(Illustration by Chad Hagen)
What Nonprofits Are Facing
ARTICLE: How Will Your Nonprofit Survive?
Southland Development Authority CEO Bo Kemp’s Viewpoint essay from the Winter 2026 issue suggested innovation strategies that nonprofit organizations might pursue in response to the steep financial challenges, policy threats, and overwhelming uncertainty they face.
- “This really put words to what so many nonprofits are feeling right now,” wrote Sarah Dunlap. “The uncertainty is just as challenging as the funding itself. I appreciate the reminder that survival can’t come from cutting alone—it has to come from innovation, collaboration, and building real financial resilience.”
- “Definitely hits close to home. That uncertainty alone can shut good orgs down,” said Keisha Thompson.
- Another commenter, Marcus Lee, reiterated the need for leaders to be proactive: “To keep serving communities, organizations will need to think like builders: Innovate, form real partnerships, and strengthen their financial foundations.”
- “I appreciate the emphasis on innovation, and courage feels especially important right now,” said Michelle Joy Morales-Villena. “This moment calls for rethinking sustainability without losing sight of mission.”
- On LinkedIn, Kemp added, “I hope that I am wrong in my prediction of the turmoil for nonprofits and small foundations this year, but early evidence doesn’t suggest that I am.”
A New Lens on Data
SERIES: Transforming Data for Equity and Justice
This ongoing series of articles, sponsored by the de Beaumont Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, explores how “data is frequently leveraged as a tool of oppression” and calls for “shift[ing] power, resources, and governance to communities.”
- “Much of public health still privileges institutional datasets over lived experience, even though communities have been naming the gaps, biases, and blind spots for years,” commented Rahma Diallo.
- “One of the easiest ways to lose trust quickly is to treat data collection as a one-dimensional, extractive exercise,” wrote Headwind Partners on LinkedIn.
- “What feels significant about this new series to me is the emphasis on widening the lens,” added Orenda L. Warren Malbrough. “This direction creates more space for community-generated evidence and lived-experience insights that deepen traditional data systems.”
Is Impact Investing a Thing?
ARTICLE: There Is No Such Thing as Impact Investing
Mulago Foundation CEO Kevin Starr set off an intense and wide-ranging debate with this provocation, writing that real-world change requires concessions that most impact investors are not willing to make and that truly concessionary investing should be thought of as philanthropy, rather than something in-between.
- “We’ve lived this contradiction on the ground,” Fayaz Ahmad Dar commented. “If money isn’t willing to accept lower returns, longer timelines, or real risk—especially in fragile contexts—it isn’t additional.”
- Another reader, Yara Aboelwaffa, wrote, “Impact investment got trendy and over the years … the terms ‘impact’ and ‘investment’ have been used so much out of context that their initial definitions have lost all meaning.”
- Meanwhile, Kusi Hornberger articulated a common response to Starr’s philanthropy versus commercial binary in his LinkedIn reply: “The most important questions and insightful answers often sit in the gray areas. It is in this space of nuance and trade-offs that we find the flexibility to solve complex problems. By forcing all capital into two buckets, we risk discarding the very tools we need to build a better world.”
- Caitlin Reimers Brumme agreed that “language matters” while cautioning that “collapsing the messy middle into ‘philanthropy’ may simplify the story for capital providers, but it introduces real signaling risk for startups.”
Read more stories by SSIR Editors.