On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, Next250, a people-powered declaration, is asking a question this country has never fully answered: What do we owe each other? Together, the authors of this article serve as co-chairs of this nationwide civic and cultural initiative preparing communities to help shape America’s next chapter as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary. The June 27 mobilization will be anchored in Washington, DC, with coordinated gatherings taking place in communities nationwide.

 The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 by men who owned slaves.

We say that not to dismiss it. We say it because the gap between what America declared and what America did is exactly where the rest of us have lived ever since. In that gap, between the promise and the practice, is where every movement for justice in this country has done its work.

That gap is also where Next250 began. But so did something else: a conviction that the story being told about this country right now—that we are too divided to share a vision, that our differences are too deep for common cause—is not just wrong. It is a narrative being propagated by people who benefit from our division. And, as such, it is a story we can refuse to accept.

Over the past year, through more than 40 base-building organizations, we conducted listening sessions with over 2,500 people from impacted communities across this country. They came from different backgrounds, different geographies, different political starting points. What we found, overwhelmingly, was not the fracture that cable news profits from selling. People wanted many of the same things: dignity, safety, opportunity, belonging, a belief that their voice matters and that their neighbor’s future is connected to their own.

The United States turns 250 this year. We believe this anniversary is the moment to demonstrate that unity out loud, in public, and together, around the shared values and policies that already connect us, whether the powerful admit it or not. That is where Next250 began.

The organizations and movements that have done the most to realize unity—the labor unions that built the weekend, the mutual aid networks that fed communities when government looked away, the civil rights organizations that litigated and marched and organized until the law had no choice but to catch up—rarely got credit in real time. They were recognized later, in retrospect, once what they built became something everyone took for granted. As this pattern continues, we must make an effort to recognize and uplift the work of organizations fighting to build a better world for us all.

To this end, about a year ago, the three of us started asking a different question than the one dominating the 250th anniversary conversation. Not: how do we celebrate what America got right? But: what kind of country do we want to become in the next 250 years?

We didn’t answer it ourselves. We listened to workers, young people, immigrants, faith leaders, Indigenous communities, artists, and labor organizers. We sat with people who have been told in various ways that their vision of America doesn’t count.

While the original Declaration asserted independence from a crown, this one asserts something more difficult and urgent: that the crises facing this country cannot be solved by any single community protecting itself while others are left to fend for themselves.

None of what we heard surprised us. The three of us have spent our lives inside these communities, working at the intersection of labor, racial justice, immigrant rights, and democracy. We already knew that Puerto Rican leaders have a lot to say about what citizenship feels like when your territory has no voting representation in Congress. We already knew that Indigenous organizers think about time differently than electoral cycles allow, not just with respect to the living, but to those who came before and those not yet born. We already knew that Muslim Americans, trans organizers, immigrant workers, and young people carrying the weight of a planet in crisis are not waiting for permission to imagine something better.

What the listening sessions gave us wasn’t information we didn’t have. They gave us something more useful: confirmation that these communities, despite everything designed to divide them, still want many of the same things. They want dignity, opportunity, safety, and belonging. Perhaps most striking, especially in this time when we hear mostly of fracture, we found a genuine belief that their futures are tied to their neighbors’ futures—even neighbors who don’t look like them, pray like them, or vote like them.

This, we believe, is the throughline connecting every movement that has ever truly won something in this country. That conviction, that we cannot be free alone, is the foundation of Next250’s Declaration of Interdependence.

While the original Declaration asserted independence from a crown, this one asserts something more difficult and urgent: that the crises facing this country cannot be solved by any single community protecting itself while others are left to fend for themselves. The gutting of healthcare. The climate emergency. Attacks on reproductive rights. The assault on voting access. The epidemic of gun violence. These are not separate issues affecting separate communities. They are a single, interlocking story about the discrepancy between whom this country has decided matters and who doesn’t.

The five principles that emerged from our listening sessions reflect what people said they needed to live with dignity: A living wage for all; Climate justice for all; Reproductive justice for all; Voting rights for all; Gun safety and peace for all.

Each of those principles has a face, a family, a story from a room somewhere in this country where someone sat down and said, plainly, this is what I need.

One of the most important and least covered stories in American civic life is the work happening inside community organizations, cultural institutions, faith communities, union halls, and neighborhood gathering spaces every single day.

This is a gathering for something: For a vision of America that is affirmative, proactive, and rooted in values that thousands of people across this country told us they still share.

These organizations are not doing this work because it is trending. They have been doing it for decades and, in some cases, for generations. The listening sessions that produced the Declaration of Interdependence were only possible because of that existing infrastructure. We didn’t show up and hand people a microphone. We entered spaces that trusted community builders had already created. We sat inside relationships that organizers had spent years cultivating.

That civic infrastructure—chronically underfunded and underappreciated, yet essential—is the connective tissue of a functioning civil society. Democracy doesn’t run on presidential campaigns or cable news cycles. It runs on church basements where tipped workers earning below the minimum wage show up before a shift to pressure their legislators on living wage bills, and come back the next week to figure out how to protect their immigrant coworkers too afraid to come to work in the face of ICE raids. That is not a footnote to American democracy. That is American democracy. It is the work that holds everything else together.

On June 27, we are asking people to come together in Washington, DC and in communities across the country, not for a commemoration, but for a continuation.

This is not a rally against something, though we know there is plenty to rally against right now. This is a gathering for something: For a vision of America that is affirmative, proactive, and rooted in values that thousands of people across this country told us they still share.

It means doing something that those with wealth and power profit from telling you is impossible: bringing together workers and immigrants, young people and elders, faith communities and secular organizers, people in cities and people in rural areas, around a shared vision for the future. It means trusting that what we have in common is real—not manufactured, not performed, but real.

The movements that changed this country were not built on consensus. They were built on relationships, on the willingness to sit with someone who doesn’t share your experience and find, underneath the difference, a common demand for dignity.

The next 250 years of America will not be written in Washington. They will be written in the decisions being made right now, at the community level, about who gets to belong, who gets to survive, and whose voice shapes what comes next.

June 27 is a beginning. The Declaration of Interdependence is an invitation. The answer to the question we started with—what kind of country do we want to become?—belongs to all of us.

The Myth of Heroic Leadership interrogates the nonprofit sector’s reliance on “heroic” executive leadership as a structural failure disguised as virtue. It challenges the deeply embedded belief that resilience lives in individual grit, arguing instead that overreliance on executive directors concentrates power, masks institutional weakness, and reproduces inequity—particularly for women and leaders of color. Through a systems and justice lens, the column examines how boards, funders, and organizational norms reinforce this model, and why sustainability depends on redistributing authority, accountability, and care across institutions rather than extracting more from a single leader.

We have built a sector on a quiet lie: that the leader who gives the most is the leader who cares the most.

It shows up in how we write job descriptions, how we structure employment agreements, how funders decide who to trust, and how boards decide what to expect. It shows up in exit interviews no one fully believes and in the silence around transitions that get framed as personal decisions rather than structural failures. It shows up, most of all, in what we reward: the executive director who arrives early, stays late, closes the gift, manages the board, develops the staff, responds to the crises, and still somehow finds time to be the public face of the mission.

We have built a sector on a quiet lie: that the leader who gives the most is the leader who cares the most.

We call that excellence. It’s not.

We should call it what it is: a leader compensating for infrastructure that the organization never built.

This false story is not benign. It is a design choice that has serious consequences for leaders, for organizations, and for the communities those organizations exist to serve.

The heroic leadership myth is not an operational problem—it is a justice issue. And until we name it as such, we will keep designing organizations that consume the people most committed to the mission in the process.

The Sector Has a Story and That Story Is a Lie

Walk into most nonprofit board meetings and you will find some version of the same dynamic. The executive director arrives prepared. They have written the materials, briefed the committee chairs, pre-negotiated the contentious agenda item, and mentally rehearsed the response to that one board member who reliably derails the conversation.

After the meeting, they will follow up on every action item because they know, without anyone having to say it, that most will not happen otherwise.

“We trust you to hold it all” is a phrase that often circulates among boards. Meant as a compliment, it communicates a transfer of structural responsibility from the institution to one human being. The result: a tacit agreement not to ask too many questions about what holding it all costs the executive director.

And the ability to hold it all is not merely considered normal, it is considered evidence of a good executive director.

“We trust you to hold it all”. . . communicates a transfer of structural responsibility from the institution to one human being.

Funders reinforce this structural imbalance. The funding landscape still disproportionately rewards demonstrable programmatic output over institutional investment, which means the executive director who holds everything together personally often raises more money than the one who has taken the time to build the systems that make organizational effectiveness possible.

Multi-year unrestricted grants—the kind that would allow an executive director to actually build internal infrastructure—remain the exception to the rule. Even when foundations do provide general operating support, it is far more likely to be awarded for a single year than over multiple years.

Program officers who have watched an organization navigate a crisis under a capable ED, often respond by deepening their trust in that individual, sometimes at the expense of evaluating whether the organization itself is sound—or examining what it needs to thrive beyond the efforts of that one individual. That trust calculus has structural consequences and the cumulative effect is visible in the balance sheets.

According to the Nonprofit Finance Fund’s 2025 State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey, 36 percent of nonprofits ended 2024 with an operating deficit—the highest rate in a decade—and more than half reported three months or less of cash on hand.

The Contract Nobody Signs but Everyone Enforces

This heroic leadership myth is rarely explicit. It doesn’t announce itself. Yet it is ever present. It gets built into governance documents, performance expectations, and employment agreements—framed, always, as being in the best interest of the organization.

Thirty-six percent of nonprofits ended 2024 with an operating deficit—the highest rate in a decade—and more than half reported three months or less of cash on hand.

I have reviewed employment agreements that encode this perfectly. In one contract I encountered, a single executive director position carried the formal accountabilities of at least four distinct leadership roles: chief fundraiser, chief program officer, communications director, and day-to-day operations manager. Each came with specific targets. Each came with accountability timelines. None came with additional headcount, external support, or a genuine organizational conversation about what it would actually take to meet those expectations.

The document was professionally drafted. The board had approved it. And throughout, the framing was consistent: this is what the organization needs. The implicit corollary was equally clear: if the executive director cares about the organization, they will agree to this.

This behavior is not an outlier. It is a norm.

That framing—in which absorbing an impossible workload becomes an expression of mission commitment—is the heroic leadership myth with a signature line at the bottom. It doesn’t just ask leaders to overwork. It morally obligates them to do so. And when a leader eventually burns out, steps back, or leaves, the story the sector tells is almost never that an unsustainable system failed a capable person. It is that the organization hasn’t yet found the right leader.

Heroic Leadership Is a Labor Design Problem—It Is Also a Justice Problem

The heroic leadership model is not just an operational problem. It is a labor design problem, and the justice argument begins there.

The executive director role in many nonprofits is structured in ways that would be unsustainable in any other sector. One person absorbs the strategic, operational, relational, and emotional labor of multiple roles. Overextension is not a side effect of this design; it is the design. And because the structure of a role shapes who can sustainably hold it, who absorbs its costs, and who bears the consequences when it breaks, this is not just a labor problem. It is an equity problem.

When everything flows through one leader—every significant decision, every funder relationship, every crisis—access to power is limited by design. Staff develop the habit of deferring, rather than real shared decision-making authority. Board members build dependence on a single interpreter of organizational reality, rather than genuine governance capacity. Community voice ends up getting filtered through one person’s bandwidth and judgment.

When responsibility and authority concentrate in a single role, the institution is not building shared leadership. It is building a bottleneck. And bottlenecks are not neutral—they determine who has access to resources, information, influence, and who does not.

When everything flows through one leader—every significant decision, every funder relationship, every crisis—access to power is limited by design.

The deepest equity argument, however, lives in how risk is distributed.

In the heroic leadership model, the executive director becomes the institutional shock absorber for the instability they did not create and was never resourced to manage. Funders transfer financial risk through restricted, short-cycle grants that keep organizations in perpetual relationship-management mode. Boards transfer governance risk through passivity and overreliance in one person. Organizations transfer operational risk by leaving infrastructure unbuilt and systems underdeveloped. All of it lands on the ED.

That risk transfer is invisible in most organizational assessments. The ED’s ability to absorb it—to function as though the instability doesn’t exist—is precisely what gets rewarded as strong leadership. But absorbing risk that belongs to the institution is not leadership. It is labor the institution has declined to deal with in any other way.

The risk does not just concentrate—it lands unequally.

The heroic leadership model narrows, over time, who will be able to remain in the executive director role—not through formal exclusion, but through the accumulation of practical demands that are not equally survivable. Enduring this model over years requires a significant financial cushion to absorb periods of underpayment or instability. It requires personal and professional support networks that don’t depend on the organization to exist. It requires a stamina that is not infinitely renewable—and that is not equally available to everyone who enters the role with the same level of commitment and capability.

The leaders who exit this model earliest are not, in general, the ones who cared the least. They are often the ones who were given the least structural support to survive. When the sector responds by searching for more resilient leaders, it is asking the wrong question. The question is not who is strong enough to hold up a broken system. The question is why we keep building systems that require people to break.

When the sector celebrates the leader who holds everything together, it is often celebrating the performance of resilience by people who have the least systemic support. That is not a pipeline problem. It is a design problem. And we will not solve it by finding more durable people to place inside institutions that were never built to sustain them.

We are not building institutions that can sustain lasting social justice. We are consuming the people most committed to it.

The Appearance of Strength Is Not the Same as Strength

Beyond the cost to individual leaders, the heroic leadership model produces a specific kind of organizational fragility that rarely gets named directly.

When a leader becomes the operational core of an institution—the person through whom every significant decision flows, every funder relationship runs, every crisis gets resolved—that institution is not building strength. It is slowly building brittleness.

The organization may look healthy from the outside: programs are running, grants are coming in, the board is satisfied. What is actually happening, however, is that a single person has become load-bearing infrastructure. And load-bearing infrastructure that can get sick, burned out, or recruited away.

The organizations most vulnerable to this dynamic are often the ones that look the most stable. A highly capable ED can mask structural deficits for years. Their ability to compensate for the absence of systems is precisely what makes the deficit invisible—until they can’t compensate anymore.

This is not a failure of individual leaders. It is a failure of institutional design. Moreover, it is a failure the sector has been systematically rewarding.

What Boards and Funders Measure—and What They Miss

When boards and funders measure commitment by exhaustion, they conflate martyrdom with mission.

Most boards want their executive directors to succeed. Most funders genuinely believe they are supporting the work. The problem is not bad intentions. It is an evaluation culture that cannot distinguish between an organization that is functioning well and a leader who is functioning at unsustainable intensity—because from the outside, those two things can look identical.

A well-designed organization with distributed leadership and strong systems looks calm. The executive director has time to think strategically, to develop relationships, to lead the board rather than manage it—setting direction and building governance capacity rather than preparing materials, managing personalities, and engineering consensus before every meeting.

An overextended leader in a fragile organization, by contrast, looks like they are handling everything well—and because they appear to be doing everything well, they look like the asset. The design deficit the ED is compensating for becomes invisible precisely because they are so good at compensating for it.

If boards and funders mistake this dynamic for organizational health, they will continue to recruit for and reward leaders who are willing to absorb structural failure personally. But they shouldn’t continue to be surprised when those leaders eventually break.

Resilience Is Not Grit, It’s Design

Dismantling the heroic leadership myth is not, primarily, an act of compassion toward individual executive directors—though it is that too. It is an act of institutional seriousness. Organizations that cannot function without a specific person are not resilient organizations. They are organizations waiting for a crisis they haven’t had yet.

Boards owe their organizations a genuine interrogation of what they are asking their EDs to do. Not the formal job description—the real one. The one that includes the board management, the donor stewardship, the staff development, the crisis response, and the strategic planning that somehow happens in the margins.

If the honest answer to that question is, “We are asking one person to do the work of four,” the board’s job is not to find a leader capable of managing four jobs. It is to redesign the organization so that no one must take on these insurmountable tasks. That might mean funding a deputy director rather than a third program. It might mean board members taking on direct donor relationships. It also means making the invisible labor visible—and distributing it.

Funders owe the sector a serious reckoning with what their funding practices produce. Restricted project grants that leave no room for infrastructure investment, short grant cycles that keep organizations in perpetual relationship management mode, and an evaluation framework that rewards programmatic output over institutional health—these are not neutral choices. They are choices that make the heroic leadership model more likely and that transfer financial risk onto the leaders least positioned to absorb it.

The sector owes a more honest accounting of the gap between its stated values and its actual incentive structures. Equity cannot be a program strategy if it is not also an organizational design principle. We cannot claim to be building institutions for justice while building institutions that run on the exhaustion of the people most invested in that justice.

Resilience is not a personality trait—it is not grit, nor stamina, nor the willingness to hold it together one more year. Resilience must be recognized as institutional design: the presence of systems, structures, and shared leadership capable of absorbing pressure, without transferring it to one person. If equity is the goal, the design question is not how to find leaders strong enough to survive these institutions. It is how do we stop building institutions that require them to.

With the upcoming 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, I am reminded of the two communities I am part of that long predate this country and have profoundly shaped its history. As an Indigenous trans person, I share a history with people who have faced torture, murder, and efforts at eradication solely based on their identities. Today, we are witnessing some of the darkest parts of this history repeating themselves and playing out in new ways. ICE agents mirror slave patrols while detention centers function as concentration camps. The state is suppressing dissent and enacting violence on civil rights and anti-war protestors. Black people are once again fighting for their right to vote. And the federal government is trying to force trans people underground by denying their existence.

Despite the many ways this country feels like it’s slipping backwards, it is imperative to remember that Indigenous and trans histories have always been rooted in resistance and rebellion. Over time, we have built networks of care that have shaped this country into a place of belonging and opportunity; a place that can begin to live up to the democratic ideals in the founding principles being celebrated this July.

The founding documents being touted this 250^th anniversary mark when the United States of America was given its name—a name that erased Indigenous people’s long-held understanding of the earth we inhabit. Turtle Island is what many North American Indigenous communities use to describe the continent, but it also signifies the deep relationship we have with the natural world.  Many of the freedoms we are fighting for today—such as the ability to migrate across borders, age with dignity, live in a clean environment, and celebrate gender diversity—existed before settlers and colonizers arrived.

A strict gender binary is also a colonial idea, imposed upon Indigenous communities by Western European colonizers. Before White people landed on Turtle Island, many native cultures in the United States, such as the Diné, Ojibwe, and Sioux people, recognized gender identities that weren’t determined by a person’s physiology, but rather their own individual sense of who they were. Indigenous communities had different names and customs around this practice but adopted “Two-Spirit” is an English language umbrella word to describe a variety of traditional approaches to embracing people who would be considered gender non-conforming in colonial terms.

The founding documents being touted this 250^th anniversary mark when The United States of America was given its name—a name that erased Indigenous people’s long-held understanding of the earth we inhabit.

Native cultures not only accepted Two-Spirit people but also celebrated them. Their ability to access both feminine and masculine spirits was respected and revered. For example, We’wha was a celebrated Two-Spirit Zuni weaver and potter who went to Washington DC as an ambassador for Zuni culture to President Grover Cleveland in 1885. We’wha was received as a renowned female artist, which was groundbreaking because Indigenous women were a rare sight in the halls of power. We’wha hoped to leverage this attention to improve the relationship between the Zuni and the U.S. government, which exerted so much control over the health and wellbeing of their people.

Despite the efforts of Two-Spirit people like We’wha, the relationship between the government and our communities has continued to be strained, tested, and broken. The federal government has a long track record of violently stealing Indigenous land and isolating native children from their families and culture. Forced assimilation touched all aspects of life, from the food we ate, to our understanding of gender, to our relationship with the land and each other. In fact, what this milestone year evokes for me is how the government enacted violence against many for the freedom of a few.

Often, people speak of the founding of the United States as a time where White men came together and created a novel form of civil freedom. Yet, as is well known, what they forged was a form of freedom that worked for them on the condition that it kept others—Indigenous people, Black people, women, people with disabilities, and people in poverty—exploited. Our communities were unable to directly benefit from the fruits of our labor, were stripped of our freedom  to make decisions for ourselves and our families, and left without representation or power to change the status quo.

Yet, from this country’s beginnings, people excluded from its founding definition of freedom—including trans people—have been speaking out and stepping up for their communities. This is the history that I want to celebrate.

These histories underlie how trans communities end up being at the forefront of cross-movement work.

Trans people have long advocated for laws and protections that recognize the civil rights of all marginalized communities. An early example is Frances Thompson, a formerly enslaved Black transgender woman who testified before Congress to protect the rights of Black people who were recently emancipated. Her testimony propelled political action during Reconstruction to give Black Americans rights to citizenship and political representation.

Thompson’s work is an example of how trans identity does not preclude us from participating in other movements for social justice. Trans people are deeply familiar with the systemic exclusion and violence faced by many communities—including disabled, incarcerated, immigrant, Black, and Indigenous communities. We’ve had our bodies scrutinized and policed over how we look. We’ve had our movements and communications tracked and surveilled by the state. And we’ve been denied access to basic needs like food, housing, and healthcare.

These histories underlie how trans communities end up being at the forefront of cross-movement work. And there are many historical examples of trans leaders who did just that. They broke through movement silos to demonstrate the ways our liberation is intertwined. Lorena Borjas and Cecilia Gentili are two of those leaders. As immigrants themselves, both Lorena and Cecilia dedicated their lives to supporting trans migrants through their own political advocacy and providing material, medical, and legal support. Their work demonstrated their own deep and personal understanding of how the rights of immigrants, sex workers, and trans people are intertwined.

Marsha P. Johnson is another example of a cross-movement leader. While perhaps most famously known for her role in the Stonewall riots, she was also a fierce advocate for the disability community. Her vision of the future was one in which trans and disabled people would no longer be wrongly subjected to forced hospitalization and nonconsensual psychiatric treatment. Her advocacy for bodily autonomy and self-determination is still incredibly relevant today.

Every day I am inspired by these legends of our movement, and how they navigated life, often before legal rights and protections. Their legacies are how I hold onto hope for the future, knowing that the communities I come from have long been building spaces and cultures where every person can receive the care and belonging they deserve.

Even though, as an Indigenous trans person, this 250th anniversary feels to me more a memorial than a celebration—a reminder that we lost so much and so many as the result of colonization—there is much to be proud of.

Trans leaders today are carrying the legacy of our ancestors forward. This includes leaders across the South who, despite living in politically hostile states, are supporting trans communities where they are. Wendi Cooper provides direct services to women in New Orleans, particularly women who are Black, Brown, transgender, and who have been impacted by the carceral system. BIPOC trans leaders are spearheading organizations like the Transgender Education Network of Texas and Intransitive in Arkansas, which are building the infrastructure for trans communities to be resourced, engage in advocacy, and access spaces of collective care.

Reflecting on this legacy being carried forward, I believe our ancestors would be proud to see how we are returning to our roots. In this time of rising fascism, we are returning to a way of being in relation with one another that centers our shared humanity and material needs. I have visited states across the country where trans people are leading mutual aid efforts to keep their communities nourished and housed. I have seen neighbors out on every block protecting our immigrant siblings from being disappeared by ICE, organizers leading protests outside of detention centers, and entire communities rallying to stop war and genocide. We are fighting for freedom for those who were excluded from it during the founding of this country.

Even though, as an Indigenous trans person, this 250th anniversary feels to me more a memorial than a celebration—a reminder that we lost so much and so many as the result of colonization—there is much to be proud of. Every day I am reminded of my history. Of the people who refused to deny who they were, people who made a way out of no way, and who devoted their lives to making it better for those of us who came after them, no matter our identity.

Indigenous and trans people, and Indigenous trans people, are here. We are here caring for ourselves, each other, and everyone caught in the crosshairs of fascism. We are protecting immigrants, feeding the hungry, running for office, and so much more. As we celebrate what this country could be, let’s remember who has been leading the way.

Welcome back to Ask a Nonprofit Expert, NPQ’s advice column for nonprofit readers, by civic leaders who have built thriving, equitable organizations.

As always, this series offers Leading Edge members the opportunity to submit tough challenges anonymously and get personalized advice. In this column, we’ll publish answers to common questions to strengthen our entire community’s capacity.

In today’s issue, Jan Masaoka returns to answer a reader’s question about the board’s involvement in setting the annual budget.

Stuck on a problem? Submit your question here.

Dear Ask a Nonprofit Expert,

I would like to know if a board should be involved in setting the annual budget for a small- to medium-sized nonprofit?

Sincerely,

Straight-to-the-point Reader

Straight-to-the-point Reader,  

The short answer is yes—for organizations of all sizes. That said, I urge you to consider this question: “Should two people who live together both be involved with the housework?”

Although the answer should be unequivocally “yes,” it also depends on the abilities and contributions of each person. And that might change over time as one person perhaps loses their job, or one develops a disability, or one has an especially tough month at work.

Legally responsible for financial oversight of the nonprofit, the board should review the budget and be confident that it reflects the organization’s priorities of the moment. Maybe it can’t afford to lose a lot of money for another year, or maybe it’s time to spend some reserves (which would show as a budget anticipating a deficit). Maybe there’s a commitment to raise salaries that needs to be reflected in the budget. The board should ask questions to feel confident that the staff has thought through the projections.

Legally responsible for financial oversight of the nonprofit, the board should review the budget and be confident that it reflects the organization’s priorities of the moment.”

In a nonprofit of say, two to 10 staff, board members often shoulder the work, such as preparing the budget. The board still needs to do its review. That’s their job holding the organization accountable to its publics.

The Four Categories of Board-Staff Tension

Tensions between staff and board over the budget typically break down into four categories:

First, staff may feel the board is micromanaging the budget, perhaps insisting on components or formats that the staff doesn’t want. For example, the board may think it’s unwise to budget in a possible grant before it is awarded, or a few board members might think the fundraising projection is too high, but in search of a balanced budget, don’t have suggestions on what expenses to cut. Such tensions are important reminders that every budget—in a nonprofit, in a household, in government—is a set of tradeoffs based on estimates and judgment calls. It is to be expected that there will be different views about what tradeoffs should be made and what estimates should be made. In most cases, being explicit about the estimates and tradeoffs lead to consensus—perhaps bringing a narrative with the budget that explains those. If they don’t, the board ultimately has the authority to determine the budget, although staff can also fail to follow the budget.

The second tension is an easier problem to solve, which is when board members pay attention to only the smallest and least important parts of the budget. They may be looking at a $1 million budget but choose to get concerned over $6,000 in supplies. This often occurs because board members can’t really make a determination whether $800,000 or $750,000 is the right figure for salaries—should that position be halftime or full time? So, they focus on something they get their arms around. Talk to the treasurer or another board member ahead of the meeting and see if that person can draw people’s attention to the big trade-offs and estimates rather than focus on tiny items. Sometimes small items can be combined into a single line item for the presentation. Other times the group has to muddle through these small items—especially when board members without financial perspectives want to feel that they are doing their job in reviewing the budget.

Remember: budget making is a process of negotiation, along with making estimates and making judgment calls. Like any negotiation, it will take leadership on both sides.”

The third typical problem is more frequent in larger-staff organizations, but can show up in nonprofits of all sizes: board members just glances at the budget and then rubber-stamps it. Of course, not everyone on the board needs to understand the budget enough to comment intelligently on it. Even in the smallest organizations it’s important to have at least one board member who understands finances, reviews finances, and gives a report to the board. Implicitly, what board members want to know is, “Should we be worried?” Delegating this question to a committee is a reasonable approach.

The fourth problem, though less common, occurs when staff balance the budget with a fundraising target for board members to raise that the board believes is unrealistic or even inappropriate. Sometimes it feels as if this new demand on board members has come out of the blue to board members who have no expectations of having to raise money. It’s bad faith for staff to put in board fundraising targets without coming to an agreement with board members about how much they can give and/or raise. Have that difficult discussion first.

Remember: budget making is a process of negotiation, along with making estimates and making judgment calls. Like any negotiation, it will take leadership on both sides. And sometimes, it will have to wait until there are either different people on the board or different people on staff.

Within the span of two weeks each year, the nation marks two declarations of freedom: Juneteenth and the Fourth of July. This series brings them into conversation to examine what they reveal, together, about the American project.

Across three essays, the series traces a central tension at the heart of American democracy: its enduring promise to freedom alongside a persistent capacity for injustice. The first essay names this contradiction and challenges the narratives that keep it obscured. The second grounds that insight in history, showing how the design of the system itself has enabled inequality to coexist with democratic ideals. The third turns toward the future, using this moment of reflection to ask what it would take to build something more honest, more durable, and more just.

Taken together, these essays invite a deeper reckoning with the present and create space for imagining what comes next.

In the Broadway hit musical Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson celebrates his victory in the election of 1800 by singing, “It must be nice, it must be nice, to get Hamilton on your side.” The scene suggests that Jefferson owed his ascent to Alexander Hamilton’s political maneuvering and influence among congressional delegates.

In truth, Jefferson owed his victory to slavery.

Far more than a minor constitutional compromise, the Three-Fifths Compromise in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution (sometimes called the Three-Fifths Clause) fundamentally reshaped the distribution of political power within the new republic. By allowing Southern states to count enslaved Black people toward congressional representation_—while denying them citizenship, rights, and political participation_—the compromise granted Southern slaveholders a definitive advantage within the new federal government.

Democracy and caste entered into a shared architecture that would shape American political life for generations to come.

Students in US schools are often taught that the central tensions at the nation’s founding revolved around disagreements between large states and small states, federal authority and states’ rights, or the distribution of power across the branches of government. The historical record, however, reveals a more consequential struggle beneath all these issues: Whether the new nation would incorporate slavery into the architecture of the republic itself. The South was clear: no slavery, no union. The United States emerged from that bargain, becoming a nation whose political and economic foundations rested on the enslavement of millions.

Racial hierarchy at the end of the 1700s was not a contradiction to American democracy but a precondition for it. The democratic system was built to depend upon racial caste. By caste, I mean a socially enforced hierarchy that organizes power, belonging, and access to political and economic life. While caste systems take different forms across societies and historical periods, race has served as the primary organizing principle of caste in the United States. When explicit forms of racial caste became untenable, the system did not abandon that hierarchy. It adapted it to new political realities.

At the very founding of this country, the relationship between democracy and caste was explicit. The Three-Fifths Compromise transformed enslaved people—particularly Black people_—into direct political and economic capital, granting Southern slaveholders a disproportionate power within the new government. Race translated directly into representation, electoral advantage, and institutional control. Democracy and caste entered into a shared architecture that would shape American political life for generations to come.

After the Civil War, this relationship between democracy and racial caste evolved but did not disappear. With slavery abolished, white Southern elites rebuilt political dominance through segregation, disenfranchisement, racial terror, and procedural obstruction. Literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, all-white primaries and juries, and racial violence engineered a Southern electorate designed to preserve control by a white elite, while limiting Black political participation.

Following the civil rights movement of the 1960s, explicit defenses of racial hierarchy became politically untenable, so the architecture adapted again. Overt systems of exclusion gave way to coded political rhetoric, race-neutral policy frameworks, institutional inertia, and cultural narratives capable of reproducing many of the same disparities without openly invoking the language of racial caste.

The caste system gave democratic order its hierarchy, coherence, and distribution of power. Democracy gave caste legitimacy, structure, and durability.

As the mechanisms became less overt, they also became more difficult to name. The relationship between democracy and caste moved from constitutional provision to political strategy, such as racial gerrymandering; from legal structure to institutional practice, such as redlining and housing discrimination; and from explicit exclusion to accumulated advantage and inherited inequality.

While conditions for Black communities in the United States have improved in meaningful ways across generations, the underlying gaps remain remarkably durable. Wealth gaps have widen. Segregation endures. Unequal access to political power, education, housing, healthcare, and economic opportunity persists. As the American caste system has evolved, it has become less visible, more diffuse, and more difficult to confront directly.

At the same time, the relationship between democracy and caste has grown increasingly unstable. From the beginning, racial caste functioned as the social infrastructure of US democracy. It organized power, mediated belonging, allocated resources, shaped political constituencies, and maintained social order. American democracy, in turn, legitimized, institutionalized, and reinforced the caste system upon which it depended.

There is no restoration of American democracy without confronting the racist structure and entrenched caste system that shaped it, stabilized it, and defined its access to a limited few from the beginning.

The caste system gave democratic order its hierarchy, coherence, and distribution of power. Democracy gave caste legitimacy, structure, and durability. As the caste system weakens beneath the pressures of demographic transformation, globalization, economic inequality, technological change, and an increasingly multiracial society, the “democratic” order built by the white elite around caste has begun to weaken as well.

And therein lies both the hope and the danger.

The weakening of racial caste opens the possibility for a more expansive and inclusive democracy. But because caste and democracy have been so deeply entangled throughout American history, the weakening of one is also destabilizing the other. The nation is not simply confronting political polarization or institutional decline. It is confronting the erosion of an underlying arrangement that has long helped hold American democracy, dominated by a white elite, together.

That is the deeper crisis beneath the crisis.

This is why conversations about “saving democracy” remain incomplete without reckoning with the racial caste system embedded within it. The two cannot be separated. There is no restoration of American democracy without confronting the racist structure and entrenched caste system that shaped it, stabilized it, and defined its access to a limited few from the beginning.

The old arrangement is weakening. The political order built around it is beginning to unravel, and once again an American generation is being summoned into the unfinished work of the founding of this nation.

In 1776, when the Declaration of Independence announced that all men are created equal, it did not have us in mind. Not Black people, not people of color, not women; certainly not those of us whose very existence would be legislated as criminal over the next two and a half centuries. And yet, through interdependence, we built independence. On ballroom floors, on house music dance floors, in club basements, and at warehouse raves, where the democracy we forged and practiced was total—rooted in governance, mentorship, chosen kinship, and mutual aid.

This network of care, which prefigured the broader movement for trans justice, forged a language of self-determination and gender identity that would come to inform mainstream trans advocacy, while insisting—long before policy conversations caught up—that trans justice is inseparable from racial and economic justice.

Today, as trans people are being legislatively erased in real time, funders are scrambling for a theory of change to meet this moment. Ballroom already offers one, created around a commitment to belonging fierce enough to sustain generations of people through systematic exclusion from civic life. Since their beginnings, those who organized ballroom life never waited for policy conditions to improve before building infrastructure for dignity. They built structures and communities around the belonging found on ballroom, club, and dance floors across the country to this day. From there, they catalyzed the cultural shifts that eventually forced open the doors of social, economic, and civic change.

Ballroom Paved the Way for Today’s Trans Justice Movement

Ballroom culture was created by Black and Latine queer and trans communities, beginning in Harlem in the late 19th century and flowering into what became the houses, balls, and chosen families of the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and into today. Sociologists call these “third spaces,” the gathering grounds outside of home and work where people build community, share knowledge, and practice democracy at a human scale. For Black and Brown queer and trans people, who have been excluded from myriad community anchor spaces, the third space has been the ball, the after-hours club, the houses.

The “houses” that organized ballroom life were chosen family structures led by house parents, who were typically more senior members of the scene and often trans women, drag queens, and gay men. Through houses and house parents, queer and trans folks gained access to community, mentorship, housing, and emotional support as they experienced family rejection, homelessness, and violence. This network of care, which prefigured the broader movement for trans justice, forged a language of self-determination and gender identity that would come to inform mainstream trans advocacy, while insisting—long before policy conversations caught up—that trans justice is inseparable from racial and economic justice. Houses produced the trans justice movement’s first frontline advocates putting intersectional justice values into practice. These leaders would go on to demand greater visibility, access, and dignity for all.

I have spent decades watching the descendants of ballroom—the houses, the elders, the young people voguing in church basements and community centers—do the slow, unglamorous work of building and holding community together. Passing the hat at a Brooklyn rave to bail out a friend. Posting bond from a dance floor in New Orleans. Slipping gender affirming resources to a young person at a ball in Atlanta. Organizing voter drives between sets in Philadelphia, Texas, and Alabama.

Even as nightlife reproduces its own exclusions—racism in queer spaces, transmisogyny, the cost of a door charge, the surveillance of who gets in—the houses, raves, and clubs have continued to build, knowing the work is unfinished. The rhythms, kinship structures, and world-building practices traveled from Chicago warehouses, where Frankie Knuckles spun house music for Black and Brown queer crowds, into today’s QTBIPOC raves and dance floors, where DJs like Armana Khan and collectives like Papi Juice spin that same tradition out for Black, Brown, queer, and trans crowds around the world. They are all part of one continuous lineage comprised of the people this country has worked hardest to erase.

Lessons From the Floor: How Funders Can Invest in True Belonging

I lead Borealis Philanthropy’s Fund for Trans Generations, which was designed with the belief that you cannot fund a movement and refuse to fund its floors. 

Ballroom culture offers deep lessons for funders who care about building true democracy—one committed to honoring complexity and wholeness. While donors pour resources into 501(c)(3)s that fit cleanly inside a grant report, the long-standing, self-defined civic infrastructure of Black and Brown trans life goes chronically underfunded, with only three and a half cents of every $100 reaching trans communities.

Beyond securing grantmaking dollars, what does it look like to apply ballroom’s kinship principles to philanthropy? At the Fund for Trans Generations (FTG), it looks like shifting power to the people closest to the work, with funding decisions determined by an advisory committee of BIPOC trans community organizers whose expertise is informed by their lived experience. It looks like recognizing the urgency of the moment with more than $3 million in rapid response grants since 2016, and another $200,000 to 25 trans-led organizations in 2026 to meet growing security and legal threats and doubling our fund as transantagonism rises. It looks like deepened investment that doesn’t disappear after a year: half of FTG’s general operating grants are multi-year commitments, paired with one-on-one and group coaching from a bench of expert coaches who walk alongside trans leaders over time.

It looks like the Flower Crown Project, the Fund’s just-wrapped two-year, $1.4 million investment in ten Black trans femme-led organizations, anchored in four pillars the cohort named themselves: Compassionate Care, Cultivation of Self, Cultural Perpetuity, and Unbridled Joy. Yes, unbridled joy—as a strategy, not a reward. The houses understood this long before we did: you cannot build a lasting movement on grief alone.

In the same vein, it means funding what philanthropy has historically deemed “extra”: land, sanctuary, rest, ceremony. It means mobilizing resources to organizations like The Griffin-Gracy Educational Retreat & Historical Center, known as House of gg. This is the legacy of the late Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and one of the only national spaces dedicated to rest for Black trans women activists, which hosts all-expense paid family gatherings for leaders to step out of crisis and return to their wholeness. It looks like supporting our partners at Imagine Water Works in New Orleans as they respond to the climate emergency and support Indigenous land stewardship on the Imagination Farm. And it looks like moving dollars to organizations like Trans Income Project, which has grown from a cash transfer collective into a collective safety net for trans Louisianans, providing meals, distributing direct cash, and covering HRT for folks from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

Yes, unbridled joy—as a strategy, not a reward. The houses understood this long before we did: you cannot build a lasting movement on grief alone.

This is what it means to fund the floor. Not as charity, but because investing in those who were never invited is how we achieve true democracy.

Over centuries, and still today, queer and trans communities have had to build new possibilities where there were none, updating societal norms and expanding belonging along the way. Now, as America turns 250 and asks itself again what and who democracy is for; how it is built: the answer is on the floor: Black, Brown, queer, and trans folks, dancing, governing, organizing, and holding one another close through it all. As it always has been—because we built it before they let us in.

This article was originally published on The Bridgespan Group and can be viewed here.

American Democracy has always been an ambitious and complicated experiment. While questions about what philanthropy can do to strengthen democracy in the United States may be particularly salient in the wake of a contentious US election season, these issues predate this moment and would have been pressing regardless of the outcome in November 2024.

Still, The Bridgespan Group is increasingly hearing from donors wrestling with the questions: What kind of contributions matter? Where to go from here? We have spent months—before and after the election—talking to donors, field leaders, and advisors, reading what others have written, and reflecting on our own work to try to provide insight into those questions.

Many others have written about the challenges we face—pointing out problems with the ways our media, education, economic, electoral, lobbying, judicial, and philanthropic funding systems work.¹ In this article, we are going to focus on some of the things that are working and what donors can learn from them.

“We are in an existential fight with those who oppose our vision of a more inclusive multiracial democracy. And if we lose too many battles in that fight, it will create a level of damage and harm that could take a generation or more to recover from.”

There may not be a simple recipe or formula that can guarantee the path to a truly multiracial, pluralist democracy—one where people of different races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, genders, and religions are respected and empowered in the civic space. However, it is not only possible to build such a democracy that works for everyone—there are bright spots where it is already happening. In fact, many people who now experience the greatest threat are also proactively leading the charge, benefiting the broader society by offering a vision of what democracy can look like. And much of that work takes place outside of the structures of elections and focuses on how communities can be heard and included.

We found four ways such work is already happening on the ground and share examples that bolster our optimism. Some of these efforts are finding common cause around issues; others are shaping narratives to be more inclusive; some use elections to shift power and support pluralism; and some focus on supporting leaders and communities to wield power once they have it.

It is also important to note that the desire for a democracy that works for everyone is not a partisan pursuit. In fact, not getting trapped by a party or partisan framing allows multiracial, pluralist efforts to thrive.

Overall, from our discussions, we found three big lessons for donors:

• Go long:Building a multiracial, pluralistic democracy is the work of decades if not generations. The challenges are deep, and organizations doing this work need funder partners who can think long-term and remain committed, even if the work is not completed in a single election cycle.
• Go local:Leaders are increasingly seeing the importance of building democracy from the community level up, fostering trust in systems and collaboration among different groups around shared interests.
• Don’t go it alone: Collaborate with the leaders on the front lines and fellow donors. There are existing networks and collaboratives looking for support and offering opportunities to learn and coinvest.

Angela Glover Blackwell, founder of PolicyLink, has written that building a thriving multiracial democracy will be “the next great US innovation.” It serves not only as a stark reminder that a democracy that works for everyone has not yet existed—but also provides the kind of audacious North Star that philanthropy is built for. We invite donors to embrace the opportunity.

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Notes:

1. Justin Gest and Tyler Reny, What Promotes Pluralism in America’s Diversifying Democracy?, New Pluralists, June 2023; Lukas Haynes, “Philanthropy to Protect US Democracy,”Stanford Social Innovation Review, October 13, 2022; Connor Carroll, William (Zev) Berger, Hanh La, and Katherina M. Rosqueta,We the People: A Philanthropic Guide to Strengthening Democracy, The Center for High Impact Philanthropy, School of Social Policy and Practice, University of Pennsylvania, 2019; Daniel Stid, Taking Democracy for Granted: Philanthropy, Polarization and the Need for Responsible Pluralism, SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University, July 14, 2024; Mohit Mookim, Rob Reich, Nadia Roumani, and Ayushi Vig, “How Can Philanthropy Help Rehabilitate Democracy?,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, January 6, 2021.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence, and our country is at an unprecedented crossroads. At a time when the United States should be coming together to celebrate all that we are, how far we’ve come, and commit to finishing the work to make America a place where freedom and equality are truly for all, a White supremacist faction is pushing our country in the opposite direction, whitewashing our past so they can whitewash our future.

On the eve of our country’s 250th birthday, and just 60 years into becoming anything close to a real democracy, we’re now in the grips of the greatest rollback of civil rights in generations.

What we fail to repair, we repeat.

Who controls the story of the past controls the future. So, it comes as no surprise that MAGA’s attempts to erase the history of enslavement and genocide are coupled with the rolling back of hard-won civil rights victories and the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act. From their iconography and propaganda to the ethnic cleansing campaign of Black and immigrant Americans, with the notable exception of White South Africans, the Trump administration is attempting to turn America back to a time when only wealthy White men had power, or the protections of citizenship.

To be clear, we’ve been here before this regressive campaign—and these tactics aren’t new.

Throughout United States history, there have been efforts to justify an order where a select few were allowed to exploit others for their own gain. From the Reconstruction after the Civil War, when White supremacists developed the Lost Cause narrative to lend cover for southern states to impose Jim Crow, to the development of the pseudoscience of phrenology to scientifically justify racial, class, and gender hierarchies, what’s happening on the federal level right now are the recycled tactics of the Confederacy of old.

By knowing our history, we can also learn the playbook to defeat the fascist agenda once and for all.

But public acknowledgement of the truth of our country’s history is a threat to the status quo. Because the truth of our past contains explanations for our present. The ongoing legacy of enslavement explains the origins of inequality and exploitation in the United States. The legacy of Indigenous genocide and removal explains the United States’ ongoing imperial maneuvers and expansionist project. The preferences toward the moneyed and elite in our Constitution explain the disproportionate power and influence that billionaires and corporations have today.

These legacies echo through our current society, and they have never been fully reckoned with or rectified. What we fail to repair, we repeat.

But there is yet another reason why US history is under attack: because by knowing our history, we can also learn the playbook to defeat the fascist agenda once and for all. All we need to look to are the abolitionists who, through their brave organizing of mass refusals to comply with injustice, were able to defeat an explicitly White supremacist movement and lay the foundation for a multiracial democracy through constitutional amendments like the 14th Amendment or birthright citizenship.

Or we can look to the Civil Rights movement, which built a race-conscious effort to realize political equality and shake the foundations of economic exploitation to its core, advancing and winning a Great Society that cut the United States poverty rate in half in just a few years.

These movements teach us two truths: that American democracy is a byproduct of mass movements, and that in this country, the struggles for racial equality, economic justice, and true democracy can only succeed when they work intertwined and in tandem.

It is this legacy we must step into today. As our country turns 250, the hard-won victories our predecessors have fought and died for are under threat like never before. Where we go in the next 250 years comes down to what we do right at this moment.

Now is the time for young people to turn away from cynicism and step into the shoes of our forebears who pushed America forward. Already, organized young people are turning the tide of politics in our country—coming together to rise up for racial justice in 2020 and, more recently, to drive the massive grassroots campaign to elect millennial Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City.

Where we go in the next 250 years comes down to what we do right at this moment.

This country has only just begun to see the impact that millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha can make as they come of age. The tide is already turning, and the future of this country is ours to create if we meet the moment.

That’s why youth-led Get Free, 50501, and Next 250 are calling on all Americans who want us to live up to our country’s promise to take a stand and reclaim our future. Join All of U.S. 250 rallies, marches, and community events across the nation on a day of action on June 27 to reckon with our full history rather than whitewash it, to put us on a path of repair to make equality real, and commit to finishing the work yet to be done to make a United States of, by, and for all of us.

Editor’s note: Language and identities evolve. This article uses historical terms alongside modern ones. Because groups, generations, and local communities have different language preferences, these choices reflect a best effort to honor both the people who lived this history and those in the movement today.

Sixty years after a trans woman at a San Francisco diner ignited the first well-documented queer uprising in US history, local activists are again mobilizing to support individuals and families fleeing government attacks on trans existence. It’s a crisis that underscores that American liberty has never been a guarantee, but a right demanded by communities that resist not just through protest, but also by organizing networks of care and defense.

The 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot—which happened three years before Stonewall and is still finding its rightful place in public consciousness—didn’t just mark a turning point in queer resistance. It catalyzed the creation of a groundbreaking network of trans-affirming organizations and services, built by and with the community.

Its legacy endures. In the decades since, trans organizers in San Francisco have kept pushing forward, sometimes in partnership with government and other times in spite of it. Today, the trans community is reclaiming the neighborhood where the riot took place and taking steps to turn it into a permanent home for queer pride and power. As transphobic policies escalate around the country, that work is not merely symbolic, but an urgent tactical response to an all too familiar systemic hostility.

Discrimination Leads to Resistance

To understand why a diner became a flashpoint, it helps to look at the crushing prejudice, exclusion, and violence that pushed its customers to fight back.

Today, the trans community is reclaiming the neighborhood where the riot took place and taking steps to turn it into a permanent home for queer pride and power.

For decades before San Francisco’s Castro District became a famous LGBTQ+ neighborhood, much of the city’s queer population was pushed into the Tenderloin—a small, densely populated, low-income area that functioned as a containment zone. Even within this neighborhood nicknamed the “gay ghetto,” trans people, drag queens, and others whose identities didn’t fit rigid gender norms—who were disproportionately young people of color—faced further exclusion. Shut out of stable housing, employment options, and even many gay businesses, they were forced to the margins of an already marginalized neighborhood.

In the 1960s, as is still true today, trans people faced acute discrimination and violence, beyond even what was already inflicted on the predominantly white and cisgender gay community that had been gaining economic, cultural, and political influence in San Francisco. The city’s police relentlessly harassed gender-nonconforming people, weaponizing laws against female impersonation, using the “wrong” toilet, sex work, or simply standing on the sidewalk to justify humiliations, arrests, and beatings.

In this hostile environment, a diner called Gene Compton’s Cafeteria was a rare late-night refuge where trans people, drag queens, and queer youth could get a meal and socialize somewhere safer than the city streets. Yet even at Compton’s, management discriminated against its customers, sometimes calling in the police to escalate the harassment. Management also hired a private security guard, banned regulars for lingering, and started charging fees just to sit down. This discrimination drew the attention of Vanguard, a new gay youth liberation group formed under the sponsorship of Glide Memorial Church, which picketed the diner in July 1966.

By August, tensions boiled over. According to accounts, one night a Compton’s employee called police to remove some customers. When police arrived and an officer tried to arrest a trans woman, she flung a cup of coffee in his face. Trans people, drag queens, and others threw objects, flipped tables, hit officers with purses, shattered windows, and forced police into the street where the riot continued. Confrontations flared up repeatedly in the following days.

The exact date the coffee cup flew is unknown because newspapers ignored it and police claim no records exist. The story stayed buried for nearly 30 years, until historian Dr. Susan Stryker uncovered a reference to it in the 1972 San Francisco Gay Pride program, in the archives of the nonprofit Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California (now called the GLBT Historical Society). The finding launched Stryker on a years-long research project that culminated in her 2005 documentary, Screaming Queens.

Reflecting on her archival find in the documentary, Stryker said she initially wasn’t sure if the story she had stumbled onto was true. “But if it was,” she said, “that riot might represent the transgender community’s debut on the stage of American political history.”

Stryker’s research verified the riot was real and her documentary restored the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot to the historical record, establishing it as one of the catalysts for the trans organizing that followed.

What the Riot Built

In the months and years after the riot, San Francisco’s trans people and allies built a first-of-its-kind network of gender-affirming organizations and services.

A key part of the pivot was when activist Louise Ergestrasse demanded support for trans people from Sergeant Elliott Blackstone, the first police liaison to the gay community in the nation in 1962, giving him a copy of Dr. Harry Benjamin’s groundbreaking book, The Transsexual Phenomenon. Already sympathetic, Blackstone became an unlikely champion, working closely with the trans community on improving police treatment of residents, increasing access to trans-supportive services, and fundraising at his church for hormone therapy when the city government refused.

Trans organizers and Blackstone also targeted government programs, pressuring the city’s Department of Health to provide services, including referrals for gender-affirming surgery, which was just becoming available in the US. As a result of this grassroots organizing, the city hired trans people to work at a job training program and issued an identification card bearing the trans individual’s name and gender, making it possible to open bank accounts, sign leases, and secure documented employment.

By 1967, trans activists, with the support of Glide Church and Blackstone, had launched Conversion Our Goal (COG), the nation’s first formal trans organization and a vital entry point for gender-affirming services. This soon evolved into the National Transsexual Counseling Unit (NTCU), the world’s first peer-run trans advocacy and support organization. Other organizations followed, including the California Association of Transsexuals Society (CATS) and Helping Hands Center.

The courage of the trans women, drag queens, and young queers who fought back at Compton’s created a legacy of fierce self-determined resistance that still anchors San Francisco’s trans community today.

This progress was part of a fragile truce with a still-hostile society. Trans people and their allies remained under constant threat from anti-trans discrimination that had not gone away. In 1973, San Francisco police ran a sting operation, entrapping an NTCU peer counselor on drug charges, and attempting to frame Officer Blackstone. Around the same time, some gay liberation coalitions were drawing new borders around who belonged in the movement—and trans people and drag queens were not included.

The years that followed brought new crises and new organizing. The devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s again demanded that the community build the healthcare and mutual aid infrastructure that the government refused to provide. The trans movement itself underwent internal shifts, driven by pioneering builders who broadened the understanding of trans identity while successfully pushing the medical establishment to decouple gender identity from sexual orientation. There were also significant policy victories along the way, such as in 1974, when San Francisco ended its ban on cross-dressing, and in 1995, when the city added “gender identity” to its law prohibiting discrimination in housing and employment. 

But the organizing never stopped. The courage of the trans women, drag queens, and young queers who fought back at Compton’s created a legacy of fierce self-determined resistance that still anchors San Francisco’s trans community today.

Defiantly Fighting Back

As the 60th anniversary of Compton’s Cafeteria Riot approaches, San Francisco’s trans community has converted defiance into infrastructure, and infrastructure into a base from which to fight the next transphobic attacks.

In 2017, three Black trans women founded the first legally recognized transgender cultural district in the world, anchored in the same Tenderloin area where the riot took place. The Transgender District works to ensure that trans people can stay in the Tenderloin neighborhood, access the care they need, and build economic lives on their own terms. It is, in the most direct sense, the riot’s institutional heir.

Trans political power is visible in many other ways. The city government now has an Office of Transgender Initiatives, a Gender Health program, and a Drag Laureate position whose second and current holder, Per Sia, is a transgender first generation Mexican-American. In 2024, San Francisco declared itself a sanctuary city for transgender and gender-nonconforming people and gender-affirming healthcare providers.

More protections are in the works. San Francisco supervisors may soon vote on expanding the city’s Fair Chance Ordinance to extend employment and housing protections to people who have convictions related to gender expression and healthcare that is legal in California. Honey Mahogany, Director of the Office of Transgender Initiatives and a co-founder of the Transgender District, said that trans-serving organizations are seeing a surge of “40 percent increases in participation, especially from people coming to San Francisco seeking sanctuary from other states.” The proposed legislation, she said, is meant to ensure that “the discrimination that they faced in their home towns doesn’t follow them here.”

While the site of the riot was listed in the California and national historic registers last year, the building that housed Compton’s until it closed in 1972 remains out of reach. The building is owned by GEO Group, a private prison corporation and major ICE contractor, which runs what it calls a “residential reentry center.” A trans-led group called Comptons x Coalition is trying to get GEO Group removed from the building so the site can be “transformed from a place of carceral harm into a community-stewarded hub for culture, care, and belonging.”

The story of the riot is also being brought to life a few blocks from where it happened. The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play, produced by the nonprofit Tenderloin Museum, places the audience inside a functioning replica diner—complete with cups of hot coffee—where the cast recreates the night the community fought back.

Sixty years on, it’s one way San Francisco’s trans community is making sure its demands to exist without oppression are still heard loud and clear.

Our food and farming systems are in crisis. As food insecurity rapidly escalates across the United States, small-scale farmers face a parallel exigency: the struggle to produce nourishing food while developing successful business models. But a new generation of New York state farmers, galvanized by a social justice mission to serve their communities and strengthen fresh food access are meeting the challenges with fresh approaches.

As newcomers enter the profession, “more regional food systems are definitely becoming more of a value system,” Iris Fen Gillingham told NPQ. In 2022, Gillingham founded the nonprofit Gael Roots Community Farm in Livingston Manor, NY, a small hamlet two hours north of New York City.

“I think that’s pivotal in a lot of the future of agriculture,” she added.

Agricultural Education and Food Access

Fresh out of college and heartbroken by the continued loss of agricultural farmland to development, Gillingham found funders to purchase the 150-acre property on which the community farm sits. The land is sentimental as her parents had leased part of the property during her childhood to farm as well. The land is currently protected with an environmental protection easement, which she now leases.

Gillingham spearheaded Gael Roots Community Farm’s food pantry founding last November, dismayed by the growing food insecurity in her hometown, despite the 2024 median income being a little over $72,000.

Gillingham grows vegetables and raises sheep, focusing on food access, agriculture education, and fiber arts through a pay-as-you-can farm stand and programming. She also founded Calliope & Gael Grocers, a no-charge, free-choice food pantry serving Livingston Manor families, in partnership with the local Calliope-on-Main Foundation. Raised on an off-the-grid farm down the road, Gillingham was involved in community, climate, and environmental justice work growing up. “When I started to see how much our society has disconnected people from where their food comes from, I felt like it was really valuable to teach more of what I had learned in my life,” she said.

Gillingham collaborates with the local school district to offer agriculture and fiber arts programming to complement their curriculum. Students have planted garlic and harvested potatoes at the community farm and learned to identify plants in school.  Community programs include understanding heritage sheep breeds and wool.

Gillingham spearheaded Gael Roots Community Farm’s food pantry founding last November, dismayed by the growing food insecurity in her hometown, despite the 2024 median income being a little over $72,000, (2024 dollars) according to census.gov where the Gael Roots supplies vegetables and nearby farms provide additional produce and meat.

Sullivan County, where the farm is located, has the second-worst health outcomes in the state. Part of the community farm’s mission, by proxy, is making healthy food options more accessible to all. “Affordability is a major part of health,” she notes.

Food as a Means of Community Organizing

Another farm in Sullivan County, Finca Seremos, works with Gael Roots to support the community.

“When we talk about this [Finca Seremos] as a food justice project, it’s really a community organizing project at the core. It uses food as the vehicle for making those connections,” Chris Nickell, founder of Finca Seremos, told NPQ. Chris, along with their partner in life and work, Brenda Gonzalez, started the farm in 2023.

After a decade of personal and professional community organizing in their Upper-Manhattan Washington Heights neighborhood before and during the pandemic, burnout spurred the pair to seek restorative community endeavors, which meant accelerating their long-term farming plans.

Nickell and Gonzalez were raised in Appalachia and Puerto Rico cultures and communities, where people looked out for one another. “We can’t imagine doing a farm that wouldn’t fit these values,” Nickell said.

Finca Seremos offers free-choice, sliding-scale community-supported agriculture (CSA) in Liberty, Washington Heights, and Inwood. CSA connects local farmers directly to the community, which led the duo to farm in support of it, as Gonzalez explained to NPQ, “Because it is rooted in practices of mutual aid, interconnectedness, and community building.” The farm also sells wholesale to mission-aligned organizations, a channel that began unexpectedly when they had an abundance of produce in their first year. The farm will expand to three acres this season to grow more for wholesale.

Gonzalez and Nickell hope that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients comprise 30 percent of their 150 CSA slots. They have fostered a vibrant member network, interacting with participants and building relationships as they select their produce.

Beyond farming and providing accessible food, a mutual aid chat connects members to immigrant rights work and immigrant defense and health resources. During New York City’s recent nurses’ strike, members of the chat responded to requests for solidarity at the picket line.

Small Farms, Big Impacts

At Serra Vida Farm, Sea Matias demonstrates how a small farm’s food-access work at scale can be supported through a combination of land access and shared infrastructure. The 32-year-old is a one of the first lessees of , a community land trust that provides land and support to beginning growers from marginalized backgrounds. Community land trusts are emerging as a way for new farmers to obtain land at a low cost and help protect farmland.

Matias is also a partner of the 607 CSA, a Catskills Agrarian Alliance (CAA) program that connects small farms to markets by aggregating food for individuals, food pantries, and mutual aid organizations. In CAA, Matias discovered a natural intersection of goals, values, and support. The alliance also offers shared cold storage, logistics planning, and trucking, so farmers do not have to handle that themselves.

Apprenticing in community gardens in the Bronx, where they hail from, and fulfilling needs within the community, was “just beautiful,” Matias told NPQ. Wanting to grow food for mutual aid at scale and honor their grandmother’s love of plants and legacy of care for others, they founded Serra Vida Farm in the Catskills Delaware Valley in 2024.

Community land trusts are emerging as a way for new farmers to obtain land at a low cost and help protect farmland.

Last year, Matias donated 97 percent of the 14,000 pounds of food they grew to 18 mutual aid groups/food pantries in Delaware County and the Bronx. With an environmental education background, a Farm School NYC certification, and farm experiences under their belt, Matias deeply understands the pathways through which New York’s local food system can be utilized.

In Support of the Community

While these farmers have all crafted different approaches, their work is characterized by thoughtful intent and collaboration. They all practice agroecology, which Nickell defines as stewarding land in ways that actively oppose the country’s predominant extractive, oppressive food system. Including food sovereignty, agroecology “describes our growing practices, captures the way we think about our stewardship of land, the social life of our food, and that we co-create knowledge with our fellow farmers,” Nickell explained.

The farmers grow food that is culturally meaningful, from Asian eggplants to uvilla, a Peruvian husk cherry, asking recipients for their preferences. Matias has adapted seeds from their Puerto Rican relatives—the mountain-region climate is similar to the Catskills.

These models, nonprofit and for-profit, are replicable. Inspired by Rock Steady Farm, one of the few worker-led cooperative vegetable farms, Gonzalez and Nickell plan to transition from an LLC to a cooperative ownership model and are actively developing a tiered ownership structure. Rock Steady is also led by QTBIPOC and has created space in agriculture for people in those communities.

These farmers recognize that collective action is required, from partnering with organizations, sharing knowledge and equipment, to developing deep community roots. It’s especially true if farms are to adapt to challenges like climate change, noted Gillingham.

Grants, funding, and donations are critical to their work, growth, and survival. Until last year, Gillingham also worked at a restaurant. Matias holds a variety of agriculture-related jobs. Gonzalez and Nickell, in their mid-30s, have used up their savings to make their farm work. Despite it all, these young agrarians’ passion for their mission is evident.

“Beyond an act of resilience,” Matias said, “it is extremely important to show our communities that we have their best interests in mind; we have their backs. These farmers are showing the ways in which a local food system can be sustained to serve both farmers and communities.”

As staff leaders and board members, how do we respond when our organizational values are tested in real time? Executive orders, legal threats, and funding pressures are forcing this question every day now across the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. Often, boards turn to the language they know. But their proximity to risk is different from that of staff, communities, or leaders on the ground. And that difference shapes how risk is understood, prioritized, and acted upon by the organization. It can result in very real risks going unexamined and in an under-recognition for what is truly at stake.

Join strategist, writer, and advisor to mission-driven organizations Dax-Devlon Ross on Thursday, June 25, 2026, at 2 PM (ET), for a discussion about reframing organizational risk. Click here to register.

It’s no secret that “flooding the zone“ has been the primary strategy of this administration—or that the approach has reached a fever pitch when it comes to dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). From my vantage point in mid-2026, the strategy has unfolded in three distinct movements. There was the Day One wave, a blunt-force trauma to the federal bureaucracy that shuttered DEI offices and redefined sex as a strictly biological binary. Then came the second wave, which took the fight to our classrooms and courtrooms by revoking disparate impact protections. By the third wave, the administration sought to “cleanse“ the private sector, targeting everything from AI guardrails to the fiduciary duties of investment firms.

The result has been a volatile mix of immediate enforcement, fierce legal contestation, and sudden abandonment. One could easily argue that this chaos wasn’t a collateral effect; it was the point. But hindsight has a way of making chaos look more coherent than it felt while we were living through it.

In those early months of 2025, perspective was a luxury we did not have. The executive orders crash landed into our lives. They hit faster than organizations could digest them, faster than counsel could interpret them, and certainly faster than leaders could assemble their boards to ask the all-important question: What has actually changed, and what is just noise?

By spring, the administration had scrambled the field, distorted the signal, and made institutions question the ground beneath their own feet. Universities, nonprofits, foundations, and school systems found themselves caught in an atmosphere of escalating uncertainty, legal ambiguity, and political intimidation. All across the mission-driven ecosystem, institutions that had spent years naming equity as central to their values suddenly found themselves asking whether that language had become a liability.

On April 3, that sweeping national anxiety became acutely personal. That morning, the Department of Education issued a certification demand tied to federal funding, requiring education-related institutions to swear they weren’t engaging in what the administration branded “illegal DEI“—a brazen attempt to stretch the logic of the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard affirmative action ruling into K–12 classrooms. For the nonprofits embedded in schools, it was a sudden, sharp reminder that no one was flying under the radar.

Scrubbing the website or quietly softening their language carried its own massive, volatile risk—a clear threat to staff trust, community credibility, and the very integrity of the mission.

As it happened, exactly one hour after the story broke, I entered a Midtown Manhattan boardroom to lead a conversation with the board of a nonprofit operating in several dozen New York City schools about its embattled anti-racism efforts. The room was packed tight. Board members bumped elbows along the heavy conference table, while a pair of out-of-towners hovered on the Zoom screen. I’d been briefed that this board was a mixed bag: some were veterans deeply anchored to the mission, while others were burgeoning philanthropists looking to roll up their sleeves. All were high-achieving professionals who genuinely wanted NYC’s children to thrive.

But the atmosphere had shifted, seemingly overnight. The administration had signaled a surprisingly sophisticated, granular awareness of the DEI lexicon, treating the terminology as a set of traceable signatures used to smuggle “illegal“ ideologies into policy. For these board members, the moral vocabulary they had comfortably affirmed from a safe distance for years was suddenly a heat map for federal targeting. Terms that had once sounded like earnest conviction—anti-racism, systemic barriers, culturally responsive—now felt like evidence.

I entered the session prepared to move them away from abstract debates and reconnect their anti-racism commitments back to the actual children, schools, and neighborhoods the organization served. More than that, I wanted to talk about the profound risk of changing course. I tried to urge them to consider that scrubbing the website or quietly softening their language carried its own massive, volatile risk—a clear threat to staff trust, community credibility, and the very integrity of the mission. I argued that retreating in a panic would cost them something they might never be able to buy back.

But it was like speaking a foreign language. The words wouldn’t stick. Every time I tried to raise the cost of changing course, the gravitational pull of the room dragged us right back to the immediate, terrifying threat of staying visible.

The questions came quickly: Should the organization remove references to anti-racism or DEI from its website? Was that language now creating unnecessary exposure? How much legal risk were they actually facing? Could continuing to publicly frame the work this way jeopardizes funding streams or institutional partnerships?

I was witnessing in real time the way pressure narrows the imagination. Sitting there at the head of the table, trying valiantly to facilitate several conversations at once, I felt the walls closing in around me. I wanted to help the organization navigate the moment responsibly, to avoid deepening fractures inside the board, and to create movement without causing harm. But legal exposure and institutional vulnerability kept swallowing the room. I could feel how little space there was for people to say plainly what they feared, what they were protecting, or how differently they were carrying the moment.

When the meeting finally ended, people affirmed that it had gone as well as anyone could have expected, maybe better.

Still, I drove back to Washington, DC, replaying every moment in my mind. The board had not failed, and they genuinely cared. By most ordinary measures, the session was fine. But I could not shake the feeling that “fine“ was entirely inadequate for the moment we were in. The warnings I had laid out about the cost of retreating had completely bounced off them.

At the time, I blamed myself, convinced I had failed to facilitate the conversation effectively. What I was actually beginning to wrestle with—what all of us were trying to do—was how to govern through a disturbance we did not yet know how to interpret.

II.

Before last spring, many of us had been living inside a kind of assumed alignment. Across the progressive nonprofit and philanthropic world, especially after the murder of George Floyd, boards and organizations had grown accustomed to saying certain things out loud. Equity was central. Race was foundational. Representation was required. Systems were everywhere. Mission could not be separated from the conditions shaping the lives of the people organizations existed to serve. That all became mantra even if we had differing views on the mandate.

There was disagreement, of course. As there was skepticism. People who never fully understood the language or who quietly wondered whether the work had gone too far. But in the years immediately after 2020, the broader moral atmosphere made it relatively easy for many people to say yes. Yes, we believe in this. Yes, this belongs in our mission. Yes, we want to be on the right side of history.

There is, however, a gulf between affirming a value when the wind is at your back and standing inside a wind tunnel when the turbines roar to life. People who had once agreed in principle now had to ask themselves what that agreement meant under threat. Was equity still mission-critical if it attracted scrutiny? Was anti-racism still central to the work if the language itself could be weaponized? Were these commitments fundamental, or were they secondary to the mission?

Yes, they were governance questions. Of course, they were fiduciary questions. It made sense that boards were grappling with them. But what I began to sense, first dimly and then with more clarity, was that “organizational strategy” was just the language used to mask a deeper panic. In reality, they were trying to locate themselves inside a terrifying new risk environment.

For some, the administration’s assault confirmed the necessity of the work; the backlash was evidence that the commitment was essential, and retreat would be surrender. For others, the same set of facts produced the opposite instinct: if the work was now exposed, the responsible thing was to lower the temperature, change the language, make the commitments less visible, and protect the institution. And between those poles were many people who were not resistant, not indifferent, not hostile, but profoundly unsettled. They supported the work but did not know how to carry it in public. They believed in the mission but were unsure how to defend the language. They wanted to do the right thing but were newly aware that the right thing might cost something.

That was the part I had not anticipated. Something fundamental was still blocking the light, a hidden friction I couldn’t yet see. And so, throughout that volatile spring, as the pressure continued to rise across the sector, I carried that unresolved ache with me everywhere. I kept returning to the question: What was I missing?

III.

Around that time, I started hearing the word resilience everywhere. It showed up in board retreats, staff meetings, strategy conversations, leadership trainings, philanthropic reports. Everyone wanted resilient leaders, resilient organizations, resilient movements.

The word often felt opaque and undefined to me. Too often, resilience seemed to mean endurance. Hold on. Keep going. Absorb the blow. Stay functional while the world becomes less stable around you. That definition never sat right with me.

Disturbance alone does not produce resilience. A shock can teach, but only if a system is willing to learn.

So, I went looking, researching the word. I found myself reading about ancient societies whose histories were punctuated by droughts, crop failures, demographic collapse, migration, conflict, and environmental stress. What held my attention was the variation: some societies recovered, adapted, and carried lessons forward, while others became more brittle after the blow. In case after case, the societies that recovered best were the ones that had faced repeated disturbance. The question was why.

As I looked deeper, I began to see a pattern. Repeated shocks forced people to develop new habits: ways of sharing food, moving across terrain, storing resources, building networks, telling stories, and passing down lessons. Over time, adaptation became collective memory. Memory became culture. Culture became capacity.

Agriculture offered one example. Farming created new possibilities for settlement, storage, and collective life, but it also introduced new vulnerabilities: drought, pests, famine, soil depletion, dependency on seasonal cycles. The innovation produced risk, and the risk required further innovation. Irrigation. Food storage. Trade networks. Migration patterns. New social arrangements.

Disruption became instruction—but only when societies actually did something with it. That was the insight I kept returning to. Disturbance alone does not produce resilience. A shock can teach, but only if a system is willing to learn. Otherwise, disruption simply passes through the system as fear, confusion, or retreat.

That helped me think differently about what had happened in organizations after 2020. The murder of George Floyd was a profound social and moral rupture. Many institutions responded quickly. They issued statements, hired trainers, created equity committees, recruited more people of color, and rewrote values. Some of that work was meaningful, and some of it was performative, but broadly speaking, the sector reached for moral and financial solutions. Organizations wanted to signal that they were listening, that they understood something had changed, and that they were willing to respond.

[M]oral risk does not disappear because legal counsel is in the room. Community risk does not disappear because federal funding feels uncertain. Staff trust does not disappear because the board is focused on exposure. They simply become harder to see.

Here’s the thing: those post-2020 changes rarely altered the underlying mechanics of how decisions were made. Consequently, they never became collective memory or governance muscle. The disruption passed through the sector, rather than teaching it how to learn.

This time, the pressure did not invite organizations to demonstrate moral alignment. Rather, it threatened them for having done so. And because many institutions had never fully stress-tested their values as governance commitments, their systems struggled to respond. Organizations that asked in 2020 what does the moment requires of us morally began asking a different question: What does this expose us to legally, financially, politically?

But moral risk does not disappear because legal counsel is in the room. Community risk does not disappear because federal funding feels uncertain. Staff trust does not disappear because the board is focused on exposure. They simply become harder to see. And that was what I had missed in the first boardroom. The group was responding through the risk language most available to it. What we had not yet done was slow down enough to ask what else the disturbance was revealing. We had not asked people to locate themselves inside the pressure. We had not made room to distinguish personal anxiety from organizational risk. We had not created a way to name moral, reputational, or community risk with the same seriousness given to legal exposure.

The reality is that for some board members, the pressure produced urgency. For others, caution. For others, confusion. For others, fear. And because those responses were not made visible, they could not become useful. They remained private interpretations masquerading as organizational judgment.

That was the moment the core question changed for me. I stopped asking about how do I help boards respond to risk and began asking: How do I help boards understand how they are interpreting risk in the first place?

Most organizations assume risk is something outside the room. But risk is also interpreted inside the room, within the people who have been charged with stewarding an institution. It is filtered through identity, role, proximity, memory, ideology, fear, and responsibility. Every interpretation may not be equally sound, but they each stem from a deep, subjective source. And if we do not surface those sources, they continue shaping decisions from underneath.

This was where the resilience work began to feel especially consequential. Certainly, a resilient organization should strive for a stable balance sheet and healthy reserves. But it is also one that can be disturbed without becoming entirely unintelligible to itself—without losing its identity. A resilient organization can step back and ask: What is this moment revealing about us? What are we learning? What are we protecting? What are we avoiding? What must change if we are going to meet the next disturbance with more capacity than we had before?

That was the work I could not do that day. And once I saw that, I knew that the next time I was in a room like that, I would approach it differently.

IV.

Months later, I got my chance. Another social services organization had reached an impasse with its anti-racism work in the current context. This time, I did not begin with the assumption that the goal was alignment; I began with listening. Before the retreat, I spoke at length with board members and staff, looking to understand how they viewed the work, what they believed was at stake, and what they worried might happen if the board moved too quickly, too cautiously, or failed to move at all.

I heard warmth, respect for the mission, pride in the organization’s work, and a genuine desire to be useful. But beneath the goodwill was a board that had not yet developed the shared language and muscle memory to act as a collective under pressure.

Through those conversations, the hidden forces shaping the boardroom finally became visible. Some board members saw anti-racism as inseparable from mission, client safety, and organizational integrity. For them, the only question was how to deepen consistency. Others believed in the commitment but needed help understanding how it translated into practical governance, strategy, and oversight. Still some struggled to reconcile their belief in meritocracy with the organization’s insistence that fairness requires accounting for unequal starting points. And then there were those whose support became deeply cautious once the external environment entered the equation—they were consumed by anxieties over funding, exposure, public perception, and legal challenge.

What I was hearing was more than a range of standard opinions. It was the live confirmation of the pattern I had encountered across leadership spaces for years: when pressure rose, people assumed recognizable postures toward risk.

They were not just debating anti-racism or DEI; they were locating themselves in relation to what felt most threatened. And because no one had ever asked them to make that location visible, those internal postures had spent years showing up indirectly—as hesitation, urgency, confusion, procedural concern, or neutrality.

I have come to think of this pattern as the risk posture spectrum.

On one end were the unwavering. For them, the backlash did not introduce doubt; it clarified the stakes. They saw equity, anti-racism, or DEI commitments as inseparable from mission. Retreat was not prudence. It was abandonment. Their question was not, should we keep going? But rather, how could we not?

Near them were the committed but seeking clarity. These were people who believed in the work but needed a stronger bridge between values and governance. They were asking: What does this mean for the board? What does this mean for oversight? What does this mean for fundraising, public communication, strategy, or budget decisions? Their uncertainty was not necessarily resistance. Often, it was a request for translation.

Closer to the center were the concerned interpreters. They were trying to read the world beyond the room. They were thinking about donors, political narratives, public perception, legal exposure, media framing, and how the organization’s language might land with people who did not share its assumptions. They might worry that equity language would be read as exclusionary or preferential. They might invoke fairness, neutrality, merit, or equal treatment. Sometimes they were not rejecting the work so much as asking, how will this be perceived?

Further along were the protective reticent. They framed caution as stewardship. They might believe the organization needed to reduce visibility, change language, delay action, or avoid certain public commitments in order to protect itself. They were often fluent in the language of fiduciary responsibility. Their questions were familiar in boardrooms: What if we lose funding? What if we are sued? What if we become a target? What if the organization cannot withstand the cost of being visible?

And at the far end were the resistant. In the kinds of mission-driven organizations I work with, they are usually fewer in number, though not absent. They reject the premise more directly. They do not believe race, identity, or equity should be central to the work. They may see these commitments as divisive, ideological, preferential, or outside the proper scope of the organization. In some rooms, this posture is voiced plainly. In others, it appears through procedural objections, endless requests for proof, or appeals to neutrality.

These postures are not fixed labels, but indicators of what pressure reveals. Seeing them allowed me to design the room differently, treating variation as vital information rather than a conflict to smooth over. Every hesitation had a source, and every certainty carried underlying assumptions. The goal was not to collapse these differences into a premature consensus, but to make them visible enough for the board to learn from.

I opened with connection. Board members spoke to one another about purpose, responsibility, and the experiences that shaped how they understood justice. We created a container for first-draft speech, for uncertainty, for the fact that people were not all entering the conversation from the same place. Only then did I invite the board to look at what had surfaced in the interviews as a mirror. And the mirror showed a board with real commitment, but different orientations, different fears, and different assumptions about what this moment required. Those differences were not obstacles to the work. They were the work.

Because the conversation began with a clearer sense of the identities, orientations, and lived interpretations in the room, people could name tensions without immediately needing to resolve them. Newer members could acknowledge confusion without being shamed. Staff could see where board members were trying to understand. And board members could begin to recognize that their uncertainty had consequences beyond themselves as individuals.

That is one value of the spectrum: it gives a room a way to see itself.

Once these postures were named, the conversation changed. The question was no longer who supports the work and who does not? That question was too crude, too binary, too flat for what disruption reveal. The better questions—the ones that helped them look past their immediate locations on the spectrum—forced a deeper interrogation of the reasoning, assumptions, and anxieties beneath the surface:

• Is my concern about the organization’s actual exposure, or about my personal discomfort with being associated with a contested idea?
• Am I seeing the community’s risk, or only the institution’s?
• Am I asking for clarity because I want to move responsibly, or because uncertainty gives me permission to delay?
• Am I invoking fairness because I am genuinely concerned about equity of treatment, or because I have never fully examined the systems that produced unequal outcomes in the first place?

To force these questions is not to suggest that fear is illegitimate. Fear often carries vital information; it tells us what people believe is fragile, what they think can be lost, and what they feel uniquely responsible for protecting. But fear should never be allowed to disguise itself as the whole of organizational judgment. A board that cannot ask these questions is not governing with clarity. It is managing tension without understanding it. And in a moment of disruption, that is not enough.

The result was not a neat resolution. It was something more useful: a room better able to work with its own complexity. Board members could speak more directly about why their perspectives mattered. Differing viewpoints became less of a threat to manage and more of a resource for discernment.

From there, the board could begin drafting clearer statements of belief and intention, anchored less in external panic than in internal purpose.

V.

Looking back, the contrast between those two rooms clarified everything. In that first boardroom, I had tried to move too quickly toward the risk conversation. I believed that if the board could see the fuller landscape, it would be able to make a better decision. But a fuller map is entirely useless if people do not know where they are standing. That was the painful lesson I had to learn.

Once people can see that they are not simply “for“ or “against“ a value, but are positioned differently in relation to consequence, the entire atmosphere changes. The conversation becomes less defensive and far more discerning. Leaders can begin to not only ask, what risk do I see? But also, what risk might I be missing because of where I stand?

Only then can a board truly widen its aperture. Only then can a room begin to take seriously the risks that are harder to quantify, but no less consequential:

1. Community risk: Are we only counting the risks that threaten the institution, or are we also counting the risks borne by the people the institution exists to serve?
2. Moral risk: Are we treating staff trust, community confidence, and mission integrity as strategic assets, or as sentiments to be managed after the “real“ decisions have been made?
3. Reputational risk over time: How will this decision be understood not just next week, but years from now, when people ask what we did when the pressure came?
4. The risk of retreat: Are we using legal uncertainty as a reason to think more carefully, or as permission to abandon commitments before we have fully tested what is actually required?

I am not trying to give boards a neat formula or a rigid rubric that will dictate what courage requires in advance. These questions will not magically resolve every tension. If anything, they may deepen them. Every organization still has to decide for itself what it is willing to risk, what it is trying to protect, and exactly how far its commitments go. But these questions will make the conversation truer. And that is precisely what disruption asks of us, if we are willing to learn from it.

So, the next time your board is stuck, do not begin only with the risks everyone already knows how to name. Begin by asking people to locate themselves inside the moment. Then, and only then, widen the aperture. Something entirely different may become visible.

Once the fuller landscape is visible, a board may still choose caution. It may choose adaptation. It may choose to stand firm. But at least it will know, honestly, what it is choosing. That is what it means to meet the moment. Not to be fearless. Not to pretend the danger is not real. But to see clearly enough to move the mission forward without pretending the hidden risks were never there.

This article was reported on Behalf of Invest Appalachia and The Appalachia Funders Network. 

Disclosure: The author works for Invest Appalachia, which manages the Fund’s capital deployment and program design.

In January 2026, the owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette—founded in 1786, a decade after the Declaration of Independence—announced they were shutting the newspaper down. After $350 million in losses over two decades and a three-year labor strike, the paper of record for the largest city in the Appalachian region was set to publish its final edition on May 3. When a nonprofit stepped in to acquire the paper just before its final press run, Pittsburgh narrowly avoided becoming the largest metro area in the country without a daily newspaper.

While a late, dramatic rescue of a civic institution makes for good news, the Post-Gazette was somewhat unlikely to be set adrift. With a 240-year institutional legacy, a metro audience, 40 peer outlets in the same market, six Pulitzer Prizes, and a philanthropic ecosystem large enough to sustain a sizeable investment, the Post-Gazette had enough visibility to attract a last-minute buyer who would fly to Toledo in a snowstorm to negotiate.

Addressing News Deserts in Central Appalachia

Most of the news outlets in Central Appalachia, meanwhile, lack all of the above. In a region where 200 of 257 counties are classified as news deserts or near-deserts, the consequences of losing local newsrooms are measurable: voter turnout declines and public corruption goes unmonitored. The decline of local news results in lower bond ratings, higher financing costs, higher taxes, and higher borrowing costs for local governments, likely because lenders can’t evaluate the quality of public projects, and engaging local stakeholders becomes more difficult. The loss of local news is often seen as a symptom of community in decline, but the research is consistent on causal direction: these are structural failures in the machinery of self-governance. The loss of local news doesn’t follow civic decline—it drives it.

Central Appalachia, a region spanning six states from southeast Ohio to western North Carolina, has long grappled with the consequences of corporate and federal extraction. For communities already over-narrated by outsiders and under-heard on their own terms, the collapse of local news entrenches the suppression of civic voice. Local news is the primary mechanism through which residents hold institutions accountable, access emergency information, and participate in the civic life of their own communities. And with one of the highest concentrations of news deserts in the country, this region doesn’t need to theorize about what that loss means, because disaster makes it visible.

When Radio Becomes a Lifeline

When Hurricane Helene struck western North Carolina in September 2024, it knocked out cell towers, internet, and power across the region. Blue Ridge Public Radio was the information system that survived, broadcasting government briefings, road closures, and Spanish-language emergency information. In communities without electricity, residents gathered around car radios to hear updates together, rationing fuel to keep the one working information source alive. Eastern Kentucky communities hit by catastrophic flooding in both 2022 and 2025 relied on local radio the same way: as the last link between isolated households and the resources meant to reach them.

Beyond acute crises, local media’s civic function often hums along in the background, embedded in daily community life. At WMMT, a radio station in Whitesburg, Kentucky, a Calls From Home program has broadcast toll-free messages from families to incarcerated loved ones in the region’s eight state and federal prisons for more than two decades. It started when two coal miners moonlighting as volunteer DJs took a song request and learned the listener was in a maximum-security facility. The program that grew from that moment isn’t journalism in any traditional sense; rather, it’s a community connection system across the walls of mass incarceration in one of the most prison-dense regions in the country. Because family contact during incarceration is one of the strongest predictors of reduced recidivism, this radio station has made a quiet, weekly commitment to civic health that no other institution provides.

Local media is civic infrastructure—as essential as bridges and water systems—and, in Central Appalachia, just as vulnerable. The old business models for sustaining news infrastructure are inadequate. Advertising revenue has migrated to platforms. Subscription bases in small rural markets were never large enough to support professional newsrooms. And philanthropy, while increasingly interested in local news nationally, has historically underinvested in Appalachian media—part of a broader pattern of capital bypassing the region that extends well beyond journalism. Central Appalachia receives less than one-fourth of the national average in philanthropic investment per capita, and just 1 percent of all national philanthropic funding for news reaches rural counties.

Local media is civic infrastructure—as essential as bridges and water systems—and, in Central Appalachia, just as vulnerable.

The breakdown of local news is a lagging indicator of community health; it’s a sign that systems of belonging are already in jeopardy. The information that communities need to govern themselves, hold power accountable, and make decisions about their own futures is what keeps people rooted—willing to stay, to show up, and to invest energy and resources where they live. This is the connective tissue at the heart of civic infrastructure.

A New Fund Aims to Boost Journalism Infrastructures in Appalachia

While controversial rescues make headlines, for most of what’s fragile or broken in our region, there aren’t billionaires waiting in the wings to fix it.

The Rural News Fund is an attempt to build something different. Launched in 2025 through Press Forward’s Central Appalachia Chapter, the Fund is a cooperative initiative led by the Appalachia Funders Network, with Invest Appalachia serving as fund manager and supported by national philanthropic and Press Forward partners.

Infrastructure investment in local news—the kind that outlasts media and philanthropic cycles—is what it takes to uphold a democracy that won’t require a last-minute rescue.

The model treats local news as civic health infrastructure, and therefore deliberately structures resources as infrastructure investments. Each of the eight cohort members—a mix of for-profit, nonprofit, and public media organizations spanning all six Central Appalachian states—enters a two-year program combining initial capacity-building finance with one-on-one coaching from experienced industry “Navigators,” peer learning, and access to flexible repayable capital in year two. The cohort includes legacy outlets, digital startups, and organizations like WMMT (the Whitesburg station behind Calls From Home); Enlace Latino in North Carolina; and Black By God, West Virginia’s only Black-led newspaper. The paths to sustainability will be as varied as the communities these newsrooms serve. The Fund provides the capital and capacity for each organization to build the one that fits.

Whether in the wake of disaster or in the daily work of building communities positioned to determine their own futures, the need is the same: information systems that are cooperatively built, community-governed, and funded as the public good they are. The forces dismantling civic infrastructure here in Central Appalachia—disinvestment, extraction, the collapse of sustainable local business models, the concentration of narrative power in institutions far from the communities they cover—are not unique to these mountains. They are coming for every community that isn’t large enough, wealthy enough, or loud enough to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

A free and functional press was central to the vision of democracy at the time of our nation’s founding. In his 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” James Madison considered the press so essential that he structured the postal system itself around it, with high postage on commercial mail subsidizing the cost of delivering newspapers.

By 1840, Americans printed more newspapers than any other nation in the world. The news wasn’t purely local in its reporting, but it was entirely local in function. Each paper, printed locally, was an expression of a specific community’s civic life—a shared language for what communities were and what they might become. The founders understood that democracy requires an information infrastructure, and they built one. Infrastructure investments in local news—the kind that outlasts media and philanthropic cycles—is what it takes to uphold a democracy that won’t require a last-minute rescue.

The Rural News Fund is a collaborative initiative of Press Forward Central Appalachia, led by the Appalachia Funders Network with Invest Appalachia as fund manager. For more information, visit ruralnewsfund.org