To establish a foundation in Spain, thirty thousand euros is, in practice, sufficient: the law presumes this endowment to be adequate. It is a significant sum for an individual and a modest one for an institution. What the law does not state is what occurs the following day.
The following day, a circular structural problem commences, which those who have not experienced it tend to disbelieve. The primary funding stream for the third sector in Spain, the 0.7% personal income tax allocation, requires that the entity be legally established at least three years prior to the publication of the call for applications. Among the assessment criteria, it includes the entity's experience in programmes of a similar nature to the one proposed. In state cultural grants, minimum seniority is not required, yet experience and the track record demonstrated are also scored.
To access primary funding, one must have existed for three years; to score well, one must have previously performed the actions one proposes to undertake. For the first three years, a new entity is, by definition, excluded from that opportunity. 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.
Having said this, the requirement is not a whim. It is public money. Administrations have suffered fraud: shell entities established to capture subsidies, programmes that were funded but never executed. Requiring seniority and experience reduces that risk. Those who demand its removal without further consideration have not contemplated who pays the price of such abuse.
What matters is the effect that this filter produces unintentionally. A system that demands a prior track record selects only that which already exists. It neither rewards nor punishes merit: it simply cannot evaluate what has not yet had the opportunity to occur. 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 endowments.
It is said that in this sector everything functions through contacts, that without political or economic relationships, one cannot begin. I have heard that phrase many times, and today I believe it confuses the symptom with the cause. Contacts 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 requested of it, the only thing that can substitute for it is for someone to vouch for it: an institution that endorses it, a trustee with experience, a telephone call. The network does not circumvent the track record requirement; it supplements it. And wherever 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 possess a network. A modest one: artists, galleries, curators, institutional contacts, people who answer the telephone. 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.
This connects with a subject I explore in my research. In the article published with Adolfo Cortés García, we distinguish between possessing legitimacy—the recognised right to be in the field, for one's work to even be a candidate for evaluation—and possessing power, understood as the effective capacity for a statement to circulate and be sustained. 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, recognition from those who understand—and possess none of the latter. Without the latter, legitimacy reaches nowhere. It is not that it is not recognised; 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 starvation cycle of the third sector: funders do not wish to pay for structure, only for activity, so entities declare minimal structural costs; with minimal structure, they cannot grow, professionalise, or prepare increasingly demanding justifications. A new entity arrives at its first call for applications without a track record and without the administrative capacity to compete for it. 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 the matter. However, I do see the direction that would be reasonable: specific entry-level lines, with small amounts and proportionate justification, designed for entities without a history; 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; in a new entity, that is all there is; funding structure without hesitation, because an entity without administration is not more austere: it is more fragile.
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, it is prudent, and it carries a cost that does not appear in any statistic: we do not know what has failed to occur. The entities that never started leave no annual report.
An 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