the connective tissue around them. We need a real talent ecosystem. One that is long-term, cross-movement, people-centred and designed to outlast a single grant cycle or political moment.
Our report Building Power shares insights and recommendations for developing a talent ecosystem for progressive social change and a framework for action. We hope it starts conversations that become strategies, and strategies that build power now and for the future.
If the far-right has shown us anything, it is that power can be built deliberately. The question for all of us is whether we are willing to build with equal ambition, patience and strategic clarity.
Read the full report
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