By Sadé Dozan, a philanthropic advisor, culturist, and movement ecosystem architect

The field often mistakes how much harm fundraisers can absorb for how good they are at relationship-building. We praise the ability to absorb discomfort, translate harm, and stay pleasant under pressure, and call it ‘professionalism.’

You don’t need me to tell you this work is heavy.

Sometimes we feel it in our bodies before we can even name it. 

If you’re like me, you’ve felt it in the way your shoulders tense before certain meetings. In the pause before you answer a question that really isn’t a question. In the careful calibration of your tone—be warm, but not needy; be confident, but not threatening; grateful but not indebted. You’ve learned that fundraising is rarely just about money. It’s about translation. About people. About holding multiple truths at once and deciding which ones are safe to say out loud. 

If you’re newer to the field, you may still think this weight means you’re doing something wrong—that one day it will get easier if you just learn the right framework, or find the right mentor, or say the right thing in the right order… And, if you’ve been here longer, you know the truth is more complex. The work doesn’t necessarily lighten. You just get clearer about what you’re willing—and no longer willing—to carry. And sometimes, when we grow more powerful in ourselves, the work transforms into something not just to endure, but an invitation of an entirely new way of being. 

Fundraising sits at a strange nexus. We are often asked to be relational in systems that reward transaction. We are told to be authentic while constantly managing perception. We are expected to build trust while operating within power dynamics that make trust fragile by default. 

And overtime, it can begin to feel like the work is less about moving resources, and more about managing comfort—ours, but mostly, everyone else’s. 

Guess what?

It’s not because you’re doing it wrong. It’s because the systems we work within were never truly designed to hold the full humanity of the people doing this work. 

The field often mistakes how much harm fundraisers can absorb for how good they are at relationship-building. We praise the ability to absorb discomfort, translate harm, and stay pleasant under pressure, and call it ‘professionalism.’ 

And still, here you are.

What keeps us here, has never just been about skill. I promise you it hasn’t been about the perfect pitch deck, or more dynamic theory of change, or the CRM that finally makes sense (though, may we all find that one day). What has kept us here is something older, quieter, deeper. 

Every breath you take is a reverberated exhale of those who came before you. 

The air in your lungs has been here longer than any institution you work for. Longer than philanthropy as we know it. Longer than the languages we use to describe impact and outcomes. You are quite literally breathing in survival. 

I often focus on breath. When I’m in a particularly stressful donor meeting, before I go on a stage, before I have a hard conversation… I breathe in. And I share that with you, in the turn of this year, as we face more fires only weeks in. Take breaths. The air that surrounds you is full of legacy. 

You are breathing in people who figured out how to live—and sometimes thrive—under conditions far more brutal than a donor meeting or a funding cycle that has fallen a part. 

I do not say this to disintegrate the reality of the weight we hold now, but simply to underline to you: breath itself has always been the work. Beings breathing life into what did not yet exist. A lineage of people who managed to inhale and exhale long enough to pass the torch to you. 

So breathe. Long enough to imagine. Long enough to build. Long enough to pass something forward.

You are not alone in this work. I’m here. And so are the footprints of people who learned how to keep breathing when the future had no language yet, who built toward freedom before it had form, who made room for worlds they would never fully see. They carried dreams on their shoulders without guarantees. Weight they chose to hold, and they moved anyway. 

And now, here you are. 

What will you choose to carry?

We tend to think of fundraising as a particularly modern profession, shaped by contemporary tools and trends. But resource mobilization is ancient. It is one of the oldest practices born from mutual aid, from collective survival, from the understanding that no one truly makes it alone. Our communities have always known how to pool, protect, and move what they need to live. 

What we sometimes forget, and what I invite us to remember, is that this work has never been about certainty. It has always been about breath and belief. About building something not yet fully defined. About sometimes carrying others towards a future that does not yet have words. 

You are a continuum. 

What you are doing now is continuity of lineage… even when the language feels sterile, even when the systems feel extractive, even when the work feels at times disconnected from the values that bring you here. 

If this moment feels like winter…and after this year we’ve had, and the preview of what currently may be, I agree—remember that winter has never been the end. Even the harshest winter breaks for spring. Not because it wants to, but because it must. 

Survival is cyclical. 

You are cyclical.

I am glad you are here.