To establish a foundation in Spain, thirty thousand euros is, in practice, sufficient: the law deems this endowment adequate. It is a substantial figure for an individual and a modest one for an institution, and this balance is deliberate. What the law does not state, as it is beyond its remit, is what occurs the following day.

The following day marks the beginning of a circular structural problem that those who have not experienced it tend to disbelieve. The primary funding line for the third sector in Spain, the 0.7% of personal income tax, requires the entity to have been legally constituted at least three years prior to the publication of the call for applications. Furthermore, the assessment criteria include the entity's experience in programmes of a nature similar to the one proposed. In state cultural grants, minimum seniority is not required, but experience and established track record are also scored.

In other words: to access primary funding, one must have existed for three years, and to score well, one must have previously executed the work one proposes to undertake. For the first three years, a new entity is excluded from that opportunity by definition, regardless of its actions. And when it is finally able to enter, it competes in accredited experience against entities that have been accumulating it for twenty years. A track record is the requirement, and funding is what allows one to build it.

Before proceeding, I concede what must be conceded, for the requirement is not a whim. It is public money. Administrations have suffered fraud, phantom entities established to capture subsidies, and programmes that were paid for but never executed. Requiring seniority and experience is a reasonable method to mitigate that risk, and those who demand its removal without further consideration have not contemplated who would bear the cost of the abuse. I do not advocate for that.

What I wish to highlight is the effect that this filter produces inadvertently. A system that demands a prior track record selects, with considerable efficacy, that which already exists. It neither rewards nor punishes merit: it simply cannot evaluate what has not yet had the occasion to occur. And the aggregate result is recognisable in any call for applications: the Third Sector Platform, in its analysis of the state distribution of the 0.7%, describes a system where a few projects absorb a significant portion of the budget while thousands operate with very limited resources.

Here I wish to address directly something that is discussed frequently in private and rarely in public, because I believe it is misconstrued. It is said that in this sector everything operates through connections, that without political or economic relationships one cannot begin. I have heard that phrase many times and have thought it many times, and today I believe it confuses the symptom with the cause. Connections are not the reason the system functions in this manner. They are the shortcut that exists because the system functions in this manner. When an entity cannot accredit the track record required of it, the only thing that can substitute for it is for someone to vouch for it: an institution that endorses it, a patron with a history, a telephone call. The network does not circumvent the track record requirement: it supplements it. And where a requirement is impossible to fulfil through formal channels, an informal channel always emerges to resolve it. That is not corruption; it is social physics.

I must add something that compels me to honesty and which disarms any tone of grievance. I possess a network. A modest one, but I have it: artists, galleries, curators, institutional contacts, people who answer the telephone. And I utilise it, as everyone does, and it is in large part what has allowed the things I direct to exist. I do not write this from outside the mechanism, denouncing it. I write from within, describing it, which is a less comfortable position but the only one I possess.

This connects to a subject within my research, and it is prudent to formulate it with precision as it provides the framework. In the article I have published with Adolfo Cortés García, we distinguish between possessing legitimacy—the recognised right to be present in the field, for one's work to even be considered a candidate for evaluation—and possessing power, understood as the effective capacity for an assertion to circulate and be sustained; that decomposition is his contribution. With that in view, the situation of a new entity is described without the need to accuse anyone: it may possess full legitimacy—accredited social interest, demonstrable quality, even recognition from those who understand—and possess none of the latter. And without the latter, legitimacy reaches nowhere. It is not that it is unrecognised; it is that there is no one to make it count.

What worsens the situation is that the filter combines with another, older one, described over fifteen years ago as the nonprofit starvation cycle: funders do not wish to pay for infrastructure, only for activity, so entities declare minimal structural costs, and with minimal structure they cannot grow, professionalise, or, precisely, prepare the increasingly demanding justifications required of them. A new entity arrives at the first call for proposals without a track record and without the administrative capacity to compete for it, and the two deficiencies feed one another.

I do not have a complete solution, and I suspect that anyone offering one in a single paragraph is simplifying it. However, I do see the direction in which a reasonable approach would lie, and it is not expensive. Specific entry-level lines, with small amounts and proportionate justification, designed for entities without a history: not as charity, but as an investment in ensuring the field does not close. Admitting that capacity may be accredited in ways other than through prior execution—the personal track record of those who compose the board of trustees, for example, which in a new entity is all that exists. And funding infrastructure without hesitation, because an entity without administration is not more austere: it is more fragile.

I conclude with what truly concerns me, which is not my case nor that of anyone in particular. A system that can only recognise what already has a track record ends up preserving very well what exists and leaving out what could exist. That is efficient and prudent, and it carries a cost that does not appear in any statistics: we do not know what has failed to occur. The entities that did not start do not leave an annual report. And for that reason, it is appropriate, from time to time, to state this from within and without complaint: not to request special treatment, but so that it remains written that the filter has a price and that someone is paying it somewhere we do not see.

On open conversation

This text describes a structure, not a grievance, and I write it from within it: I direct an entity, I have a network, and I use it. Its thesis is that the requirements of seniority and prior experience are reasonable as a fraud prevention measure while simultaneously producing a filter that selects what is already in existence, and that so-called contacts are the symptom of that filter and not its cause. If anyone wishes to intervene from the perspective of entity management, the administration that grants funding, research on the third sector, or the experience of having attempted to start something, this notebook remains open, and I am particularly interested in hearing from anyone who believes I am mistaken.

Sources

Law 50/2002, of 26 December, on Foundations, art. 12 (minimum endowment) (BOE).

Royal Decree 821/2021, regulatory bases for 0.7% IRPF subsidies, arts. 4 and 15 (minimum seniority of three years; experience as an evaluation criterion) (BOE, 2 October 2021).

Order CUL/2912/2010, bases for aid for cultural action and promotion, art. 3 (experience and track record as criteria) (BOE, 13 November 2010); 2025 call for proposals, BOE-B-2025-6888.

Third Sector Platform. Analysis of results from the state 0.7% call for proposals (2024 and 2025 editions).

Ferrer i Guàrdia Foundation and Third Sector Platform of Madrid. Study on the financing of Social Action Third Sector entities.

Gregory, Ann Goggins and Don Howard. “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle”. Stanford Social Innovation Review, autumn 2009.

Cortés García, Adolfo, and Juan A. Esteban Ruiz. Recognition and Surplus. Zenodo, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21630455