Many nonprofit professionals are immigrants, children of immigrants, or individuals whose identities are deeply shaped by histories of migration and resilience. We carry with us an innate understanding of how immigration policy affects real families, but we also understand fear.
Essay Archives
Understanding community and local voices is your strength when communicating for development
But here’s what no one tells you: navigating the technical side of the job is just one part of it. The harder part is managing the invisible expectations that come with being a person of color working in development, often under white, Western leadership.
Why CCF Family Reunion is different from other conferences: It’s about relationship, not just content.
Relationship-building is not a side benefit of this conference; it is the core function.Trauma-informed fundraising: Why urgency without care is costing us trust
Trauma-informed fundraising does not mean avoiding urgency or sanitizing injustice. It means refusing to use pain as a shortcut.
Q: Why do nonprofits struggle to achieve their missions? A: Colonialism
Given my learnings, I identified a key thing holding nonprofits back from achieving their missions and advancing progressive change: their complicity in colonial mindsets.
To the young, the less young, and the still-here fundraiser
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.’
When responsibility is individual rather than systemic: CCF’s unfinished work
If CCF stops at perfecting individual ethics while systemic harm continues untouched, we’ve accomplished what the recycling movement did before governments intervened: we’ve made people feel better about participating in a fundamentally unjust system.
A personal reflection on the US Refugee Admissions Program
Bureaucracy has faces. A long time ago, in a past life it seems, it wore mine. I was a refugee resettlement officer on the continent of Africa, straddling nonprofit immigration work and public service.
The staying kind: Storytelling as a tool for reconnection and repair
I have watched stories that were sacred to someone become a branding tool for someone else. We deserve a different relationship to story, one that moves us toward repair instead of extraction.
Laid off? More like liberated and empowered!
We talk about community so much at CCF, but it was still so heartwarming to know how many of my friends and family I was able to lean on after being laid off… It is in this time that you find out just how much your support network is willing to do to be in your presence and support you. Cherish that.
Can people change? Captain America: Brave New World and CCF.
This is about superheroes, but more than that, it’s about how we judge changing, redemption, and accountability in our real-world institutions.
How to apply the foundational yogic principles of Yama and Niyama to Fundraising
I found it helpful to draw parallels between [the Yamas and Niyamas] principles and various elements of my life to better understand them. They’ve provided a framework that has shaped my approach to both work and fundraising efforts.