In the work of urban-focused non-governmental organizations (NGOs), funding structures dominated by tightly programmed funds are often mismatched to the non-linear nature of urban transformation work in practice. To illustrate the potential of alternative blended approaches, the paper analyzes how flexible, multi-year funding (not directly tied to predefined activities or timelines) can be used alongside project grants to support urban transformation amid political and institutional uncertainty.

Based on WRI Ross Center’s six-year Deep Dive Initiative across 21 cities, the paper offers insights relevant to peer organizations operating in similar institutional and mixed funding contexts. Across cases, flexible funding was blended with programmed funds in four recurring modes, which allowed teams to make frequent adjustments in response to changing political conditions, partner readiness, or emerging opportunities by adapting the timing, sequencing, and scope of the work.

  1. Seed funding: early exploration, relationship-building, and strategic entry
  2. Add-on funding: layer on adjacent agendas and research onto existing work
  3. Policy lifecycle funding: support early implementation after policy adoption
  4. Gap funding: sustain engagement through interruptions or uncertainty

Using flexible funding blended with programmed funds offers many benefits as well as introducing new organizational trade-offs that must be actively managed. These include a continued need for clear purpose and strategy, learning and accountability routines, and honesty about organizational capacity to navigate potential tensions that flexible funding introduces.

The analysis surfaces a set of “practice questions” to consider as organizations deploy flexible funding alongside project grants:

  1. What flexible funding is available, and what is it intended to support within a portfolio?
  2. What kinds of decisions is flexible funding being used to enable?
  3. How are decisions about the use of flexible funding made and revisited over time?
  4. How does flexible funding interact with organizational capacity over time?
  5. When does continued engagement supported by flexible funding still serve the mission?

In practice, blending flexible funds with programmed funds will likely shift accountability. It becomes less about compliance with predefined outputs and more about the ability to explain how and why resources were deployed in response to changing conditions, and to support ongoing learning about when and how adaptation is needed.

Cities worldwide are grappling with intersecting sustainability, climate, and inclusion challenges that demand coordinated, long-term, urban transformation efforts. Local governments rely on intermediary organizations to support coordination, learning, and sustained engagement across fragmented governance systems. Yet these organizations are typically funded by through short-term, tightly scoped project grants, even as urban change unfolds over long timeframes and across political cycles. This paper examines how one organization addressed this mismatch in practice and offers insights into how international organizations can provide long term support to local government to advance climate adaptation and low-carbon development.

The paper is a qualitative case study of the WRI Ross Center Deep Dive Initiative (DDI), a six-year internal program designed to deploy flexible, multi-year funding across selected city engagements. Rather than evaluating impact or testing causal claims, the paper analyzes how combining flexible funding with programmed funds and strategic guidance shaped intermediary practice under conditions of uncertainty, how it was used at different moments in city work, and how initiative design choices influenced alignment, continuity, and learning across city contexts. 

By grounding these questions in one organizational experience, the paper contributes a practice-based perspective to debates on how intermediaries are resourced. It does not seek to generalize beyond the case, but to make visible patterns, constraints, and choices that are often implicit in day-to-day work.