How to meet grant sustainability criteria with ready-to-use capacity building content

Sustainability sections are among the hardest parts of a conservation grant application to write well. Many funders require them. Many applicants fill them with vague assurances about continued community engagement, future funding intentions, or the lasting behavioural changes the project will generate. Reviewers read these statements hundreds of times and have learned to discount them when they lack specific mechanisms.

The core problem is that many sustainability arguments describe outcomes without describing the conditions that make those outcomes possible. Saying that conservation work will continue after the grant ends is not a sustainability plan. Describing the specific changes in organisational capacity that will make continued work possible is.

Structured professional training for the delivery team is one of the many underused and highly credible sustainability mechanisms available to conservation organisations. The argument is direct. If the team that receives a grant ends the funding period more skilled, more confident in designing and evidencing conservation work, and better equipped to write strong proposals for future funding, the organisation's ability to sustain and grow its conservation programme is measurably greater than it was at the start.

That is a sustainability outcome a reviewer can assess. It is specific. It is verifiable through certification. And it is something the funder has directly contributed to, which is a narrative many donors find compelling.

Understanding what reviewers are assessing makes it possible to write sustainability content.

The following content is written to adapt for the sustainability section of a conservation grant application. Replace placeholder numbers with figures based on your team size and adjust the project context where needed.

Conservation organisations delivering time-limited projects frequently face a structural challenge at the point of grant closure. The conservation work has progressed, but the team's capacity to sustain that work, attract further funding, and demonstrate impact to future funders has not always developed at the same rate. Without deliberate investment in professional skills during the grant period, organisations can find themselves dependent on continued external funding to maintain basic delivery, rather than being positioned to grow their funding base independently.

This dynamic is well documented in the conservation capacity building literature. Research reviewing professional development provision across sub-Saharan Africa found that the gap between the skills conservation teams need and those they have access to is a significant constraint on long-term conservation effectiveness, and that scaling up access to structured professional training is among the highest-priority interventions for the sector (O'Connell et al., 2019). Addressing this gap within the project period rather than treating it as a post-grant concern is a more effective approach to building the conditions for sustained impact.

To address this, the project budget includes a team training subscription with WildTeam, a conservation capacity building charity registered in England and Wales (charity number 1149465), whose courses are used by staff from hundreds of organisations globally including WWF, WCS, TNC, and many national and regional bodies across more than 100 countries.

WildTeam's training is distinguished from other professional development options in four ways.

• Courses are accredited, with participants assessed through examinations and awarded certification on successful completion.
• Course content is grounded in peer-reviewed best practice, with each course built on an extensive review of the relevant scientific and professional literature and reviewed by conservation experts from across the sector.
• Courses are designed as vocational and practical rather than academic, giving participants ready-to-use approaches they can apply directly to their conservation work rather than theoretical frameworks requiring significant interpretation.
• Courses are delivered online and self-paced through a combination of short video lessons, peer-to-peer engagement with other learners, and practical exercises that ask participants to apply each approach to their own specific conservation situation. This means the learning is grounded in each participant's real context from the start, rather than in generic examples that may not reflect the conditions on the ground.

All core project staff will complete structured vocational training across the following areas:

The subscription covers all current and future WildTeam courses for the duration of the grant period, providing a sustained professional development resource rather than a single training event.

Impact

The organisation has stronger capability to design, manage, fund, and report on its conservation projects.

Many funders now require evidence that funded organisations embed gender equality, disability, and social inclusion principles into their work in a practical and measurable way. General commitments to GEDSI are no longer sufficient for many institutional donors, who want to see specific mechanisms rather than statements of intent.

WildTeam's courses integrate GEDSI throughout rather than treating it as a standalone requirement. Across the curriculum, teams learn how to identify and include marginalised groups in conservation planning and delivery, manage power dynamics in stakeholder processes, remove barriers to participation at community level, apply do-no-harm principles when conservation activities affect vulnerable groups, and measure who benefits from conservation interventions and who does not.

This content runs through project planning, stakeholder engagement, monitoring and evaluation, and ethics courses. Including WildTeam team training in a proposal therefore provides a specific, curriculum-backed mechanism for GEDSI compliance that reviewers can assess directly. It is evidence of equitable practice built into how the team works, not a box-ticking exercise added at the application stage.

One additional benefit of including team training in a proposal is the partnership it creates. Funders consistently rate partnership applications more favourably than single-organisation submissions. Adding WildTeam as a named capacity building partner means the proposal is no longer submitted by one organisation alone.

This partnership is substantive rather than nominal. WildTeam provides a defined service, delivers it to an agreed cohort of staff, assesses and certifies the outcomes, and in larger subscriptions provides an annual learner report that documents progress. That is a real partnership with measurable deliverables, which is exactly what funders are looking for when they reward collaborative proposals.

To include WildTeam as a named partner, contact WildTeam directly before submission to confirm the arrangement and obtain a brief partner statement for inclusion in supporting documents if required.