The actions of the Federal Government have caused harm. For grantees, this has in some cases led to them laying off staff, spending limited resources without reimbursement, and may even result in threatening an organizations’ existence. It has certainly eroded relationships built with communities over years. And life-saving measures that were going to be implemented will not.
Maybe it’s time to acknowledge scarcity… in order to cultivate collective abundance
Someone working from [a Collective Abundance] model doesn’t wait for big grants to trickle down. They find creative, hyper-local ways to resource others in the community by sharing donors ethically, co-hosting campaigns, exchanging labor, pooling sponsorships, and even trading non-cash resources that reduce expenses.
Capacity isn’t an excuse: How disabled people are excluded from nonprofit programs
I’ll be the first to admit that I have a lot of disabilities, so after being excluded so many times, I started to question: “Is it just me? Am I too hard to accommodate?” But the requests I made were simple…
ChatGPT weakens our capacity to reimagine liberated futures; how not to relinquish your agency to Big Tech
The conversation I want to have is about the internal cost of relying on capitalist tools built for profit, extraction, and domination. And how ChatGPT is weakening our capacity to reimagine liberated futures.
Dig in for the long game: Nonprofits and fundraisers must prepare for a role in an ecosystem of resistance
This is institutionalizing the riot. Social benefit organizations can act as a ratchet. When smaller militant organizations push progress forward, larger more moderate ones hold and consolidate gains. The choice is simple: be divided and ruled, or act as part of an ecosystem and win.
A Conversation About Giving in Different Contexts and Countries
By Carol Ng’ang’a and Martha Lidia Oxi Chuy
In this conversation about giving in different contexts and cultures, Carol Ng’ang’a (Kenya) and Martha Lidia Oxi Chuy (Guatemala) discuss what giving looks like in their different cultures.
How to separate your personal & professional value from the funds you raise as a fundraiser of color
By Courtland J. Powers-Gunnells
What I realized was that I needed to communicate my impact differently. In my portfolio, I began telling the story of how my approach to fundraising centered on what organizations needed most.
Imagine raising money for a nonprofit organization while power-obsessed white men wreak havoc on liberty and justice for sport.
…amidst new waves of political chaos and cruelty, I’m back again—this time with an invitation to build community in a new way, namely to make peers and colleagues of our ancestors.
CCF + the Social Change Ecosystem with Deepa Iyer
Community-Centric Fundraising’s Rachel D’Souza talked with Building Movement Project’s Deepa Iyer, creator of the Social Change Ecosystem about how to determine your role in the Social Change Ecosystem and what we can all do to meet the challenges our sector currently faces.
What are we growing toward? Less about what’s broken, more about what’s possible.
And we know the pieces are shifting. Philanthropy is in flux. DEI efforts are being re-evaluated or quietly shelved. Staff turnover is rattling once-stable institutions. Long-standing funding sources are vanishing. What remains, as my friend Stephanie Green Weizer says, is the “organic matter of our missions”—the values, love, and truth that can’t be extracted or destroyed. From this nutrient-rich core we can build something new.
We live with abundance. Philanthropy scarcity is fake news.
The narrative about philanthropy being about charity needs to change. People need to become aware that we are investing in our own futures and in our own collective prosperity.
There has never been a more powerful moment to reimagine our entire industry. First, we need to face the facts.
What will shake enough people from the dream that any of this is working for anyone, so that we gain the momentum to build the frameworks that can take us into a different future?