As relatively small organizations, conservation trust funds (CTF) in general struggle to find the right balance between the size, qualifications and cost of administrative and support staff. Combined with volatile financial markets, limited funding opportunities, and sometimes rigorous reporting and compliance, CTF’s can find stability by collaboration and consolidating their “back office” activities to streamline their operations. Sharing services can be a key strategy for supporting CTF effectiveness: sharing overhead costs and eliminating redundancies across organizations helps the CTF sector be more efficient, reduce costs and risk, improve access to high-quality services and foster the collaborations that lead to program innovation.
