Published:
July 4, 2025
I bet you’ve felt this too: the weight of decisions getting heavier, the pace of change picking up, and fewer places to name the complexity of it all.
In our work with not-for-profit leaders across the country, the same three challenges keep rising to the surface. Sometimes as a quiet under current, sometimes with urgency.
They’re not abstract trends. They’re showing up in strained budgets, difficult board conversations, staff burnout, and sleepless nights.
While each one is hard enough on its own, they’re deeply connected. They point to something bigger. We need more spaces to reflect, reset, and learn from each other.
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Programs that once defined your organization’s impact, ones that community members still name with pride, are no longer guaranteed to last.
In some cases, they’ve been chronically underfunded while demand has surged. In others, they haven’t been given the time, attention, or resources needed to evolve with the communities they were built for. Whatever the reason, an increasing number of leaders are facing the very real possibility that long-standing programs may need to be paused, scaled back, or discontinued.
But the decision is only the beginning.
Once it’s made, you’re left to navigate the ripple effects. Such as how to communicate it with care, support the staff most impacted, rebuild trust within the community, and how to keep your team grounded through uncertainty. That work (part grief, part strategy) is isolating. And too often, it happens behind closed doors.
Over time, the not-for-profit sector has absorbed a quiet but devastating trade-off: mission over sustainability.
We’ve taken pride in doing more with less. In finding creative ways to stretch budgets. In showing up for communities even when our teams were underpaid, unsupported, and exhausted.
But we’re hitting a wall.
More leaders are being asked to reckon with a reality we’ve long avoided: the inequity inside our organizations. Staff who can’t afford to live near the communities they serve. Frontline teams who absorb layers of trauma without adequate mental health support. Leaders are forced to triage between client care and staff care.
The hard work ahead is about more than raising salaries or adding benefits (though these are important!). We need to look at reshaping the assumptions we’ve internalized and find new ways to make not-for-profit roles sustainable for the long haul.
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The rise in polarization. It’s showing up in our work in ways we’re still learning to name.
It’s showing up in how clients speak to staff—sometimes with open hostility, sometimes with racialized or discriminatory language. It’s showing up in team dynamics, where scarcity and mistrust are becoming more common. It’s even showing up in leadership spaces, where uncertainty and emotional fatigue are making it harder to show up with clarity and confidence.
We’re in a trust recession, and not-for-profits are not immune.
Applying strategies that used to work, such as staying calm, being neutral, and trying to keep things “professional”, aren’t functioning these days.
Leaders are being called to engage in deeper, more emotionally complex work. And most of us were never trained for it.
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None of these challenges have simple solutions. And no two organizations will navigate them the same way.
What’s clear is this: we’re moving into a season that demands more connection, not less.
More candour. More shared insight. More space to speak the hard truths of this work and support each other through them.
(Details soon)
Until then, just know this. You’re not the only one feeling the pressure. You’re not the only one trying to lead through it. And you don’t have to figure it out alone.