What gives us reason to believe in these difficult times for our democracy? In Hope in the Dark, Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman lifts up hope and bright spots—drawing attention to forward movement and the tangible signs of progress being made toward a democracy that enables all people to thrive.

When I laid out four tests for our democracy in March to introduce this column, I did not expect Test 3 to come into focus this quickly.

The third test asks whether civil society leaders and organizations will remain free and independent. I wrote that a free and independent civil society—the faith communities, labor unions, community groups, and public charities through which people actually do the work of self-government—is the beating heart of our democracy. I expected the test to unfold gradually, through pressure on the legal defense infrastructure and quiet attrition at the edges of the field. I did not expect it to arrive in a single fortnight, in three high-profile cases, each focused on a different part of civil society.

In a span of about two weeks, the Department of Justice secured an 11-count indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on charges that legal experts across the political spectrum have called defective and likely to be dismissed. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ordered Disney’s eight ABC-owned television stations to file for years-early renewal of broadcast licenses within days of the president and first lady demanding that ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel over a joke. And in the same week, the DOJ secured a second indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over a deleted Instagram photo of seashells on a beach. Former federal prosecutors have called the indictment remarkably weak.

None of these cases is built to win. That is what I want to sit with for a moment, because I think it is the part most easily missed.

The Point of a Flimsy Indictment

A flimsy indictment that is eventually dismissed still does its work. The work is signaling—to every other comedian, former official, and civil rights organization—that the cost of being noticed is high enough that maybe it would be wiser to soften the joke, decline the interview, table the report, or simply stay quiet for a while. Timothy Snyder, historian and author of On Tyranny, calls this anticipatory obedience and identifies it as the first lesson of the 20th century. It remains the cheapest tool in the authoritarian kit because the targets do most of the work themselves. You do not have to actually punish a critic if the example of someone else’s punishment causes a thousand quieter critics to edit themselves preemptively. Self-censorship scales in a way that prosecution does not.

Of the three cases, the SPLC indictment is the one I have been watching most closely, because it is being used as a proof of concept. (Note: SPLC Action is a current grantee of Democracy Fund Voice.) The charges allege that, between 2014 and 2023, SPLC paid informants who had infiltrated white supremacist groups and concealed those payments from donors and banks—and that this constitutes fraud by an organization whose mission is to dismantle hate groups. Former federal prosecutors interviewed by CBS News have called the indictment legally stretched and likely vulnerable to dismissal before trial. The organization that took the Klan to court and bankrupted the United Klans of America is now charged, in effect, with being soft on the Klan. The absurdity is the point. The absurdity is what makes the message legible to everyone else: If they can do this to SPLC, they can do this to you.

A flimsy indictment that is eventually dismissed still does its work. The work is signaling…that the cost of being noticed is high enough that maybe it would be wiser to soften the joke, decline the interview, table the report, or simply stay quiet for a while.

What has surprised me is how quickly the message has traveled through private institutions that most of us thought of as neutral infrastructure.

Within days of the indictment, the charitable arms of three of the largest donor-advised fund (DAF) sponsors in the country—Fidelity Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, and the Schwab-affiliated DAFgiving360 —began blocking their account holders from directing grants to SPLC. The reasons given were nearly identical, and entirely procedural: Their policies give them the right to pause donations to organizations under federal indictment.

I want to be plain about what this means, because the procedural framing obscures what is at stake. An indictment is an allegation, not a conviction. SPLC remains a 501c3 organization in good standing. It is eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions today. And yet three of the largest pass-through vehicles for individual US philanthropy have decided that a charge from this DOJ—a charge legal experts have called defective on its face—is sufficient grounds to cut a 50-year-old civil rights organization off from its donors during the precise moment it needs them most.

There is a particular irony here. For years SPLC was one of the leading voices urging exactly these institutions to stop facilitating donations to hate groups through their DAFs. The institutions that once relied on SPLC’s expertise to make their own giving programs more responsible are now using a spurious fraud allegation to shut SPLC out.

The danger is not only what this does to SPLC, or to Jimmy Kimmel, or to James Comey. The danger is that it is a playbook. If the only thing required to defund a civil rights organization is for the DOJ to bring a charge, however weak, then the administration has been handed an extraordinarily powerful tool, and the price of using it is essentially zero. Every organization the administration decides it does not like becomes a target.

This is the part where I want to share about what gives me hope—because I do have it, and I want to explain why.

The hope is not abstract. It comes from evidence we now have because other institutions facing similar pressure have already run the experiment for us.

The Cause for Hope

Resistance, organized and legally defended, has been working.

Last year, the Trump administration issued executive orders against major law firms whose lawyers had represented disfavored clients. Nine of the most prestigious firms in the country made deals, agreeing collectively to provide nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for causes the administration favored, in exchange for an unenforceable promise to be left alone. Four firms—Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, and Susman Godfrey—sued instead. By March, the DOJ signaled an interest in dropping its appeals after losing in district court four times in a row. The firms that fought won. The firms that capitulated lost partners and clients, are bound by deals they cannot fully escape, and have watched their reputations within the legal profession suffer in ways that could take a generation to repair.

The same pattern played out at universities. Columbia, Brown, and others negotiated quickly when federal funding was frozen, paying hundreds of millions of dollars and accepting sweeping concessions. Harvard fought back in court and, in September, won a decisive ruling that the administration’s funding freeze was illegal. The case is on appeal and the larger battle is not over. But the contrast is unmistakable. The institution that resisted has so far won where it has been heard. The institutions that settled are now living with the terms of agreements that limit their independence in ways that will outlast any one administration.

I sit with these examples because they tell me something about what is actually happening beneath the noise. Giving in to the administration does not buy safety. It buys a price tag for the next demand. Resistance, organized and legally defended, has been working.

That is the lesson I think our sector now has to absorb, and quickly, because the same choice the law firms and the universities faced is now in front of philanthropy.

I have been telling colleagues these past few weeks that what is being asked of us is not complicated, even if it is not easy. We need to make our expectations of DAF sponsors explicit, public, and accompanied by the willingness to move money. A policy that automatically blocks giving on the basis of a federal indictment, regardless of merit and context, is not neutral compliance. In an environment where the DOJ is being used to pursue political opponents, such a policy is an active subsidy for that pursuit. The charitable arms of Fidelity, Vanguard, and Schwab are large institutions, and large institutions move when their largest customers tell them to. A growing group of philanthropic leaders is signing a public statement of solidarity with SPLC calling for exactly that, and I would invite you to add your name. The San Francisco Foundation has already publicly invited DAF holders to transfer their assets there. Other community foundations and mission-aligned sponsors will follow if donors lead.

We also need to fund the defense infrastructure that makes resistance possible in the first place. SPLC has hired strong counsel and filed a discovery motion, and it will need sustained support through what is likely to be a long fight. But the deeper need is support for the broader infrastructure—like the Democracy Protection Network, the Democracy Security Project, the legal organizations doing rapid response work for civil society groups under attack. I wrote in March that this infrastructure was facing a funding gap as it tried to grow to meet the scale of the threats. That gap has not yet closed. These organizations are the load-bearing walls of an independent civil society, and the people they protect are precisely the people whose own funding is being squeezed. They cannot fund their defenders. We have to.

I want to say a brief word about the FCC’s threats against ABC, even though it is not the central case here, because I think it belongs in the same frame and I expect it to be back in this column soon. A federal regulator does not get to use license review as punishment for jokes the first lady does not like, and the timing of an “accelerated” review the day after the president called for a comedian’s firing strains any innocent reading. With the 2026 midterms approaching, the willingness of broadcasters to cover this administration honestly is part of the election integrity question, not separate from it. Test 3 and Test 4—assessing whether we have free and fair elections—are bleeding into each other, which is part of why this moment feels different from earlier ones. I will have more to say about that as the year unfolds.

The Choice to Make Right Now

The hope I keep returning to is grounded. It is grounded in the fact that the law firms that stood up won. It is grounded in the fact that Harvard has won where it has been heard. It is grounded in the fact that SPLC has not flinched, has hired counsel, and has been met with a wave of solidarity from civil society leaders and from several major community foundation publicly inviting donors to vote with their assets. None of this guarantees the outcome. All of it suggests something simple and important: The strategy of intimidation works only when its targets, and the institutions adjacent to its targets, agree to be intimidated.

If our sector decides—visibly, collectively, with money attached—that we will not allow our giving infrastructure to be weaponized against the civil society organizations we exist to support, then the playbook breaks. The administration cannot prosecute every nonprofit it dislikes. It cannot indict its way through a coalition. What it is counting on is that each of us, individually, will calculate that the smart move is to keep our heads down.

Anticipatory obedience is a choice. So is standing up for one another.

I will keep watching the four tests as the year unfolds, and I will keep writing about what I see. As ever, I welcome your responses, your critiques, and your own hopes in the dark.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist‘s weekly newsletter here.

On a sunny Friday afternoon in October 2023, some 70 children filed into a cool, dark tunnel in the south of Paris to help the city rehearse for its increasingly hot future.

The tunnel, part of the abandoned Petite Ceinture railway encircling the city, is always 64 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius), making it the perfect safe haven from the potentially lethal heat imagined outside. Once underground, each youngster was asked to simulate the effects of extreme temperatures that might become reality in their lifetimes. Some pretended to have been poisoned by food that spoiled during a power outage. Others faked the effects of carbon monoxide leaking from a faulty generator. Meanwhile, Red Cross workers scrambled to decide who to send to overwhelmed hospitals. Around them, dozens of others — fire fighters, city officials, teachers — did their best to simulate the chaos and cascading impacts a heat wave of unprecedented duration and intensity might force them to confront.

The exercise, called Paris at 50 degrees Celsius, was designed to imagine what might happen if the mercury hits 122 degrees F, something scientists warn is increasingly likely by 2100. It combined live drills and a tabletop exercise to help shape a plan to protect the city’s 2 million people from that kind of heat. Once limited to a handful of cities, these exercises are spreading as local governments stress test health services, emergency response, and essential infrastructure before temperatures reach dangerous extremes.

What Paris is rehearsing could soon confront cities across the continent. European governments are being urged to prepare for 5 to 6 degrees F (2.8 to 3.3 degrees C) of warming, a change that could push Paris toward dangerous summertime temperatures by the end of the century.

Such heat is a global threat. Modeling suggests more than 1.6 billion people in nearly 1,000 cities could regularly face perilous conditions within three decades. Heat waves are already straining hospitals, causing outages, and paralyzing transit. In the complex systems that make up a city, even small failures can lead to larger breakdowns.

But as cities invest time and money into these exercises, one question remains: Do they actually improve preparedness?

It took Pénélope Komitès more than 18 months to prepare a drill that would last just two days. As Paris’ deputy mayor in charge of resilience, she considers such planning essential. “It was very important for us to show people that heat waves are not just something we see on the TV, but something that can happen soon, and that we need to improve what we’re going to do,” she said.

To help inform the scenario, scientists at the Île-de-France Regional Climate Change Expertise Group, which advises city leaders on climate risk, modeled what the future might look like. Other studies based on data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have largely confirmed their projection that temperatures could hit 122 degree F (50 degrees C) by the end of the century. For now, the city’s record stands at 108.68 F (42.6 C), registered on July 25, 2019.

The World Health Organization estimates that heat contributes to roughly half a million deaths worldwide each year. Symptoms can quickly escalate from fatigue to dehydration to heat stroke as the body loses its ability to cool itself. For older adults and people with heart or kidney disease, that strain can be fatal.

In Paris, much of the work of designing the simulation fell to Crisotech, a consultancy specializing in crisis exercises. It spent nine months working with the city to develop a dozen scenarios designed to anticipate where services would buckle, how agencies would work together, and which residents might be missed. The role-playing the children, from two different schools, participated in at two locations occurred on the first day; the second was dedicated to tabletop exercises among city officials and first responders.

“The objective was to anticipate all possible impacts of a heat dome across Paris, to consolidate the [preparedness] measures planned by the city in the event of an extreme heat wave, test new solutions, … and identify new actions to be implemented,” said Komitès.

More than 100 organizations took part, from city agencies and emergency services to utilities and nonprofits. While other cities, including Melbourne, London, and Phoenix, have hosted similar workshops, Paris made the unprecedented decision to include citizens in the role-playing portion of the €200,000 ($236,000) event. The city held informal meetings to recruit volunteers and help residents visualize the scenario. Children were especially valuable participants, both because they will face the consequences of a warming world and because they ask so many questions, said Ziad Touat, the crisis management consultant who led the simulation for Crisotech.

Komitès also wanted to prepare Parisians for the day when all of this would unfold for real. That’s important, she said, because the pandemic showed that well-informed communities respond to a crisis more effectively. If people recognize the symptoms of heat stroke, for example, or know when to find a cooling shelter, first responders can focus on the most vulnerable, Komitès said.

Five years ago, these simulations were confined to a handful of cities in the U.S. and Europe. Now, cities around the world are getting interested, said Cassie Sunderland, managing director of climate solutions at C40, a global network of mayors focused on climate action.

Some of the sims are sprawling operations like the one in Paris; others are more modest tabletop exercises, or hybrids that combine interagency workshops with limited role-playing. All are meant to identify points of failure before a crisis does.

Success is not measured by whether a drill runs smoothly, but rather, the opposite. The most valuable ones are realistic enough to force decisions, yet unpredictable enough to expose coordination problems and infrastructure failures. For example, engineers might be brought in to determine the temperature at which train tracks expand. “Imagine if you suddenly have a huge amount of people who need additional health care, but doctors and nurses can’t get to the hospital because of transport failures,” said Sunderland.

The growth of these exercises reflects a broader concern that many cities are unprepared. “Simulating extreme heat is really important,” said Dr. Satchit Balsari, a professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School. “A lot of cities stop and make heat action plans, but they actually don’t drill into how they are going to implement them, whether the funding for it exists, and if they actually have the know-how.”

Some scenarios can only be explored in a simulation, such as the question of cooling patients experiencing heatstroke. “How do you take a large human body and put it in ice? Is there a bucket that big?” Balsari said. “The answer is no, so is it a body bag? Where do you get all this ice?” What might appear simple on paper becomes a challenge unless tested.

Simulations should also consider what measures are needed after the heat breaks, Balsari said. For instance, healthcare systems will need plans for addressing the long-term impacts like increased risk of chronic kidney disease. “Have a final session that thinks about what the subsequent months look like,” he said.

Such challenges are compounded because most cities do not have someone responsible for crafting a unified response. A few, including Athens, Greece; Melbourne, Australia; and Freetown, Sierra Leone, have appointed “heat officers,” but most rely upon coordination among multiple departments. Rigorous testing can identify where that might break down and how coordination can be improved. Phoenix created a heat department after an exercise revealed that very problem.

Some of the cities most vulnerable to extreme heat may not have the resources to stage an expensive drill. But Touat said preparedness is not an all-or-nothing affair. Smaller, less costly efforts can still build readiness — whether by testing communications plans, mapping vulnerable citizens, or practicing how agencies would collaborate during an outage. “Don’t try to have everything at once and to spend too much money to do an exercise of this type,” he said. “It’s better to do five small ones than one big one.”

However, simulating extreme heat to improve preparedness isn’t enough, and work to decrease temperatures in cities must happen in parallel, Sunderland said. True resilience requires long-term changes that cool cities and slow climate change itself.

Even though these simulations have their limits and can come with a hefty price tag, many cities still see their appeal.

In Taiwan, they are expanding beyond cities. The country staged a tabletop exercise last year and plans a live simulation in July to test coordination within cities and between national officials. The goal is to test whether national and local agencies can effectively work together, said Ken-Mu Chang, the deputy director general of the country’s Climate Change Administration.

The tabletop exercise and role-playing scenario will focus on managing the health impacts of a days-long 104-degree F (40-degree C) heat wave — the kind of prolonged heat that can overwhelm hospitals and power systems. One challenge, Chang said, is designing an exercise that feels realistic enough to be useful without creating unnecessary public anxiety.

After last year’s trial run, officials realized that much of the exercise focused on agencies explaining existing plans, rather than showing how they’d respond to a crisis. “We want to make those gaps more visible and more concrete,” Chang said. “We want agencies not only to explain what they have, but also to identify what is still missing under a more extreme situation.”

Meanwhile, Barcelona, Spain is adapting the model Komitès helped develop.

The Catalan city faces growing urgency to prepare for a hotter future. The Mediterranean basin is warming 20 percent faster than the global average, making it one of the continent’s climate hot spots. Barcelona is among the European cities expected to see the greatest number of heat-related deaths by the end of the century.

Given that future, city officials want to develop plans to protect infrastructure, build a registry of vulnerable residents, and improve coordination. “It’s not easy when there’s so many actors and it’s not easy when the impacts are on so many different levels,” said Irma Ventayol, who leads Barcelona’s climate change department and is overseeing the simulation.

“Can we cope with waste management at 40 degrees C or 50 degrees C? Are the trucks prepared? Maybe they are, but no one has checked, so we need to ask those questions sooner rather than later,” Ventayol said. She also sees media coverage of the event as an opportunity to raise awareness among Barcelona’s nearly 2 million residents.

Beyond protecting the city, she hopes the exercise can help others. “I’d like to have a protocol that can serve other cities too, a scalable methodology that other cities can take and replicate, even for other impacts such as floods,” Ventayol said.

In Paris, the simulation — which inspired a flooding exercise that took place in October — produced 50 recommendations later folded into the city’s 2024–2030 Climate Action Plan. Some are now underway, including insulating thousands of homes and replacing asphalt parking spaces with trees; it planted 15,000 last winter alone. Even the three bathing spots along the Seine River that opened with a splash during last year’s Olympics are part of a broader effort to help residents stay cool.

Komitès is being peppered with questions from others eager to launch similar exercises. All of the lessons for the simulation were compiled into two public documents: a guide to running a heat simulation of this scale and a report detailing what organizers learned. “Everything we did is already on the internet so you’re already one step ahead,” said Touat at Crisotech.

The biggest surprise to come out of the exercise had nothing to do with infrastructure resilience or cooperation among departments. What shocked Komitès the most was how unprepared Parisians are for extreme heat.

The realization prompted what may be the city’s most important adaptation effort yet: preparing citizens, not just officials. In March, Paris opened its first Campus of Resilience with the civil protection agency and fire department. The center will host training sessions, smaller simulations, and public workshops open to all residents. “We need to talk with Parisians,” Komitès said. “To inform them, to prepare them.”

Welcome back to NPQ’s fundraising advice column, Ask Rhea. Rhea Wong is a fundraising expert and professional coach, exuberant author of Get That Money, Honey! host of the Nonprofit Lowdown podcast, and an unfailingly encouraging voice in a sometimes-bleak landscape. Rhea wants you to succeed, and she’s here to answer your questions.

Have a fundraising question? Send it to this submission form and choose “Fundraising” from the drop-down menu.

Dear Rhea,

I joined the board of an organization I love. I’m smart, I’m connected, I’m generous. At my last board meeting, the executive director handed me a list and said, “Go ask your friends for money.”

I froze. If I call my friend Janet, won’t she think I’m only reaching out because I want something? Won’t she ask me back next time her cause needs money? I want to help but I just can’t bring myself to do this.

Am I a bad board member?

Sincerely,

Anxious Board Member

Dear Anxious Board Member,

You are not a bad board member. You are not lazy. You are not broken. You are having a completely rational response to a completely broken system.

Here is what no one told you when you joined this board. The model most nonprofits use for major gift fundraising was built 50 years ago, and it does not work on today’s donors. The model goes like this: Get a list of names. Make some calls. Ask for money. That is the entire strategy.

It is killing your relationships. It is killing your donor pipeline. And it is making good board members like you feel icky.

Real talk: You are being asked to do the wrong job. Your actual job is to be a partner in fundraising, not a salesperson for it. And once you understand the difference, everything changes.

The Villain in This Story

The villain is not your executive director. The villain is not you. The villain is not even your donors. The villain is a broken model that treats fundraising as solicitation and nothing else.

Here is what happens when you follow it. You get a list. You call your friend Janet without context. Janet thinks, “Why is she calling me? Oh. They want money.” She feels blindsided. She feels used. She writes a small check to make you go away.

Major gift fundraising is not a single act of asking. It is a six-stage process, and only one of those six stages is the ask.

Now, Janet will likely not give again. She will not introduce you to her three friends who actually have capacity. The organization just lost what could have been a $50,000 relationship because someone asked for $5,000 the wrong way.

Multiply that by every board member at every nonprofit in this country, and you start to see the scale of what is being left on the table.

This is not a board problem but rather a partnership problem. The board is being asked to operate alone, without context, without a process, and without a partner on the staff side who can carry the relationship forward. No wonder boards freeze.

Fundraising Is Not One Thing—It’s Six

The breakthrough that changes everything for board members is the realization that major-gift fundraising is not a single act of asking. It is a six-stage process, and only one of those six stages is the ask. The other five are things you already know how to do. You just did not know they counted.

Here are the six stages of a consent-based major gift process:

1. Engagement: An event, an introduction, a conversation where someone first hears about the work. No one is asking for anything.
2. Preliminary qualification: The confirmation of five things: They have capacity, they have a reason for giving, there is some kind of relationship, the timing is right, and we have permission to continue.
3. Qualification: A real conversation that clarifies their interest and invites them into a process.
4. Cultivation: The wining, dining, schmoozing, site visits, program tours. The getting-to-know-you phase.
5. Solicitation: A co-created proposal for funding. Not a random ask. A natural conversation, because the work was done up front.
6. Stewardship: The afterglow. Showing the donor what their gift made possible.

Look at where the board lives in this process. Board members lead in engagement. They help in preliminary qualification. They participate in qualification. They participate in cultivation. They participate in stewardship. Staff leads on solicitation.

Read that again. Out of six stages, the board only takes the lead in one (engagement) and staff leads on the ask. Every other stage is a partnership.

That is the reframe. You are not the closer. You are the connector, the host, the relationship builder, and the celebrant. The staff is the strategist, the qualifier, and the asker. Together, you are a team. Apart, you are both flailing.

Why Boards Freeze

When I work with board members and ask them to introduce someone in their network, the most common answer is, “I do not know any rich people.”

That is almost never the actual problem.

The actual problem usually sounds more like this: I do not trust what the staff is going to do with my contacts. I am afraid of being embarrassed. I have not had any meaningful conversations with the people closest to me about what they care about. I do not want my friend to feel hunted.

All of those fears are valid. All of them go away when there is a real partnership in place between the board and the staff.

Partnership means the board member knows what is going to happen to Janet after the introduction is made. Partnership means the staff member is not going to chase Janet like Jaws if she says no. Partnership means there is a shared agreement about who does what, when, and how Janet will be treated at every step. Partnership means the board member can call Janet six months later and Janet will say, “Oh, I love that organization you introduced me to. They have been wonderful to get to know.”

That is the shift from petitioner to partner. Not just for the donor. For the board member, too.

What Real Partnership Looks Like in Practice

There are a few practical things board members and staff can do together starting at the next board meeting to foster stronger partnerships, such as:

• Have a real conversation about who does what. Most boards have never had this conversation explicitly. They have a vague sense that fundraising is “everyone’s job,” which is functionally the same as being no one’s job. Get specific. Who opens doors? Who qualifies prospects? Who has the cultivation conversation? Who makes the ask? Write it down.
• Build a shared pipeline the board can actually see. If the only person who knows what is in the pipeline is the executive director, the board cannot govern. A simple shared document with prospect names, where they are in the six stages, the dollar potential, and next action is enough to start. It does not need to be fancy. It needs to be visible.
• Replace cold calls with warm hosting. Instead of asking board members to phone strangers, ask them to host. A salon-style dinner with eight to 10 guests, hosted in a board member’s home, with the executive director in the room to talk about the mission, opens more relationships in two hours than a month of cold calls. The board member’s job is to invite. The staff member’s job is to follow up. Two roles. One outcome.
• Brief board members before every introduction. No board member should be sent into a conversation cold. A two-minute briefing on the prospect, the talking points, what we know, what we are listening for, and what success looks like is the difference between a board member feeling prepared or ambushed.
• Debrief after every donor touchpoint. Most boards never close the loop. The board member makes the introduction, then hears nothing for six months, then assumes nothing happened. A simple debrief after each donor meeting builds trust and momentum. It also tells the board member their effort mattered.
• Steward your board members the way you steward your donors. Board members are donors of time, money, and social capital. If they are not being thanked, updated, and shown impact, they will quietly disengage. The same care you give a $50,000 donor is the care your board members deserve.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Here is the part that should make any board member uncomfortable: The cost of staying in the broken model is not just one missed gift, it compounds.

This quarter, board paralysis could cost the organization $50,000 in unmade introductions. This year, it costs the December campaign. Next year, it costs the major donor who quietly went somewhere else because no one ever bothered to find out what she actually cared about.

A burned relationship is one of the hardest things to repair. Sometimes you do not get the donor back at all.

And while we are talking honestly, as a board member, you are responsible for the financial health of the organization. If you cannot get a clear answer about what is in the pipeline for next quarter, what is at risk, and where revenue is coming from, you are flying blind. That is not a fundraising problem. That is a governance problem. You cannot make strategic decisions about programming, hiring, or expansion if no one can tell you where the money is.

If it is not on the scorecard, it did not happen.

Three Questions to Ask at Your Next Board Meeting

If you are a board member reading this, here is your move. Ask three questions at your next meeting:

1. How many qualified prospects are currently in our pipeline, and where is each one in the six stages?
2. What is the dollar value of proposals out right now, and when do we expect them to close?
3. What is my specific role in the next 90 days, and what is the staff’s specific role?

If those questions can be answered in 60 seconds, your board has a system and a partnership. If they cannot be answered, you do not have a system. You have a list. And a list is not a strategy.

For the past year and a half, I’ve worked with researchers to study beliefs about reparations and to translate that research into language that advocacy groups and organizations can use to change their aims and practices. Our findings yielded a new understanding about how narrative infrastructure can connect to day-to-day organizing and communications work.

As a narrative practitioner, I realized the problem was on my end: I hadn’t explained how to truly integrate these powerful research findings into the day-to-day work.

Reparations may seem like a complicated issue, but at its core the definition of reparations is simple: “Reparations” is the process of a government making amends for harm. While most people think of reparations solely in terms of money, they include a variety of material, systemic, and symbolic repairs for victims, their families, and society. The process involves four steps that can be taken in any order: reckoning, acknowledgement, accountability, and redress.

But advocating for a social justice issue that has so much history, emotional complexity, and misconceptions surrounding it can be confusing. Just when I thought I’d convinced someone that reparations were politically feasible, I’d learn that they didn’t think slavery impacted the present and therefore reparations wouldn’t be needed at all.

The reparations movement is backed by a lot of research—including polls, surveys, national reports, and message testing—and I was adding to the list. Still, I initially wasn’t sure how to use the research in my advocacy work, and I didn’t see anyone else using it beyond an initial press release. As a narrative practitioner, I realized the problem was on my end: I hadn’t explained how to truly integrate these powerful research findings into the day-to-day work. To do this took a significant shift in my approach.

Back at the drawing board, I imagined an aerial view over a small town: the wide-range perspective makes it easy to see the interlinked systems of roads between hospitals, markets, and schools where goods are delivered across locations. But on the ground, unable to view the town’s layout entirely, it’s easy to feel lost and unsure of how to get from one place to another to access the right resources.

The narrative field has developed narrative infrastructure, the “roads” or set of systems maintained in order to deliver messages and narratives consistently over time. These systems include strategic planning, collaborative networks, funding, data, and technology. Communications teams have become skilled drivers of reliable “vehicles” that include press releases, social media posts, speeches, events, film and television content, and art. These vehicles deliver a range of essential “goods”: messages, stories, and ideas.

Similarly, the social justice strategy and narrative research projects I was so passionate about were offering incredible bird’s-eye views of the best ways to connect data and campaigns. When these projects land in the hands of community organizers and communicators on the ground, however, the same research is often skimmed and passed over in favor of habitual tactics that get the job done quickly.

What I needed was a map with clear directions to effectively travel to our campaign goals and achieve our vision for a better future.

What Is a Belief Arc?

My team and I developed what we call a belief arc—a narrative map that outlines the series of beliefs a person adopts as they come to understand a complex social issue in a fundamentally different way.

A well-researched belief arc shows us an individual’s mental processes as they change their mind about a specific issue. It reveals not just where people stand, but the specific beliefs they hold along the way.

Structurally, belief arcs follow a three-part foundation:

1. A series of foundational beliefs about society at large
2. An issue-specific solution proposal
3. A series of issue-specific beliefs

Along the arc, different audience segments fall into various stages depending on their held beliefs. Narrative strategists are able to move audiences from each group—from opposition to persuadable to active support—by tackling theoretical “gaps.” Belief gaps are related to whether individuals actually align with the ideas; the hope gap is the doubt audiences may have about seeing issue-specific ideas coming to fruition. The action gap traces what messaging is required to inspire audiences to actively mobilize for a cause.

This new narrative tool is inspired by the ladders of engagement used by labor organizers, contemplation ladders used in psychology, and the supporter journeys used in donor organizing. It also integrates research from social science, psychology, and marketing that tells us that most people don’t completely support or oppose complex social issues and that it’s unusual for people to entirely reverse their beliefs on an issue in a single setting.

Using these frameworks meant the belief arc could easily be integrated into existing organizing processes. In fact, looking at past social justice movements, it appeared successful advocacy may have unknowingly used belief arcs all along.

For example, in 2012, just 48 percent of people in the United States supported same-sex marriage. However, 54 percent believed that gay and lesbian relationships were morally acceptable, 64 percent believed gay and lesbian relationships should be legal, and 77 percent believed that gay and lesbian domestic partners or spouses should have access to health insurance and other employee benefits. The data illustrate the notion of a belief arc: Many respondents who didn’t support same-sex marriage held positive intermediate beliefs about LGBTQ+ people and their rights. Over time, thanks to powerful advocacy, support for each of these beliefs evolved and all of these percentages grew, indicating that people in the United States were generally moving along a belief arc.

This meant the new tool could clarify the middle for current advocacy efforts and, maybe, help organizers increase support more quickly.

How to Use a Belief Arc

The first belief arc I created with my team was the Reparations Belief Arc, in collaboration with researchers, narrative experts, and reparations movement leaders from Voss Research and Strategy, Lake Research Partners, Get Free, BLIS Collective, We Make The Future Action, and Vetiver. It maps eight beliefs from full opposition to full and active support for comprehensive reparations and is paired with eight demographic audience segments, which can be moved up or down the belief arc, depending on the messaging provided.

This arc shows the range of uses of belief arcs more generally:

1. Tying social justice movements together
2. Audience and message targeting
3. Goal setting and success tracking
4. Broader narrative strategy development

First, the foundational beliefs in a belief arc inherently lend themselves to narrative collaboration between social justice movements. If climate justice, immigrant rights, and reparations movements all need to instill the belief that “history impacts the present,” then one movement’s narrative success should positively impact the other’s. In a time when solidarity is essential, identifying our overlapping foundational beliefs offers us a chance to stay issue-focused while intertwining our liberation journeys.

The following defines the active beliefs that audiences adopt along the arc, and the application of each belief within the Reparations Belief Arc.

1. No change is needed (“Slavery does not impact the present.”)

1. Identifying the problem (“Slavery and its legacies impact the present.”)
2. Caring about the problem (“We need to do more as a society to address the harms of slavery and its legacies.”)
3. Identification of a target (“The Government is responsible for making things right.”)
4. Support for the solution (“Reparations are the right way to make things right.”)
5. Tactical confidence (“Reparations are possible.”)
6. Public support for recent harms (“Taking action in support of reparations for the recent harms of the legacies of slavery is worthwhile.”)
7. Public support for historic harms (“Taking action in support of reparations for the historic harms of slavery and its legacies is worthwhile.”)

Belief arcs can also be used to target messaging to specific people based on their beliefs. For example, someone who believes reparations are the right solution and are possible responds to messaging very differently from someone who believes slavery does not impact the present. We can therefore focus on moving people one step up the belief arc, increasing support incrementally.

By expanding traditional audience segmentation beyond opposition, persuadable ideas, and base support, the intermediate beliefs identified in a belief arc move us away from all-or-nothing campaigning that looks for full support after a single engagement. This can also increase trust within a movement ecosystem, which must rely on others to make subsequent touchpoints to move a person all the way up the belief arc over time.

Belief arcs also help challenge the traditional notion that narrative work is hard to track. They allow practitioners to set trackable goals, such as moving 60 percent of engaged audiences one step up the arc. Paired with annual polling or engagement surveys, the belief arc offers tracking for performance indicators. Instead of trying to track all the beliefs and themes that were changed, practitioners can track a single belief within a specific project. It takes just seven questions to track and look at the change in response over the duration of a project or campaign. This convenient indicator in audience response can point to narrative success, or lack thereof.

Today, the country is the most politically polarized it has been in decades. Belief arcs put these disparate perspectives into focus by catering messaging to different groups along the spectrum.

Finally, this kind of incremental engagement also allows us to prioritize our narrative work and set SMART—Strategic, Measurable, Ambitious, Realistic, Time-bound—narrative goals. By focusing funding or campaigning on a single stage of the belief arc and then surveying the general public annually, advocates can see if their campaign is changing the mass narrative connected to that specific belief stage.

For the Reparations Belief Arc, there are a couple of theories of change that the movement is currently deliberating before prioritizing specific stages of their arc. Will reparations organizers garner enough active support to win by moving 11 percent of the public out of the hope gap? Or maybe advocates need to prioritize moving the 33 percent of the US public that doesn’t think slavery impacts the present. The movement is weighing its options. Similar processes could help inform strategy development for any other controversial issue, with a wide range of supportive and oppositional beliefs.

Today, the country is the most politically polarized it has been in decades. Belief arcs put these disparate perspectives into focus by catering messaging to different groups along the spectrum. In addition to being able to use it in day-to-day reparations advocacy and communication, belief arcs are now being developed in campaigns for transit infrastructure, 2026 Get Out the Vote initiatives, and housing and climate advocacy.

As the narrative industry continues to grow and establish its importance across social advocacy fields, I hope the belief arc meets the call for narrative infrastructure to make this work more impactful than ever. Our country needs it.

This post was republished with permission from Ujima WIRE, the blog of the Boston Ujima Project.

The Neighborhood Birth Center has been in the making for a decade. Executive director and founder Nashira Baril has made it her mission to bring to life the first standalone birthing center in Boston, to redress frustrating maternal health outcomes in the Bay State and to produce care designed by and for women of color, from the ground-up. Editorial Manager Alula Hunsen reports back on Birth Center as they get ready to finally break ground on a physical facility, making good on their promise to birthing people and the communities that support them. 

Still, the Birth Center and Community Movement Commons’ initial proposal was denied by the Boston Zoning Board of Appeals last February, surfacing tensions around housing, development, and community control. Residents raised concerns about housing needs and whether  the development was sufficiently resident-led. After addressing key concerns, including adding green space and parking, shrinking the building envelope, and deciding to move forward with the Birth Center on its own while retaining housing at 23 Kearsarge Ave,the Birth Center re-submitted and was approved in December. Following a 30-day comment period that drew no objections from abutting owners, and a lawsuit filed afterwards that failed to materialize serving papers within a requisite 90-day-period, the Birth Center is moving forward. Baril shared that, “In spite of any tensions, the Birth Center is committed to being a good neighbor, and we hope to demonstrate that to neighbors and abutters in the future. In a neighborhood where gentrification is accelerating, we understand that there is some mistrust; we hope to have a huge impact on community health, and a small impact on people’s day-to-day lives as their neighbor.”

Notes

This article was guest-edited by Emmy Liu. Emmy Liu is an editor and writer whose work centers on meaningful exchange—how ideas move between people, how meaning is created, and how it is made and felt. She works at the intersection of art, language, and culture. She’s worked for Milk.xyz, Mission Magazine, and Boston Art Review.

Social scientists in the United States have long wrestled with a fundamental problem: Most of the research about human behavior that they are taught has been conducted on Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic populations—what psychologist Joseph Henrich and colleagues have dubbed “WEIRD” societies. These populations represent roughly 12 percent of humanity, yet their behavioral patterns are treated as central to understanding universal truths.

Philanthropy in the United States suffers from a similar form of myopia. We’ve built our sector on the assumption that US institutional models represent the pinnacle of philanthropic practice. We pride ourselves on “learning journeys” and “listening tours” while consistently overlooking many of the world’s most effective philanthropic innovations—not because they’re obscure, but because they exist outside the institutional frameworks we reflexively recognize as legitimate.

It’s time for the philanthropic sector to recognize that the most innovative solutions for sustainable social change aren’t being developed in foundation boardrooms.

The irony in the current historical moment is acute. As trust in US institutions declines and global challenges demand urgent response, philanthropy as we know it looks ill-equipped for the volatility and complexity ahead. Meanwhile, communities comprising the Global Majority—which includes people of African, Asian, Latin American, and Indigenous descent, who constitute approximately 85 percent of the world’s population—have spent generations navigating political instability, resource constraints, and urgent crises. Similarly disregarded communities closer to home have also developed their own models of collective care and mutual aid. These include Indigenous communities, Black communities, and poor communities.

Among them, these groups have developed philanthropic practices that are more flexible, crisis-tested, community-rooted, and effective at resource mobilization than many of our institutional approaches are ever likely to be. Yet the philanthropic sector regularly ignores them or treats them as mere curiosities rather than viewing them as compelling practices from which to learn.

It’s time for the philanthropic sector to recognize that the most innovative solutions for sustainable social change aren’t being developed in foundation boardrooms. Rather, they’re emerging from communities that have long understood how to respond to crises without waiting for strategic plans, how to mobilize resources with minimal bureaucracy, and how to center the leadership of those closest to the challenges they face.

Simply put: It’s time for philanthropy to be less WEIRD.

The Myth of American Philanthropic Exceptionalism

The philanthropic sector likes to tell itself a comforting tale: The United States is uniquely generous, our foundation model represents the apex of giving, and our approach to philanthropy is something the rest of the world should aspire to replicate.

While there is no final shared definition of “philanthropy” in the United States, practitioners in the field often default to models based on the US tax code. Broadly, the sector understands philanthropy to be the specific practices of major donors, foundations, and various types of associations and other 501c3 nonprofit organizations, rather than defined simply as care for fellow humans. Case in point: Giving to these organizations is treated as “philanthropy”; remittances from one family member to another are not.

The data call into question the effectiveness of this narrow interpretation of philanthropy, as do our experiences as practitioners in the US philanthropic sector who are also members of Global Majority communities.

Consider the case of remittances—the money that immigrants and diaspora communities send back to family and friends in their home countries. In 2023, these transfers of money to low- and middle-income countries totaled $656 billion, nearly three times the roughly $223 billion that governments provided in official foreign aid that year. That flow of money from individuals to their communities of origin represents one of the largest and most consistent sources of financial support in the world, but most definitions of US philanthropy don’t count it at all. Many countries also give more equitably relative to their GDPs, including Indonesia and Kenya, and many communities provide support in ways that aren’t captured in our familiar Western definition of philanthropy. We focus on tax-incentivized, institutionalized giving and ignore how people around the world mobilize resources to support their communities and advance social good.

Consider a limited sampling of what we miss when we define philanthropy so narrowly, with such a clearly WEIRD bias.

• In Southern Africa, stokvels (community-based savings clubs) and burial societies have mobilized resources for generations through collective solidarity and the philosophy of ubuntu (translated as “I am because we are”), providing a vital social safety net independent of formal banking.
• In Latin America, compadrazgo (ritual kinship) networks of padrinos and madrinas (co-parents or godparents) have long stewarded community support through informal, trust-based systems of reciprocity that function as a flexible social safety net.
• In India, community foundations and pooled funding efforts center collective ownership and community-defined impact while operating at scales of impact that rival the reach of major American foundations.
• Since the late 1700s, African Americans have sustained a movement to provide economic support and assistance to their communities through mutual aid societies, funding everything from the Underground Railroad to the civil rights movement to social services needed to confront systems of oppression that kept their communities from accessing basic needs. According to the K. Kellogg Foundation’s Cultures of Giving report, African American households give 25 percent more of their income to charity than the national average.

These aren’t unsophisticated practices that need to be institutionalized, bureaucratized, or further legitimized via academic research. They’re practical approaches deliberately and effectively structured for local accountability, rapid response, and sustained impact.

Institutional US philanthropy isn’t the norm; it’s an outlier. Recognizing this fact is essential for two reasons.

First, treating US models as the default best practice has led us to export approaches that are often poorly suited to the contexts in which they’re imposed. Examples include efforts to export rice to rice-producing countries, work to produce mosquito nets that undermined local economies, and water well projects that ignored community needs and left behind well-constructed holes in the ground. From climate change to public health, US funders have too often been guilty of prescribing solutions while sidelining communities who are already doing the work, often more effectively.

Second, assuming our models are “normal” rather than WEIRD limits our collective openness and ability to learn from others who often know better. As we explain in more detail below, philanthropy among Global Majority peoples often works better than the more familiar US models. We have our own insights to share, but we also have much to learn.

Being open to this knowledge presents us with an extraordinary opportunity to move toward a set of better philanthropic models at a time when our communities—and, indeed, the entire world—desperately need us to do so.

What People Who Are Less WEIRD Know

Decades of navigating crises and resource constraints have led people in the Global Majority to produce philanthropic models that offer crucial lessons for a sector facing unprecedented challenges. Three of them feel particularly noteworthy in our current moment.

1. How to Respond to a Crisis with Agility and Resilience

When COVID-19 emerged, countries in West Africa drew on hard-won experience with Ebola to mount effective responses while better-resourced nations stumbled and struggled. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, communities and local funders mobilized quickly, leveraging networks and knowledge carried locally, not found in pandemic playbooks written in Geneva or Atlanta. 

Mobilization also happened at a continental scale: The Africa Medical Supplies Platform created a transparent marketplace that allowed 55 African Union member states to pool their purchasing power. It thereby helped ensure equitable access to diagnostic kits, PPE, and vaccines without relying on the fluctuating priorities of US or European donors.

African institutions even used the crisis to build lasting infrastructure for health security. The African Epidemics Fund, operationalized in 2025, now provides the Africa Centres for Disease Control with flexible, autonomous funding. When US government aid was suspended in 2025, the importance of such independent systems became even more acute.

During the height of COVID-19, some US funders demonstrated that they, too, could move quickly in response to a crisis: eliminating lengthy applications, trusting grantee partners, accepting sensible, community-defined success metrics, and more. But many have treated such practices as a temporary exception, missing the opportunity to fundamentally rethink US philanthropy’s cumbersome approach to due diligence.

Meanwhile, communities that have long lived with great uncertainty have continued to invent and innovate, often going further and faster than institutional philanthropy has been willing to go. As civil-sector infrastructure organization EPIC-Africa noted: “Africa is home to some of the world’s fastest-growing economies. While foreign funding plays a role, it is neither the only nor the most important driver of our progress. The real story lies in our homegrown generosity and innovation.”

2. How to Practice Community-Rooted Resource Mobilization at Scale 

US-based philanthropy has a long tradition of encouraging individual agendas and “philanthropic freedom,” which has too often led to top-down thinking and siloing of action. Among Global Majority populations, different social and cultural practices have helped pave the way for philanthropic efforts that are community-rooted and more consistently integrated (and/or interconnected) from the ground up rather than the top down.

In India, for example, philanthropic fund and systems builder Dasra has pioneered models that connect donors not to funder-driven strategies but to community-defined priorities, with intermediaries serving as bridges rather than gatekeepers. The approach enables a shift from transactional grantmaking to what Dasra refers to as ecosystem orchestration.

During the COVID-19 crisis, Dasra and the Tarsadia Foundation launched the Rebuild India Fund, recognizing that while large NGOs received significant funding, small grassroots community-based organizations were often excluded due to their lack of formal structures or Western-style reporting capabilities. The fund now supports 342 NGOs across 25 Indian states and five Union Territories, focusing on marginalized groups including scheduled castes, tribes, and LGBTQIA+ communities.

Critically, an investment committee of nonprofit leaders—not Dasra or the contributing funders—ultimately decides which organizations receive funding. This model addresses what Dasra identifies as a historic “trust deficit,” demonstrating that donors can step back from control without sacrificing impact.

Dasra’s model also aims to build “connective tissue” in the social impact ecosystem so donors aren’t left in solitary silos, endlessly searching for their own unique strategies and becoming vulnerable to analysis paralysis. The focus is straightforward and practical: moving money to make things better, trusting partners to handle deployment, and measuring success by community-defined outcomes rather than institutional metrics.

3. How to Make Collaboration Work

“Collaboration” has been a buzzword in the US philanthropic sector for decades, but we have a lot to learn about how to actually make it work. Following the Bridgespan Group’s deep dive into collaborative funds working in the Global South, Jeff Bradach observed, “If you’re an adviser, you can’t claim that you’re looking at the most powerful examples of any practice or organisation if you’re only looking at your own context….The Global North has much to learn from the Global South.”

For one thing, successful collaborative efforts are typically community-led. Bridgespan’s research found that “for most collaborative funds we followed up with, at least three-fourths of grantees are led by an individual representative of the communities they serve.” 

What’s more, organizations like EPIC-Africa, the Africa Women’s Development Fund, and India Development Review (IDR) serve as crucial bridging infrastructure. They share research, amplify community voices, and build connective tissue in ways that make entire systems more effective.

US philanthropists often express envy of such effective connectivity. Yet when presented with opportunities to fund similar infrastructure domestically or internationally, many US funders prefer either to fund direct services or to build entirely new institutions rather than strengthen existing ones. This is especially ironic since alternatives like mutual aid societies and giving circles have been collaborating effectively in US communities for decades.

Giving circles have attracted over 370,000 people who have collectively moved more than $3.1 billion in the United States, and the movement is on track to double again in the next five years. These circles tend to be more diverse in race and gender than traditional philanthropy and seek deep engagement with funding recipients beyond financial support.

Organizations like the New Generation of African American Philanthropists (NGAAP) in Charlotte, NC, exemplify this model. Since 2006, NGAAP has worked to reclaim the root meaning of philanthropy—love of humanity—through collective giving and strategic action, combining the tenets of mutual aid with opportunities for financially successful members to step in where institutional philanthropy has struggled.

Giving circles serve as both catalysts for capacity building and mechanisms to increase the visibility of the community organizations they support.

Streamlining and Rehumanizing Practice

The world of WEIRD philanthropy needs to reckon with the fact that a new game has begun. We need to learn to play it well, and quickly. Thankfully, the first steps are comparatively straightforward. Many are even familiar.

Learning from Global Majority philanthropy isn’t about importing specific models wholesale. It’s about adopting principles that make giving more responsive, community-directed, and human-centered. Whether funders are giving locally, nationally, or internationally, a similar set of lessons apply.

For Institutional Funders

• Rethink due diligence. The COVID-19 emergency revealed that funders could move quickly when they chose to. That capacity didn’t disappear when the emergency subsided. Drop the exhaustive compliance requirements and move to trust-based approaches permanently. Let partners define indicators of impact rather than imposing institutional frameworks that serve funders more than communities.
• Create more bridges, not more silos. When funders encounter a gap, the instinct is often to create something new. But infrastructure typically exists already; it just might not look familiar. Look to support existing community foundations, diaspora networks, and collaborative funds. Recognize that organizations serving as intermediaries aren’t overhead; they’re the connective tissue that makes the entire ecosystem more effective.
• Fund collaboratively, for real. Pool funds, simplify (and share) application processes, and reduce the time nonprofits have to spend competing for resources. This will make the entire sector more efficient while shifting power dynamics in meaningful ways. Models from organizations like Co-Impact demonstrate what’s possible when funders prioritize collective impact over individual attribution. Common application systems—similar to the Common App for college admissions—can reduce burden on grantees who shouldn’t have to customize proposals for each potential funder.

For Family Foundations and Individual Philanthropists

• Build authentic relationships. Think of diaspora organizations, community foundations, and locally rooted intermediaries as co-strategists who understand the context better than any external funder could. Engage accordingly. The Daphne Foundation’s approach during the Ebola crisis—reaching out to partners in Liberia to seek their ideas rather than crafting solutions from New York—provides a model worth emulating.
• Lead from behind. Contribute to community-defined priorities rather than pursuing individual agendas. Trust that collective wisdom almost always outperforms individual strategy. This doesn’t mean abandoning discernment or diligence. It does mean recognizing that proximity and experience lead to expertise and wisdom that should guide resource allocation.

For Philanthropy Professionals (Advisors, Consultants, Media, and Infrastructure Organizations)

• Create learning spaces for continuous exchange. Not one-off learning journeys but sustained platforms for knowledge exchange between US philanthropy and practice in the rest of the world. Philanthropy media in the United States should regularly elevate Global Majority voices and practices, treating them not as curious alternatives but as models worthy of serious engagement and potential emulation.
• Decenter the United States as the default authority. Recognize Global Majority practices as innovation, not novelties. Saviorism is narrow-minded and damaging. Shared humanity and empathy are not. Interrogate power dynamics in every interaction. Learn from initiatives like Native Americans in Philanthropy, Hispanics in Philanthropy, and the Africa Grantmakers’ Affinity Group (AGAG) Legacy Project that center non-Western approaches to giving.

The Margin Is the Center

Foundations and donors in the United States have resources and capacity that matter, and most want to do as much good as they can. Our goal is to help them recognize that effective philanthropy can, and already does, take many forms—many of which don’t resemble the WEIRD models we’ve elevated as universal standards.

We need to be less WEIRD. In doing so, we’ll become more effective, more accountable, and more worthy of the trust communities place in us.

The crises we face—including climate change, democratic backsliding, and growing inequality—demand the kind of adaptive, community-rooted, trust-based approaches familiar among Global Majority communities. Not because one community is inherently wiser than another, but because different communities have already developed practices that are more resilient, more responsive, and more human than our own.

The invitation here is to recognize that what we’ve treated as the margin might actually be the center, that what we’ve dismissed as informal might actually be more effective, and that the wisdom we desperately need may already exist.

The world doesn’t have time for US philanthropy to spend another decade in self-reflection. We need to be less WEIRD. In doing so, we’ll become more effective, more accountable, and more worthy of the trust communities place in us.

Maati Jone Primm did not envision herself as a bookstore owner, even though Marshall’s Music and Bookstore, the oldest operating Black-owned bookstore in the United States, has been in her family for decades. The bookstore, originally founded in 1938, was purchased by Primm’s grandmother, a college-educated woman who was the first in her family to be born outside of slavery.

Located in Jackson, MS, often referred to as the “Blackest City in America,” Marshall’s is situated within the historic Farish Street district. This downtown neighborhood was once a hub for Black businesses and offered refuge to Black Mississippians during the Jim Crow period until the 1970s, when businesses in the district began to decline. Elsewhere in the city, Black people would have to hold their heads down or get off the sidewalk if a White person approached them, but that was not the case on Farish Street.

“Everybody convened on Farish Street. It provided a life,” Primm told NPQ. “You could have fun. You could visit a doctor. You could come to the bookstore and be educated. It was difficult to have books. You couldn’t go to a White library and take out books, or even touch them, or even sit there.”

The Importance of Black Bookstores

Though many of the businesses are no longer in existence, Marshall’s remains, and Primm attributes its longevity largely to the longtime support of customers. She says that there are customers who came to the bookstore as children with their grandparents, who now bring their own grandchildren to the store.

Primm grew up in Minneapolis but would visit her grandparents and the bookstore during the summer. It was then that she was able to witness how people and businesses thrived within the district “in spite of all the racism and terrorism that goes on in Mississippi, even to this day.”

Still, even after she bought the bookstore from her family, she never intended to stay. She thought she would be in Mississippi for at most four years, but the calling was too great. As an extension of the bookstore, she began to engage in advocacy work, such as successfully fighting for people who had been wrongfully convicted. To Primm, this advocacy work is part of what her family has instilled in her.

[Black bookstores] do far more than sell books—they have a long history of educating people and helping to shape minds.

“The idea of my family is that you’re not truly successful unless you’re helping to lift others up,” she said.

That is one reason why Primm believes the work of Marshall’s should extend beyond its four walls. Inspired by the work of people like Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, Marshall’s holds what Primm calls Saturday schools where they are “going out amongst the people, going into projects, renting spaces, going into churches—wherever we need to go to teach the people.”

Primm also works to ensure that as soon as people come inside the bookstore, they receive an education that extends beyond what is being taught in schools. For instance, the building features a wall of remembrance that allows people to learn about the ancient University of Timbuktu in Mali, General Hannibal, and other historical facts. The wall extends up into the present day.

“We’re not stuck in the Civil Rights Era,” Primm said. “We concentrate on the whole, so when you walk in, you get an education just by reading the wall.”

As Primm notes, this type of education is more important than ever since the state has implemented laws that discourage the teaching of Black history, sparking concerns from lawmakers and advocates that children are not being taught comprehensive history in schools. Primm says that the education students received has long been inadequate—and she’s working to change that.

“Even before those laws were in place, what you would get in public institutions in terms of Black history was the history of loss—how we lost this, how we lost that, how we were dependent on other people to address our plight, which is garbage. We were taught garbage in order to…keep us compliant,” she said.

The number of Black-owned bookstores has significantly increased across the United States in recent years.

Speaking to Primm, one can sense her passion and understand why Black bookstores are important. They do far more than sell books—they have a long history of educating people and helping to shape minds. In recent years, books like Katie Mitchell’s Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores and Char Adams’s Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore have helped shine light on this history.

The State of the Black Bookstore

Continuing the work of lifting up the importance of Black-owned bookstores is the National Association of Black Bookstores (NABB), which was founded on Juneteenth, 2025. The group has identified five goals:

• Serving as the national clearinghouse and advocate for Black bookstores
• Providing professional resources and community for booksellers
• Leveraging collective buying power of Black booksellers
• Growing and sustaining Black participation and accessing the bookselling industry
• Preserving and educating the history and legacy of Black bookstores

In early 2026, NABB released its inaugural The State of the Black Bookstore report, which amplifies the fact that the number of Black-owned bookstores has significantly increased across the United States in recent years. The report also acknowledges the challenges they face, often related to funding but not limited to it.

The report notes that there are 306 Black-owned bookstores across the country. This is down from the peak of 325 in 1999, but up significantly from the 120 recorded bookstores in 2020. For many, there is a connection between the racial justice protests of 2020 and the growth in Black-owned bookstores since. It is a sign that, particularly amid attacks against the teaching of Black history in public schools, people are searching for third places where they can receive unaltered knowledge. In many ways, Black-owned bookstores are helping to fill this need.

Among the challenges…for Black-owned bookstores are…frequent exclusion from major author tours; and neighborhood shifts, like gentrification.

The 306 Black-owned bookstores across the country represent 8 percent of independent bookstores in the United States. Of these, 36 percent are currently operating without a permanent brick-and-mortar location. Only 4 percent of people working in the publishing industry identify as Black.

While New York is home to the most Black-owned bookstores in the country, a disproportionate number of Black-owned bookstores are located in the South. Sixty-six bookstores are located in Florida, Georgia, and Texas alone. This is notable as these are some of the states most impacted by laws limiting public school curricula—not to mention that Florida and Texas have the highest number of banned books as of mid-2025.

The report also notes that there are 14 states with no Black-owned bookstore at all.

Among the challenges the report identifies for Black-owned bookstores are capital and start-up costs, along with high rent and systemic barriers to financing options; revenue sales and the fact that these bookstores often lack financial support; marketing and visibility, and frequent exclusion from major author tours; and neighborhood shifts, like gentrification.

As the owner of a bookstore that has been able to survive for nearly a century, Primm reflects on the challenges that bookstores across the country are facing. She suggested that some “may need to address [how] they go about doing business” and perhaps adopt an approach that is in more direct communication with community members and “go outside the four walls of their stores and let people know who they are.”

She also contends that racism is likely impacting Black-owned bookstores, citing her own bookstore as an example. For years, Primm has been working to obtain a larger space because the current location is quite small and restricts her from doing some of the activities she would like to do. The City approved her proposal to buy a building, but it has been four years and Primm has seen no progress made, largely because state officials are refusing to move the proposal forward.

“I’ve never heard of people taking four years to purchase a building,” Primm said. “It’s just straight-up racism that’s preventing us from doing what we do.”

SameSame Collective is a nonprofit that provides direct mental health advice to queer youth in parts of the world where there is limited public acceptance and community support. Founded in 2021, the organization built automated chat agents onto WhatsApp, the popular messaging application owned by Meta.

When ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) came on the scene about a year later, Jonathan McKay, one of SameSame’s cofounders, figured it was game over for its comparatively primitive chat service. The organization ran workshops to test how users responded to its original offering versus an AI-powered chatbot.

“I fully went into those workshops expecting that they would say, ‘We much prefer ChatGPT and Meta’s AI,’ and that we would have to conclude we don’t have a reason to exist,” McKay told NPQ.

And yet, quite the opposite occurred.

“While they liked the user experience of ChatGPT and Meta’s AI more, they scored our service higher on trustworthiness and local relevance. And so, we left those workshops thinking, ‘OK, maybe we do deserve to continue to exist.’ But how do we leverage what LLMs make available to us to make our service even better?”

“Making [a bot] more human-like may backfire.”

This is a question all organizations might do well to ask themselves amid the wave of AI products and services sweeping the nonprofit sector. A counterintuitive consensus is emerging from research and real-world experiences within nonprofits: People don’t like AI that tries too hard to be human—a finding that may carry particularly important consequences for organizations whose missions are based on conscientiousness and compassion.

The Research of Chatbots

For all the billions of dollars being invested in making AI ever more personable, a growing body of research suggests that people are increasingly disenchanted with human-like bots.

At George Mason University’s Costello College of Business, researchers built a chatbot for a Minneapolis nonprofit as part of an experiment. One was an “anthropomorphized” version—it had a name and was conversational—and another one was more direct and robotic. The goal of the chat was to steer people toward volunteering or donating. The study found that the more human-like the bot, the less likely people were to stick around and engage.

“In a very personal context, a nonprofit where people actually donate out of free will, or it’s very personal to them, like some cause in society…making [a bot] more human-like may backfire,” Siddharth Bhattacharya, a George Mason professor who cowrote the research’s findings, told NPQ.

Another recent study published in Nature Human Behaviour found that people vastly preferred human expressions of empathy to those generated by AI.

“As sophisticated or advanced as it could get, [AI] is never going to have been in a situation where it’s also lost its job, or it’s not able to put food on the table for its kids.”

“Human-attributed responses were rated as more empathic and supportive, and elicited more positive and fewer negative emotions, than AI-attributed ones,” the study noted. “Moreover, participants’ own uninstructed belief that AI had aided the human-attributed responses reduced perceived empathy and support.”

These findings suggest that recent stories about people falling in love with AI chatbots or being steered toward destructive behavior are outliers. People seem more likely to respond with doubt and discomfort to AI bots that affect human emotions.

AI, Chatbots, and Nonprofits

These findings in many ways confirm what leaders at tech-based nonprofits have been seeing up close as they integrate AI into their services.

Empower Work helps those navigating career challenges by connecting them with counselors. Jaime-Alexis Fowler, the organization’s CEO, first noticed the adverse reaction clients had to the prospect of chatting with bots back in 2018.

“The peer counselor would be like, ‘No, I’m a real person,’” Fowler told NPQ. “They did not want to talk to an AI bot.”

Fowler noted that AI bots have an empathy gap: “As sophisticated or advanced as it could get, [AI] is never going to have been in a situation where it’s also lost its job, or it’s not able to put food on the table for its kids.”

Fowler explained there are three forms of empathy: cognitive, affective, and motivational. “Right now, AI can do the cognitive one,” she said. “But affective empathy and motivational empathy are two areas that are really important when you’re navigating something extremely difficult.”

McKay has spent a lot of time trying to understand why young people—those presumedly most comfortable interacting with digital personas—would be turned off by humanized chatbots.

“I suspect what’s happening with a lot of LLMs is that people are trying to infuse them with some kind of brand or style…. And it’s like, ‘That’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to get some value. And if every message doesn’t give me value, if I have to wade through all of this other fluff, I don’t want to do that. That’s more work for me.’

AI as a Tool, Not a Personality 

For many nonprofits, whether or not to use AI may be a moot point: the technology is too ubiquitous to ignore today. More than half of nonprofits report using it in some capacity, a substantial increase from just a few years ago.

An emerging consensus among nonprofit leaders is that AI use should be accompanied by close human involvement and an ethical framework, particularly when using it to interact with an organization’s beneficiaries.

“Nonprofits should regularly request community feedback on how the user is experiencing the AI and adapt their product to take feedback into account,” Kevin Barenblat, the co-founder and president of the nonprofit tech incubator Fast Forward, said in a statement. To help nonprofits develop sound guidelines around AI use, Fast Forward offers an AI policy builder tool.

In the realms of education and counseling, AI’s potential to help nonprofits expand their reach to underserved populations makes the technology at once singularly promising and fraught. Roughly 65 percent of rural counties in the United States do not have practicing psychiatrists. In low-income countries, less than 10 people per 100,000 have access to mental health treatment. It is estimated that less than 2 percent of US grade-school students receive high-quality personalized tutoring, a shortage that particularly impacts lower-income areas of the country. But replacing human interactions with AI chatbots presents many challenges.

Aly Murray founded UPchieve to help bridge these gaps. Technology has been at the forefront of its efforts to expand tutoring services to lower-income communities, offering a platform that allows students to chat in real time with human tutors.

UPchieve recently gave students the option of having sessions with an AI tutor instead of a human one. It found that just 20 percent opted for the AI tutor, and those who did rarely went back to using it. The fact that its AI tutor’s personality trait was to be “overwhelmingly positive” didn’t help; it may have made it even less popular.

“Students didn’t like that,” Murray told NPQ. “In sessions where the gap in sentiment was large between the student and the tutor—whether it was human or otherwise—students’ average sentiment actually decreased over that session.”

“What’s unique and special about so many nonprofits, especially so many service organizations in the nonprofit space, is that they have this incredible capacity to deeply understand what’s happening with the communities they serve and address that in a deeply human way.”

Instead of using AI as tutors, UPchieve decided to use AI to make human-conducted tutoring sessions more effective and insightful.

“We’re able to summarize what happens in the tutoring sessions for students and teachers. There’s no way teachers would have had time to read through all of the tutoring sessions that their students were having,” Murray said.

Similarly, Empower Work did not abandon its work on AI agents but shifted its focus from clients to counselors. An AI assistant can offer insights and suggestions to counselors during real-time sessions.

“Now the AI assistant just seamlessly surfaces those based on the conversation, and the peer counselor can use their discretion [on whether to use them or not],” Fowler said.

AI tends to stir intense feelings in the nonprofit sector, with some viewing it as a panacea and others as a scourge to be avoided at all costs. The experience of tech-forward nonprofits suggests a middle ground: using AI as a tool that enhances their missions, while being wary of how AI interacts with their service communities and the wider public. This approach, after all, plays to the strengths of the nonprofit sector.

“I think what’s unique and special about so many nonprofits, especially so many service organizations in the nonprofit space, is that they have this incredible capacity to deeply understand what’s happening with the communities they serve and address that in a deeply human way,” Fowler said.

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

Abortion pill access by mail will continue uninterrupted as a key drug’s approval for use ricochets through the nation’s highest courts.

On May 4, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily halted an appeals court’s decision that would have barred prescribing mifepristone — one of two drugs used in most medication abortions — through telehealth, despite medical research supporting the Food and Drug Administration’s 2023 decision to allow virtual care.

The Supreme Court’s decision extends until 5 p.m. ET May 11, and is meant to give the high court time to weigh in on a contentious issue that was last before the court only two years ago.

The case could substantially reshape the availability of abortion, less than four years after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. That decision, which allowed states to ban abortion, ultimately fueled the emergence of telehealth-focused practices. Medical providers practicing in states with specific abortion protections prescribe and mail two abortion medications — mifepristone and misoprostol — to people seeking care in states with bans. Even in states without abortion restrictions, patients are increasingly turning to telehealth, which can be more convenient than going to a clinic.

Data from the Society of Family Planning suggests that as many as 1 in 4 abortions are now done through telehealth. About half of those are for people in states with abortion bans or heavy restrictions.

Here is the latest on what you need to know about mifepristone’s availability and what to expect next.

Are telehealth abortions available?

Yes. The Supreme Court’s intervention means medical providers can continue offering mifepristone through telehealth, and they intend to do so.

But even before the high court intervened, abortion providers across the country had made contingency plans that would allow them to continue offering telehealth abortions without mifepristone: prescribing and mailing higher doses of misoprostol, the other drug often involved in abortion.

The misoprostol-only regimen is largely safe and effective in terminating pregnancies and is used in countries where mifepristone is not available because of cost or legal barriers. But it is less effective than taking both drugs.

Research published in 2023 found that misoprostol alone ended pregnancies 88 percent of the time. Mifepristone and misoprostol together successfully resulted in abortion between 95 and 99 percent of the time. Misoprostol alone can also have more intense side effects than mifepristone and misoprostol, including increased bleeding that can lead more patients to seek emergency room follow-up care.

The National Abortion Federation, a professional association of abortion providers, encouraged members to offer misoprostol-only abortions for patients seeking telehealth if mifepristone was not available.

Multiple Planned Parenthood affiliates confirmed that they are prepared to offer misoprostol-only abortions for telehealth patients while continuing to offer the combination regimen to in-person patients.

The Massachusetts Medication Abortion Project, a telehealth practice that relies on state-specific protections known as shield laws to offer medication abortions by mail to people living in states with bans, has also planned to shift to just misoprostol if medical providers could not legally mail mifepristone to patients.

Why is mifepristone being targeted?

Mifepristone has been approved in the United States since 2000, and its safety and efficacy is supported by decades of rigorous research. In 2021, the FDA began allowing medical providers to offer the drug through telehealth, citing the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, the FDA officially approved mifepristone for telehealth distribution.

But telehealth’s increasing prevalence — particularly in states with abortion bans — has made it a top target for abortion opponents, who point out that virtual care is a key reason why abortions have increased since Roe v. Wade’s fall.

Under the Trump administration, the FDA has agreed to review mifepristone’s approval. But abortion opponents have argued the administration is slow-walking that process, pressing for quick action and producing papers that question the drug’s safety. Mainstream scientists have criticized those papers, with some calling them “junk.”

As of May 4, President Donald Trump has not weighed in on the case now before the Supreme Court. In hearings thus far, the FDA has said that Louisiana does not have legal standing to challenge the federal approval of mifepristone but has not weighed in explicitly on Louisiana’s arguments challenging drug’s safety.

Louisiana has also argued that a long-dormant anti-obscenity law called the Comstock Act outlaws the mailing of all drugs used to induce abortions — an argument that would cut off access to mifepristone and misoprostol. The appeals court did not consider that argument when blocking telehealth; it’s not clear if the Supreme Court will. In hearings so far, the Trump administration also has not responded to Louisiana’s arguments about the Comstock Act.

Hasn’t this happened before?

The case now before the Supreme Court is only the latest effort to use the legal system to restrict mifepristone. This case was brought by Louisiana in October, but in 2023, a coalition of anti-abortion doctors initiated a similar legal challenge in Texas. In that case, the Supreme Court ultimately found that those doctors had not experienced direct legal harm and did not have standing to challenge the FDA.

It’s unclear if the court will rule similarly now. While the previous case was spearheaded by healthcare providers, this case was brought by Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill on behalf of a woman who says she was forced against her will to take abortion medications acquired through telehealth.  That has become a key talking point for abortion opponents, and now, multiple cases challenging telehealth abortions include allegations that a woman was forced to terminate her pregnancy with pills acquired in the mail. In fact, research shows that most people who experience coercion with abortions are actually forced to keep their pregnancies.

Meanwhile, states with anti-abortion leaders are lining up other efforts to challenge mifepristone, including in Texas, where a state law has enabled massive civil lawsuits against anyone who helps people in the state get abortion pills by mail. Abortion opponents are testing that law’s effectiveness with civil suits pending in federal court.

The timing of this particular case could thrust abortion policy back into the political spotlight in an election year. Polling shows most voters support abortion protections and oppose restrictions.

What’s next?

The Supreme Court will weigh by 5 p.m. ET on May 11. It could issue a ruling through its “shadow docket,” which allows the justices to make a quicker, often-unsigned but still legally enforceable decision without hearing arguments first. That ruling could either preserve mifepristone’s availability by telehealth or allow the lower court’s decision to stand.

The Supreme Court could also agree to take up the case, scheduling oral arguments before the current term ends in June, or for its next term, which starts in the fall. If it did so, any ruling issued now would last only until the court formally heard and decided on the case.

Long before extremism became a national headline, United Vision for Idaho (UVI) was listening to people in small towns and isolated counties, where authoritarian and extremist groups had been actively organizing for decades. Long before rural communities became the subject of post-election analysis, UVI was doing the work of organizing in places where public institutions had weakened, civic life had frayed, and distrust had become a precondition for authoritarian drift.

We at UVI, a statewide organizing network that I lead, understood that what had been taking shape in Idaho was part of a much larger nationwide strategy already underway.

For nonprofit leaders and democracy practitioners, these current conditions raise an urgent question: Why have communities become so deeply disconnected from the civic institutions meant to serve them?

Much of the nonprofit sector has focused its energy on policy advocacy, electoral mobilization, and organizing in urban areas. While those strategies remain essential, the experience of communities across rural and conservative regions suggests that rebuilding democratic participation requires something deeper: reinvesting in the relational infrastructure that allows people to see themselves as participants in a shared civic system.

The Oversight of Rural Communities

What we have witnessed across the country did not emerge overnight. It’s what happens when democratic institutions lose legitimacy, when entire communities are politically abandoned, and when people searching for belonging, coherence, and power encounter well-organized movements ready to offer all three.

While economic hardship is real…the deeper challenge is a waning belief in democracy itself.

When democratic systems fail to provide that, people do not stop searching for ways to make sense of the world—they find it elsewhere. Increasingly, authoritarian movements are persuasively claiming to provide what people are looking for, and doing so with precision, consistency, and long-term investment.

Despite rural places making up 20 percent of the population, only a small fraction of philanthropic dollars reach them. Social justice movements have left vast portions of the country behind. In practice, democratic outcomes are frequently determined by narrow majorities rather than broad consensus, meaning a small shift in public opinion can determine the result. This is why it is not just a moral failure but a strategic one to write off even 20 percent of the country.

Rural communities and conservative regions are too often cast as inaccessible, politically fixed, or strategically irrelevant, written off as red, rural, and conservative—and thus surrendered. But we should understand these areas as places where democratic fracture has been taking shape for generations, and where the consequences of institutional abandonment are being felt most intensely.

Rural and conservative communities often reveal the contradictions of US democracy more clearly than anywhere else. While economic hardship is real—declining infrastructure, limited healthcare access, persistent poverty—the deeper challenge is a waning belief in democracy itself.

The widespread belief that institutions, political parties, and national leaders have little interest in people’s lives or communities stretches across the political spectrum. But the sense of abandonment people living in rural places across the country feel is a powerful motivator to seek belonging and community from those there to offer it.

For decades, national discourse has treated rural places either as cultural curiosities or a political problem. Rarely have they been treated as critical sites for democratic renewal. That oversight has had profound consequences.

Ignored Signs

The warning signs have been visible for years. Over the past several decades, legal and institutional shifts have steadily reshaped the conditions of democratic participation, including the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which dramatically expanded the role of money in politics. A coordinated wave of state preemption laws beginning that same year enabled legislatures to override local decision-making on issues ranging from labor standards to environmental protections.

What once appeared as localized democratic strain—visible in rural communities for years—is now manifesting as a national condition.

Rulings such as Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) have since allowed extreme partisan gerrymandering to stand, reducing electoral accountability, and the aftermath of the 2020 election revealed unprecedented pressure on election officials as Donald Trump and his allies pushed to overturn certified results.

These developments have been reinforced by deeper structural changes that shape how power operates across the system. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 accelerated the consolidation of media ownership, contributing to the decline of local journalism and weakening shared civic understanding.

State legislatures have increasingly overridden voter-approved initiatives, taken control of local election administration, and expanded executive authority, further concentrating power. At the same time, a coordinated ecosystem of conservative-leaning organizations—including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and aligned state policy networks—has helped translate ideology into policy and scale it across jurisdictions.

Together, these shifts reflect a broader pattern: Participation is constrained, accountability is weakened, and power is increasingly centralized. What once appeared as localized democratic strain—visible in rural communities for years—is now manifesting as a national condition, reshaping political life across the entire country.

Political division today is no longer confined to elections or policy debates. It has seeped into the relationships that hold communities together. Families avoid political conversations. Friendships fracture, and neighbors stop speaking. Over time, these small fractures accumulate into something much larger: a society increasingly unable to deliberate collectively about its future.

This is the crisis we are facing. But it is a misdiagnosis to treat it solely as a problem of ideology, misinformation, or partisanship. At its core, this is a crisis of relationship.

The Willingness to Remain in Relationship

Our crisis of relationship is not theoretical. Today, nearly one in four people in the United States says political violence may be justified to “save the country.”

At the same time, many people report having few or no close relationships with people who hold opposing political views and avoid those conversations altogether. Research by the Pew Research Center and Public Religion Research Institute finds that many Americans have limited cross-party social networks and express discomfort discussing politics with those they disagree with. This is social fragmentation at a level that places democratic stability at risk.

A society that cannot sustain relationships across difference cannot sustain democracy. What makes this moment so consequential is that we are not witnessing a sudden rupture—we are witnessing the culmination of decades of strategic investment, institutional erosion, and relational breakdown.

Moments like this can be turning points that determine whether democratic systems are renewed or whether their erosion accelerates. The question is whether we are up to the challenge. Rebuilding democracy requires defending institutions, but it also requires rebuilding the relationships that make those institutions possible.

No political party will save democracy. No single leader will save democracy. And no election alone will save democracy.

Democracy will survive—if it does—because millions of ordinary people choose to stand together in defense of a shared future.

That work begins with something both simple and profound: the willingness to remain in relationship with people whose experiences, identities, and beliefs differ from our own. But most of our current strategies were not designed to rebuild relationships. They were designed to win outcomes.

We generally measure success through what is easiest to count—doors knocked, calls made, voters reached—while the deeper work of building trust, understanding, and shared purpose has been sidelined.

Organizing at the Edge of Democracy

This moment demands more than analysis. It demands honesty. We must be relentlessly critical of our own movements. What have we been getting wrong?
What have we failed to see? And what would it mean to organize in a way that actually meets this moment?

To organize at the edge of democracy is to work in places where hope often feels brittle. It means showing up in communities that have not seen meaningful investment for decades—if they have seen it at all. It means engaging in conversations across political divides that many consider unbridgeable. And it means recognizing something fundamental: Democratic erosion rarely begins in the places receiving the most attention. It begins in the places that have been abandoned.

Authoritarian movements understand this. Where institutions withdraw, they move in. Where communities feel ignored, they offer belonging. And where democratic movements fail to show up, they build relationships.

This is why rural and conservative communities are not peripheral to the future of democracy. They are central to it.

What often appears as ideological rigidity is frequently something else: the result of systemic neglect, fractured institutions, and the absence of meaningful engagement across difference. These are not communities beyond reach; they are communities that have too often been left out of the work of democracy itself.

If polarization is rooted not only in disagreement but in disconnection, then rebuilding democratic culture requires repairing relationships.

It requires a different approach than our current time-bound, scripted, and transactional persuasion tactics. This work demands curiosity, listening, and engaging in authentic dialogue through sustained human connection and relationship building.

Learn Directly from People

This is the premise that led us at United Vision for Idaho to launch the United Vision Project—a national organizing training and outreach initiative designed to engage people across extreme political divides through authentic, relational conversation. Since our launch in early 2021, we have reached 1.4 million people across 12 states, had 107,000 authentic conversations, discovered insights into the primary drivers of political behavior, and produced work that has shifted sentiment across division at a rate of 32.7 percent, according to United Vision for Idaho’s 2026 reporting.

Rather than assuming what drives polarization, or relying on polls, surveys, or secondhand accounts, the project set out to learn directly from people themselves through direct outreach: how they understand their experiences, what shapes their beliefs, what motivates their political behavior, and what opens—or closes—the possibility of deepening dialogue.

Through this work, we dispel many of the myths surrounding organizing in rural places. The program provides comprehensive training and opportunities for people and democratic practitioners to build skills to navigate complexity across any issue, find commonality, build trust and rapport in unlikely places—and transition their experience to their own communities.

What has emerged is a different way of organizing, with a proven record of effectiveness.

Democracy is not a static condition. It is a practice: one that requires ongoing participation, negotiation, and renewal. It is built through the everyday interactions that shape how people see one another, understand difference, and imagine a shared future.

When the cultural and social conditions that bind us together break, we need to look deeper than winning the next election; we need to find the will to rebuild the relational foundations that democracy requires—and invest in them again, intentionally, at scale, and in the places we have too often left behind.

That work is already underway. The question is whether we are willing to support a different kind of organizing that makes democracy possible and sustainable for generations to come.

This story was copublished with The 19th, an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics, policy, and power, as well as #WeTheCivic: America 250, a narrative movement centering the multiracial nonprofit and civil society workers, organizations, and communities in America 250 narratives.

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

In the lead-up to our country’s 250th anniversary, Errin Haines is writing a series of columns to contemplate the complicated expansion of our democracy. Subscribe to The Amendment newsletter.

Adriana George immigrated to the United States from the Caribbean at 21 years old and soon found community in her new home, doing the work she loved as a nanny in New York City. 

In New York, George met her husband. Together, they moved to Philadelphia, where she continued to work as a nanny. She found a second family among other nannies who gathered at a local park. Between keeping an eye on the children entrusted to their care, the women shared their experiences on the job: the long days, the abusive bosses, the relentless pace that had no breaks built into it.

“As much as I need my job, my employers need me, too,” George said. “And yet, workers were still encountering abuse and constant violations.”

Knowing that she and other caregivers had rights and deserved better treatment, George started collecting her fellow workers’ testimonies. In Philadelphia, the city that birthed the idea of freedom and liberty for all, George was doing some of the same work as patriots 250 years earlier, listing grievances against oppression and injustice — and demanding change. 

Already active in the National Domestic Workers Alliance, she eventually left her caregiving job to become a full-time organizer. She now runs the alliance’s We Dream in Black program in Pennsylvania, advocating on behalf of Black, Afro-Latina and Caribbean domestic workers.

“I don’t like to see injustice around me,” George said. “I’m fighting for workers to know they deserve better. Domestic workers do the work that makes all other work possible.”

George’s insistence on dignity, fairness and belonging reflects the larger struggle over who gets to fully participate in American democracy. Even before she came to America, as a young woman, she had an unbending determination to right wrongs and correct course. 

People like George, who were excluded from the intent and applications of the nation’s founding documents, have always pushed back against the origin myth written by and for White men. Again and again, they have confronted our founding ideals and forced the country to become what it claims to be.  

The American Revolution did not end in 1776. Our country has not had one founding, but many.

The first American Revolution was about independence from Britain. It was about a group of colonies declaring that they would govern themselves as a nation.

The revolutions that followed have not been about independence from another country. They have been about Americans shaping what independence would mean for themselves, expanding the language of the Declaration of Independence itself: all are created equal.

Our founding documents define freedom and equality as requirements of independence. To be fully American is to be free — and to be fully American is to be equal. And yet Americans have been forced to confront this contradiction between the nation’s ideals and its reality since its birth. 

We should now consider the evolution of our democracy as an ongoing American Revolution, marked by moments that have pushed us toward greater progress and broader participation: from slavery and the end of the Civil War, to the 14th and 15th Amendments, to the 19th Amendment — each one widening the scope of who can claim citizenship and who has the right to vote. In more recent history, we can look to the hard-fought victories of the 20th century won by Black folks, women and queer people in their battles for equal rights. 

The expansion of American democracy has never been linear. This progress has often been met with backlash. But that history also reminds us that every generation has a role to play in shaping the country. The work continues — on the streets, in courtrooms, in parks where nannies talk.

It’s Americans like Adriana George who are founding our country still today.

George has shown up to meetings at Philadelphia City Hall and successfully pushed for a new law expanding protections like a public list of employers with a history of mistreatment, restitution to harmed workers, and proactive investigations of abusive employers to prevent retaliation for speaking out. 

She still remembers her citizenship ceremony in Philadelphia. Wearing a fancy navy blue dress she bought for the occasion, she stood next to her husband and mother-in-law, beaming with pride as she took the oath.

“It was a great feeling — and also mixed emotions around it, because now I’m pledging allegiance to the United States,” said George. “I wanted to become a citizen because it was the right path to take.” She is a homeowner. She pays taxes. She is an Eagles fan. “I do consider myself a Philadelphian,” she said.

George was reborn as a U.S. citizen. Her activism is part of what it means for her to be American and what makes her a revolutionary. 

The people who fought in the Revolutionary War were ordinary folks who believed in an idea. But there have been others whom we haven’t historically described as founders or revolutionaries, even though they are the ones who push boundaries, defy convention, undo injustices and constantly seek change. They have helped to close the gap between America’s founding ideals and its lived reality, persevering with a faith that they, too, had a claim to the imperfect promise of our country.

That belief and the responsibility to carry it forward are part of our inheritance. Like George, we can do our part to shape an America that makes the promises of freedom and liberty real for all of us. 

In 2025, corporate broadcast networks aired just eight hours of climate coverage across an entire year—a 35 percent drop from the year before—according to a new analysis by Media Matters for America. The decline came even as climate disasters intensified across the United States and federal climate policy entered a period of aggressive rollbacks. Climate justice appeared in only 2 percent of segments, fossil fuels in 8 percent, and White men accounted for more than half of all guests featured in climate coverage. The result is a public narrative that treats climate largely as a lifestyle segment or a one-off disaster story rather than the defining political and economic issue of our time, all while sidelining the expertise of women and frontline communities.

Climate coverage remains overwhelmingly event-driven, with extreme weather accounting for a significant share of segments, while the systems driving those events…are rarely examined.

Broadcast television still reaches millions of viewers each night. When that platform shrinks its climate coverage, the implications extend far beyond journalism. They shape how the public understands risk, policy, and responsibility. If climate appears only when a wildfire spreads across the screen or a hurricane makes landfall, audiences are left without the context needed to connect those events to fossil fuel systems and the corporations benefiting from them, the political decisions that enable their expansion, and the communities living with the consequences long before disaster footage makes the evening news.

Intentional Changes in Climate Coverage

The contraction in coverage is not occurring in a vacuum. It is unfolding alongside structural changes inside major newsrooms that are reshaping editorial priorities. CBS—historically the leader in broadcast climate reporting—dismantled much of its climate reporting capacity in late 2025 after installing Bari Weiss as editor in chief. Weiss rose to prominence as a columnist at The New York Times before founding The Free Press, a subscription-based media platform that positions itself as a corrective to what it describes as ideological bias in mainstream journalism.

Women remain underrepresented, despite playing leading roles across climate science…And frontline communities…are almost entirely absent, even as they experience the most immediate and sustained impacts of environmental harm.

Under Weiss’s leadership, The Free Press has frequently elevated climate-contrarian perspectives, questioned the urgency of climate action, and framed the crisis through cultural and ideological debate rather than scientific consensus or systemic analysis. When that editorial approach is introduced into a major broadcast newsroom, it does not simply diversify viewpoints—it reshapes what is considered credible, urgent, and worthy of sustained coverage. At CBS, those shifts coincided with the dismantling of much of the network’s climate reporting infrastructure, signaling a move away from climate as a core beat.

The effects are already visible. Climate coverage remains overwhelmingly event-driven, with extreme weather accounting for a significant share of segments, while the systems driving those events: fossil fuel expansion, regulatory decisions, and long-term emissions trajectories are rarely examined. Federal climate actions appear only intermittently in coverage, leaving viewers without a clear understanding of how policy choices shape climate risk, public health, and economic vulnerability.

Who gets to speak about climate further narrows the story. White men dominate as expert voices, shaping how the issue is framed and understood. Women remain underrepresented, despite playing leading roles across climate science, organizing, and policy. And frontline communities—those living near refineries, petrochemical corridors, and sites of fossil fuel extraction—are almost entirely absent, even as they experience the most immediate and sustained impacts of environmental harm. The result is not just a lack of diversity; it is a distortion of expertise itself.

Taken together, these trends point to a deeper structural problem within the US media ecosystem. Climate reporting in corporate outlets expands during moments of visible crisis and contracts once the immediate spectacle fades. What remains is episodic coverage that documents impact without interrogating the cause.

Independent Media and the Gaps in Climate Coverage

For nonprofit and movement-rooted media, this contraction creates both a challenge and an opening.

Often described as “movement journalism”—an approach advanced by organizations like Press On—this model treats journalism in service to liberation, fostering collaboration between reporters and grassroots movements and supporting storytelling led by communities most impacted.

In practice, across the country, independent and movement-rooted media platforms are stepping in to fill the gaps left by corporate outlets. Publications like Prism, Capital B, Scalawag, Convergence, and NPQ continue to report on climate from a justice lens—often sustaining coverage of systemic drivers and community impact even as corporate broadcast outlets scale it back. These outlets operate with far fewer resources, yet they consistently center frontline communities, investigate structural causes, and track the political and economic forces shaping climate risk.

At Counterstream Media, the organization I lead, this approach has meant reporting on the fight against petrochemical expansion in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” where organizers are challenging the legacy of plantation land use and the fossil fuel-to-plastic pipeline that continues to shape environmental exposure. It has meant covering the rapid expansion of AI-driven infrastructure in Memphis, where communities are confronting the intersection of energy demand and environmental health risks. And it has meant documenting how Indigenous organizers are linking land rights, climate policy, and sovereignty, reframing climate not as an isolated environmental issue but as part of a broader political and economic system.

This is not simply a matter of representation. It is a question of narrative infrastructure: who defines the problem, who names its causes, and which connections are made visible.

The Need for Sustained Investments in Climate Coverage

What often gets lost in philanthropic conversations is the distinction between communications and journalism. Climate philanthropy invests heavily in communications strategies designed to advance specific campaigns or policy goals. But communications is not a substitute for independent reporting. Journalism—especially when rooted in communities—has the ability to surface inconvenient truths, follow emerging storylines, and connect systems in ways that are not always aligned with existing funding priorities.

This work is often collaborative rather than siloed. For its recent Earth Day issue on the build-out of AI data centers, Counterstream Media’s Peace & Riot magazine worked in partnership with Capital B to republish reporting, Floodlight to support visual assets, and MediaJustice for their organizing expertise. These kinds of collaborations point to a growing ecosystem, where movement-rooted outlets are not only producing journalism but also building pathways for that work to circulate more widely.

The rise of movement-rooted media does not eliminate the need for robust climate reporting by major news institutions. Broadcast networks still have reach, influence, and multibillion-dollar budgets that independent outlets cannot easily replicate. But as corporate media narrows its climate coverage, the responsibility of explaining the crisis increasingly shifts elsewhere.

For the nonprofit sector, that shift should prompt a reassessment of priorities. Climate work is often framed in terms of policy wins, technological solutions, or corporate-sponsored community programs. Without sustained investment in independent journalism, the public narrative that underpins those efforts remains fragmented and incomplete.

Broadcast television remains one of the most powerful agenda-setting forces in the United States, reaching millions of viewers each day. But as the 2025 Media Matters data make clear, its climate coverage is shrinking in both volume and depth, even as the stakes grow more immediate. In that gap, independent and movement-rooted media are not simply adding new voices—they are taking on the work of connecting the systems, political realities, and lived experiences that broadcast news is increasingly leaving out.