A climate action network has a list of 10 reasons why activism requires money. As it passes these milestones, unencumbered by money, the See Through Network has discovered cash-free activism is not only possible, but transparency is just one of its many unanticipated advantages. 

This article describes how the See Through Network, seeking to speed up carbon drawdown without a bank account, is breaking what many (including itself when it started) believe to be inviolable commandments, carved in stone, summarised as ‘You Need Money’.

Things Activists Need Money For

Before launching in 2021, the founders of the See Through Network knew they’d need money for their project to succeed.

The ambition of the Network’s Goal – Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping The Inactive Become Active – suggested success would require quite a lot of money.

As their project progressed, the Network compiled a list, summarising why money was essential.

The See Through Network happened to be a climate action organization, but The Ten Requirements apply to any form of activism, where the core mission is anything other than making money or, where shareholder value is measured is anything other than dollars and cents.

The Ten Requirements condensed all the line items that might appear in a charity or NGO budget into ten short phrases. 

Unlike The Ten Commandments, they follow a sequence. Number 1 addresses the first requirement, Number 10 the most ambitious. 

The Ten Requirements

Activists need money to:

1. Pay ‘hard’ costs 
2. Manage volunteers 
3. Engage participants 
4. Build & maintain IT
5. Have measurable impact
6. Create original content
7. Gain social media reach
8. Engage influencers
9. Have others pay volunteers
10. Operate at scale

The See Through Network compiled The Ten Requirements following:

• Internal discussions
• Researching other activist groups, both failures and successes
• Advice sought from outside experts
• Unsolicited advice from people considering themselves experts
• Hundreds of people it engaged with during the course of its activism, from local volunteers to multinationals

Anything missing?

For clarity, here’s some detail on what The Ten Requirements cover:

1. Pay ‘hard’ costs = ‘unavoidable’ costs for any legal entity operating in the modern world, e.g. company incorporation fees, accountancy, web hosting etc.
2. Manage volunteers = many NGOs and charities depend on volunteers, but the people managing them are paid, as without professional supervision, volunteers would lack motivation, direction and discipline.
3. Engage participants =  activism requires the targeting and involvement of a specific audience. With so much noise and competition, this doesn’t come cheap.  
4. Build & maintain IT =  even a website needs an expert. Anything more complex, like databases or apps must require even greater professional expertise.
5. Have measurable impact =  activism is futile without real-world and online impact being measured. Monitoring engagement requires paying for professional skills.
6. Create original content =  breaking through social media noise requires unique, exclusive, bespoke, eye-catching, memorable video and audio content. ‘AI slop’ has created an even greater premium for human professional content creators.
7. Gain social media reach = in the attention economy, reach is measured in ‘eyeballs’. Social media’s business model depends on charging money for access to your target audience.
8. Engage influencers =  any significant impact is impossible without the endorsement of the powerful, whether celebrities, politicians, brands or business leaders
9. Have others pay volunteers =  ‘paying volunteers’ is a contradiction, unless you can convince a 3rd party to pay your volunteers to do what they’re already doing with no strings.
10. Operate at scale =  the bigger and more complex the operation, the more money will be required to stop it collapsing.

If you think The Ten Requirements doesn’t cover all the important things activists need money for, or disagree with the sequence, please let the See Through Network know and they’ll update/refine the list.

Just one more thing…

By mid-2025, four and a half years after launch, the See Through Network achieved the first eight of the Ten Requirements.

Without any money – literally, without a bank account.

If you’re sceptical (The Ten Requirements lists the good reasons you have to be sceptical), read on.

If you’re a busy person in a hurry, jump to The Ten Rebuttals at the bottom of this article, summarising progress so far.

If you’re convinced you ‘know’ activism requires money and would rather not challenge your conviction with contradictory evidence, thanks for reading this far.

Of course everyone needs money

When See Through Network’s founders first discussed their activist project in early 2021, they started by articulating their Goal. 

After much debate, they distilled their ambition into ten words:

Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active

Goal defined, they reviewed current activist groups in the field of decarbonisation, including:

• Science-based initiatives like their inspiration Project Drawdown
• UN programmes like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
• Political movements like Europe’s Green Parties
• Established environmental groups like The Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, The Sierra Club
• New direct-action groups like Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain
• Global South-focused initiatives like The Climate Network, Forest People’s Programme.

Defining its role, the See Through Network triangulated an approach that neither duplicated nor competed with existing activist groups.

As the See Through Network’s ‘Unique Selling Points’ emerged, it set up a website and published its:

1. distinctive ‘Transparent Trojan Horse’ Methodology, 
2. rationale behind its transparent branding, to reflect A
3. ‘target audience’ analysis
4. taxonomy to categorize content, essential in the age of AI

Money, Carbon & Transparency

Transparency quickly emerged as a key feature of the See Through mission.

Climate politics is complex, involving many competing interests. Most, however, at some point boil down to choosing between the long-term survival of human civilization and the short-term boosting of bank accounts. When the choice is between making money and reducing carbon, money nearly always prevails.

Sometimes, there’s no need to choose between them, but realpolitik often defies logic. Even when renewable energy is far cheaper than fossil fuel, for example, governments continue to constrain the former and subsidise the latter.

Fine words cost nothing, so this brutal truth hard is often hard to spot. When choices already involve many interconnecting tradeoffs, it’s particularly easy to camouflage the Money>Carbon truism in fig leaves, painted with greenwash.

A visiting alien might be baffled why this planet’s dominant species favours an abstract thing it made up 5,000 years ago (money) over a critical chemical element all life of earth has been made of for 3.5 billion years (carbon), but we all normalise it.

Making money nearly always requires ‘information asymmetry’, i.e. sellers make money by withholding certain information from buyers. Examples include protecting IP with patents or concealing it in ‘black boxes’, storing data behind paywalls, or investing based on private research.

If the climate problem intimately connects money and information asymmetry, the See Through Network increasingly saw the logic that climate solutions must use radical transparency to bridge this gap.

But if money is part of the climate problem, won’t requiring money make it harder for climate activists seeking solutions?

This logic became increasingly nagging.

Act First, Pay Later

Still, the See Through’s launch team believed in the The Ten Requirements. They considered how to fund their activities. L any other activists, NGOs and charities, they found fundraising took up more and more of their time and energy, leaving less and less for their core mission.

The team was fortunate to include people with a wide range of experiences in different forms of fundraising: AI startups seeking venture capital, filmmakers pitching to broadcasters and film funds, charities seeking grants, various scales of self-funding businesses.

They concluded the most practical approach would be to prove the concept before addressing funding.  If any funder would require evidence their money wouldn’t be wasted, first provide the proof, they reckoned.

China’s arch-pragmatist leader Deng Xiaoping often quoted a Chinese proverb celebrating pragmatism – ‘Crossing the river by feeling for the stones’. Having defined their decarbonisation destination in the Goal, the See Through team set about feeling for some stones.

Acting first, deferring money questions, they made progress. Their core challenge was the same facing any activist group. For businesses, money was the key metric. For activists, money was a means and not an end. ‘Success’ therefore meant:

1. Maximising time and effort spent in pursuing the Goal
2. Minimising time and effort spent raising and disbursing the money derived from 1

Stumbling across gold mines

Network founders included both entrepreneurs who’d run profitable businesses and seasoned creatives, who’d pitched for limited funding. Both favoured the idea of generating its own income over joining the crowds of supplicants chasing ‘free’ money. 

As it experimented, See Through stumbled across several potential ‘gold mines’. 

Network volunteers with entrepreneurial backgrounds developed plans to monetise them. It was agreed that self-funding could be much more efficient, and less time-sucking, than constantly pitching for third-party money.

See Through News’ first experiment hit potential pay dirt. Conceived as a piece of ‘street theatre’ to engage climate activists, it developed into The Think Game.  

Its prototype was a hit with a Green Party peer and various Green party activists in Wiltshire. Tests on retirees in Cumbria went even better. By the time See Through News attended COP26 in Glasgow, it has been further refined. 

As designed, The Think Game worked like a charm on ordinary Glaswegians, immigrant Nigerian nurses, Canadian climate activists, medical bagpipers and the world’s most active climate activists. It even worked with a German responding in Chinese, quizzed by Beijinger with 10 minutes’ training.

Word got around. Business people saw the early versions and alerted their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) teams:

• After a live demo zoom call, Epson Europe’s marketing team immediately offered £3,000 to conduct The Think Game at their European HQ to ‘raise employee awareness’.
• A veteran FTSE 500 CEO offered to introduce The Think Game to his fellow big business bosses for employee training.
• The world’s 9th biggest bank requested a live demo for the ESG team at their European & Asia HQ. 

They were also interested in See Through News’ other outreach and education projects:

• How To Live Without Plastic
• The Superhero Drawing Competition
• The See Through News Newspaper Review Project
• 1 Sunday Morning, 4 Films
• The Vox Pox Project
• The Learn Game
• Concert in the Key of C
• Global Reporter Intensive Training (GRIT) 

Despite – or possibly because – each was designed primarily to engage and interest ordinary people, each of these projects turned out to tick multiple boxes for corporate or government funders of outreach projects.

Many of the See Through team had spent the majority of their working lives hustling for funding rather than doing the thing the funding was for.  They started joking that these See Through projects, designed to reduce carbon, appeared to inadvertently and effortlessly make money.

But they also started becoming wary of money’s unconsidered disadvantages.

Money’s downsides

As each gold mine appeared, it became more apparent that making money came at the cost of the See Through Goal. 

Anyone who’s ticked boxes or pressed hot buttons when filling in a grant application form knows ‘free’ money comes with strings attached. 

• Each additional string pulls you further from the shortest route to your Goal. 
• Each pull deflects you from your purpose.
• Each deflection dissipates your volunteer resources.

The Network’s journalists, lawyers and accountants volunteers were used to ‘following the money’. They warned money is a means of control as well as liberation. As one pithily put it, ‘Money is sludge, as well as lubricant’. 

Internally, debate shifted from how to make or apply for money, to whether money was actually necessary.

The Network was making rapid progress. The more it achieved without a bank account, the less urgent the need to have one, let alone fill it with money, became.

Meanwhile…

Starting with See Through News, new arms were spun off, each specialising in different aspects of the network’s overarching ambition to measurably reduce carbon. 

Year by year, they evolved into the See Through Network current four arms:

• See Through News (est. 2021): The original entity, now focused on journalistic, outreach and educational activities. 

• See Through Games (2022): The Think Game inspired The Learn Game, which inspired The Act Game. This suite of interconnected real-world games were spun off into a specialist arm to develop scalable online versions.

• See Through Carbon (2023): To manage anything, not just carbon reduction, you must first measure it properly. The Network became aware of the degree to which commercial carbon accounting standards had been suborned by the greenwash industry. Like financial ratings agencies before the 2008 crash, competitive business models favoured awarding the lowest number at the lowest cost, at the cost of accurately measuring real-world carbon footprints. See Through Carbon (STC) was set up to fill this gap as the Network’s ‘technical’ arm. STC is an ecosystem providing accurate, free, open-source, transparent carbon reporting, delivering auditable, granular data, currently developing 7 Pilots.

• See Through Together (2024): Building on See Through News’ success in exploiting Facebook’s free infrastructure to increase reach at no cost, See Through Together was created to apply the same methodology to the world’s #2 and #3 platforms, YouTube and Instagram. By mid-2025 the See Through Network’s total global reach had passed 1 million. It continues to grow at the same pace.

Money’s Upsides

In its interactions with businesses, the See Through Network learned that the quicker people are to dismiss the possibility of achieving anything meaningful without money, the less likely they are to consider its benefits.

The Money FAQs section on the See Through News website pointed out these benefits in theory. The rest of the See Through Network now experienced them in reality.

Milestone by milestone, the Network gradually realised that the needs it had listed in The Ten Requirements were not in fact true. Rather than facts based on relevant experience, they were predictions based on irrelevant experience. 

In short, no one claiming any of The Ten Requirements had actually ever tried achieving them without money. So how could they ‘know’?

As each Ten Requirements milestone shrank in the rear view mirror, those that lay ahead became less intimidating.

Not everyone agreed. One Trustee resigned over the funding issue shortly after Requirement 5 Have measurable impact was passed. 

But as the Network’s zero-budget achievements began creating a virtuous cycle, unanticipated advantages emerged.

The ethical advantages are summarised in See Through Carbon’s strapline ‘If you can’t buy integrity, why should you be able to sell it?’. 

Securing moral high ground, however, turned out to be just the most obvious. Practical benefits include:

• Agility, Flexibility, Efficiency: Operating unencumbered by money raised productivity by an order of magnitude. No money means no time and energy spent fundraising, disbursing, accounting, negotiating contracts and auditing.
• Creativity: not having money makes you focus on alternative means of effecting change. Storytelling and framing are great carrots. Greed, fear and deadlines are great sticks.  Non-fiat currencies include stories and eyeballs.  Money is neither the only, nor the oldest mediator of transaction. We still barter constantly.
• Motivation: almost everyone, regardless of wealth, status, or expertise, has some time to ‘volunteer’. Faced with 999 charities with bank accounts who spend most of their time fundraising to pay themselves, some prefer donating their time and skills to the 1 that doesn’t.
• Security: as the See Through Network expanded its operations globally, volunteers in autocracies faced new challenges. Representing a foreign-owned NGO gathering data can be high risk for local volunteers. Security services, however, like journalists and lawyers, tend to ‘follow the money’. They rapidly lose interest when there’s no financial paper trail.
• Branding: Many businesses fund charitable arms; very few take the reverse path. ‘Paying’ for itself without money makes the See Through Network stand out. If stories are the oldest currency, being zero-budget in a money-obsessed world is, ironically, priceless.
• Pragmatic: Managing without money is  a proof of concept for See Through News’ practical, street-smart, real-world approach to the task of carbon drawdown.

The more experience See Through Network’s global team gained of operating cash-free, the more attuned their ears became in understanding what people really meant when they asserted that what they were doing was naive, foolish, or impossible. 

If we have Money Goggles strapped on at birth, volunteering for See Through Network gradually removed them. Eyes began to perceive previously hidden visions.  Ears heard previously inaudible frequencies. Brains detected new emphases.

When people say: ‘You need money’, See Through Network volunteers think: ‘You need money’

The Ten Rebuttals

Since 2021, the See Through Network, to its surprise and delight, has worked its way through The Ten Requirements.

Here’s a brief history of how it has passed The Ten Requirements milestones without recourse to money:

1. Pay ‘hard’ costs: Spring 2021

From the start, See Through Network donors/volunteers have directly paid its ‘hard costs’ as and when required. Web hosting, telecoms, legal incorporation fees, project costs, event travel and accommodation expenses etc. have all been covered without the need to transfer money in and out of a See Through bank account.

Most of these donations fall well below the £30 threshold the UK government requires to qualify for ‘Gift Aid’ tax relief. Like tax deductions for registered charities, this benefit is moot, as the Network has no costs against which to claim relief. This also spares the Network the additional costs of registering as a charity (See Through News and See Through Carbon are limited-by-guarantee companies, registered in England & Wales).

The Network has not had to waste resources to itemise these ‘hard cost’ donations, but estimates that after four years they cumulatively amount to low thousands of dollars, covered by dozens of donors/volunteers. As the Network expands, they become easier to cover.

2. Manage volunteers: Summer 2021 

Projects developed for launch at November’s COP 26 required a wide range of expertises, including: 

• Social media strategy
• Logistics
• Volunteer coordination
• Video production
• Live streaming
• Original music composition and performance
• Teaching resources for primary school curriculum
• Safe facilitation of children’s activities
• Audio recording, field engineering and mixing
• Graphics
• Web development

See Through News found experts in all these fields, and recruited further volunteers from around the world when it deployed its trial projects in Glasgow.

3. Engage participants:  Autumn 2021

• A core staff of four self-funded two weeks at COP 26. They supervised dozens of volunteers engaged in various projects, from a mobile home parked at the invitation of a venue 200m from the Green Zone security perimeter.  
• Over the fortnight the team recorded hundreds of Think Game players and Superhero Drawing Competition entries, and spread them via its social media accounts. 
• Another team live-streamed a Concert in the Key of C featuring original musical collaboration between the founder of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and Scotland’s premier Chinese-speaking bagpiper to viewers around the world.

4. Build & maintain IT:  2022

• Volunteers web designers built and continue to maintain The See Through News website. 
• A separate group of volunteers built and continue to maintain the See Through Carbon website.
• Another group of database experts, coders, and AI designers, in the UK, USA, Uganda and the Netherlands is now creating and maintaining See Through Carbon’s Pilot database, website and data collection app.

5. Have measurable impact: 2023

• The See Through Carbon Competition produced two winners, from Mexico and Nigeria, using the prize fund of US$500,000 worth of supercomputer-grade cloud computing to reduce carbon in the Global South. 
• The prize fund was an unsolicited donation in the form of a credit that expired in 5 months, later recounted in a See Through Together podcast.
• 1 Sunday Morning, 4 Films, a ‘unique experiment in community filmmaking’, ran for two months in Finchley, North London, involving dozens of local volunteers and hundreds of local schoolchildren, culminating in a World Premiere at the UK’s oldest surviving purpose-built cinema, built in 1910 
• The See Through News Global Reporter Intensive Training (GRIT) programme remotely trained 150 10-15 year-old students at schools for HIV orphans in the Mathare slum district of Nairobi, Kenya. Over 6 days, veteran TV professionals instructed them in the basics of video storytelling, produced 15 short films in teams of five. Two films won an international ‘Junior Hackathon’ competition seeking ideas from children to create businesses supporting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

6. Create original content: 2024

• A team of social media, filmmaking, advertising, SEO and digital marketing experts collaborated on launching the See Through Together YouTube channel. 
• See Through Together’s Playlists feature popular, frequently-shared genres (podcasts, music, property shows, traditional crafts, humour, education etc.)
• 100% of all content is original, created by professionals. None is AI-generated.
• Within a year, with no ‘boosting’ or 3rd-party endorsement, the channel ‘organically’ had more than 200,000 views, and is growing fast.

7. Gain social media reach:  Spring 2025

• Three years after its first experiments with community Facebook Groups, total global membership of See Through Network-administered Groups passed one million.
• Dozens of volunteers around the world moderate thousands of posts every day in countries including the UK, South Africa, Australia, The Philippines, Ireland and Nigeria. Some groups have memberships of more than 200% of their total populations.
• Unlike most climate activist groups’ social media reach, the million-plus people that make up See Through Network’s reach are ordinary people, who’ve built trust in the See Through brand over long periods. They don’t consider themselves ‘activists’, but accept the science and reality of human-induced climate change and feel powerless to do anything about it. I.e. the Network’s target audience  of ‘Unwilling Inactivists’.

8. Engage influencers: Summer 2025

• See Through Carbon’s ‘Who We Are’ page features a few of the pro bono volunteers who have contributed to the Network’s growth in a wide variety of ways.
• See Through Carbon’s Articles page includes three Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) with consultancies engaged in carbon reduction, in the UK, Uganda and Rwanda.
• In August 2025, one of Uganda’s three COP negotiators was appointed as Director of Government Relations, Uganda. Dr. Jibril Semakura Owomugisha’s MoU pledges to win government endorsement for See Through Carbon’s Pilot data collection and See Through News sensitisation projects in Uganda.

9. Have others pay volunteers: TBC.  

The Memoranda of Understanding with commercial and individual third parties on the See Through Carbon website specify the mechanism designed to enable this.

10. Operate at scale: TBC.

When and how this milestone is passed depends on your quantification of ‘at scale’. The See Through Network has various metrics for this, with different numbers of zeroes. You are of course welcome to benchmark your own, and let the Network know.

Still certain you need money to do good?

Reaching No. 8 on The Ten Requirements without a bank account may not have convinced you that effective activism is possible without money.

Fortunately, convincing people has become less important to the See Through Network. Each milestone passed means it can show, rather than tell. Demonstrating real-world achievements with hard numbers, reduces the need to convince sceptics.

• As pragmatists, the See Through Network knows there’s no need to convince everyone, only enough people  to advance its Goal at any given point.The Network is designed to attract visionary leaders, not timid followers.

• As fans of the scientific method, the See Through Network acknowledges the possibility that ticking off the first 8 of The Ten Requirements may prove nothing more than it’s a ‘monkey climbing a tree to reach the moon‘. It also notes that having been wrong on numbers 1-8 diminishes sceptics’ credibility on items 9 & 10.

• As students of behavioural psychology, the See Through Network knows the futility of using evidence or logic to sway people with an emotional attachment to a particular narrative.

So far, so good.

If you’d like to contribute to any part of the See Through Network in any way, email:

volunteer@seethroughnews.org

Or share this article widely.