This story was originally written for the Substack, Civic Being, and is republished with permission from the author.

In 1874, a bold bishop and an inventive businessman paired up to build a movement that reshaped civic life for nearly half a century.

And yet, most of us have never heard of it.

The 1870s were a fertile moment in US history, shaped by the social and economic upheaval that followed the Civil War. It was a time of flux between paradigms, when old institutions were showing signs of decay and the established powers were neither agile nor innovative enough to chart new paths for flourishing. It was the cultural equivalent of that moment in a creature’s metamorphosis when it is no longer what it used to be, and not yet what it’s becoming.

Soft power was in flux. The national vision was fractured. Tensions mounted between progress and politics. It was a prime opportunity for audacious visionaries to wrangle the forces at play:

• Paradigms were shifting. Scientific and technological achievements were destabilizing long-held ideas about purpose, design, and humanity’s place in the world. Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man were upending familiar truths, while the spread of railroads was standardizing life around timetables and machines.
• Religion was wrestling with reform. The spiritual aftershocks of postmillennialism were rippling through congregations. Many Protestant leaders called for moral action in the public square, urging believers to fight for abolition, temperance, education, and other moral reforms as a religious imperative.
• Public education was budding but limited.The public education movement was well underway, with elementary schools established in every state. Yet only a small percentage of Americans, about 2-3%, completed secondary school—mostly wealthy white children and women training to become teachers.
• The middle class was emerging. Despite a severe international economic crisis, many workers were accumulating time and resources for the first time. Emboldened by industrial growth, millions of Americans were relishing their newfound disposable income and free time (albeit this is 1874, and leisure activities outside of major cities are largely limited to quilting bees, barn dances, and the ever-thrilling game of whist).

The conditions were ripe for cultural reinvention, and John Heyl Vincent and Lewis Miller intended to make full use of them.

Not Possibly Your Grandma’s Summer Camp

Vincent was a Lutheran bishop respected for his leadership and advocacy in the Sunday School reform movement, and Miller was a businessman best known for inventing an early iteration of the lawn mower (and, fun fact, for being Thomas Edison’s father-in-law).

In the summer of 1874, the two opened a summer training program on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in western New York. They believed that grappling with civic issues was essential to leading a moral life, and that religious tenets could be reconciled with budding scientific consensus through study. While originally created to provide lifelong learning opportunities for Sunday School teachers, the program’s unique blend of recreation, morality, politics, and ideas quickly caught on beyond the parish.

Soon, “Chautauqua” became synonymous with a gathering that blended civic issues with science, education, art, and leisure. Think TED Talks, NPR, and The Great Courses all wrapped up in what can only be described as adult summer camp for the well-meaning and well-to-do. Theodore Roosevelt, a repeat participant, once described the Chautauquas as “typical of America at its best”.

The headquarters (still active today) spent decades as the epicenter for politicians, artists, musical acts, spiritual leaders, explorers, and intellectuals. Participants might start their day with a swim or stroll through nature, end it with a symphony in the open air amphitheater, and spend the time in between discussing “The Uses of Mathematics” or the “Nationalization of Industry in Europe”. Crucially, the goal wasn’t to take a stand on any particular issue, but to create space for civic study and reflection at a time when there weren’t many places for most people to do so.

It was important to Vincent and Miller that this new, integrated brand of civic culture be open to all (or at least, to more than could make the trek upstate). So in 1878, they launched their “Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle” (CLSC), a nationwide reading program for adults to study and discuss civically-relevant ideas and current issues in local groups. It was a sort of proto-Oprah’s Book Club, but with the depth of a liberal arts degree.

Participants received curated books like The Iliad, with instructions reminding students not to “make reading these stories hard” and “relax yourself to the swing of them.” Because there’s nothing like reading The Iliad to soothe the end of your day. Students also received monthly publications on topics like “The People who Live in Algiers”, “The Actions of Glaciers”, and “Child Labor and Some of the Results”. Basically, Vincent and Miller had convinced hundreds of thousands of people to voluntarily spend their free time doing civic homework; how’s that for an American Dream?

As counterintuitive as it may sound in our culture of TLDRs and 60-second highlight reels, CLSC was an indisputable success, and paved the way for lasting change. By 1930, tens of thousands of participants had completed a formal four year course, graded by volunteer professors across the US, with many more participating in their local reading groups.

Importantly, at a time when most people weren’t completing secondary school, nearly 65% of the participants mulling over the adventures of both Homer and massive blocks of ice were women. CLSC is often cited by historians as a gateway to progressive Women’s Clubs, liberal Protestantism, and serious social reforms like suffrage and temperance. It provided a social and educational infrastructure for civic action.

In the decades after its first convening, Chautauquas evolved even further, supporting independent spin-offs built around the CLSC and summer camp models. By the early 1900s, there were hundreds of fully operational independent Chautauquas across the United States. There was probably one near you. And in 1904, an ambitious businessman decided to take the party on the road, creating “Circuit Chautauquas” that lured rural townsfolk in with their signature blend of entertainment and education, reaching as many as 12,000 towns in a single summer.

By the end of their era, Chautauquas were everywhere. They had successfully reshaped the conventions and imaginaries of civic culture. On their 50th anniversary, in the summer of 1924, some reports suggest that as many as 40 million Americans, or about a third of the population at the time, participated in a Chautauqua. That’s more than turned out to vote in the 2024 presidential primaries.

Who Killed the Chautauqua?

For nearly 50 years, Chautauquas were the bedrock of civic life for many, crafted to (some of) the needs of the late 19th century. And they served their purpose pretty well, until those needs started to change.

While irrefutably imperfect and built to suit the white Protestant gaze, Chautauquas seeded a new kind of civic engagement for millions at a time when there were very few options. Before most people had telephones or hot water, they were offering a grassroots, independent, women-driven, middle-class-fuelled, self-organizing, vibrant civic culture that created space for art, science, and religion to coexist. Not bad for a couple of guys with no government backing, no college degrees, and no one’s permission.

And yet, most of us have never heard of it.

Worse still, most of us have never been invited to a festival of ideas in our town’s center where we could simultaneously talk geological formations, organize for women’s rights, and soak in a symphony. So what happened?

The short answer: a crashing economy, the rise of home radios, and no clear plan for cultural succession.

Culture is a living conversation, and by 1930, that conversation had changed. The Great Depression left little space for indulgence, no matter how noble the cause. Public education and libraries had expanded, filling some of the gaps that once made Chautauquas feel urgent. Radios brought news, stories, and music straight into the home. “Talkies”, or films with sound, took over the silver screen, and the rise of mass automobiles made it possible to drive to a nearby town to see them.

Americans needed a civic culture tuned to the realities of the time, and the Chautauqua was imprinted by a different agenda and social order. It became the same kind of relic of the past that it was initially constructed to subvert. And so it faded into the footnotes of the parts of history that the powerful aren’t particularly incentivized to tell us about (we’ll talk suppression of success stories from the unsanctioned self-organizing masses another day).

It wasn’t so much a failure as a sunsetting: an idea that had completed a cycle. Unfortunately, there was no equally ubiquitous civic operating system waiting in the wings to take its place. Civic culture refracted in hundreds of directions, as it’s done throughout much of human history. It spread across rotary clubs, campuses, nonprofits, salons, and social movements; all potent forces, but none with the same connective infrastructure or unifying scale.

Chautauquas worked because they were designed at—and to—a moment in time when the conditions were aligned. Formal systems were in transition, cultural forces were in flux, and there were enough people looking for somewhere to put their energy to keep them alive. They’re a fascinating case study in what happens when people imagine outside of the lines, radically distribute ownership, integrate ways of being, and build flexible systems that both recognize and reshape the status quo.

And most importantly, they worked because someone decided to build them.

A thriving civic culture isn’t promised, yet a healthy democracy depends on it. Without it, our futures will favor the few already in power. As our lives are sculpted by increasingly complex ideas and forces, we need systems for collective sensemaking that go beyond voting, town halls, and marches. We need to get brave and brazen in creating intentional, ground-up systems that provide public opportunities to explore civic issues, make worldshaping ideas legible, and invite the public to co-create what happens next. We need to imagine it, build it, and rebuild it—again and again.

As a society, our goal shouldn’t be to design solutions that are everlasting, but to continuously invest and reinvest in informed, living civic infrastructure built to reflect the realities of the communities and eras that they serve. The form may change, but a culture that uplifts public imagination, knowledge, agency, and belonging in civic spaces should be a fundamental characteristic of our democracy. Today, in many ways, we’re seeing the consequences that can happen when it isn’t.

There is no well-established career path, government department, or sector dedicated to creating or maintaining the kind of civic culture we need.

If we want it, we’re going to have to build it ourselves.

The Trump administration is again attempting to eliminate federal funding for before-school, afterschool, and summer programs for underserved and low-income students. This time the push is part of a broader budget proposal that would gut the educational safety net for millions of the nation’s most vulnerable children.

This is not a new crisis. For years, federal investment in programs that support children outside of the traditional school day—broadly called out-of-school time programs—has stagnated while demand has soared, leaving states, local governments, community-based organizations, and families to absorb the costs. Now, the Trump administration wants to slash federal investment even further. Given the risks to federal funds, some states have been innovating in response, but those efforts, however promising, are patching a hole that federal policy created and keeps making bigger.

It is, in short, a plan to rebrand federal disinvestment as local control, end equity requirements, and leave underresourced communities to fend for themselves.

One of Trump’s targets is the Nita M. Lowey 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) grant. Currently funded at $1.329 billion, it is the only dedicated federal funding stream for out-of-school time support. The administration’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2027 would zero it out entirely, along with 16 other Education Department grant programs collectively funded at $6.5 billion last fiscal year. Also on the chopping block are funds for teacher training, English language learners, civil rights oversight, affordable housing, preschool development, childcare, food security, AmeriCorps, and more. In place of the deep cuts, Trump proposes to create a single “Make Education Great Again” (MEGA) block grant of just $2 billion, offering a fraction of the funds with few regulated uses.

The math is not subtle, and neither are the politics. The block grant strategy comes straight out of Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint driving much of the Trump administration’s agenda. It is, in short, a plan to rebrand federal disinvestment as local control, end equity requirements, and leave underresourced communities to fend for themselves.

Stagnate, Consolidate, Deregulate, Eliminate

The need for out-of-school time programs has long outpaced what’s available, and federal investment has not kept up. Research by Afterschool Alliance shows that a staggering 77 percent of the 29.6 million children whose parents want afterschool programs and 51 percent of the 24.6 million children looking for summer experiences are locked out by barriers such as cost, availability, or transportation. These programs are a lifeline that provides places for children to learn and grow when school is out and parents are at work.

While 21st CCLC grants are designed to prioritize high-poverty, low-performing schools to reach the children who need help most, stagnation and inflation have stretched resources thin. In written testimony to a House Appropriations Subcommittee in April, Afterschool Alliance Executive Director Jodi Grant noted that only one in three qualified requests for 21st CCLC funding are approved, not because the other programs don’t merit support, but because the federal pool of money is simply too small.

The administration’s answer is to make the pool smaller still.

Trump’s MEGA block grant is framed as giving control to the states and parents, but it would function primarily as a tool for deregulation and defunding. Unlike the 21st CCLC formula grant, which has clear rules about who it must serve, the MEGA block grant would strip guardrails away and let states spend the money however they choose. Afterschool and summer programs would have to compete with regular school-day needs for a much smaller pool of money—a fight they are unlikely to win.

At an April 28 Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing about the proposed budget, Senator Susan Collins of Maine warned that the cuts and consolidation under the MEGA grant “will undermine the goals of helping our K-12 schools.” Subcommittee Chair Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia pushed back too, noting that 21st CCLC grants “play a great role and really fill the gaps” in her state, where “there’s not enough childcare…and afterschool care is really hard to get.” She asked Education Secretary Linda McMahon directly if the MEGA grant would let each state “make the determination as to how important” afterschool programs are. McMahon confirmed they would decide if that’s “where they have their need,” meaning whether a child can access afterschool programs will depend on the political priorities of their state government.

Dismantling a Civic Network

21st CCLC is not just a funding stream. It is a civic network of schools, nonprofits, libraries, faith groups, businesses, and individuals working together to support children when the school day ends. Even while vastly underfunded, it supports about 1.4 million children, 65 percent of whom are economically disadvantaged, 16 percent are English language learners, and 12 percent have disabilities.

In her testimony, Jodi Grant described how local partnerships make the program work. “Many local afterschool and summer programs are successful because they draw on the support of local organizations,” she said. “These partnerships leverage additional resources, increase volunteer involvement, and enrich the programs.”

While most 21st CCLC funding goes to public school districts, more than 1,100 nonprofit, faith-based, and community organizations are direct grant recipients. Under a block grant model, Grant warned, those organizations “that have earned the trust of local families…would lose their funding, not because they failed, but because a block grant structure would be used to support only school day activities.”

The threat to 21st CCLC funding fits a broader pattern. Across diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, public service infrastructure, and community-based organizations, the administration has repeatedly targeted the civic institutions that support people when other resources fall short.

The Stakes Are High

Youth-serving programs are already struggling with rising costs and stagnant federal investment, and the proposed cuts would make that worse.

The bipartisan policy nonprofit First Focus on Children described Trump’s budget as “slashing critical programs for children and families to pay for defense and tax cuts for the wealthy.” Its analysis found that across the 20 largest discretionary programs that benefit children, the administration would cut $5.826 billion—a 5.73 percent drop from fiscal year 2025 levels.

The Trump administration also tried to eliminate 21st CCLC funding in its previous budget proposal, only to be blocked by bipartisan opposition in Congress and pushback from advocates. Ultimately, a president’s budget proposal is a political wish list, not a final decision. Congress controls federal spending.

The real battleground is now the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, which must pass spending bills before September 30 to avoid a government shutdown. The Afterschool Alliance has been rallying lawmakers to defend the program and increase funding to $2.09 billion, and encourages people to contact their representatives to voice their support.

In May, a coalition of 11 Congressional lawmakers from eight states and Washington, DC, introduced the Afterschool for All Act (HR 8654) to reauthorize the 21st CCLC framework and grow its funding to $10 billion a year for a decade, paid for by a 1 percent increase in the corporate income tax rate. The goal is to put afterschool and summer programs on stable ground and beyond the reach of any single administration’s political agenda.

When States Stop Waiting

The recurring threat of defunding has catalyzed some states to build their own, more durable funding for out-of-school time programs. The Children’s Funding Project reported in 2025 that states are “increasingly using specific sources of revenue, separate from their general budgets, to provide stable, long-term funding for programs and services for children and youth outside of the K-12 school day.” Some are tapping lotteries, casinos, tobacco, and sports betting taxes, while others are trying more creative ways to provide out-of-school time.

New York City is taking steps toward universal childcare that folds in early learning, afterschool enrichment, and summer coverage. The city’s new “2-K” expansion, a partnership between Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul, pilots free year-round, full-day care for two-year-olds, open to all families regardless of income, occupation, or immigration status. The pilot launched with 2,000 seats in high-need neighborhoods, backed by $73 million in state funding the first year and $425 million the second, with plans for 12,000 citywide seats by 2027. Hochul has also pledged statewide universal 4-K and proposed a $1.7 billion boost for early childhood education and childcare across New York State.

Alaska and Vermont have both capitalized on cannabis as a funding source. In 2018, Alaska carved out part of its marijuana excise tax for afterschool programs focused on healthy youth development, generating about $2 million a year and currently supporting 10 multi-year grants. Vermont aimed higher in 2023, when it dedicated revenue from its 6 percent cannabis sales tax to expanding the availability of “robust, reliable, and affordable” out-of-school time programming, especially in underserved communities. In its first two fiscal years, Vermont’s cannabis tax generated over $15.6 million and funded 41 multi-year projects, with $9.7 million projected for fiscal year 2026. The state’s oversight report is clear that this money does not replace 21st CCLC or other funding, but complements it, allowing the state to support programs “of any level of size or readiness.”

Every time federal investment stagnates or shrinks, more programs close, more families lose access, and more children spend the hours outside of school without the educational support their parents want for them and their futures require.

North Carolina is pursuing a novel strategy to have tech companies pay for academic enrichment outside of school hours. The state is one of 22 with no dedicated funding for afterschool and summer programs, and the gap that has created is stark: four out of five children whose parents want them in an afterschool program can’t get a spot, leaving 664,000 kids without access. Two proposed bills would establish the Learning and Enrichment in Afterschool Program (LEAP) and fund it partly with money won in lawsuits against social media companies for harming young people. That effort runs alongside a separate legislative push to require parental consent for younger teens to use social media, with penalties of up to $50,000 per violation.

The Patchwork Is Not Enough

The children who need out-of-school time programs most—low-income, underserved, and who have the fewest alternatives when programs disappear—are not only in states willing to innovate. They live everywhere, including in places that have shown little interest in filling the gap. A patchwork of state-level workarounds, however creative, cannot replace a national commitment.

Every time federal investment stagnates or shrinks, more programs close, more families lose access, and more children spend the hours outside of school without the educational support their parents want for them and their futures require. Congress has stopped the Trump administration from gutting 21st CCLC funding before and can do so again—and advocates say this is the moment to go even further. The Afterschool for All Act offers a long-overdue vision of a decade of guaranteed increased funding. Whether Congress has the will to act on that vision remains to be seen.

When we tell the story of American democracy, we usually tell it as a story of movements and victories. A revolution. An abolition. A Civil Rights Act. Women’s suffrage. Marriage equality. We mark the moments when the pendulum swings and we declare progress.

But the real story—the one nonprofits have been living for 250 years—is messier. It’s not about winning. It’s about balancing. It’s about showing up in the space between extremes, knowing you’ll never permanently succeed, and doing the work anyway.

The Mosher Family: Recognizing and Acting on What Government Won’t  

In 1819, the Mosher family and their Quaker neighbors built something in Morrow County, OH, that the state refused to build: a network of safe passage for enslaved people seeking freedom. Underground routes ran through their county. Dozens of families risked fines and imprisonment to shelter fugitives—sometimes a dozen at a time.

But the real story—the one nonprofits have been living for 250 years—is messier. It’s not about winning. It’s about balancing. It’s about showing up in the space between extremes, knowing you’ll never fully succeed, and doing the work anyway.

But here’s the impermanent truth: people were often recaptured anyway. The system regularly failed. The Moshers’ maps and modest cabin couldn’t protect them. Yet the Moshers didn’t stop. After the passages, they built a new house in 1832, and kept going. Charles Mosher documented everything in a 1,000-page family manuscript to bear witness to what government would not acknowledge, what the market would not value, and what the law would not protect.

This is what nonprofit work really is: observing injustices that the dominant system denies, framing them as incompatible with human dignity, and acting despite knowing you cannot win completely. The Moshers knew slavery would not end because of their farm station. They did it anyway. That’s impermanence as commitment.

Hull House: The Danger of Grounding Too Rigidly

Jane Addams founded Hull House in 1889 to democratize access to culture, education, and civic participation. It was revolutionary. Settlement houses became the infrastructure through which immigrant communities—poor, working-class, often racialized people—gained footholds in American civic life.

But Hull House also embodied something else: the danger of grounding too tightly in one vision of what democracy should be.

Addams opposed unrestricted immigration. She supported eugenics. Hull House’s vision of “American” civic participation often meant assimilation: stripping immigrants of their own languages, traditions, and forms of knowledge in favor of a White, nationalist ideal of belonging. Ironically, the very institution designed to include marginalized people in civil society also worked to culturally erase them.

This is one of the nonprofit sector’s recurring failures: grounding so rigidly in our own vision of justice that we let go of the very communities we claim to serve. We become the corrective mechanism that over-corrects. We swing from one extreme (indifference to immigrant communities) to another (coercive assimilation).

Sarah Josepha Hale: When Women’s Rights Exclude Brown Women 

In nineteenth-century America, Sarah Josepha Hale wielded enormous power as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which had 150,000 subscribers and was widely read across the North and South. She advanced women’s education, published women writers, and founded institutions like the Seaman’s Aid Society. As the daughter of an American Revolutionary General and fundraiser for the Bunker Hill Memorial, she petitioned to proclaim Thanksgiving as a national holiday explicitly centered on women’s domestic labor and moral authority. In 1862, this was a radical claim that women’s work mattered enough to shape national culture.

But Thanksgiving, as Hale envisioned it, was a White woman’s holiday. It was built on the fetishization of Indigenous peoples and centered on a nationalist mythology that excluded women of color and immigrant women. She was an abolitionist, but her solution was to send Black people back to Africa. Her vision of women’s rights was grounded in the assumption that women’s proper sphere was domestic and moral, not political. When we celebrate what Hale, a working widow, achieved for women and families in terms of cultural influence and economic equality, we often disavow what she excluded.

This is impermanence in its most painful form: the recognition that even our victories are partial, that our focus on one community’s liberation often means the sacrifice of another’s.

Planned Parenthood: Sustaining Core Mission Through Transformation

Planned Parenthood was founded on a vision: that reproductive autonomy is essential to women’s freedom and dignity. That vision remains. But the organization has had to interrupt and transform its own assumptions repeatedly—about whom it was designed to serve, about the politics of abortion access, and about the limits of a clinical model divorced from broader justice work.

Planned Parenthood continues not because it has solved the issue of reproductive justice, but because it keeps reflecting on what it is not doing and what communities it is failing—and acting to adjust. It sustains its mission precisely by being willing to transform how it pursues and funds that mission.

This is the nonprofit sector at its best: repeating core commitments while interrupting and transforming the methods that no longer serve the mission.

Regional Theater: Artistic Vision Requires Economic Justice

The regional theater movement emerged in the 1960s as a democratic vision: that great art shouldn’t be confined to Broadway and coastal cities. That communities across America deserved access to world-class theater. That theater could be a civic institution, not just an entertainment commodity.

Fifty years later, regional theaters are collapsing. Not because the vision failed, but because the economic and political model was never sustainable. Artistic vision without economic justice leads to perpetual crisis at theaters like Victory Gardens in Chicago, which has struggled since 2020. Organizational structures that allow for abuse in the name of art eat their young, like Children’s Theatre of Minneapolis did for decades, only recently coming to terms with its abuse. Theater companies have had to let go of dreams of permanence and stability. Many are closing. Others are grounding in smaller, more sustainable models. Some, like Austin’s Rude Mechs, are challenging the very idea that a theater needs a building, a budget, and a season.

This is impermanence as reality: the recognition that even our most beautiful creations will not survive unchanged.

Nonprofits: Existing in the Paradox of Democratic Capitalism 

Here’s what 250 years of American nonprofits actually teaches us: philanthropy works in troubling, imperfect, but sometimes triumphant ways. Some generationally wealthy people are unexpectedly generous and open-minded, and a handful of social activists are rigid and selfish. Our relationship with each other is often a paradoxical, love-hate dynamic: We need them to supply the resources for our projects, they need us to assuage their guilt and give them purpose, but it’s hard to forget that the very existence of a donor class is at the root of the structural inequality nonprofits generally aim to ameliorate.

Capitalism, riddled with unfettered greed, creates immense wealth alongside immense suffering—by design. It doesn’t account for the people that the market deems unprofitable. The purpose of democracy is to elevate and empower voices otherwise left unheard and supply the basic needs otherwise unmet. And that’s why we must fight to maintain a dynamic and thriving nonprofit sector.

When a government system that barely provides a social safety net for its citizens fails (or refuses) to meet human need, nonprofits emerge. Ideally, we all work together for the betterment of all.

The Unending Work of Social Justice

This is where we need to be honest with each other: there is no permanent solution to inequality. There is no final victory for justice. The work is impermanent by definition.

This doesn’t mean the work is futile. It means the work is different from what we’ve been taught to expect. It’s not about reaching a destination. It’s about maintaining a balance.

The Moshers knew the Underground Railroad wouldn’t end slavery. Addams knew Hull House wouldn’t end poverty. Hale knew one holiday wouldn’t secure women’s rights. Regional theaters know their existence doesn’t solve the crisis of public memory and truth and culture.

They did the work anyway. They keep doing it anyway.

What the 250th Anniversary Demands

If we’re honest about what America’s 250 years have really been, we see not a story of progress but a story of balance, of perpetual correction, of impermanence as the fundamental condition of justice work. Perhaps what the nonprofit sector needs to offer the country right now is more immediate awareness of the actual daily struggles our constituents are going through. Not more certainty about what the “right” solution is, in terms of fidelity or impact or scalability, but sharing lived realities without the quick bite-sized solutions of fundraising rhetoric.

So, what do we need?

We need compassion. We need to honor the limitations of philanthropy and our ability to change human behavior, attitudes, and conditions. We need reflection. We need to cultivate an honest reckoning with where we’ve over-corrected, where we’ve excluded, where we’ve grounded too rigidly in our own vision and lost sight of the communities we claim to serve. We need commitment to each other’s welfare—including staff, volunteers, and yes, our donors—and centering wellbeing as the core of mission-based work. We need commitment to the person in front of us, to the communities we live in and we’re accountable to, to the essential work of maintaining balance when everything wants to swing to extremes.

For 250 years, the nonprofit sector has embodied an existential function in a democratic capitalistic society: the willingness to act knowing you won’t win completely. The willingness to ground in values while staying flexible about methods. The willingness to cull the wealth of individuals and the nation to help those who are not in power, control, or health. The willingness to let go of what doesn’t serve while holding tight to what matters most: We, the People.

The 250th anniversary should be a moment when we name this explicitly—not as failure, not as a minor charitable pastime, but as deep organizational wisdom. We should host inclusive spaces where complex and constructive conversations are held.

The pendulum will keep swinging. Extremes will keep emerging. The market will keep trying to privatize the public good. Government will keep failing to meet basic human need.

And American nonprofits—if we stay rooted in compassion, reflection, and commitment to each other and the whole of society—will keep showing up to maintain the balance. Not to win, or grow exponentially, but to keep democracy alive through the impermanence that defines it.

That’s the real American story. That’s something to celebrate on the 250th.

It was when a self-described science podcaster used the phrase “post-COVID” in a social media graphic that I had to speak up. I don’t normally comment on businesses’ or strangers’ posts, but the use of such a biased, unscientific phrase motivated me to post a comment in protest.

“Post-COVID” is a woefully inaccurate term. While, in the current moment, we are no longer at the peak of COVID—often defined as extreme waves of deaths and hospitalizations—we do not and will never live in a “post-COVID” world. People are still being impacted by this disease, including becoming permanently disabled and contracting new cases.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported 12,284 new cases of SARS-CoV-2 from April 6 to May 3, 2026. In the previous 28-day period, 27,615 new cases were reported. According to WHO, five countries in the Americas, Europe, and Southeast Asia all had increases in new cases greater than 10 percent.

We do not and will never live in a “post-COVID” world.

In addition to COVID, we live in a world facing increasing rates of multiple infectious diseases mutating, in large part due to climate change and habitat loss, and diseases stretching into new areas where they had previously been unreported.

The latest examples of this are the Andes strain of hantavirus, with a cluster of cases coming from a Dutch-flagged cruise ship in May, and Ebola, with new cases confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in a rapidly escalating outbreak.

News of both viruses raced through social media, with many posts fear-mongering or spreading inaccurate information. Repeatedly, I read the phrase “I can’t do another pandemic,” implying the poster could not bear to get vaccines, stay inside, socially distance, or wear a mask.

For those of us living with Long COVID, such comments are beyond frustrating. The reason we have post-COVID syndrome is because not enough people cared to do a pandemic and follow medical guidance the first time around, including getting vaccinated and boosted and wearing masks—community care our community should still be doing.

Even as other viruses that pose less of a threat to the public in the United States have spikes in cases, COVID is still with us and continues to be a mass-disabling event. Ignoring or minimizing COVID contributes to delays in diagnosis or care and causes the mental health of people living with Long COVID to suffer. It also does not prepare us for facing newly emerging or more widely spreading diseases.

“I Am Still Not the Same As I Was” 

I’m one of the about 18 million people worldwide diagnosed with Long COVID. It is estimated that the real number of people with Long COVID is actually much higher, but many people have not been officially diagnosed, either due to not understanding or refusing to believe their symptoms, or because they don’t have access to care.

I was diagnosed with Long COVID following one COVID infection in February 2023.

That’s similar to the experience of Luke (who is using a pseudonym to protect his identity) in Minnesota. Luke was a college student at his “dream school” when he contracted COVID as a sophomore. Eventually, the illness, which included sudden joint pain so severe he couldn’t stand up for longer than a minute, forced him to drop out of school and move home.

“The first doctor I spoke with diagnosed me with post-viral arthritis as a result of my COVID-19 infection, and I struggled to believe that the mild virus that cleared up weeks ago could be doing this to me,” Luke said in an interview with NPQ.

Other Long COVID symptoms he experienced included extreme fatigue, so much he was sleeping 12 hours a day without a dent in his exhaustion, and brain fog that impacted his ability to speak coherently.

My own symptoms have also been fatigue and cognitive issues, including a daily headache that lasted three years before I was given an additional diagnosis of neural inflammation and put on a treatment plan. Luke and I are fortunate in that we both happen to live near two of the last remaining medical clinics devoted to the research and treatment of Long COVID. But these clinics are disappearing every day, due to funding cuts.

As Luke said, “I am still not the same as I was before Long COVID, and I may never be. I am hopeful that more treatment options will emerge down the line with further research, but as of right now, Long COVID has sidetracked my life, and been permanently disabling to me and many others.”

“Most People Stopped Caring”

For those still very much living in the reality of COVID and the long-term aftermath of even one infection, news of spiking cases of hantavirus and Ebola have been received with resignation. It is not easy to trust that people will do the right thing when it comes to community care.

Writer Stephanie King said in an interview with NPQ: “I have zero confidence that people will take appropriate precautions against hantavirus because COVID has shown that we don’t really believe in public health anymore.”

“Most people stopped caring about COVID the moment they decided, accurately or not, that it was not a danger to their personal health.”

King hasn’t been diagnosed with Long COVID, but she does have recurring shingles infections after getting COVID while she was running a GED program in North Philadelphia, PA. Even a single COVID infection has been linked to new health problems developing after recovery. These can include, according to Harvard Health, “heart attacks, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, inflammation…and blood clots that traveled to [patients’] lungs.”

As Luke told NPQ, “First and foremost, I’m horrified that public health has been so thoroughly politicized in America that it’s affecting the safety of the rest of the world. The cuts to USAID have already cost lives, and I fear that many Americans won’t realize what’s been lost until the consequences reach their doorstep.”

When it comes to the public response, Luke said, “I’m not surprised that hantavirus and Ebola are causing panic while COVID goes ignored. Cynically, I believe that people care more about these novel threats because they still think it might affect them. To my eye, most people stopped caring about COVID the moment they decided, accurately or not, that it was not a danger to their personal health. Even for those who took COVID seriously to begin with, once vaccines were available, lockdowns had ended, hospitals were no longer overwhelmed by the dead and dying, and the CDC rolled back its recommendations, COVID was out of sight and out of mind.”

Because there is a COVID vaccine, people may view COVID as less of a threat, though even one mild infection can cause Long COVID, with repeated infections increasing the risk, or can lead to other health problems previously unseen in a patient. There is no vaccine yet for hantavirus or Ebola, whose mortality rates are both higher than COVID. Neither is there established treatment for either, beyond comfort or palliative care.

Luke also pointed out that “neither have had widespread outbreaks in the United States, so they remain an unknown threat rather than one like COVID or even measles, which are perceived as an already dealt with thing of the past.”

“People seem almost as afraid of the threat of another lockdown as they are of the diseases themselves.”

This despite measles’ resurgence in the United States where there have been 3,564 confirmed cases in 46 states since 2025 alone, mostly striking children and teens. In a piece published in March of this year, Harvard Health characterized measles as “making a comeback.”

But people want to forget about measles as they want to forget COVID. Not only are we not keeping new cases and those impacted by Long COVID in mind, we are not putting the lessons of the COVID pandemic into practice, such as masking.

Taking appropriate precautions to protect her own health and that of her community while in public spaces, has led King to feel like, as she described it: “The Last Person Masking.”

As Luke said, “In the discussions I’ve seen around hantavirus and Ebola, people seem almost as afraid of the threat of another lockdown as they are of the diseases themselves. Rather than increasing awareness of disease control and prevention, COVID seems to have fostered an aversion to any personal inconvenience caused by public health measures.”

It’s Never Too Late

Such an aversion not only impacts the mental health of the millions living with Long COVID, a disease which already can lead to worsening mental health outcomes, it could deter people with symptoms from seeking treatment—or even getting a diagnosis at all.

That’s already hard to do; in March 2026, only 26 clinics nationwide responded to an inquiry from The Sick Times affirming that they still offered Long COVID care. That’s down from 400 clinics offering such care in 2022. This rapidly shrinking number of Long COVID clinics, unequally distributed across the United States, with zero care facilities in rural areas, is despite the fact that the number of people with Long COVID is only growing.

Long COVID is an extremely isolating disability. It can be invisible. No one can see my headaches. It’s inconsistent—I have some energy one day, but definitely not the next. And it alienates a person when they don’t feel safe to be in the world, even among friends if those friends don’t take illness prevention seriously.

“I’m lucky enough to live in an area with an active COVID-safe social scene, but before I got plugged into that, I felt kind of crazy watching the whole world return to normal as though nothing had ever happened,” Luke said. “It felt like the million people who died of COVID in the US alone and the million more who were disabled by it had suddenly disappeared from collective memory.”

Luke continued, “Even during lockdown, it was pretty common to hear people say that only old and disabled people were dying. I can’t un-know how many people see those lives as worthless. I can’t stop seeing the refusal to wear a mask as an extension of that attitude.”

The best defense against illness is preventative: to get regular and updated vaccines, including for COVID and flu. To avoid areas where a virus is spreading. To take the precautions dictated by community health professionals. And to mask in public.

“It’s never too late to start wearing a mask again!” Luke said. “I think many otherwise caring people have stopped masking from a combination of social pressure and believing it’s pointless, either because they think the pandemic is over, or because they think it won’t make a difference if they’re the only one doing it. I can’t deny that masking can be socially ostracizing at times, but it is not pointless, the COVID pandemic is not over, and you, your loved ones, and your neighbors deserve to be protected from unnecessary illness.”

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There is a quiet narrative that has taken hold in our society. It shows up in policy conversations, in funding decisions, and how systems are designed. It suggests that elders are a growing burden on healthcare, on housing, on families, and on the economy itself. This framing is repeated so often that it begins to sound like fact. But it is not the truth. It is merely a reflection of how our systems have been structured, not an expression of who elders are or the role they’ve always held.

Across the United States, millions of grandparents are serving as primary caregivers for their grandchildren, often without adequate financial or social support.

Many of our current systems were never designed with elders in mind. We design policies that treat our elders primarily as dependents. We create housing that isolates rather than connects. We build systems that prioritize efficiency, cost, and speed, while overlooking the relational roles that sustain real community life. When elders struggle under these conditions, it is an indicator of a structural failure. Yet the typical response is to frame these challenges as an individual problem caused by aging, which is simply not accurate.

Across the United States, millions of grandparents are serving as primary caregivers for their grandchildren, often without adequate financial or social support. In my work with elders and families through Grandmothers’ Village Project, Inc., I’ve seen firsthand the power elders carry and the systems of support they create. I’ve seen grandmothers raising grandchildren with limited resources—holding entire families together without recognition or support. I’ve seen elders who continue to function independently—offering guidance, stability, and care—long after systems have written them off as dependents. I’ve seen people who are still carrying, still giving, still holding, even as the structures around them fail to hold and nurture them in return. Elders are not a strain on our communities. They are the infrastructure that upholds and sustains them.

When the foundation of a community is weakened, the entire structure feels it.

Systemic Failures and the Erosion of Social Connection

Long before formal systems existed, elders carried knowledge, resolved conflict, raised children, and held communities together through hardship and change. That reality has not disappeared. It has simply become less visible within the frameworks we use to define value. Today, elders continue this work in quiet and often unrecognized ways. They continue to care for grandchildren, support extended families, preserve cultural knowledge, and maintain the relational fabric that no formal system can replicate. And yet, we have built societal systems that depend on this labor while failing to acknowledge or resource it.

Elders are not a strain on our communities. They are the infrastructure that upholds and sustains them.

These systems were designed around narrow definitions—of independence, productivity, and value—that do not include the contributions of elders. This limitation often leads to elders being excluded rather than integrated into systemic design. The result is not only isolation, but also a quiet destabilization of the communities these systems are meant to support.  

We can see this most clearly in the everyday realities that rarely make it into policy conversations. Grandparents raising grandchildren on limited income. Elders stretching food benefits to cover more than just themselves. Older adults facing increasing levels of social isolation, with studies linking loneliness to serious health risks. These are not isolated situations. They are indicators of a broader misalignment in how we understand and support community life. 

When elders are separated from daily life, when their presence is reduced to appointments and check-ins, something essential is lost. The community members who once served as anchors end up living disconnected from the very relationships they helped build. That loss does not show up neatly in data points or funding reports, but it is felt in families, in neighborhoods, and in the erosion of social connection.

Investing in Elders Is Foundational for Community Resilience 

To understand elders as infrastructure is to recognize that they are not extraneous, something to be accommodated, but a central element that needs to be integrated. Just as we would not design a city without roads or water systems, we should not design communities without fully considering the role of elders. Their presence strengthens social cohesion, supports intergenerational learning, and provides continuity and stability that no institution can replicate. When we invest in elders, we are not only supporting individuals, we are also reinforcing the resilience and stability of entire communities.

Fortunately, this kind of approach is already beginning to take shape in community-based models that center elders as integral to daily life. One example is the work of Grandmothers’ Village Project, Inc., including the development of Wisdom Tree Village—an ecosustainable, elder-centered community designed to restore connection, dignity, and intergenerational living. The intention is not simply to house elders, but to reestablish their rightful place within the fabric of community life, where their presence is not peripheral but central to society. 

To understand elders as infrastructure is to recognize that they are not extraneous, something to be accommodated, but a central element that needs to be integrated.

When elders are positioned at the center rather than the margins, the narrative begins to change. They are no longer seen as people to be managed or accommodated, but as essential contributors to the health and continuity of community life. And when the center is strong, everything around it has a greater chance to thrive.

To achieve this requires a shift in how philanthropy, policy, and community planning approach the question of elder support. It asks us to move beyond seeing elder care as a cost and instead understand it as a foundational investment. It asks us to design housing that invites connection rather than isolation, to create shared spaces where elders can participate fully in community life, and to ensure access to nourishing food, culturally relevant resources, and opportunities for continued engagement. It also asks us to listen, not in a symbolic way, but in a structural way, by including elders as decision-makers, knowledge holders, and leaders in shaping the communities they have long sustained.

What is needed now is not more acknowledgment, but a realignment of priorities. We must begin to invest in community-based approaches that recognize relational labor, ensuring that elders are resourced in ways that reflect the value they already provide. When we recognize elders as infrastructure, our decisions begin to reflect that truth. And in doing so, we do not simply improve the lives of elders, we strengthen the very systems we all depend on.

With severe cuts to public health infrastructure and growing uncertainty about philanthropy’s financial footing, nonprofit leaders—executive directors, foundation program officers, and other funding decisionmakers—must think beyond the grant cycle to sustain health equity programs. This is especially true when their work addresses deep-rooted stigma and entrenched systems.

Too often, once the funding is awarded, the real work of implementation is left to frontline teams without the support, infrastructure, or sustainability plan needed to make the program last.

Drawing from our experience in providing oversight of program implementation and grant funding, we see clearly how this pattern plays out in healthcare delivery, especially emergency care. The result is costly and inefficient. And now more so than ever, it devastates health equity work. When a program ends, and the change doesn’t stick, a patient loses access, and a community loses the progress it worked hard to gain.

Too often, once the funding is awarded, the real work of implementation is left to frontline teams without the support, infrastructure, or sustainability plan needed to make the program last.

The good news is that new research-backed frameworks are being deployed to support implementers working in unstable times. One example is the changemaking framework developed by the Bridge Center (Bridge)—a program of the Public Health Institute in Oakland, CA. Over six years, Bridge directly funded hospitals to implement emergency department (ED)—based substance-use disorder treatments. The model draws from proven strategies to decrease preexisting bias, to use evidence-based practices for addressing stigmatized health conditions, and to create sustainable reform in acute care settings. And this guidance extends well beyond healthcare—it offers lessons for funders and nonprofit leaders seeking to sustain change, while developing strong implementation experience.

We Know Health Equity Infrastructure Works

Today, EDs are the most accessible entry point into the US healthcare system, especially for patients experiencing low socioeconomic status and other barriers to outpatient care. EDs operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with a federal mandate to never turn anyone away. And this infrastructure is essential. One-fifth of the people who utilize EDs report having no other source of healthcare. Yet EDs are largely underresourced and underequipped for the public health role they are already playing.

Bridge leads strategic efforts to address these gaps by transforming practices in EDs, thus supporting their work in providing evidence-based addiction treatment, reproductive healthcare, and sexually transmitted disease services to patients who have nowhere else to go. Through our efforts, we’ve learned change is hard. Yet, even amid the most complex challenges, change is possible.

The results of intentionally transforming organizational practice are real and hard-won. With Bridge’s grant support, emergency departments in California meaningfully addressed stigmatized health conditions by providing buprenorphine treatment to more than 45,000 patients with opioid use disorder. EDs are also implementing routine opt-out testing and linkage to treatment for communities disproportionately impacted by infectious diseases such as syphilis, HIV, and viral hepatitis. And now, in the era of post-Dobbs v. Jackson, EDs are becoming a critical access point for medication abortion and contraception, including at hospitals far from traditional family planning sites. Together, these initiatives are active across hundreds of hospitals in over 40 states, representing new infrastructure built over years of navigating institutional inertia, shifting policies, and fragile funding.

Programs should anchor solutions in their day-to-day realities of frontline staff.

Given the current political landscape, that infrastructure is now at risk. Bridge is just one example of many initiatives that have made great strides but are grappling with sustaining the work amid funding retrenchment. Federal funding cuts have moved at lightning speed. The lead agency for funding mental health and addiction treatment programs was reduced by 50 percent in 2025, and family planning programs have been decimated at global and local scales.

Making It Last: Strategies for Sustaining Your Program’s Impact

Nonprofits working on the frontlines for health equity play a vital role in turning persistent challenges into progress through their community-centered work. Funders also play a critical role by resourcing this work and cultivating cross-sector collaboration, helping build an ecosystem and the systems change needed to carry this work through long-term.

To shift practice and systems, we recommend nonprofit leaders to:

• Support your teams by designing for the frontline: Programs should anchor solutions in the day-to-day realities of frontline staff. Before finalizing any program deliverable, name the specific context in which your frontline team will use it. Consider factors that influence their ability to provide services, such as the time of day, their competing demands, and the available technology.

As part of Bridge’s work, we strategized with ED leaders to determine what is feasible and how to facilitate a level of change that will become normalized and enduring. We tested every deliverable against a single question: Would this actually work at 2 am in a busy ED? Emergency physicians make life-or-death decisions in under two minutes. Any program asking them to change their practice must meet them in that reality.

Onerous reporting requirements have real costs: they slow down implementers and crowd out the actual work.

We haven’t always gotten it right. One education initiative supporting medication abortion initiation assigned a textbook chapter as reading material. Busy emergency physicians told us they clicked on the chapter, saw a “sea of words,” and closed the tab. A training format that our champions don’t engage with is a failed training. We switched instead to a video lecture, which has received great reviews.

We’ve learned that if a program expects changes in how people work, those changes should be designed from their perspective.

• Right-size data collection to fit program goals: Onerous reporting requirements have real costs: they slow down implementers and crowd out the actual work. Power dynamics between grantmakers and grantees lead many nonprofit leaders or program managers to go extra lengths to stay in and even above compliance with their awards.

When Bridge’s California ED buprenorphine program was scaling, every team had a hypothesis they wanted to test and a survey metric to match. One midpoint survey ballooned to over 50 data points, which places a heavy burden on the data collectors often working on care expansion on top of their full-time job. We course-corrected by tying every data point back to the program’s core aims and committing to collect only what we had a genuine plan to use.

We recommend writing one sentence for every data point you collect, describing the decision it will inform. If you can’t write that sentence, cut the metric.

The same goes for required meetings. Bridge recently balked at a grant application that required two meetings per month with a funder offering a modest dollar amount. We recommend describing the way every meeting will inform the desired goal. If it’s not clear, cut the requirement, and let your frontline leaders implement.

• Build sustainability as a deliverable from the start: Grants end. Yet we want the program impact to last. This can only be achieved when the work goes on after the grant ends. That is, specific plans for what survives the grant funding cycle should start on day one.

For Bridge’s ED programs, that meant building tools that grantees could own and operate independently, like a spreadsheet with a built-in algorithm that allowed hospitals to generate their own return-on-investment reports for hospital leadership. These reports detailed the cost-savings attributed to ED-based substance use interventions, demonstrating the value of continuing the program beyond grant end dates. When Bridge successfully advocated for a new Medicaid benefit supporting ED-based patient navigation services, we awarded funding to hospitals willing to test and document the benefit to understand how to turn a policy win into a permanent financing mechanism.

Asking how your program would survive if funding disappeared tomorrow should be built into planning before launch. Right now, any healthcare organization that sees Medicaid patients should be working to understand the impacts of the current administration’s policy changes on who is and isn’t eligible for coverage. While the anticipated cuts are expected to be substantial, there are many steps organizations can take to protect patients from losing coverage, including comprehensively diagnosing conditions that are eligible for exemptions.

• Advocacy is part of the job; leverage your coalition partners: With federal support for health equity work under pressure, advocacy is not optional. Leaders can map the one policy or payment change that would do the most to sustain your program’s impact after the grant ends. Then make advocating for that change a line item in your workplan.

At Bridge, that one policy change was the creation of a new Medicaid reimbursement pathway for patient navigation services that is now a covered benefit. The work didn’t end when the benefit went live, we are actively working on technical assistance to increase uptake of this mechanism to sustain lifesaving patient care.

The best advocacy is done when you can partner with coalitions to build collective impact. Bridge represents just one corner of the healthcare landscape. Through coalitions such as the Reproductive Health Service Corps, we expand our partnerships to include nursing advocates, pharmacists, midwives, and prescribers beyond emergency medicine. We are also proud to be a member of the Health Equity Workgroup at Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), introducing us to partners far beyond the traditional healthcare landscape.

Here Are Three Things Foundations Can Do Now

• Support great leaders to thrive long-term: The demanding work of frontline implementers can often lead to burnout, making it essential to think creatively about long-term support beyond what traditional nonprofit budgets typically cover. The pressures are real and well-documented: nonprofit leaders are contending with chronic underfunding, staffing shortages, and the emotional weight of working on deeply complex social challenges. According to the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s State of Nonprofits 2024: What Funders Need to Know report, 95% of nonprofit leaders expressed some level of concern about burnout, and 76% said that staff burnout was at least slightly impacting their organization’s ability to achieve its mission.

Think about creative ways to bolster the impact and expand the network of your nonprofit partners beyond financial contributions. The good news is there are examples of this work already underway.

The Black Feminists in Philanthropy network, made up of over 350 Black women and gender-expansive people working across foundations and wealth advisory roles worldwide, has modeled what it looks like to go beyond the grant: convening regularly to pool strategic intelligence, acting as absorbers who translate between institutional bureaucracy and movement needs.

When it comes to rapid response, Nonprofit Quarterly’s field guidance is equally direct: if your foundation cannot move funds quickly, that is not a reason to opt out—foundations can partner with intermediaries and pooled funds already holding the work, and allow grantees to quickly access emergency resources for legal defense, crisis communications, and other needs that cannot wait for the next grant cycle.

At CGI, we ensure all commitment partners can attend our Annual Meeting each September, where they can connect with changemakers from around the world and bring renewed energy back to their work. In 2025, we also implemented working sessions where partners could roll up their sleeves and work together to identify solutions to our most pressing challenges, including the issues facing maternal and reproductive healthcare access across the US and globally. It is no secret that young men shifted right in the last election cycle and that while 61 percent consider themselves pro-choice, they remain passive on the issue. One partner who tackles young men’s engagement in pro-choice advocacy participated in the working session and was able to make several concrete connections with some of the leading organizations in this space to share resources and find ways to mutually reinforce each other’s work.

• Develop Collaborative Networks: Foundations have broad networks and can see across organizations, communities, and issues in a way that an individual grantee cannot. Connecting like-minded implementers and communities creates space for cross-pollination of ideas, sharing best practices, and identifying new opportunities for coordination, especially when resources are limited.

Consider how you can identify aligned organizations working towards similar goals and help build strong connections among them, so they are able to reinforce and support one another.

Lasting impact requires designing for sustainability from the start and embracing innovative approaches for lasting engagement.

CGI’s model is rooted in building partnerships and uncovering new pathways to mobilize action through 1:1 matchmaking, convenings, and the creation of action networks for ongoing collaboration. Over three years, we’ve supported the Reproductive Justice Action Network that brought together funders, practitioners, and community-based organizations to share best practices, exchange lessons learned, and identify opportunities for collaboration and partnerships. Partners through this network have collectively mobilized 10.5 million dollars for maternal and reproductive health in the US.

• Leverage your credibility to spark conversations: Use your platform to be a vocal advocate for the issues that your implementing partners are addressing and think about how you can bring additional resources and attention to the topics to create lasting engagement and impact. Now more than ever, it’s important that foundations use their platform to amplify the voices of grant partners and drive broader conversations about the systemic issues that they address.

At CGI, we prioritize cross-sector convenings, like our Working Group model, to elevate these perspectives, bring together unlikely partners, and foster creative, collaborative solutions, and have always prioritized reproductive health and rights as part of these conversations. One partner working on reproductive and maternal health payment reform was so motivated by the diverse mix of participants, including policy practitioners, clinicians, grassroots advocates, and funders, that she identified a new initiative to promote transparency in coverage and drive systemic impact.

Lasting impact requires designing for sustainability from the start and embracing innovative approaches for lasting engagement. We call on all executive directors, foundation program officers, and others in leadership roles to consider these strategies. The investment you make today is only as strong as what it leaves behind.

Ask any experienced fundraiser what distinguishes good development work from great development work, and they will almost certainly not describe a better grant proposal template. Most likely, they will describe something harder to name, a kind of relational intelligence: the creative skills of reading a room, making unexpected connections between a funder’s interests and a community’s needs, and managing the complexities of both without losing sight of either. In essence, they describe an art.

Then, ask that same fundraiser what their job actually requires most days. The answer will be something different, spanning compliance documentation, metrics reports, funder cultivation calls, logic model revisions, and grant portal navigation. The science of the work. The art, fundraisers will likely reveal, keeps getting squeezed.

Most of us in the sector have accepted this tension as a feature of the work rather than a symptom of something wrong with the system. I would argue that acceptance deserves examination. The pressure fundraisers experience in interpreting and translating community life into institutional form is not accidental, but rather a governing feature of modern philanthropy. What follows is grounded not in a comprehensive sectoral survey but in lived practice across philanthropy-dependent organizations, where these dynamics are most acute.

The System Is Not Neutral

Funders do not simply give money. By design, they define—through the structures of how they give money—what counts as legitimate work, credible impact, and a worthy organization. As an extension of this power dynamic, grant proposals are not neutral administrative instruments. They are governance documents. They require applicants to express their missions, communities, and theories of change in language, metrics, and frameworks that align with institutional expectations. Before a single dollar moves, organizations are already reshaping themselves to match.

The squeeze is not a new critique. Theda Skocpol named it decades ago as the shift from membership to management, when participatory civic organizations are replaced with professionally managed entities that speak for constituencies without being accountable to them. The problem has not been solved. Rather, it has been formalized and embedded into everyday nonprofit labor.

Over the past several decades, grantmaking has become increasingly professionalized. Common applications, normalized metrics, and results-based accountability frameworks are now sector standards, justified as improvements for transparency and effectiveness. This has also contributed to an intensified demand for narrative coherence, emotional resonance, institutional legibility, and other formal accountability mechanisms at the expense of relational responsiveness.

Contemporary philanthropic accountability systems serve more than just a function of evaluation by acting as governance tools that regulate organizational conduct. Through resource distribution, this process inherently determines what can be observed, measured, and credibly communicated. As scholars in nonprofit and public-sector strategic planning have long argued, planning and performance systems influence core organizational decisions, not simply reporting deliverables. When planning processes lose their connection to deliberation and learning, they tend to become instruments for control and legitimacy rather than tools for shared sense-making across a structural power imbalance.

The individuals who bear this cost are a highly valued labor group. They include development directors, gift officers, grant professionals, and communications staff who operate daily at the intersection of community realities, organizational constraints, and funder expectations. The nonprofit fundraisers’ role is best understood as interpretive work, which is a continual, skilled process of transforming complex, relational, and often disputed realities into formats that satisfy institutional needs without completely erasing their origins. What job descriptions fail to capture is the necessity of this translation process into accessible formats for those who will never directly interact with the communities involved.

Interpretive labor is skilled, demanding, and largely invisible in the sector’s discussions of professionalism, accountability, or talent. It closely resembles what sociologist Arlie Hochschild famously described as emotional labor—when feeling and meaning are managed in service of institutional demands. In philanthropy, this labor is essential to the flow of resources, yet structurally undervalued.

Built for Extraction

In a recent essay from Stanford Social Innovation Review, organizational consultant James Lopata traces the nonprofit sector’s operating logic back to Henry Ford’s 1913 assembly line, a system that dramatically increased productivity by requiring workers to check their humanity at the factory door. Lopata’s great-grandfather took that bargain and worked in a Michigan auto factory. He collapsed from a heart attack on a walk to the water fountain and died while the line kept moving.

Lopata argues that human services organizations inherited the same extractive operating logic of rigid hierarchies, compliance-focused metrics, a need-to-know information flow, and the assumption that people must conform to systems rather than systems adapting to human capacity. He contrasts this with what he calls a “breathing organization,” designed around rhythm, agency, and flourishing rather than maximum output.

It is a powerful and necessary argument. But to ensure the health of a just and effective sector, it does not go far enough. The extractive structures Lopata describes are not primarily design failures internal to organizations, but governance responses to the funding relationship itself. For example, organizations adopt compliance-focused metrics, narrative discipline, and information control because funders and other power-laden stakeholders require measurable outputs, coherence, and reassurance on funder timelines. The internal structure is extractive because the external relationship is extractive. Structure shapes behavior, but the structure arrives through the grant.

Consider also the flow of need-to-know information in nonprofit settings. This is often framed as a managerial deficiency. Yet, in practice, it reproduces narrative compliance internally. Senior staff limit what frontline or program staff know about funding conditions and organizational risk because the story told to funders and the experience of staff are rarely identical. The hierarchy protects the narrative. The narrative protects the funding. Most consequentially, the people closest to the community experience are last to hold organizational truth.

Burnout Is a Structural Signal

The nonprofit sector has a well-documented burnout problem, one that is still too often misdiagnosed. The dominant explanations emphasize workload, compensation, and individual resilience, but do not explain why so many of the most skilled development professionals leave even well-resourced organizations.

Recent sector analysis increasingly frames burnout as an organizational and governance issue rather than a personal failing. In a 2024 NPQ conversation, Beth Kanter argues that burnout is an institutional responsibility embedded in workplace design and power dynamics, not something individuals can self-care their way out of. Likewise, the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s State of Nonprofits 2024 report found that burnout is now the top concern among nonprofit leaders and is directly affecting organizations’ ability to achieve their missions.

What distinguishes exceptional fundraisers is not their technical compliance fluency. It is their ability to read relational dynamics in real time, to improvise within narrative constraints without losing the thread of community truth, and to broker authentic connection across the power differentials philanthropy creates. These capacities are creative and improvisational, resembling a performer’s or an artist’s intelligence more than a technician’s.

Accountability regimes that reward precision, predictability, and narrative closure progressively crowd out essential fundraising capacities. When skilled practitioners are required, year after year, to operate beneath their relational and creative ceiling, they leave. The sector calls this turnover. A more precise term is structural exit.

A Hundred Years of the Same Problem

Between 1917 and 1932, Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington partnered to build a mixture of 5,357 schools, shops, and teacher homes for Black communities across 15 Southern states. The funding model required matching contributions from local communities. Black communities met and exceeded the requirement, contributing more, dollar-for-dollar, than the Rosenwald Fund itself.

Washington insisted that the schools be built by local labor rather than prefabricated structures, arguing that community investment and economic circulation were part of the educational mission. Communities generated the majority of the resources, but they held none of the governance authority. The Rosenwald Fund set architectural plans, specifications, and matching terms.

When Rosenwald’s commitment ended, the program ended, and segregated public funding structures remained intact. Community investment without community governance had built something real and left the underlying system untouched. Washington himself was performing a version of the labor modern fundraisers perform daily by translating community need into a form philanthropic capital could act on, while trying to protect the integrity of the work at its source.

Why Reform Is Not Enough

From established reforms like trust-based philanthropy and participatory grantmaking to new experiments in partnership and organizational redesign, like leadership sabbaticals and member-driven matching models, innovative thinking in the sector represents genuine progress.

These solutions matter and deserve support, but it is important to recognize they also operate entirely in the existing philanthropic apparatus, which remains structurally constrained. They still require organizations to apply, justify worthiness, and conform to definitions of legitimacy set by funders. The authority to define credible impact, effective leadership, and authentic community engagement largely stays on one side of the relationship.

In other words, nonprofits can flatten hierarchies, open information flows, and build in rest and rhythm internally, only to find the breathing stops when the grant report is due. A breathing organization inside a suffocating funding relationship is not a solution. Often, it can be a longer runway to the same destination.

The Question We Are Not Asking

Many sector conversations about talent, burnout, and sustainability implicitly ask the same question: How do we get better at telling our story to funders? That is the wrong question. Or perhaps, it is the question the system has trained us to ask. The question with more at stake is this: Who has the authority to define what a community’s story is?

Fundraisers who sustain their integrity inside this system, who maintain community accountability while performing narrative compliance, are doing something genuinely difficult that the sector has not yet learned to name, cultivate, or protect. The art of fundraising is not a soft skill; it is the connective tissue between lived experience and institutional power.

When creativity, authenticity, and integrity get squeezed out, we do not just lose quality talent. We lose one of the sector’s last mechanisms for keeping community knowledge alive inside institutions built to translate it away.

Climate change is widely recognized as the defining crisis of our time. Driven by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, it threatens massive biodiversity loss and more frequent and extreme weather events. And in the United States, the impacts of climate change show in tangible ways.

Recent years have rattled the West with abnormally numerous intense wildfires, with places like Colorado and Arizona facing prolonged droughts. On the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, hurricanes have brought unprecedented rainfall and destruction to unlikely places such as Texas and the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. The Pacific Northwest has been hit by extreme heat waves; the Florida Keys are experiencing ecosystem disruption and biodiversity loss. In turn, agricultural production and supply chains are increasingly strained nationwide.

“Marginalized communities face the most harm from climate change due to deep-rooted systemic inequalities.”

“Extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and extreme temperatures driven by climate change are impacting every corner of our country,” Jim Walsh, policy director at Food and Water Watch, told NPQ.

Although climate change affects all of us, its harms are not distributed equally. As Suriya Khan, advisor for the Fair Start Movement, told NPQ, “The issue is straightforward: Those who contributed least to the crisis are bearing the most severe and often irreversible consequences, especially in a system that has already moved beyond safe ecological and social thresholds.”

Research shows that vulnerable communities around the world, including within the United States, are currently disproportionately bearing the harms caused and intensified by climate change. Low-income communities, sexual and gender minorities, women and girls, racially marginalized communities, and younger and future generations face the most severe consequences of climate change.

“Marginalized communities face the most harm from climate change due to deep-rooted systemic inequalities,” Olivia Nater, communications manager at Population Connection, told NPQ.

These communities also shoulder disproportionate burdens from the industries driving the climate crisis, including air, water, and soil pollution.

“Whether an organization focuses on LGBTQIA rights, poverty, public health, or animal protection, climate change is already shaping the outcomes of the people they serve.”

Moreover, because climate change and natural disasters can destabilize political systems, they also pose a threat to human rights writ large. Research shows that climate instability strains democratic and social systems, deepens existing inequalities, and ultimately results in additional and intensified harm to marginalized communities. It has also been linked to democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarian regimes.

Climate change is inherently intersectional, and this demands that nonprofit organizations consider how their missions might require them to address and mitigate climate harms affecting the communities they serve.

Why Climate Change Matters for Every Nonprofit

Because of the wide-ranging, disproportionate impacts of climate change, nonprofit leaders interviewed by NPQ were adamant that nonprofits must integrate climate justice into their work.

“Climate change affects all of us, but not equally, and that inequality is precisely why every organization has a responsibility to engage,” Khan explained. “Whether an organization focuses on LGBTQIA rights, poverty, public health, or animal protection, climate change is already shaping the outcomes of the people they serve.”

For example, housing instability and homelessness expose LGBTQ+ communities to overlapping environmental and public health harms. LGBTQ+ people without stable housing are more likely to live in heavily polluted areas, contributing to long-term health consequences and increased susceptibility to climate-related hazards.

“LGBTQ people are disproportionately affected by climate change in part because of the discrimination and systematic exclusion that make them more likely to experience economic and housing insecurity,” Ari Shaw, senior fellow and director of International programs at UCLA’s Williams Institute, told NPQ. “These are the same conditions that make communities most vulnerable to climate events like floods, extreme heat, and disasters.”

Even same-sex couples who have secure housing are more likely than different-sex couples to live in densely populated urban areas and coastal regions, both of which face heightened exposure to climate risks. These couples are also more likely to reside in communities with underresourced infrastructure and limited access to emergency planning or recovery support, reducing their capacity to prepare for and adapt to climate disruptions.

“Research also shows that LGBTQ people face specific barriers during disaster response,” Shaw explained. “Many avoid emergency shelters out of fear of discrimination, and transgender people can be denied aid when their legal documents don’t match their gender identity.”

Beyond these entrenched systemic inequities, the intersection of ideology and climate is often explicit. A review of 45 right-wing organizations working against trans rights revealed that four out of five have received funding from fossil fuel companies or wealthy donors. One of the climate policy experts involved in the study noted that the fossil fuel industry benefits from stoking fear around transgender issues because it diverts attention from “the very real and ongoing risks that climate change creates.”

Nonprofits whose mission is related to LGBTQ+ rights should also advocate for climate mitigation and environmental resilience to achieve their goals. According to Shaw, the disparate impact of climate change on LGBTQ+ people “makes work on climate change and extension of the work that many LGBTQ organizations are already doing.”

This example also maps onto nonprofits working on poverty, women’s rights, racial justice, public health, and housing security, among others. As Khan explains, “Climate is not a separate issue; it is a force that amplifies existing harm, deepens inequality, and destabilizes communities. Ignoring it means accepting worsening conditions.”

How All Nonprofits Can Help Mitigate Climate Harms

Nonprofit leaders recommended three ways that nonprofits whose missions do not explicitly focus on combating climate change can join the movement to support climate-vulnerable communities and advance environmental justice.

1. Challenge inaccurate narratives propagated by corporations driving the climate crisis and enabling governments.

Corporations driving the climate crisis have contributed to the weakening of democratic systems and are enabled by the government. In the United States, Khan told NPQ, this dynamic is reflected in “policy paralysis, regulatory capture, and widening inequality.”

Regulatory capture refers to the cooptation of policymaking by extractive industries to serve their interests. According to Khan, this phenomenon also appears in how the government and other institutions measure policy success and who they exclude when selecting metrics. “When institutions define success using incomplete baselines, they don’t just mismeasure progress—they legitimize ongoing harm,” Khan explained.

In this way, these corporations sustain the extractive practices driving climate change, promoting false narratives to justify them, evading accountability, and maintaining destructive economic systems. One example of this, according to Walsh, is greenwashing, a tactic used by extractive industries to mislead consumers on the environmental impact of their products.

“Corporations are gaming the systems through campaign donations and slick PR campaigns to convince the public and policymakers that schemes like biofuels and carbon capture are going to address the climate crisis,” Walsh explained. “In reality these greenwashing efforts enrich corporate interests, maintain the status quo, and perpetuate harms to communities and our planet.”

Zahara Nabakooza, a leader at Truth Alliance, believes that this issue goes far beyond greenwashing and shapes how we see the world: whose lives are valued, who deserves resources, and the power imbalances at the root of the climate crisis.

“Education, media, and political systems shape how people understand the world. When these systems carry bias, they can normalize inequality and hide injustice,” Nabakooza told NPQ. “Over time, repeated narratives can feel like truth, even when they are not.”

Because these narratives are embedded in the worldviews people are born into, it is essential to make them visible and actively challenge them. Khan and Nabakooza told NPQ that nonprofits can play a key role in contesting these narratives and pushing for greater corporate and governmental accountability for climate harms.

“Fair Start addresses climate change by focusing on accountability, truth, and proper baselines,” Khan explained. “We work to identify where harm is being misrepresented or minimized and challenge claims of ‘impact’ that fail to account for real-world consequences. A central focus of our work is exposing what we call ‘illegal baselining,’ when institutions use misleading starting points to make harmful systems appear acceptable.”

Other nonprofits, Khan noted, should similarly challenge misrepresentations and minimizations made by corporate and government actors when it comes to climate-vulnerable groups.

2. Raise awareness of the intersections between climate change and other issues.

Since climate change has such broad impacts, nonprofit leaders interviewed by NPQ said that nonprofits new to environmental justice should explain how climate change intersects with and affects their missions.

Nater told NPQ that Population Connection, for example, raises awareness of the links between population, climate change, and sustainable development through its outreach and education work.

“We advocate for the empowerment of women and girls as an overlooked yet critical climate solution,” Nater explained. “We also financially support more than 20 grassroots organizations around the world that are working to protect the environment and remove barriers to family planning and girls’ education.”

Food and Water Watch, as Walsh explained, also works at the intersections of these issues, “bring[ing] together community organizing, legal resources, communications plans and a vision for a livable planet that builds political power to oppose corporate domination and protect the public and our natural resources.”

According to Walsh, nonprofits new to environmental justice can similarly advocate for the communities they serve by connecting their missions to climate solutions and raising awareness that climate justice is integral to, rather than separate from, their work.

“Everyone has a stake in fighting the climate crisis because it shapes the world around us. The climate crisis and the industries driving it forward are impacting public health, housing, civil rights, and affordability,” Walsh explained. “That means that all sorts of nonprofits can benefit themselves and their members by working to stop environmental injustice and fight for a livable planet.”

3. Break down silos between movements to build collective power.

Challenging false narratives and raising awareness of climate justice for vulnerable communities requires nonprofits to work together across intersections.

“Breaking down silos requires recognizing that these issues are structurally connected,” Khan told NPQ. “That means aligning around shared harm rather than isolated missions, using common standards of accountability, and focusing on real outcomes instead of institutional identity.”

Walsh noted that once the nonprofit sector recognizes that “climate change is something that affects all of us [and] it is not a standalone issue, but one that requires coordinated action across civil society,” organizations can build broad coalitions to challenge extractive industries and the governments enabling them.

“We can build coalitions by aligning around shared goals of improving public health, fighting corporate domination, building affordable and sustainable housing, and holding lawmakers accountable for the decisions they make,” Walsh explained.

But these coalitions, he pointed out, will require organizations to “take time to build relationships across movement spaces, ensure impacted communities are at the table, and build on the varied expertise that everyone brings to the table.”

While building such alliances will require significant work, Khan believes it is imperative to begin immediately: “Once it is acknowledged that we are operating beyond multiple thresholds, the urgency becomes unavoidable, and collaboration becomes necessary rather than optional.”

Note: The author currently provides consulting services to the Fair Start Movement, staff and affiliates of which are quoted in this article.

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?

Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eater

Toni Cade Bambara’s question from The Salt Eaters resonates deeply as I reflect on the importance of mental health and what it takes to sustain it—for ourselves and others. This question offers clarity: wellness is not passive. Healing is not merely the absence of pain. Wholeness requires truth, active change, and a refusal to treat survival as leadership.

In the nonprofit sector, the cost of survival is too often absorbed by the people we ask to lead. For leaders on the front lines of justice, democracy, and care, wellness is a daily negotiation with budgets, bodies, funders, grief, uncertainty, urgency, and the future.

This is especially true for Black women leaders, often expected to be both the strategist and the sanctuary: to translate pain into possibility while our wellbeing is treated as secondary to the work we make possible. Too often, sacrifice is mistaken for leadership. And, too often, resilience in the face of workplace trauma, funding structures, and broader systems of harm, is normalized without confronting the underlying systemic causes.

Wholeness requires truth, active change, and a refusal to treat survival as leadership.

Before founding The Highland Project, I learned to confuse urgency with purpose and endurance with excellence. I was praised for being exceptional. But behind that praise was depletion. I was running toward achievement, impact, belonging, safety, and purpose. I wanted to actualize Black brilliance and be of use to future generations. Because the work felt sacred, the exhaustion was harder to name. But my body was telling the truth: no appetite, constant motion, and no capacity to be still.

Through practice and the teachings of leaders like Octavia Raheem, I learned that rest is not a reward. It is a requirement for vision.

The Conditions We Lead Inside  

At The Highland Project, our research on Black women’s views on wealth, the economy, and democracy shows that Black women are naming the toll of living inside these conditions. In 2025 polling with the firm brilliant corners Research and Strategies, 45 percent of Black women voters said their mental health had worsened; 67 percent disengaged from the news to protect their peace; and by fall, 88 percent were dissatisfied with the direction of the country.

This is not background noise. It is the environment our leaders are operating inside of.

Across the nonprofit sector, leaders are navigating funding cuts, delayed payments, political attacks, rising community need, burnout, economic anxiety, uneven power dynamics, and uncertainty while living with the same conditions as the communities they serve. The leader is inside the crisis, translating it, absorbing it, and trying to build a way through.

Dr. Gail Parker’s work on ethnic and race-based traumatic stress helps name what many leaders know in their bones: harm lodges in the body, shaping breath, rest, safety, and exacerbated levels of stress carried across generations.

Through practice and the teachings of leaders like Octavia Raheem, I learned that rest is not a reward. It is a requirement for vision.

Mental health in the nonprofit sector is not just a wellness issue. It is a funding issue. Chronic underfunding creates the conditions that drive staff burnout and organizational instability—forcing many nonprofits to operate in sustained crisis while staff absorb the costs of mission-driven work.

There is a dangerous story underneath our sector: that a leader’s body is expendable in service of the mission. When leaders burn out, organizations lose memory, relationships, imagination, and continuity.

Practice spaces, retreats, coaching, and wellness stipends can matter deeply. Meet Me at the Highland’s Legacy Studio helps leaders pause, listen inward, and reconnect to their legacies. And still, no single offering is enough.

A retreat is not enough if a leader returns to a budget built on precarity. If funding is short term, restricted, and contingent on proving urgency, care becomes a temporary intervention inside an unsustainable system.

What Wholeness Requires

If we are serious about mental health, then we must be serious about budgets that include multi-year general operating support, leadership sustainability, administrative labor, investment before crisis, and room to lead from somewhere other than survival.

To fund nonprofit leadership as if leaders only need technical assistance or rapid response dollars is to misunderstand the assignment. If we want sustained change, we have to fund sustained leaders.

Funders must ask better questions—and invest in the responses: What did the work cost? Who is supporting the people doing the serving? What conditions would allow this work to be sustained with dignity?

Wholeness is no trifling matter. If we want leaders and communities to be well, and movements to endure, awareness is not enough. Wellness requires steady, flexible, restorative investment.

Investment that understands that the people closest to the work are not fuel to burn. They are the future.

In April, Virginia voters approved a new congressional map drawn by Democrats hoping to balance out last year’s gerrymandering in Texas. Virginia’s redistricting fight was powered by a broad nonprofit coalition that helped push through a temporary map change and, for a brief moment, suggested Democrats could regain up to four House of Representative seats.

A few of the best-known national actors behind this effort included:

• Brennan Center for Justice, which provided legal analysis, public education, and national policy support for Virginia’s redistricting and broader fair-maps efforts.
• Common Cause, especially Common Cause Virginia, which organized grassroots groups to push anti-gerrymandering reform and public engagement around map fairness.
• NAACP, which was part of the broader constellation of civil rights groups engaged in protecting fair representation in Virginia redistricting debates.

However, shortly after the referendum vote, the legal and political scene changed abruptly. First, Virginia’s Supreme Court declared the new map null and void on May 8, in a 4 to 3 decision. Then, the US Supreme Court issued a decision on Louisiana v. Callais, weakening voters’ ability to challenge discriminatory maps under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (52 U.S.C. § 1030).

Nevertheless, this fight showed that civic organizations can shape political power before district lines harden for another decade, and how legal expertise, grassroots trust, and public education can work together when the stakes are high.

The Weakening of Voter Rights

Before Callais, you did not need to prove discriminatory intent to challenge maps. It prohibited gerrymandering practices that showed an unequal opportunity to participate or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or other factors. After Callais, advocates are left with fewer federal voting rights protections.

“They asked us how we felt about it. We gave our response in the form of a vote, the people spoke, and the judge struck down our voices.”

In essence, the Supreme Court’s decision weakened the practical force of the Voting Rights Act in redistricting disputes, making it harder to challenge discriminatory maps once they are drawn. Since the decision came down, Southern states have moved quickly to exploit that opening: Tennessee approved a new map aimed at eliminating the state’s only Democratic seat; Florida advanced a redraw expected to net more Republican seats; and Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi all became part of an accelerating redistricting push.

Congressman Steve Cohen (TN-D) warned that the ruling dilutes the Voting Rights Act’s guarantee that minority voters can elect representatives of their choosing and argued that any changes to the Act should come from Congress, not the courts. Kevin Morris wrote in an analysis for the Brennan Center that the Court’s trajectory showed a “bankrupt and sad vision of democracy.”

The gerrymandering fight thus becomes a compressed political window, which should matter to nonprofits since public education and alliance-building require time. If advocacy groups wait until after a map passes, they may already be too late. As Alliance for Justice, a legal nonprofit, wrote in February, “In the voter assistance realm alone, dozens of states are considering bills that would make it harder for community groups to help people register to vote and cast a ballot.”

Virginia’s Supreme Court ruling that the redistricting vote did not count because the state did not follow the proper constitutional procedure, kept Virginia’s old congressional map in place for the 2026 election, even though voters had already approved the map change. That reversal landed in a much harsher national environment than the one Virginia voters thought they were entering.

Following the court’s decision, Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general appealed to the SCOTUS in an effort to put the newly drawn electoral map in effect, claiming that the Virginia Supreme Court was, as NPR reported, “‘deeply mistaken’ in its decision on ‘critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation,’” and that the decision “overrode the will of the people.” In the end, the SCOTUS sided with Republican legislators, who claimed it would be wrong for the Court to weigh in on state-level politics.

For nonprofits, winning the public argument is no longer enough. Organizations also must secure the procedural and legal grounds under those victories.

The ruling hit Black Virginians particularly hard, who make up 18 percent of the population and had overwhelmingly backed the amendment. Research showed strong support among Black precincts and a statewide pattern in which Black voters were central to the referendum’s passage. The court’s decision did more than preserve an old map, it erased a voting victory many Virginians saw as a chance to strengthen representation and push back against years of map manipulation.

The anger in the state has been palpable. Many voters expressed shock at having a confirmed referendum win overturned. In an interview with WDBJ, Virginia Tech graduate student Makayla Smith said voters were ignored. “They asked us how we felt about it. We gave our response in the form of a vote, the people spoke, and the judge struck down our voices. So it brings the question, do our votes actually matter? Do our voices count?,” she said.

Redistricting and the Question of Democratic Legitimacy

Heather Cox Richardson, a well-known historian and author of Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, pointed out on her YouTube channel that this is not only about whether Black Americans get to elect politicians they want. While important, the Callais ruling is about the permanent control of the United States of America by a radical minority. She framed the stakes broadly, arguing that these disputes are not simply about voting rights, but about whether political power can become structurally locked in, undemocratically, by a right wing wealthy minority. Whether one agrees with that interpretation or not, it reflects how deeply redistricting has become tied to questions about democratic legitimacy itself.

Although now null, Virginia’s short-lived victory still matters because it exposed both the power and the limits of nonprofit-led coalitions in the voting rights arena. The pro-redistricting coalition succeeded by translating a complex issue into a narrative voters could understand: Who gets represented, whose voices count, and how maps shape access to power and resources. That message, combined with years of organizing, made the issue comprehensible enough to win at the ballot box. For nonprofits, the lesson is that winning the argument is no longer enough; they also have to secure the procedural and legal ground beneath it.

It also revealed how easily untraceable political spending can overwhelm public debate. In our digital-dominant world, with the proliferation of generative AI and deepfakes, media literacy matters more than ever. Voters are flooded with misleading mailers, partisan narratives, and dark-money advertising. Nonprofits, in turn, are organizing while also trying to protect the information environment that makes democracy possible.

As a result, Virginia voters were often confused. For instance, former President Barack Obama appeared in both a 2026 ad for redistricting and a misleading video against redistricting from 2017. Groups like Media Literacy Now help by teaching people how to evaluate claims, recognize credible sources, and recognize emotional manipulation before it distorts civic decision-making. That work is not peripheral to redistricting—it is one of the few defenses left as court remedies narrow and political messaging becomes more sophisticated.

For nonprofits, winning the public argument is no longer enough. Organizations also must secure the procedural and legal grounds under those victories. Media literacy, legal preparedness, and rapid coalition-building have become inseparable from civic engagement work. And supporting the work to get out the vote is more important than ever to help legitimize the processes necessary to uphold our democracy.

The Risk for Nonprofits

Hawaii’s S.B. 2471, which will take effect in 2027, represents an unusually bold attempt to curb corporate political spending. Drawing on a legal theory developed by the Center for American Progress, lawmakers argue that because corporations are created and empowered by the state, Hawaii can condition those powers—including limiting certain types of election-related spending. This could impact both corporations and nonprofits that spend funds fighting redistricting laws.

As always, fundraising continues to be a challenge—and as political nonprofits dominate the headlines, donors may struggle to distinguish between mission-driven work and election spending. That makes it more important than ever for service organizations to clearly communicate what they do, why unrestricted support matters, and how their work benefits communities rather than campaigns. If the public starts treating all nonprofits as part of the same political machinery, ordinary organizations will pay the price. The redistricting bonanza has intensified that confusion because so much of the money moving through these fights is being routed through entities the public cannot easily see.

Virginia showed that organized civic power can still win at the ballot box, but court decisions showed how easily those wins can be erased. Callais showed that federal courts are no longer a reliable backstop. The Southern redistricting surge over the past couple of weeks shows that states are moving quickly to convert that legal opening into a hard political advantage. And Hawaii’s S.B. 2471 shows that some states are beginning to look for structural ways to curb the influence of money before it further corrupts the process.

For nonprofits, the answer is not to retreat. It is speed, clarity, and coalition. They need to educate early, organize broadly, protect donor trust, and help the public become more media literate so voters can recognize when a redistricting fight is about representation—and when it is being sold as something else. The window for action is narrowing, but it is still open for organizations that are prepared to move now.

This story was originally reported by Barbara Rodriguez of The 19th. Meet Barbara and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

The word “Black” has been almost completely removed from a package of bills that have long been viewed as Congress’ main legislative vehicle to address the Black maternal health crisis, frustrating some advocates who feel Black women are being erased from the policy.

The key change this year is the title. The Momnibus Act — filed in mid-March — was called the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act in 2023; before that it was the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021 and the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2020. None of the previous packages, which were championed by Democrats, have been enacted.

But references to “Black” in the package’s legislative text have also evolved. The 2020 version has more than a dozen, primarily referencing Black women. In the 2021 version, many of those were replaced with nearly a dozen references to “Black pregnant and postpartum individuals.” All those descriptions were removed in the 2023 bill, with the word Black appearing only once across the entire package, referencing a historically Black college or university or other minority-serving institution. Those 2023 changes carried over to the latest version.

The legislation — which does not appear to have a path forward in the Republican-controlled Congress — has long been touted as a way to address the United States’ abysmal maternal health mortality rates, as well as the stark disparities for Black women. Maternal mortality rates in the United States surpass all other developed nations. In 2023, there were 18.6 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the nation. The rate is far worse for Black women at 50.3; they are three times more likely to die than White women from a pregnancy-related cause, irrespective of income or education.

But removing “Black” from the title of the bill comes as the Trump administration attacks initiatives aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion. Advocates worry that the title change is both a signal that racial disparities shouldn’t be at the forefront of discussion — and a warning sign that they won’t be addressed.

Democratic Rep. Lauren Underwood of Illinois, a lead sponsor of the Momnibus package, said the title change reflected how people describe the legislation, which this year covers everything from the perinatal workforce to research investments.

“When people are like, ‘What’s going on with the Momnibus? Has the Momnibus passed? I’m looking for information on the Momnibus,’ or whatever — this reflects that,” said the congresswoman, who emphasized that the bill continues to help Black women. She also highlighted that the Black Maternal Health Caucus that she helps oversee has secured hundreds of millions of dollars for maternal health policies that center Black women.

For some, the changes and the explanation behind it are more complicated. The 19th spoke with leaders of more than a half dozen groups that work to improve Black maternal health, many who have not spoken publicly about this.

“There is a painful irony in a bill that originated as the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act, that was named to address the Black maternal health crisis, no longer naming the population it was created to serve,” Angela D. Aina, cofounder and executive director of the Black Mamas Matter Alliance (BMMA), said in a statement. The group is not publicly supporting the Momnibus package this year but has in past years.

Several advocates also said they’re frustrated but still support Underwood, a Black woman who often speaks about Black maternal health through a personal lens. When the bill was reintroduced, Aza Nedhari, president and CEO of Mamatoto Village, which supports Black maternal health policies, frankly detailed her thoughts on the changes in a LinkedIn post. Yet she understands that there are lots of forces at play.

“I do think that Congresswoman Underwood genuinely cares about this issue,” Nedhari told The 19th. “She’s been working on this for so long. I think we need to put the focus on where it needs to be: Why does she even have to make this choice in the first place?”

A spokesperson for Underwood said removing the word Black from most of the legislation in 2023 was due to technical edits related to the Kira Johnson Act, a bill in the Momnibus package named after a Black woman who died in 2016 in the hours after childbirth. The legislation encourages investments in community-based organizations that support mothers.

Though it has not been enacted, aspects of the bill have been implemented through congressional funding directed to the Office of Minority Health under the Department of Health and Human Services. These appropriations, first approved under the Biden administration, total more than $30 million to date. Underwood’s spokesperson said removing the word Black in 2023 aligned the legislative text with language used by the Office of Minority Health to avoid future regulatory hiccups under existing regulations.

Some of the references to Black people were replaced with “demographic groups with elevated rates of maternal mortality, severe maternal morbidity, maternal health disparities, or other adverse perinatal or childbirth outcomes.” The latest bill also links to a formal definition for “racial and ethnic minority groups” that includes Black people.

“The definitions in the bill are designed to make sure that the money can get to the communities that need it,” Underwood told The 19th, who emphasized the substance of the bill has not changed and has been expanded to encourage more research funding.

The bill retains language aimed at addressing data collection of Hispanic people and has provisions acknowledging Indigenous populations.

“BMMA supports those provisions and the communities they serve, and we recognize the importance of that specificity. The asymmetry is what gave us pause,” Aina said.

Several organizers told The 19th they raised their concerns about the bill’s title and text changes privately to Underwood.

At least some advocates were aware of the 2023 changes at the time but supported the legislation because of the political and social climate under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, both vocal supporters of Black maternal health policies.

But since then, President Donald Trump has targeted the Office of Minority Health for elimination amid efforts aimed at dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion.

When asked if the bill’s title change is related to the political climate, Underwood responded: “The Momnibus does talk about the Black maternal health crisis. So it is not accurate to say that the Momnibus has removed references to Black and it doesn’t aim to address the Black maternal health crisis.”

Underwood’s explanation — which doesn’t appear to acknowledge the text changes — is unsettling for Nourbese Flint, president of All* Above All, a national organization that supports reproductive justice by expanding abortion access. Flint’s organization is weighing whether to support the legislation this year.

“It suggests that there’s something wrong with it being about Black women,” she said. “I think that is the piece that I am really concerned about, is that there’s nothing wrong with having a bill that is trying to close the gap for Black women dying.”

Underwood reiterated that the Momnibus legislation is the signature bill from the Black Maternal Health Caucus, which she has co-chaired since its launch in 2019. The Momnibus package also still has the support of hundreds of groups, companies and affiliations.

“Our number one singular priority is advancing the Momnibus, period,” she said. “That has not changed. That has always been the case.”

The National Partnership for Women & Families, which advocates for policies that improve maternal health and tracks state-level Momnibus efforts, is among the groups no longer supporting the legislation.

“The National Partnership for Women & Families firmly believes that the need to address the Black maternal health crisis is urgent and that the commitment to addressing this crisis effectively begins with clearly naming the problem,” Jocelyn Frye, president of the group, said in a statement. “At a time when this administration too often refuses to confront the prevalence of racial disparities — and in some cases denying they exist altogether — it is more important than ever to center those most affected.”

Jamila K. Taylor is president and CEO at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a national think tank that examines gender and racial inequities from an economic lens. The group has endorsed the Momnibus in the past but has not this year — but it is supporting some of the individual bills that make up the package.

“We are in the midst of a fraught social and political moment as a nation. People of color, and Black women in particular, are facing diminished political power, disproportionate job loss, and poorer health outcomes — including higher maternal death rates than their White peers,” Taylor said in a statement to The 19th. “It is more important than ever to center the needs of Black women in the policy solutions to address racial biases and injustices.”

Frye and Taylor said separately that they hope to keep working with Underwood and other members of Congress to make progress on Black maternal health issues.

Underwood declined to comment on the views of advocates or private concerns in a follow-up inquiry to her office.

Trump’s attacks on DEI have had a ripple effect across corporations, research grants and college campuses. Recent federal cuts to Medicaid, which accounts for 40 percent of all live births and 65 percent of births to Black mothers, are expected to worsen health outcomes for pregnant and postpartum people.

It’s part of why changes to the bill may be so concerning for some advocates, said Deva Woodly, a professor at Brown University who studies the impact of public discourse on social and economic issues. She said the changes — even if some predate Trump’s return to office — could lessen the efficacy of the bills if they’re passed.

“There is no race-neutral way to address Black maternal mortality. It has to be addressed honestly and unabashedly, and trying to address it in a way that does not name the subject is going to be inefficacious,” she said. “Because if you leave the language cloudy, then it can be misapprehended and deliberately misused by whomever is in power and enforcing the law.”

Woodly offered a hypothetical scenario in which a women’s health bill makes its way through Congress over several years but references to women are gradually taken out.

“The health bill that doesn’t name women cannot address women’s health,” she said. “The Black maternal health bill that does not name Black women cannot address Black maternal health.”

Elizabeth Dawes, director of maternal and reproductive health at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, called the shift in language “demoralizing” and “disheartening” — a reinforcement for her that Congress is not working enough to address the concerns of Black women like herself. She worries it sets a bad precedent for grassroots advocacy.

“When we’re thinking about the future of how we advocate for change, and what that means and what that looks like, it would reshape that for us to be vague about our ask, for us to be general,” said Dawes, another cofounder of BMMA who is no longer affiliated with the group and now helps lead the Black Maternal Health Federal Policy Collective. “I think we’ve seen enough of how general conversations go. I think they go nowhere.”

That tension was on display during a congressional hearing on April 17 when Rep. Summer Lee, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, questioned Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about reports that the department told organizations applying for federal dollars to remove nearly 200 words, including Black, from funding applications.

“How are we going to solve the Black maternal mortality crisis if we cannot say ‘Black’?” she asked Kennedy.

Lee told The 19th in an interview after that exchange that she had not noticed the title change on the Momnibus bill, which she supports as a co-sponsor.

“I’m not shocked,” she said. “We’ve seen a lot of people shifting not their priorities but how they word it preemptively in a lot of instances, because they’re afraid that if they are forward with their mission, that their organization, that their program is geared toward addressing a particular issue that they think falls within diversity, equity or inclusion, that they will no longer be able to receive the funding.”

Lee’s office later declined to further comment on Underwood’s explanation for the title change.

The office of Democratic Rep. Alma Adams of North Carolina, one of the lead sponsors of the bill, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Suzy Vazquez, a spokesperson for Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, the bill’s main sponsor in the Senate, said: “When Senator Booker speaks about this issue and this legislation it is in the context of the maternal health care crisis facing the Black community. His purpose and priority is ending disparities in maternal health and advancing policies that improve outcomes for Black moms and their families by standing up in Congress to ensure no mother is left behind.”

Nedhari had a response to that statement: “This issue is not whether or not people genuinely care. It’s about the level of courage that you are willing to have in this moment — to name that this is for who it’s for.”

Underwood, who has a background in nursing, speaks often about the intersection of disparate maternal health outcomes and Black women. She participates in multiple events focused on Black maternal health, most recently during Black Maternal Health Week in mid-April. She told The 19th that she is continuing to consolidate support for the package and is having conversations “with colleagues on both sides of the aisle about the priorities.”

“There’s always opportunities to advance one or more bills through the committee process, and we’ve been pursuing those opportunities aggressively,” she said. She declined to specify which bills.

Amid the federal stalemate, Black women have taken action on the state level to address racial maternal health disparities — including state-level Momnibus bills, Medicaid postpartum coverage extensions, doula reimbursement and the establishment of maternal mortality review committees with community representation.

Dawes added that many of the efforts to address racial maternal health disparities are led by Black women and they’re not waiting around for Congress to act.

“We’re going to fight for Black moms no matter what. We’re going to get them the care they need no matter what. So if Congress isn’t going to do it, let’s see what can happen in the states. If the states aren’t going to do it, let’s see what happens at the city and county level,” she said. “But I believe Congress has the responsibility to do something, and that something needs to be wholehearted. It needs to be comprehensive, it needs to be thorough, and it needs to be bold enough to name Black women, to name the people who it’s trying to support.”

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Brittany Jones: Very simply put, we were facing the moment where almost half of our board was about to roll off, and we did not have any kind of succession plan in place. We were at the point where the existing board had exhausted their networks, had stretched their contacts, and then all the faces turned to me, and I’m a fairly new ED in the organization. I’m not originally from Atlanta, so even just stretching the network I had was not going to be enough to really, honestly, just fill the seats that we knew were going to be opening up.

“Our networks are stretched—what are we going to do?”

But also for me as the ED, I was looking for…not necessarily a culture shift, I’m not sure what to call it, but I needed new perspective in the room. I needed new creativity and innovation, and, honestly, an opportunity to raise more awareness about who we were, even inside this room, and also going into this idea of okay, well, our networks are stretched, what are we going to do? Well, the capacity as a very small organization was minimal to even conceptualize how we were going to do this well and do it right and give it the time and energy it needed. So we acknowledged pretty early on…that we were going to need help in a board search process, because this was [not] our expertise, nor was there capacity to really own it from start to finish.