Many organizations claim to value people who “think differently.” Innovation, independent thinking, and challenging assumptions are celebrated in mission statements and leadership rhetoric. Yet the systems these organizations rely on to hire, evaluate, and promote employees often systematically filter out the very people most likely to think differently. Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in how workplaces treat autistic individuals.

We write as a father-and-son research team that has firsthand experience confronting this persistent contradiction in modern workplaces. One of us a behavioral scientist, the other a neuroscientist; one neurotypical, the other autistic. Our collaboration has changed how we think about organizations, competence, and human potential.

Hiring processes tend to reward social fluency over competence. Performance evaluations often privilege style over substance. Workplace norms frequently equate professionalism with eye contact, conversational ease, rapid interpersonal responsiveness, and conformity to unwritten social expectations. Inclusion efforts, even well-intentioned ones, for neurodivergent employees often focus on helping them appear more like typical employees rather than on redesigning environments so that they and their divergent cognitive styles can genuinely thrive.

These practices reflect a deeper problem in how organizations understand neurodiversity. Autism is still commonly framed primarily in terms of deficit, accommodation, or social impairment. Yet a growing body of research in psychology, organizational behavior, and neuroscience suggests a more complicated and potentially more hopeful story. Some of the same cognitive and neurological differences associated with autism may also confer important organizational advantages, including greater resistance to cognitive bias, reduced susceptibility to conformity pressures, and a tendency to prioritize evidence over social consensus.

These are not marginal capabilities. They are increasingly central to organizational survival. Modern organizations operate in environments saturated with complexity, uncertainty, and information overload. Under these conditions, human judgment becomes especially vulnerable to distortion. Decades of research in behavioral economics and psychology have shown that people routinely rely on cognitive shortcuts that lead to systematic errors in thinking. Confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, overconfidence, groupthink, and moral rationalization all shape organizational decision-making in ways leaders often underestimate.

These distortions are not merely abstract psychological phenomena—they have real-world consequences. They undermine hiring decisions, generate ethical failures, and encourage excessive financial risk-taking, strategic blind spots, and cultures of silence. Entire industries have experienced catastrophic failures because people ignored contradictory evidence, deferred to social consensus, or failed to challenge flawed assumptions. To mitigate this risk, organizations invest enormous resources trying to improve critical thinking, reduce bias, strengthen ethics, and encourage candor.

Many autistic employees possess aptitudes that support these goals. Our own research, along with work by others, suggests that autistic individuals may be less susceptible to several forms of cognitive and social bias. In experimental studies, autistic participants have shown lower susceptibility to the bystander effect, meaning they may be more likely to intervene or speak up when something appears wrong. Other research suggests reduced moral disengagement, indicating a lower tendency to rationalize unethical behavior. Autistic individuals may also be less vulnerable to the inflated self-confidence associated with the Dunning–Kruger effect—the tendency of people with limited knowledge of a domain to overestimate their competence.

These findings should not be interpreted romantically or simplistically. Autism is not a superpower, nor do all autistic individuals share identical traits or experiences. Neurodiversity is diversity. But the broader pattern matters because it challenges long-standing assumptions about what constitutes valuable workplace cognition.

Failures of Organizational Design

Autistic individuals often appear to rely more heavily on principles and external evidence than on social inference when making judgments. In group settings, they may be less influenced by peer inaction, status hierarchies, or pressures for consensus. As a result, they may identify problems, inconsistencies, or ethical concerns that others overlook or avoid discussing.

Neuroscience research may help explain why some of these patterns emerge. Studies examining large-scale brain networks suggest atypical relationships among systems involved in social reasoning, external attention, and cognitive control. In neurotypical individuals, these systems often work together in ways that allow social information to fluidly shape attention and judgment. In autism, these relationships may be organized differently, producing greater emphasis on externally grounded information when social cues conflict with observable evidence.

These tendencies, when translated into organizational life, can produce a distinctive cognitive profile: greater focus on accuracy over impression management, reduced concern with how things appear socially, and stronger attention to how things actually are. Yet most organizations are not designed to recognize and incorporate these tendencies as strengths.

The barriers autistic employees face are often framed as individual limitations, but many are more accurately understood as failures of organizational design. Traditional hiring systems remain heavily dependent on unstructured interviews that reward charisma, improvisational social interaction, and familiarity with implicit norms. These characteristics have surprisingly weak relationships with actual job performance in many roles, yet they strongly shape employment outcomes.

Similarly, organizational cultures frequently reward interpersonal smoothness over principled dissent. Employees who question assumptions, point out inconsistencies, or communicate too directly may be perceived as difficult, inflexible, or insufficiently collaborative, even when their observations are accurate and valuable. In these environments, autistic employees often learn to mask their natural communication styles to appear more socially acceptable. Such masking can help individuals navigate workplace expectations, but at the psychological and cognitive toll of lost energy that could otherwise be directed toward performance, creativity, or problem-solving.

The result is not only inequitable for neurodivergent employees but strategically shortsighted for employers. When organizations systematically privilege conformity, impression management, and social sameness, they narrow the range of perspectives available during decision-making. They increase vulnerability to groupthink and reduce the likelihood that flawed assumptions will be challenged early. Diversity initiatives often focus heavily on demographic representation while overlooking cognitive diversity, even though organizations depend fundamentally on how people perceive problems, process information, and make judgments.

Designing for Neurodiversity

Designing for neurodiversity, therefore, requires more than accommodation. It requires rethinking how organizations define professionalism, competence, communication, and collaboration.

This begins with hiring. Organizations should rely less on socially performative interviews and more on work-sample tests, structured assessments, and evaluations tied directly to job-relevant competencies. Many autistic candidates perform exceptionally well when given opportunities to demonstrate actual skills rather than navigate ambiguous interpersonal rituals.

It also requires making organizational expectations more explicit. Many workplace norms operate through implication and social inference, creating hidden rules that advantage employees already fluent in dominant communication styles. Clarifying expectations around communication, feedback, meetings, and performance standards improves functioning for everyone, not just neurodivergent employees.

Leaders must also distinguish between professionalism and stylistic conformity. Differences in eye contact, conversational pacing, tone, or social interaction should not automatically be interpreted as disengagement, disrespect, or incompetence. Organizations committed to inclusion must create environments where employees can contribute effectively without constantly suppressing their natural cognitive styles.

Most importantly, organizations need cultures that genuinely reward evidence-based thinking. Teams function better when disagreement is not penalized, contradictory information is surfaced early, and employees are encouraged to challenge assumptions constructively. Neurodiverse employees often thrive in precisely these environments, but so do organizations more broadly.

The implications extend beyond autism. Designing organizations that accommodate different cognitive styles ultimately strengthens decision-making quality for entire teams. Systems that reduce ambiguity, clarify expectations, minimize bias, and reward principled dissent improve organizational functioning across the board.

Organizations today are facing increasingly complex social, technological, and ethical challenges. They cannot afford to rely on narrow models of competence or professionalism. Only those capable of integrating different ways of thinking—especially ways that challenge consensus, resist bias, and remain anchored in evidence rather than social comfort—are prepared to confront these difficulties and succeed.

There’s arguably no group more in need of free AI tools and expert staff embedded to deploy them than the nonprofit sector. While the dissolution of USAID and other funding cuts exacerbate growing global demands to address public health, economic opportunity, and climate-related challenges, NGOs and social impact organizations are underwater, triaging widespread and complex needs against limited capacity.

Sensing that strain, AI juggernauts such as Anthropic and OpenAI, among others, are creating a range of grants and free staffing solutions worth hundreds of millions of dollars to help fill the gaps.

Anthropic's recent announcement of Claude Corps—a $150 million initiative that will provide AI-trained fellows, grants, and AI tools to nonprofit organizations—is one example. In June, OpenAI’s foundation arm announced a new $50 million commitment to its two-year-old People-First AI Fund, which aims to support nonprofits and other public service organizations using AI. And Salesforce and Google.org offer AI accelerators for social impact organizations that include months of training, pro bono access to experts, and funding.

The social sector is getting an incredible offer that almost never happens. But the need for careful assessment is real. The rise of nonprofit-targeted philanthropy from the AI industry raises difficult questions about the risks of long-term organizational dependency on free (at least for now) tools, data stewardship, market influence, and the extent to which a small number of technology providers may shape how the sector adopts and integrates AI over time. How nonprofit organizations respond now can shape both their short-term operational capabilities and their long-term financial sustainability.

The Hidden Risks of AI Industry Philanthropy for Nonprofits

Before AI tools and staffing are deployed across social impact organizations, a deep risk assessment across three categories of inquiry can help to mitigate potential adverse and unexpected outcomes of “AI for good” offerings:

1. Who sets the rules around data stewardship? Nonprofits are uniquely tasked with storing some of the most sensitive data sets across sectors. From health records including data around rape and abuse, disabilities, and homelessness, this information offers a vulnerable and comprehensive accounting of issues that don’t necessarily show up on the open web. When it comes to AI industry support for the social sector, beneficiary organizations should play an equal, if not dominant, role in setting guidelines for how AI companies' tools read and store their data, and whether that data can be used to train AI models.

2. How can we prevent long-term organizational dependencies? Despite advances in technology, many nonprofits know the experience of being stuck with ill-fit or costly systems, such as constituent relationship management (CRM) tools, because of the significant labor and financial investment required to change or update them. AI industry funding offers a potential solution to this problem, but some may rightly worry about finding themselves in the same sticky position a few years down the road. To avoid similar challenges with AI tools, as nonprofits begin to receive gifted technology from a single provider, staff should decide in advance whether and how they can eventually switch platforms more easily and cheaply if needed. Other questions to consider: How can they objectively determine which AI tools and companies work best for their needs? What happens after the free tools and staffing provided to these organizations are no longer available? Proactive planning to address these scenarios is needed to ensure nonprofits can effectively take advantage of these gifts while moving on to other tech solutions, if needed, in the future.

3. Are nonprofits leaving money on the table? What could nonprofits stand to gain by coming to the AI industry table as partners rather than beneficiaries? Does the value of the social sector’s inner workings and data—which AI companies will ultimately benefit from—exceed the value of these gifts? What are alternative options to the ones presented for nonprofits that accept AI gifts, or for the sector at large? Approaching AI industry philanthropy with such questions could result in additional long-term benefits, operationally and financially.

Building Guardrails Before Adverse Effects Take Root

The most comprehensive way to mitigate these risks is to establish federal and sector-wide policies, standards, and best practices for gifting AI tools, infrastructure, and staffing, as well as their use by beneficiary organizations. Any such standards should be informed by people in the nonprofit sector and in the communities they serve. Before writing policies, the sector should convene to address these opportunities strategically.

Some of this is starting to happen. Independent Sector recently announced the creation of a panel of experts to develop an ethical framework for the nonprofit sector’s adoption of AI. And resources such as NTEN’s AI for Nonprofits Resource Hub, developed in partnership with the National Council of Nonprofits and Maryland Nonprofits, offer sample AI governance templates that organizations can use as a starting point.

However, to date, nonprofits have little comprehensive guidance on whether and how to accept AI industry gifts, how to set parameters to avoid being locked into a single provider, and when to negotiate the terms of acceptance. Creating such a framework now for nonprofits can prevent a host of issues in the future.

From AI Access to Financial Sustainability

Given the long-term implications of these new AI industry philanthropic models, it may be time for nonprofit leaders to look beyond what’s offered in these gifts. If AI companies stand to continue their meteoric financial gains, and their donations of tools, time, and expertise are offered to the social sector—for which it may receive data, knowledge capture, and research that couldn’t be gained otherwise—then there’s an argument to be made that nonprofits should also see some of the economic gains. Indeed, approaching these gifts as a starting point rather than a final offer could ultimately help expand the sector’s funding and capacity and sustain its impact at a time when its long-term existence is more precarious than ever.

Expanding the terms of these donations could include options such as:

Equity, stock, and capacity grants: Nonprofits accepting tools and staffing from AI companies might also receive financial assets from the company as part of the philanthropic gift, giving them a stake in the future upside of AI development and contributing to the sector’s overall financial sustainability.

Subsidized nonprofit AI staff: Embedded staff from fellowships such as Claude Corps and similar programs could be converted to permanent hires, continuing their work within an assigned nonprofit after successfully completing their fellowship and allowing the organization to retain that institutional knowledge. Salaries could be subsidized by the host AI company.

Community benefit and mitigation funds: Nonprofits partnering with the AI industry could advocate for ongoing payments to civic institutions working towards proactive efforts to build AI literacy and skills for the community at large, and for those whose jobs might be displaced by AI. Funds can also be used to address any potential harms caused by AI data centers, including potential adverse environmental, physical, and medical impacts on individuals living near them.

This moment represents more than a technological and operational shift for nonprofits. Approaching AI industry gifts cautiously, with an eye toward long-term benefits yet to be realized, could give the sector the opportunity to sustain itself financially and give communities a voice in how AI technology develops and proliferates for social good.

A few years ago, I argued in this SSIR article that strategic capacity building and trust-based philanthropy are not opposing ideas. Funders do not have to choose between being responsive, relationship-centered partners and offering hands-on support that helps nonprofits strengthen as organizations.

But as capacity building has become a more common part of philanthropy, another question has become harder to avoid: How do we know whether it works?

Too often, funders answer this question with the easiest data to collect, which offers surface-level insight into whether grantees were satisfied with the support they received. Satisfaction is important. It can tell funders whether a consultant was responsive, whether an engagement felt relevant, and whether the process was a productive use of time, but it fails to tell us whether the work impacted organizational practice, improved performance, or helped an organization make progress toward the outcomes they seek.

This distinction matters because capacity building is never free for nonprofits, even when funders pay for it. It requires staff time, leadership attention, and organizational bandwidth. At a moment when many nonprofits face acute resource constraints, funders should be able to answer a basic question before encouraging partners to take on additional work: Will this time investment be worth it?

Capacity building has matured as a philanthropic practice. Its measurement has not. If funders believe support beyond the grant is a strategy for impact, then we need to move beyond asking whether grantees appreciated the support and toward asking whether it led to desired and durable change.

Why Satisfaction Is Not Enough

Funders’ reluctance to robustly measure capacity-building is understandable. The work is complex, long-term, and nonlinear. Outcomes are often indirect and context dependent. A strategic planning process, revenue model project, data system redesign, or executive coaching engagement may not produce measurable results for months, or even years. Attribution is difficult, and additional measurement activities can easily become another burden placed on grantees.

These concerns are real. But the absence of measurement also has costs.

Without better evidence of impact, funders risk repeating activities that feel useful in the moment but do not lead to sustained change. We may continue recommending providers and projects because grantees liked them, not because their support improved organizational practice. We may invest in offerings that absorb nonprofit time without helping leaders make progress on mission-critical activities. And we may miss opportunities to learn which supports are best positioned to help organizations at different life stages, and why.

Satisfaction data matters, but it offers an incomplete picture. A capacity-building project can be well-run and well-liked but still fail to lead to lasting and desired change. Conversely, support that feels challenging in the moment may lead to important shifts in decision-making that can improve financial sustainability, program quality, or organizational focus.

An Improved Measurement Approach: What Changed?

There’s no single formula for measuring the impact of capacity building. But funders can start by organizing around simple logic: Capacity-building support should be assessed across time, with different questions at each stage.

At Overdeck Family Foundation, we have been building and refining this approach since launching our capacity-building model in 2020. Since then, we have invested nearly $6 million in more than 200 capacity-building projects with over 80 grantee partners. Our work has spanned areas such as revenue sustainability, cost-effectiveness, evidence-building, strategic planning, leadership development, and scaling strategies.

Across that work, we have found it useful to measure capacity-building support across three time horizons: short-, medium-, and long-term outcomes.

First, at the end of a capacity-building engagement, funders should ask: Did the support meet an immediate need?

This is the moment to assess satisfaction. Post-engagement surveys or debrief conversations can help funders understand whether the support was relevant, timely, well-delivered, and respectful of the grantee’s goals and constraints. This data is especially useful for assessing provider quality and grantee experience. But this should be treated as the beginning of the measurement process, not the end.

Second, six to 12 months later, funders should ask: Did anything change in organizational behavior or practice?

This is the stage many funders skip. It is also where some of the most useful learning happens.

A follow-up survey, check-in conversation, or revisiting a pre-engagement diagnostic can help determine whether the organization is applying new skills, making different decisions, or using new tools. For example, is a team using a new financial model to guide planning or pricing decisions? Are staff using data differently to inform program design? Has a revenue strategy moved from an Excel spreadsheet to regular operating practice?

These medium-term indicators show whether capacity-building outputs are becoming part of the organization’s workflow rather than remaining a one-time project.

Third, at least a year after an engagement, funders should ask: Did the support contribute to improved organizational performance?

At this stage, the focus shifts from whether the support was useful to whether it plausibly contributed to measurable progress. Depending on the goals of the engagement, this might include changes in program reach, cost per participant, earned revenue, financial sustainability, evidence-building, or progress toward grant goals.

Importantly, these measures do not always require a new reporting system. Much of this information may already be available in grant reports, renewal conversations, annual data collection, or other existing touchpoints in the grantmaking process. The goal should be to use existing data more intentionally, not to create new measurement burdens.

This three-horizon approach helps funders distinguish among three different questions that are often collapsed into one. Did grantees like the support? Did they use it? And did it contribute to measurable progress?

What Measurement Can Reveal

When funders consistently measure capacity building over time, they begin to see patterns that satisfaction surveys alone would miss. Across our own portfolio, internal measurement has shown that capacity-building efforts are associated with meaningful organizational gains, including an average 18 percent reduction in program cost, 114 percent increase in earned revenue, and 125 percent increase in reach. These outcomes cannot be attributed to capacity building alone, but the data helps us understand whether the support correlated with the kinds of organizational changes it was designed to advance.

Consider DiscoverE, a nonprofit organization that promotes student engagement in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Since becoming an Overdeck Family Foundation grantee in 2021, DiscoverE has intentionally sequenced grant funding and capacity-building supports toward goals related to scale, sustainability, and impact.

DiscoverE’s first challenge was developing a more diverse and sustainable revenue model. After participating in a workshop series, the organization was able to identify mission-aligned earned revenue opportunities that informed an updated revenue strategy with a new fee structure for its high school STEM program. With a strategic revenue model in place, DiscoverE was in a position to gain deeper understanding of its programmatic cost, which uncovered pathways to cost-effective scale. The team also received funding to complete a cost analysis exercise, which helped identify areas where programs can earn revenue to cover operational costs and where contributed revenue can ensure continued participation for students and classrooms in need of financial support. Lastly, DiscoverE received support to utilize lean testing methodology to explore potential solutions to address educator retention—a key barrier to growth.

Over this period of funding and capacity-building support, the organization saw 12 percent growth in total revenue, 65 percent growth in earned revenue, and a 24 percent increase in reach in its most recent year of operation. It also saw an increase in regions with greater than 40 percent educator retention.

It’s unlikely that capacity building alone caused these results. Rather, this example shows how funders and nonprofits can use measurement to better understand whether a series of supports is contributing to the organizational conditions that make growth and sustainability more likely.

Measurement is just as valuable when it shows us what doesn’t work. 

In some cases, we found that projects with high satisfaction scores at the end of the engagement did not lead to sustained changes in organizational behavior six to 12 months later. Grantees appreciated the support, but the work did not translate into the longer-term shifts they hoped to see. That finding led us to phase out certain providers and offerings. Without medium-term measurement, we likely would have kept funding support that grantees experienced positively but ultimately did not use.

Measurement Strengthens Trust

One reason funders may hesitate to evaluate capacity-building support is concern that measurement will feel punitive. That risk is amplified if funders use data to evaluate grantees rather than improve their own support of grantee work.

Done well, measurement builds trust rather than erodes it. The key is to be clear about what is being evaluated. The purpose is not to grade a nonprofit’s performance or determine whether a grantee “used” the designated support correctly. It’s to understand whether the support was well-designed, well-matched, and useful enough to justify the time and resources it required.

That distinction should shape the entire impact measurement approach. Funders should be explicit with grantees that feedback will be used to improve or discontinue offerings, not to penalize organizations. They should right-size data collection, using existing information whenever possible, and reserve new data requests for questions that will actually inform decisions.

Funders should also be disciplined about what different data can and cannot answer. Quantitative measures can help identify patterns across a portfolio, but they may not explain why change happened or why it stalled. Qualitative insights, case studies, and conversations are often essential for understanding context, testing hypotheses, and improving support.

In our experience, this kind of measurement has not come at the expense of trust. Our foundation’s most recent Grantee Perception Report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy put us in the 92nd percentile among funders providing capacity-building support. The report also found that grantees who received capacity-building support rated us higher on trust and impact than those who did not.

The broader point is not about any foundation’s scores. It is that accountability and trust are not opposites. When funders are transparent about why they are collecting data and how they will use it, measurement can become part of a learning relationship rather than a dreaded compliance exercise.

What Funders Can Do

If the field wants capacity building to be more than a well-intentioned investment, funders need a more practical measurement standard. Three shifts would help.

• Move beyond measuring only satisfaction. Post-engagement feedback is useful, but it should not be the endpoint. Funders should define what change they expect a capacity-building engagement to support and revisit that expectation after enough time has passed for those behaviors or practice to take hold.
• Use existing data whenever possible. Capacity-building measurement should not create a second reporting framework. Funders can often learn from grant reports, renewal conversations, financial data, program metrics, and regular check-ins. More data is not the goal.
• Act on what you learn. Measurement only matters if it changes decisions. Funders should use data to adapt their recommendations, refine scopes of work, and discontinue offerings that do not lead to meaningful change. Some investments won’t pay off; that is not failure if the lesson improves future decision-making.

Capacity building remains one of the most promising ways funders can help nonprofits strengthen their organizations beyond the grant. But good intentions are not enough. If funders ask nonprofit partners to invest time and attention in capacity-building support, we should be prepared to examine whether that support changes practice, improves performance, and contributes to goals. A stronger evidence standard will help funders make sure capacity building is worthy of the organizations we serve.

I joined Inspirit Foundation as its director of finance and impact investment back in 2015. Based in Toronto, Inspirit is a public foundation that advances racial, social, and economic justice in Canada. At the time, Inspirit was dabbling in its first impact investments. A short time after in 2016, we committed to a 100 percent impact portfolio—a pledge to allocate all our assets to investments that generate positive environmental and social outcomes.

I was the driver behind Inspirit’s complete overhaul of its portfolio, shifting from a traditional approach invested broadly across the stock market to one entirely composed of impact investments across public and private asset classes. I designed the portfolio’s transition strategy and was tasked with implementing the commitment. I won’t pretend the path ever felt certain: My doubts were strong. I suspect that those same doubts hold back many who are drawn to this approach. I believed this was the right decision for the organization, but I was privately concerned we might sacrifice returns in the name of impact and validate the skeptics.

In the end, we proved the skeptics wrong: Our impact portfolio outperformed traditional investing over a 10-year span. To my knowledge, Inspirit became the first institutional portfolio to achieve a decade of outperformance while maintaining a 100 percent impact mandate. Its success should inspire bolder experimentation and commitment to impact investing as a strategy compatible with investing for returns.

Portfolio Overhaul

When I first joined Inspirit, it was immediately evident to me that the portfolio needed a complete overhaul.

First, the foundation’s grant-making dollars advanced social progress while its investment capital worked against it. Grants funded efforts to build a better future, while the investment capital bought shares in businesses contributing to the very problems the foundation was trying to solve. While reconciliation with Indigenous peoples was one of Inspirit’s strategic priorities, some of the foundation’s assets were invested in energy companies with a history of illegal appropriation and exploitation of Indigenous land and resources. That had to change.

Second, I believed in the business case for investing with an eye toward positive social and environmental outcomes. My view wasn’t simply that impact investing would outperform, but that businesses solving long-term societal challenges would be better positioned for long-term financial success than companies creating or ignoring those challenges.

That belief naturally led us toward investment areas such as healthcare innovation for an aging population, the energy transition, and financial inclusion, while avoiding industries we believed faced increasing structural headwinds, like tobacco, firearms, and fossil fuels. I believed that investment hypothesis would eventually prove true. What I wasn’t sure about was how long the proof would take. The reality was that there was no contingency plan, no turning back. The foundation set out to honor its commitment, regardless of time horizon.

I first heard about the concept of a 100 percent impact portfolio from a consultant’s research report published in 2012 that an investment advisor shared with me. The report referenced Heron Foundation, a private foundation based in New York City focused on community economic development. Under the leadership of then CEO Clara Miller, Heron in 2012 committed to invest the entirety of its assets to further its mission. Its bold approach captured my attention, and I followed its progress closely. I took my first work trip after joining Inspirit to meet Miller at the Heron office in Manhattan.

Our conversation framed the whole project for me: Increasing the impact of every dollar and earning strong financial returns did not have to be competing goals. And so, this idea became the crux of Inspirit’s new investment policy statement that embedded social and environmental outcomes into its investment strategy. We redefined fiduciary duty as optimizing for both risk-adjusted financial returns and risk-adjusted positive impact.

The policy also laid out why we believed this approach would succeed over the long term: “Our expectation, based on historical and simulated data, is that companies focused on industries that provide solutions to our world’s most pressing problems will be better positioned for long-term financial success than companies that have neutral or negative effects.” In other words, the portfolio was built for where we believed the economy was heading, not where the market happened to be rewarding capital at any given moment. That sentence became the lens through which every investment decision was made.

From there, the real test began: building the portfolio. On the private markets side, the foundation invested primarily through debt, private equity, and pay-for-performance instruments. Over the following decade, Inspirit made 30 private impact investments, with no losses or impairments to date. That record is itself an argument.

Inspirit became known for its willingness to be the first investor in a fund or project. It was the initial investor in Raven Indigenous Impact Fund, Canada’s first Indigenous venture capital fund supporting Indigenous ventures generating value for their communities. The foundation was the first investor in Windmill Microlending, a loan fund providing financing to new immigrants pursuing professional accreditation that has since raised more than $60 million and also a fund managed by BKR Capital, Canada’s first institutional Black-led venture capital firm funding Black-led businesses meeting the unmet needs of marginalized communities.

The public markets posed a harder problem because Canadian asset managers were not prepared to meet Inspirit’s unusual goal of marrying financial returns and positive impact. So the foundation partnered with asset managers to create new mandates that could satisfy its more holistic investment goals. In every public asset class, Inspirit’s investment was the first money in, teaming up with managers to become the first investor in new investment vehicles built specifically to meet the foundation’s financial and impact requirements. That’s what happened with Addenda Capital’s new impact fixed income fund, and the early results were so strong that others joined us. Addenda’s public fixed-income mandate now has over $700 million CAD ($497 million US) in assets under management—quite the leap from Inspirit’s initial $8 million CAD commitment.

Even cash had the opportunity to work toward our impact objectives: The foundation moved its bank account to a credit union that leverages deposits to finance affordable housing, clean energy, and social enterprises.

One of our most important decisions was to benchmark the portfolio against traditional market indexes, such as S&P/TSX Composite for Canadian equities, MSCI World for global equities, and FTSE Canada Universe Bond for the fixed income allocation. If we were going to claim impact investing worked as desired, the portfolio needed to be measured against the most common investment indexes with broad exposure to the stock market.

Ups and Downs

For the first four years, the portfolio added about 2 percent of excess performance relative to the benchmark—solid success. Then in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused enormous social and economic hardship, the portfolio outperformed by more than 7 percent.

What surprised me wasn’t that the portfolio outperformed, but that it succeeded so quickly. I honestly thought we’d still be waiting decades before we’d have any real indication whether we were right. More money in the portfolio meant more resources available to advance Inspirit’s mission. But this was also the first sign of something I hadn’t fully anticipated: a much higher degree of volatility than expected relative to the broad stock market. I knew our portfolio would behave differently from conventional benchmarks. I just didn’t expect it to produce outperformance of 7 percentage points in a single year.

The good feeling didn’t last long. The following year, the portfolio underperformed by nearly 4 percent. That degree of difference caused me some discomfort, but the portfolio was still ahead overall.

The next two years helped, adding approximately 6 percent of relative outperformance. Eight years into the journey, the portfolio had accumulated nearly 11 percent of excess performance relative to its benchmark.

Then the tide turned. Geopolitical developments, including US President Donald Trump’s rollback of clean energy commitments and ongoing global conflicts created a challenging environment for many impact-oriented strategies. Over the past two years, relative outperformance declined by more than 10 percent.

A full decade into the initial commitment to a 100 percent impact portfolio, Inspirit finished ahead of its benchmark by approximately 0.7 percent. The margin is slim, but its meaning is not. The financial outperformance contradicts the naysayers, refuting the assumption that impact investing inevitably leads to lower returns. It quelled some doubt, too.

A Meaningful Milestone

These past two years have admittedly tested my conviction, yet the commitment remains firm. Our fundamental premise—that investments that create value for society are more likely to create value for investors over the long term—remains sound. The portfolio is now aligned with the foundation’s mission in a way that would have been difficult to imagine a decade ago.

The last two years also reinforced another lesson: While our underlying premise hasn’t changed, our understanding of specific investments has shifted. That’s how long-term investing should work. Steadfastness isn’t about stubbornly holding the same companies forever; it’s about remaining committed to the investment thesis while continually reassessing whether individual investments still support it. Ten years doesn’t settle the debate, but it is a meaningful milestone. It suggests that a portfolio intentionally constructed around long-term societal and economic trends can remain competitive with conventional investing over a significant investment horizon, even through periods when markets reward very different parts of the economy. For me, that’s the real takeaway, not whether we finished 0.7 percent ahead of a benchmark.

After more than a decade of learnings with Inspirit, I felt it was time to branch out on my own and launch an impact-investing consultancy to work with a wider group of values-driven investors and their portfolios. With my next step comes my next question: How do we use what we have learned to reshape a system presumed to almost always reward the opposite? I do not intend to watch that from the sidelines. I intend to help build it. I hope you will join me.

Nonprofits are racing to adopt AI, with a recent report showing 92 percent already using the technology to support their work. Many early adopters have focused on direct-to-user applications like AI tutors that help students learn, AI coaches that offer guidance at scale, and AI navigators that help people find benefits or services. These tools hold real promise, especially in a sector where demand often exceeds capacity. But for organizations whose work depends on empathy and human connection, automation can also feel at odds with care. The Center for Effective Philanthropy has noted that social change leaders are increasingly concerned about AI’s risks, including the loss of human connection when it matters most.

Empower Work feels that tension directly. While we use technology to scale, our core service, which offers free, confidential, text-based coaching for people navigating tough work challenges, relies on deep human connectivity. When someone texts into the line, they connect with a trained peer counselor ready to provide personalized support for difficult situations such as underemployment, poor management, and job loss.

Human relationship isn’t just at the center of our theory of change; it’s something our help seekers actively seek out. They frequently ask our peer counselors, “Are you human or AI?” because they want reassurance that there’s an actual person on the other end of the line. At the same time, demand for worker support is growing. Empower Work faced a challenging question: How could we maintain the human connection and empathy that make these conversations impactful, while incorporating AI in a way that helped us serve more people?

In this article, we outline some of the choices Empower Work made when integrating AI and what we learned, so other teams seeking to scale their people-centered services can adapt and integrate AI without sacrificing human empathy.

Start With a Problem Statement

Empower Work’s text-based coaching model supports help seekers (typically lower-wage workers and those from historically marginalized communities) gain clarity, confidence, and agency. Someone might text us after workplace bullying has affected their sense of safety or when they’ve lost confidence after a monthslong job search or when they know they need to leave a job but feel stuck by burnout and uncertainty. In a session with Empower Work, they receive emotional support from a trained peer counselor and leave with clear, immediate next steps.

With rising economic and political uncertainty, the demand for our text line was growing. To ensure our peer counselors could meet this increased need, we asked, “Where do we lose time or consistency that reduces the quality of human support we provide?”

This question is familiar to people working across service-based nonprofits. Staff need to respond quickly and consistently, but the work also requires judgment, trust, and care that cannot simply be automated. Through user experience research and workflow analysis, Empower Work found key constraints for our peer counselors:

• First were manual, time-intensive but repetitive tasks: writing end-of-session summaries, catching up on prior messages from help seekers during handoffs, and finding resources in a complex template library.

• Second was their cognitive load while having conversations with multiple help seekers at once. Uncertainty about how to best support the help seeker and respond in a timely manner increased feelings of stress.

The North Star became clear: preserve human empathy and judgment in interactions with help seekers and use AI to support our counselors behind the scenes so they can spend even more time deepening the connection that is at the heart of their job and our service. The choice reflected both what our help seekers directly told us they wanted and growing research on AI’s empathy gap showing AI can only perform one of the three components of empathy—it can understand another’s state, but it can’t actively feel what another is feeling or invest in them. Because of that, human responses in emotional contexts are often more likely to build trust, create positive immediate emotional impact, and provide the motivation to help people take action.

Building Trust

The next challenge was implementation: how to introduce AI in ways that strengthened interactions with help seekers rather than diluted them. We built an AI assistant plug-in that showed up in the peer counselor workflow environment where they were talking to help seekers. It could read the live text conversation of the counseling session and offer support in three areas: ideas for suggested next responses, relevant resources from Empower Work’s vetted library, and summaries for handoffs or end-of-session documentation. Building the assistant wasn’t the end, but the beginning of a learning process for integrating AI into our work. The steps below walk through our process and how service-centered organizations can test AI carefully, learn quickly, and set guardrails before expanding further.

Start with low-risk, high-friction work

As we explained above, a useful place to begin is with tasks that consume staff time but do not require AI to make consequential decisions. Across nonprofits, this often includes retrieving context, surfacing vetted information, and drafting internal documentation. When using Empower Work’s AI assistant, counselors always reviewed, edited, and decided what to share before any messages were sent. Starting with this kind of human-in-the-loop support allows organizations to reduce friction without handing off sensitive judgment to the model.

Embed AI into staff training at the right time

Training is where organizations can build comfort, reduce confusion, and make clear that AI is there to support human judgment rather than replace it. But timing matters. At Empower Work, we initially waited to introduce the AI assistant in the final week of peer counselor training through a homework reading. Counselors were told the tool existed, but they did not practice using it during live training sessions. When AI assistant adoption numbers were lower than expected, follow-up surveys revealed that the issue was not lack of interest, but rather that many counselors were simply not aware of the assistant, did not remember it was available during live shifts, or were unsure how to use it in the moment.

Based on this awareness gap, we decided to move the AI introduction from the end of training to the middle of training, after counselors had built a foundation in Empower Work’s core counseling skills and added live practice using the assistant with supervisors. After making this change, we saw a significant increase in usage and positive feedback from counselors.

Build feedback loops into the technology

Staff and volunteers closest to the work need simple ways to flag when an AI feature is helpful, off base, or creating friction, and teams need a clear process for turning that feedback into improvements. At Empower Work, that meant creating a volunteer AI advisory council of peer counselors who could respond quickly to product changes and help test prompt variations. The team also built feedback directly into the assistant through five-star ratings and open-response comments on outputs. Each week, the UX lead reviewed that feedback, identified recurring themes, translated them into prompt refinements, and tested those changes again with the advisory council.

Because the advisory council could directly see how their feedback shaped the assistant, they developed a sense of ownership over the tool rather than feeling that new technology was being imposed on them. We also did not make the assistant mandatory. Counselors were invited to try it at their own pace, with light nudges and social proof showing examples of how other counselors were benefiting from it.

Scale with values-aligned partnerships

The strongest AI partnerships do more than add funding or technical skills; they reinforce the values of the core service itself. For nonprofits, that can mean saying no to attractive AI use cases that are more appealing to funders than they are helpful to constituents. At Empower Work, some donors were most interested in direct-to-help-seeker AI counseling, such as a chatbot that could respond to workers without a human counselor involved. That kind of tool might have produced higher immediate projections for “total reach” numbers in grant proposals, but we knew the community wanted human support in high-emotion moments. PagerDuty, one of our philanthropic and technology partners, proved to be the right collaborator because it aligned with our philosophy of starting with internal AI tools behind the scenes that support scale.

Design Lessons

In high-trust services, small design choices can have outsized effects on trust, usability, and adoption. Imagine a counselor is having a conversation with a help seeker who feels safe and understood. The counselor wants help thinking through the next response, so they write a prompt to AI such as, “Should my response focus more on emotional support or practical next steps?" If that prompt were accidentally sent to the help seeker, the trust and rapport built in the conversation could be damaged. Or imagine a newer counselor who is still building confidence. If the AI suggests a single definitive-sounding response option, they may assume that that response is the answer and copy and paste it without fully considering whether it fits the moment or their own voice/instinct. Risks like these helped guide our design priorities and safeguard strategies:

1. In fast-paced settings, more flexibility is not always better.

Nonprofits may assume that giving staff an open-ended AI interface will create flexibility, but in live service environments it can also increase cognitive burden and introduce avoidable risks. In Empower Work’s early prototypes, counselors had both an open-response chat box and prompt buttons for next response guidance, relevant resources, and summary. In practice, the open field proved less helpful: It slowed replies, increased mental load, and created the possibility that an AI prompt could accidentally be sent to a help seeker. Removing it made the tool simpler, faster, and safer to use.

2. AI should support judgment, not replace it.

In human-centered services, the goal is rarely to produce a single, best answer. More often, staff need support that sharpens their discernment. At Empower Work, that meant offering counselors a small set of suggested next responses rather than one definitive recommendation. Over time, the team found that a limited range of plausible options preserved human choice while avoiding the overload that comes with too many possibilities.

We also collaborated with our top AI assistant peer counselor users to create best practices for using the assistant thoughtfully. We gave counselors sample scenarios, AI-generated responses, and asked them to rewrite the responses as they would actually send them and then organized these into principles with example scenarios showing the side-by-side AI response before and after a counselor made changes.

One thing that stood out was how useful the AI could be when the counselor needed help finding the next general direction in a complicated conversation, but it also highlighted how necessary it was for the counselor to adjust the response in their own voice. In one example, a help seeker was trying to decide whether to stay in a difficult job for five more years to keep retirement medical benefits, or risk moving to another job with the potential to be just as bad. The assistant offered a focusing question, but our counselor did the human part—slowing it down, making it collaborative, and writing it in her own tone and voice.

3. Model choice is an ongoing design decision.

In social sector settings, performance must be judged in context. A slightly stronger model on paper may be the worse choice if it adds latency to real-time interactions. When we initially launched the AI assistant the larger models produced modest gains in output quality but introduced delays of up to a minute per prompt, which was too costly in a service where counselors aim to respond to people quickly.

Six months later, we revisited the comparison and found that newer models had significantly improved the quality of more emotionally complex outputs, especially next response guidance, without introducing the same level of latency. We shared side-by-side examples with counselors, and they strongly preferred the newer model even if it meant a bit more latency, so we updated.

The lesson is that model selection is not a one-time decision. As models, costs, latency, and use cases change, organizations need to regularly re-examine the tradeoffs and choose the model that best balances quality, speed, and cost within the realities of live support.

Time Back Where It Matters

After six months, roughly 65 percent of Empower Work counselors used the assistant at least once per shift, and a year later, usage had grown to nearly all active counselors. The assistant helped counselors manage more simultaneous conversations, from about two to nearly three, and counselors saved time and responded to help seekers faster: The average time to share resources dropped by 41 percent, and the average time to write session summaries dropped by 60 percent. And throughout, we maintained trust with our help-seeker community by ensuring that a human counselor was always present in moments of need, supported by AI but still using their own judgment, empathy, and voice.

When someone is anxious about losing their job or facing a hard conversation with a manager, they do not want an AI chatbot; they want a person with shared experience who can listen and feel with them. That belief shaped our guiding principle when integrating AI: AI does not counsel help seekers directly in highly emotional moments. Instead, it supports the people providing care so they can stay more present with the people seeking help. The lesson for peers and philanthropy is simple: For deeply human, empathy-based services, use AI to strengthen human support rather than replace it. That is where trust is built, and where deeper impact happens.

Two decades ago, I joined a group of Malians and Americans partnering with communities on the edge of Mali’s capital city. We aimed to bring care quickly to patients’ doorsteps, with no out-of-pocket fees. Volunteering our time, working out of a converted storage closet, we saw tremendous preventable suffering. When our neighbors struggled and failed to get care in time, we watched a toddler die from malaria. We mourned a young mother who died from an untreated cavity.

It is difficult to describe how excited we were when a leader in a large global health financing institution told us that her institution could finance our first healthcare system, fully, for the first few years. However, she had one condition: Her institution would fund us only if we kept out-of-pocket fees in place. No fees, no funding for any portion of our work: In her opinion, the cost per patient served, even though less than $1 per month, was not scale-able.

We turned her down.

At that time, I was traveling back and forth between our work in Mali and my training at Harvard Medical School in the United States, where we spend one thousand times more per person on average for healthcare, where we would not hesitate to spend more than $100,000 on a single patient’s hospital admission. The argument that $12 per person annually was not affordable at scale, for people facing extreme poverty, strained credulity.

More importantly, community recommendations and rigorous research showed us that user fee removal was necessary if we were to solve the problem of equitable, timely access to healthcare. We devoted months to trying to persuade this potential funder, bringing forward the research of Nobel Laureate economists and the expertise of community members. When she remained unconvinced, we made the difficult decision. In the years that followed, we struggled to raise necessary funds from month to month. But when the results came in from our first research study, done in partnership with the Malian government, we found that the communities we serve had increased patient visits tenfold, and had achieved, to our knowledge, the largest and fastest improvement in child survival on record.

The Trouble With Scaling Cheap

Social entrepreneurs have often faced pressure to lower standards, to scale what is cheap, and to work where it is easy. The pressure comes not only from contracting official development assistance agencies; it comes from philanthropy. But despite good intentions, these recommendations endanger the lives of those we serve, and the moral foundations of our field. They would set us on a path toward a world of greater inequity and injustice.

This argument is not new. In 1978, representatives from 134 nations converged in Kazakhstan, in the city of Alma Ata. Together these nations made a historic declaration—and committed to pursue healthcare for all. Soon after, however, global north-based institutions pressured global south governments to cut healthcare spending and to charge sick people fees for healthcare. Now 40 years later, an extensive body of research has shown us the consequences of these fees: delayed and reduced access; widening inequity; the deaths of millions of children; and one billion people pushed annually into or further into poverty by healthcare costs.

It has been argued that as official development assistance contracts, social entrepreneurs should determine what funding government has available to pay, and then design solutions that are cheap enough to match that price point at scale.

The recommendation to design solutions with and for the public sector, that the public sector can finance, is long overdue. The cost needs to align with what the government can and will pay for.

However, the cost of a solution is not set; the amount of money a government can pay for a solution is not fixed. Paul Farmer described the myth of insufficient resources as the socialization of scarcity, a dangerous belief that poor people deserve lower standards because we’ve accepted artificial scarcity as normal. We know that giving people a lower standard of healthcare because they are poor is wrong. But we convince ourselves that our abundant world lacks the resources to pay for what is needed, and that we must accordingly lower our standards.

Sometimes there are pots of money sitting untouched in government coffers, already allocated to solve the injustices of poverty, just waiting for social innovators to partner with government, to unlock and deploy them. Indus Action, one of this year’s Skoll Awardees, is a great example of this kind of social innovation: They create tools that make it easier for the poor to access government benefits in India, work that is urgently needed and worthy of support.

Far more frequently, however, the magic pot of funding does not (yet) exist. The inequities we seek to solve persist, in part, because of the lack of a financing pathway. Standard-setting work creates future ability to pay (rather than waiting on it to magically appear).

In short: Social innovation can change both the price point and ability to pay, as partners work together to create a financing pathway that did not exist before.

New Financing Pathways

Antiretroviral treatment for patients living with HIV shows us what this can look like.

When highly active antiretroviral treatment (HAART) emerged at the turn of the century, this combination therapy proved capable of stopping the progression of HIV in its tracks. At the time, however, antiretrovirals cost $10,000 to treat a single person for one year. The broad consensus in global health at the time (among institutions based in the global north) was therefore that patients living in poverty in the global south would not and could not access treatment. Prevention and palliative care to ease the deaths of those infected were concluded to be the only viable, scale-able solutions.

However, a small group of social innovators decided to challenge this prevailing conclusion. A study in The Lancet by researchers at Partners in Health showed that it was possible to treat patients in Haiti with equitable outcomes, comparable to patients living in the United States; negotiations with pharmaceutical manufacturers and bulk procurement, driven by CHAI and others, brought the cost of treating a patient with AIDS down by 99 percent, from $10,000 to $90 in less than a decade; the Global Fund and PEPFAR were born, creating a financing pipeline, mobilizing resources from both global north and the global south governments to save 70 million lives.

The same pattern played out for the community health workforce itself. A decade ago, the idea of supporting Community Health Workers as professionals, not volunteers, was dismissed as the Cadillac of community health: too expensive, too difficult. A World Health Organization guideline, major financing, and 50 national policies later, it turns out it was just the car.

These social innovators did not lower their standards to meet the predefined price point and the status quo readiness to pay. Instead, they were able to:

1. Prove that equitable outcomes were possible
2. Lower the price point without lowering standards
3. Build a financing pathway where none existed, raising the ability to pay.

This is the blueprint for social innovation we need now. Instead of assuming that the ability to pay is constant and dropping the standard of care to meet it, they kept the standard of care high, and made the price point and ability to pay converge.

And it is a playbook that can be used in many different places. In 2025, my colleagues at Muso supported our government partners in Cote d’Ivoire to use this same playbook for change. The Ivorian government sought universal access to healthcare and launched an ambitious universal health coverage program. Muso supported them to test solutions that would accelerate access to healthcare. Our team also tested ways to make the system more efficient without compromising quality. Over the course of two years, we found ways to reduce cost per person served by 20 percent per year without compromising standards or impact. Based on the results of joint research, the Ivorian prime minister directed nearly 3,000 rural public clinics to open care without fees for more than 13 million eligible people nationwide in 2025. World Bank financing covered the first few months, and then government funding took over. In a year when millions of people elsewhere in the world lost access to care amid official development assistance cuts, millions of Ivorians gained access to healthcare thanks to this initiative.

Here as elsewhere, cost-effectiveness and efficiency proved essential: Together we found ways to better steward resources to get more impact out of every dollar for patients, and to create a solution that government partners can pay for nationally. Lower costs without lower standards. Much more work remains to be done: to renew domestic financing, to ensure quality delivery.

Foreign assistance contracted dangerously, but it did not die in 2025. It derisked the first months of a historic national healthcare reform, that was then picked up by domestic financing.

The Trouble With Scaling Easy

Social innovators don’t only face pressure to go for cheap solutions; they also face simultaneous pressure to work in easier contexts.

Over the past months, I spoke with multiple other social entrepreneurs whose teams work in conflict zones and fragile states, who shared with me that they have faced pressure, not from global financing institutions but from private philanthropists, to abandon their partnerships in these contexts, and to focus on working where resources were more abundant and the winds of stability would be at their backs. Their logic is clear: For solutions to scale with government, the public sector needs to be ready and able to deliver that solution. Even in the best of conditions, achieving meaningful change in the lives of millions of people is a steep climb. It is therefore understandable why some recommend focusing on places where the path to scale is well-paved.

Does this mean, however, that attempts to scale equitable solutions in fragile and conflict states are misguided, or even delusional? Like the cheap enough argument, the easy enough argument breaks down because of three faulty assumptions: that need is universal, that potential to scale is fixed, and that governments in fragile contexts do not have that potential.

While some would counsel that “need is everywhere,” urging social entrepreneurs to go where the potential to scale would be easiest, need is not everywhere. Look at the global distribution of under-five child mortality. Our world faces more armed conflict than at any point since World War II, and half of all child deaths occur in fragile states and armed conflict zones (where child death rates are three-fold higher than in peaceful areas).

Going where the need is does not mean doing less. Our public sector partners in Mali, in the face of protracted armed conflict, have scaled up evidence-based interventions to more than six million Malians within the national health system: professional community health workers delivering high-quality care deep in conflict-affected areas, in line with WHO-recommended standards and decades of evidence.

I used to believe that the best that we could strive for in conflict settings is relief: cushioning the blow, palliating the atrocities of war.

Our community and public sector partners in fragile settings have since proven that “relief” is the wrong standard: Communities at our joint operational research sites in Mali have achieved child survival rates on par with the United States.

Any leader who has scaled a business or social innovation can tell you that potential to scale potential is not born. It is built. And fragile states are also building: Between 2003 and 2021, in the face of worsening armed conflict, Burkina Faso reduced child deaths by 74 percent, by scaling up multiple evidence-based interventions, removing fees for children under five, and pregnant women at public facilities nationwide.

If we choose only to fund and work in stable, well-resourced contexts, inequity gaps will widen, and millions of children will needlessly die. To build a more equitable world, we must be ready to work, to fund, to cultivate scale capacity, and to scale solutions in the most difficult circumstances, to give these contexts priority.

Certain partners have committed further in the face of conflict. In late 2025, for example, the Board of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, announced a 15 percent increase in financing for fragile and conflict settings, even as ODA cuts contracted their budget. We have also seen some of our partners in philanthropy change, to prioritize fragile states and conflict zones; settings where philanthropy is scarce and inequity is great. Our partners at the Patchwork Collective have prioritized grants in what they call philanthropic deserts. And the Dovetail Foundation launched a strategy to prioritize grants where inequities are greater and partners have been fewer, while supporting their partners to set the bar higher, to do work “worthy of those we serve.”

Scaling Right

Nelson Mandela once wrote, “It is always impossible until it is done.” Social innovation requires this kind of moral imagination, the capacity to articulate a future fundamentally different from the status quo, and to build a path to that future before it exists.

We do not need to choose between equity and scale. We do not need to choose between efficiency and equity.

We can scale right:

1. Do and fund work that raises the bar, solves the problem, and pursues equity. As Kevin Starr has put it, if the solution is not good enough, it should not scale.
2. Create solutions with the public sector, from the design phase, as innovation labs, and at every step on the path to scale.
3. Build and fund credible plans to make the price point and ability to pay converge, mobilizing new financing pathways, pursuing efficiency and cost-effectiveness without sacrificing quality and equity.
4. Work and fund in challenging places. Prioritize where inequities are greatest. Do not look for tailwinds. Charge into the headwinds. And create tailwinds together.

This approach does not guarantee success. In communities facing extreme poverty, the shocks of climate change, political fragility, and armed conflict, those we serve find systems rigged against them. They deserve better than wishful thinking: Progress will require the hard work of changing the rules of those systems. The Mulago Foundation shares a menu of tools that our team has found useful for what they call the big shift, to support the public sector to change those rules, to deliver and finance change at scale: collective action, policy change, and tech. With the right tools, partners, and policies, the price point and capacity to pay can converge on an equitable, just solution.

This path will require enduring commitment, not over months, but for decades to come.

A cocoa farmer once told me how she almost died in childbirth: “I was hemorrhaging, and the nurse said to me, ‘You don’t have enough money to pay for all the medicines we need to stop you from bleeding to death. Which one do you want to buy?’”

And these are the stakes. We can choose to reject the socialization of scarcity, to reject the premise that some people’s lives are worth less than others because of where they are born or how much money they have. We are here to do what has not been done before, to create the solution that did not exist, to build the financing pathway that did not exist, to scale right. That is how we deliver on the promise of Alma Ata, toward healthcare for all.

For much of their history, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been profoundly underfunded. Charged with educating generations of Black leaders while navigating segregation, disinvestment, and chronic inequities in access to capital, these institutions learned to survive with far fewer resources than their predominantly white peers.

Recently, however, that reality has slowly started to shift through unprecedented philanthropic commitments. MacKenzie Scott has donated more than $1 billion in unrestricted gifts to a range of institutions. The Moody Foundation’s $150 million investment in Huston–Tillotson University marked one of the largest single gifts ever made to an HBCU. The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation’s $50 million commitment to Atlanta-area HBCUs further underscored a growing recognition of their importance. These gifts have stabilized fragile balance sheets, strengthened endowments, relieved student debt burdens, and even enabled long-delayed investments in facilities and academic programs. The impact has been real and immediate, ensuring the survival of the institutions to serve another day.

These gifts, however, have not yet rewritten the deeper terms of power, capital, and autonomy that continue to constrain Black higher education and knowledge production both within the United States and across the global African diaspora. At a moment of demographic contraction in American higher education, growing uncertainty in federal financing, and intensifying global competition for talent, HBCUs still face an existential threat.

If philanthropy continues conducting one rescue mission after another, treating bold imagination as a risk, and waiting for greater certainty about which social justice approach will allow them to fly under the radar in the current policy environment, an opportunity will be missed. If, instead, efforts shift from generosity to fearless strategy, the next wave of gifts could midwife true sovereignty and a reimagined role for HBCUs as the beating hearts of local communities; engines of Black wealth; anchors of a global, pan-African knowledge economy; and co-authors of a global labor future that includes Black and diaspora talent, capital, and institutions at its center.

To realize that vision, philanthropy and impact capital should take three decisive actions, based on proven interventions.

1. Use Catalytic Capital to Stabilize Enrollment Through Fair Student Financing

The first and most urgent opportunity is to deploy philanthropic capital not only as grants but as catalytic guarantees that expand access to fair student financing, thereby strengthening enrollment as the core economic engine of HBCUs.

Each year in the United States, more than $50 billion in student loan applications are denied, primarily due to the absence of a creditworthy co-signer. As a result, roughly three million students stop out or drop out annually for lack of modest “last gap” financing—often under $7,500—that is not covered by Pell Grants, institutional aid, work-study, or federal loans.

At a graduate school level, the recent elimination of Graduate PLUS loans will further constrain the graduate study options of students who most rely on federal credit. These challenges disproportionately affect low-income and first-generation students, including African American students and the HBCUs that serve them. At a time when demographic shifts are shrinking the overall pool of traditional college-age students, the inability to finance enrollment threatens institutional sustainability.

The challenge extends beyond domestic students. Each year, academically prepared African students receive offers of admission from colleges in the United States—including HBCUs—but are unable to enroll. Household income is insufficient, scholarships cannot meet demand, and without US credit histories or co-signers, these students are excluded from nearly all private lending options. As the world’s largest and fastest-growing college-age population, globally mobile African students face a financing gap estimated at $8 billion annually in the United States and more than $50 billion worldwide. The result is a missed opportunity on multiple fronts: for students, for institutions, for knowledge production, for home countries, and for the broader economy.

HBCUs are uniquely positioned to serve these students. They already educate a disproportionate share of Black immigrants and their children, and they maintain deep cultural, historical, and intellectual ties to the African continent. With appropriate financing mechanisms, HBCUs could become natural magnets for diaspora students at precisely the moment when many US institutions are struggling to meet enrollment targets and when African universities are struggling to provide enough seats for qualified students.

Against this backdrop, traditional philanthropy, however generous, cannot fill the gap. Instead, impact capital must be deliberately structured as leverage. By pooling first-loss or guarantee capital through credible intermediaries, including the United Negro College Fund, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, or specialized diaspora lenders and organizations, philanthropy can unlock several multiples of private and bank capital for student lending without requiring lenders, including Black-owned banks, to absorb disproportionate default risk.

This approach already works with both FundingU for domestic students and 8b.finance for international students, organizations run by two authors of this article. Structured properly, a dollar of philanthropic capital can catalyze two to five dollars of private lending.

Importantly, this is not about expanding predatory debt. Guardrails matter. Any guarantee structure must include transparent underwriting, capped interest rates, financial literacy requirements, and repayment contingencies tied to income and impact. Imagine, for example, financing structures that reduce repayment obligations for graduates who serve underserved communities and countries; who work in high-need sectors such as energy systems, education, health, or climate resilience; or who are affected by changes in visa regimes.

Done well, catalytic student finance can provide a durable cushion against future funding shocks by ensuring HBCUs can continue to enroll low-income students at both undergraduate and graduate levels. More than that, it can turn the historical disadvantage of being associated with Africa into a competitive advantage in a shrinking student market.

2. Build Pan-African Research and Digital Infrastructure

Enrollment stability alone is not enough. The second transformative opportunity lies in positioning HBCUs as anchors of a pan-African intellectual economy—a 21st-century Alexandria for Black and diasporic thought. Despite their outsized role in producing Black professionals and leaders, HBCUs remain structurally disadvantaged in research funding, laboratory facilities, computing infrastructure, and endowed faculty positions. Historical underinvestment has left many institutions competing for the same federal grants as far wealthier research universities—often with little chance of success.

Philanthropy can change this dynamic. Rather than forcing HBCUs to chase scarce domestic research dollars, donors can support transnational research ecosystems that link HBCUs with African universities and global partners. Joint degree pathways, co-located research institutes, shared faculty appointments, and coordinated exchange programs would allow institutions to operate as nodes in a global knowledge network rather than isolated campuses.

Related investments in collective HBCU digital exchange could further multiply impact. By pooling procurement for learning management systems, cybersecurity, cloud computing, research platforms, and student services, institutions could reduce costs through economies of scale. Shared infrastructure could also support joint recruitment, visa navigation, and cross-border internship and career placement for students.

Moreover, targeted philanthropic investment in endowed chairs, career-connected learning experiments for students, research centers of excellence, and digital platforms would allow HBCUs to develop distinctive strengths in fields such as artificial intelligence, climate science, health equity, agriculture, fintech, and advanced manufacturing, as well as other areas where global demand is rising and Black and diaspora talent remains underrepresented. Grant capital can be structured with provisions for repayment or revenue participation if research leads to commercialized outcomes, allowing philanthropic dollars to recycle and compound rather than disappear.

3. Catalyze Community Economic Engines Around HBCUs

The third opportunity extends beyond campus boundaries, where philanthropy can enable the creation of a self-reinforcing economic engine.

Many HBCUs sit in historically Black neighborhoods that have endured decades of disinvestment. Students often confront housing shortages, limited childcare, inadequate broadband, and underdeveloped local economies—all of which affect persistence, the possibility of internships while in school, and graduation rates.

Philanthropy and impact capital should play a catalytic role by seeding revenue-generating structures around campuses that strengthen both institutions and surrounding communities. Importantly, these investments, including student-led ventures and social enterprises, should be structured in partnership with HBCUs so that lease income, revenue participation, or equity flows back into endowments and scholarship funds. Examples of efforts that can be expanded under this pillar include public charter school authorizing and operating capacity at HBCUs like Voorhees and Stillman, respectively; the HBCU Wealth-Building Initiative piloted by the United Negro College Fund; and the HBCU Brilliance Initiative which expands access to flexible capital.

Over time, returns from community assets can cushion institutions against future state or federal funding shocks while simultaneously creating jobs, wealth-building opportunities, and improved quality of life for local residents. Capital can be layered across grants, recoverable grants, concessionary debt, and market-rate investments. Where possible, Black-owned financial institutions should be engaged as partners in structuring and managing this capital—ensuring that financial intermediation itself becomes part of the wealth-building ecosystem.

In this model, HBCUs transform from institutions waiting on annual fundraising cycles to anchors of place-based development with recurring revenue streams tied directly to student success and community vitality.

Now Is the Time to Rewrite the Rules

For generations, HBCUs have been praised for doing “more with less,” even as they have been tasked with delivering social transformation with insufficient tools. Today, those institutions are not simply under-resourced; they have little self-determination, and many may not survive the current crisis hitting higher education in general and Black institutions in particular.

At this juncture, the impulse of philanthropy cannot be the comfortable one of delivering salvation, or worse yet, fiddling on the sidelines, hosting another conference, waiting for a new theory of change to emerge, or expecting someone else to take the lead. The moment calls for funders to midwife sovereignty in at least three ways: stand with HBCUs even when the path is not fully mapped; underwrite experimentation and iteration rather than only proven models; and stay in the relationship long enough for new approaches to become institutional norms, not just short-lived pilots that look good in annual reports but leave power untouched.

Foundationally, the moment demands that funders back their professed belief in Black agency and self-determination with action, by ceding control and trusting Black-led institutions and HBCU-based builders as thinkers, architects, and decision makers. That trust should extend to the global role HBCUs can play—building knowledge, leadership, and solutions in solidarity with marginalized communities in Africa and the wider Global South, where their experience can help unlock new approaches to shared challenges.

The number of registered non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide has never been higher. Philanthropic giving has grown for more than two decades. Donors everywhere demand ever more rigorous impact measurement. And yet the sector’s collective results—the degree to which it actually bends the curve on poverty, education, health, or climate—remain stubbornly difficult to see from altitude.

Scholarly literature helps explain why, though in an inverted way: Its assessment of the field tilts conspicuously positive. The most comprehensive review of the field, a systematic analysis of 3,336 peer-reviewed articles spanning 35 years, found that case studies dominated the literature, with pronounced geographic and sectoral gaps, and generally reporting favorable effects of NGO interventions on health and governance outcomes. The authors of that review, Jennifer N. Brass and colleagues, qualify the result, noting that only about 60 percent of health articles and 16 percent of governance articles used a clearly measured outcome indicator, and that NGO studies rarely include a counterfactual. A separate review of three leading nonprofit journals across four decades reached a related finding: Only about four percent of articles took a critical stance, and critical work had, if anything, diminished rather than grown.

The minority of scholars who have looked critically reach a stable and uncomfortable verdict. Two decades after academics Michael Edwards and David Hulme first argued that NGOs had grown “too close for comfort” to the donors and states that fund them, they, along with researcher Nicola Banks, revisited the question and concluded that the problem had not lessened. Rather, they argued that weak roots in civil society, political restrictions, and over-professionalization continued to undermine NGO legitimacy, and that most NGOs remained poorly placed to influence what actually drives social change. Their broader diagnosis was not that NGOs have failed to deliver services (many demonstrably have), but that the sector as a whole tends to relieve symptoms of poverty rather than alter the structures that produce it.

NGOs rarely fall short because their missions are unworthy. More often, they underperform because their management systems are poorly matched to the complexity of the problems they are trying to solve. Research increasingly suggests that mission-driven organizations do better when they are designed to learn, collaborate, and adapt, not just fundraise, report, and grow.

A more useful way to see these failures is as a set of organizational burdens that repeatedly pull NGOs away from impact. With apologies to the classicists, these seven labors of the modern NGO—recognizable to many people working in the field—include structure, inertia, communication, redundancy, longevity, outcomes, and community involvement. These aren’t nonprofit weaknesses but recurring management pressures that distort how NGOs allocate resources, make decisions, define success, and relate to the communities they serve. Examining the seven burdens and their interlinkages provides a framework for understanding how they limit organizational impact and how the field might overcome them to solve problems more effectively.

The seven labors framework draws on more than 25 years of fieldwork, including entrepreneurship programs at the Academy for Creating Enterprise in the Philippines and Mexico, commerce ministry analysis in Tonga, studies of Shenzhen’s Overseas Chinese Town parks, education-outcomes analysis at Food for Life Vrindavan in India and in schools in Fiji, and research on NGO effectiveness in Ghana. Across those settings, management pressures such as fragmented funding, competitive pressures, short grant cycles, and the expectation of continuous expansion appeared repeatedly. Like Hercules’s labors, these create recurring trials that NGOs must confront one by one.

The levers that stand to unmake these labors sit not only with NGO executives, but also with corporate partners shaping environmental, social, governance and philanthropic commitments; foundation boards setting grantmaking terms; impact investors pricing time horizons; and directors who serve on nonprofit boards. Each person’s daily decisions either sustain the seven labors or lighten them.

Labor One: Structure

Many NGOs function like small federations, with a headquarters, one or more national offices, local affiliates, and often fiscal sponsors or intermediaries. Each layer may require a level of oversight, local knowledge, or risk control, and thereby add cost. And branches of the same organization may compete, openly or tacitly, for donors, staff, and media attention.

Research on nonprofit capacity frames performance as a function of the resources an organization can raise, as well as the capabilities and practices that convert those resources into results. Work on international-local NGO collaboration points the same way; collaborative engagement is linked to stronger project performance, while its effects on local capability are less consistent and depend heavily on pressures coming from outside the partnership (donors, governments, and media). The implication is clear: Structure either supports mission execution or drains it.

Consider the Academy for Creating Enterprise. In 1999, Steve and Bette Gibson sold their business, moved to Cebu in the Philippines, and wrote a five-week curriculum to teach microenterprise skills to people starting businesses out of necessity. They built a curriculum, taught it, and let graduates open alumni chapters. The Academy now reports more than 150,000 graduates in 16 countries and more than 1,000 local chapters, and illustrates how a codified program can expand without a full administrative office in every location.

When expanding an organization’s scope of service, senior NGO leaders should ask whether a new affiliate is the best vehicle or whether an existing partner could deliver the same outcome with less drag. For funders, corporate giving officers, and foundation program leads, the operative question before any grant isn’t only whether the idea is sound, but how many hands a grant passes through before it reaches the intended target, and whether each pass-through adds enough value to justify its cost.

Labor Two: Inertia

The second labor is the paralysis of the starting line. Under pressure to appear credible, NGOs often overinvest in formal infrastructure, branding, and internal systems before establishing a repeatable path to value creation. Offices, procedures, and reporting structures can create the appearance of readiness while delaying work that actually builds trust and evidence.

NGO capacity literature is useful here. Capability helps when it enables execution and learning, but distracts when it substitutes for them. For leaders, that means distinguishing between infrastructure that enables performance and infrastructure that mainly reassures outsiders. Every month a new NGO spends on building apparatus before delivering services is a month its intended beneficiaries go unserved. Every founder who abandons a project because the administrative burden of getting started proved greater than the mission itself represents lost human capital the sector cannot afford.

Consider Food for Life Vrindavan. In 1991, founder Rupa Raghunath Das began distributing food in Vrindavan, India. When the organization concluded that food alone could not break the cycle of poverty, it expanded its focus to education, eventually establishing three schools. And in 2022, it received recognition at The Indian Corporate Social Responsibility Awards event. Rather than waiting for legitimacy, Das got started, and scaled later. Another example is the Local Coalition Accelerator, a group of local organizations in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Uganda that have shared governance and peer-to-peer capacity and created joint action plans since 2020, thanks in part to three-to-five-year funder support.

The antidote to inertia is less celebrated than it should be. In the early years, NGOs can share back-office infrastructure (including finance, human resources, and legal services) with organizations in related fields. This works when arrangements are secure and appropriate, and when NGOs treat administrative minimalism as a feature, not a shortcoming. Funders can support this approach by financing shared services rather than requiring every grantee to duplicate them.

Labor Three: Communication

NGOs generate large amounts of local knowledge through implementation, partnership, and community engagement. Yet much of that knowledge remains trapped inside teams, projects, or individual staff members.

Knowledge-management research suggests that structured knowledge-sharing can help organizations spread experience, reduce repeated mistakes, and align action with mission. OECD guidance on locally led development similarly concludes that the system still does too little to value and share local knowledge in ways that improve effectiveness and sustainability. Brass and colleagues document the fragmentation empirically, noting that NGO scholarship is scattered across some 950 journals, with more than half of those journals publishing only a single article on NGOs during the 35-year period they studied. Researcher Alexandra Gheciu meanwhile documented how military forces, government bodies, and NGOs involved in peacebuilding draw on material resources, knowledge and expertise, and institutional prestige, not simply to foster collaboration or improve practice, but to secure leadership roles so that they can shape the rules of post-conflict reconstruction.

Still, some organizations are highly focused on knowledge exchange. Ashoka has spent more than 40 years building infrastructure, including stipends and communication platforms, to support a global peer-learning community of social entrepreneurs. And smaller organizations like the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP) convene network members through meetings, webinars, communities of practice, and other forums where they exchange evidence, experience, and practical ideas. ALNAP also maintains a public library of more than 23,000 humanitarian resources to help circulate lessons from individual programs across the sector.

Quarterly peer convenings, published post-mortems of failed programs, and shared measurement frameworks aren’t glamorous, but leaders who want to differentiate their organizations and ease the burden of learning the same thing over and over again need to invest in communities of practice.

Labor Four: Redundancy

Whereas the first labor, structure, describes layering within organizations, redundancy describes layering across them. Some redundancy is healthy. Competition can produce innovation, and a pluralism of approaches is genuinely valuable when the best answer is unknown. But redundancy is often a byproduct of everyone wanting to be a founder, rather than a strategy for experimentation. A cluster of organizations tackling the same community problem with roughly the same model isn’t necessarily pluralism. Each new initiative may be defensible on its own terms, but taken together, the result can be duplication of administrative effort, fragmentation of expertise, and competition where collaboration would create more value. OECD analysis describes the same pattern from the receiving end, where funders regularly ask local partners to participate in capacity-strengthening activities (such as building skills, knowledge, and competencies) without coordination.

Uganda’s health sector offers a vivid illustration. By 2012, donor-funded organizations had launched so many overlapping mobile-health pilots, often running incompatible systems in the same districts, that researchers referred to it as an affliction of “pilotitis.” The Ministry of Health declared a moratorium on new projects until they could demonstrate interoperability and sustainability, and subsequently approved only a handful of initiatives to scale nationwide. The green-lighted solutions, such as the mTrac health-reporting system, reached all of Uganda’s districts within a year.

The most useful question a funder can ask before issuing a new grant isn’t “Is this a good idea?” but “Who else is doing this, and why is another entrant the right answer?” The most useful question an aspiring founder can ask is whether partnership with an established organization would be more effective than launching a new one. The choice not to start and instead find new ways to support existing organizations should be a legitimate option.

Labor Five: Longevity

Recent OECD work on locally led development argues that sustainable outcomes depend on long-term, equitable partnerships and tailored capacity sharing, not just project delivery. Short grant cycles can disrupt employment continuity, force programs to end before organizations earn beneficiaries’ trust, and leave little room for endowments or recurring-revenue models that could help organizations weather changes in donor priorities.

BRAC, founded in Bangladesh in 1972 to address poverty and inequality, is a classic example of an organization that uses a diversified operating model of grant-funded programs, microfinance, and social enterprises to support its longevity. Another example is Fundación Paraguaya, founded in 1985. The foundation’s agricultural schools operate as working farms and businesses; students learn by running enterprises like an on-campus hotel, whose sales cover operating costs. According to its 2024 institutional report, 59 educational institutions in 28 countries have adopted this self-sustaining model.

These examples show that organizations can design for longevity rather than just hope for future funding. NGO leaders can build revenue models that don’t depend entirely on annual fundraising, even when that path is harder than chasing the next grant. Funders can move at least one well-justified grant from 12 or 24 months to five years (making sure to establish milestones, safeguards, and clear exit conditions) and replace one innovation requirement with a continuation-and-depth requirement.

Labor Six: Outcomes

Researcher Adil Najam’s classic NGO accountability framework helps explain why so many measurement systems are designed to reassure donors rather than improve decisions. Najam’s tentative assessment of the three accountabilities NGOs face is unusually blunt for a framework paper. He rates accountability to patrons as high on functional measures (and medium on strategic ones), accountability to beneficiaries as low to nil, and accountability to an NGO’s stated mission as low. His summary is that upward accountability dominates because it’s tied directly to funding and legitimacy, but at the cost of clients and mission. The result is a familiar distortion. Reporting systems are fine-tuned to demonstrate compliance but fail to surface difficult truths about program performance that might help improve them.

The work of researchers Talata Sawadogo-Lewis and colleagues reflects this. During interviews, the monitoring and evaluation staff at 11 NGOs with maternal and child health projects described donor reporting as the primary motivation and audience for evaluation. Participants also described rigid reporting requirements, as well as limited capacity to use evaluation findings to determine whether programs reached their intended populations and met their needs, or to guide improvements. Researchers Tracey M. Coule and colleagues found an analogous pattern in nonprofit scholarship, where 23 of the 72 critical articles they reviewed exposed problems without advancing a normative course of action.

Yet some organizations deliberately expose problems with the aim of changing the systems that produce them. Engineers Without Borders Canada, which models this practice through public “failure reports,” and Nigeria’s Women Inspiration Development Center, which documented how community resistance changed its approach, are just two examples.

The prescription here is cultural before it is technical. Senior leaders should publish losses, not just wins; fund independent evaluation; and reward organizations that disclose what didn’t work, because without that disclosure the sector cannot learn.

Labor Seven: Community Involvement

Community participation in the development and implementation of NGO initiatives can make solutions more relevant, trusted, and sustainable. But, as a systematic review of 49 health-service studies by Victoria Haldane and colleagues suggests, strong organizational and community processes must be in place to navigate inherent social and cultural complexities. In the same paper on funder-NGO power dynamics mentioned earlier, Banks, Hulme, and Edwards argued that the difference between communities that NGOs consult and communities that govern interventions parallels the difference between NGOs (typically intermediary, professionally staffed, and donor-funded) and membership-based organizations (led by and accountable to the people they exist to serve). They contended that the most durable examples of community-led development emerge tend to emerge from well-resourced, membership-based organizations.

Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a transnational network founded in 1996, connects community savings groups through settlement, city, national, and international federations. These groups collect settlement data for negotiations with municipal, state, or national public bodies that control relevant land or projects. By 2002, the World Bank-supported Mumbai Urban Transport Project—which was jointly implemented by the Government of Maharashtra, Indian Railways, and other public agencies—had resulted in the relocation of thousands of railway-side households. With technical and organizational support from the Mumbai-based Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres, residents in affected areas (organized through the Railway Slum Dwellers Federation and linked to the National Slum Dwellers Federation) numbered homes, registered households, and mapped their settlements. The state agency responsible for resettlement, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, gave community organizations authority to decide which families qualified for resettlement housing and which available homes they would receive. SDI’s durable federation structure, savings networks, and technical partnerships gave residents the organization and credible information they needed to negotiate access to land, infrastructure, and housing entitlements with public authorities.

NGOs should embed community members in not only advisory but also governance capacities; measure beneficiary satisfaction with the same seriousness as funder satisfaction; and treat staff continuity in the field as a strategic asset, not a human resources line item. Foundation trustees and impact investors can accelerate this shift by asking a single question of every grantee, every cycle, “Where in your governance do the people you exist to serve actually hold a vote?”

A Labor, Not a Fate

Taken together, the seven labors show that NGO underperformance is rarely the result of one isolated weakness. Structure fuels duplication. Inertia delays action. Poor communication traps knowledge. Redundancy wastes scarce resources. Short-termism undermines sustainability. Donor-centered accountability distorts learning. Weak community involvement erodes trust. Each labor compounds the others. That is the diagnostic value of the framework. It lets senior leaders, boards, and funders ask not whether a program is well-intentioned or well-funded, but whether these seven burdens are quietly weakening the organization’s ability to create and sustain results.

Across seven countries and more than 25 years of fieldwork, the most common mistake we see senior NGO leaders make is attributing their organization’s obstacles to local context, such as the donor environment in one country, the political climate in another, or the cultural dynamics of a particular community. Those obstacles are real, but the seven labors are not purely local. And while they don’t manifest in universal or identical ways, we have seen them recur across diverse settings, and they are a reminder that impact depends not just on what an NGO aims to do, but on what it’s built to carry.

There is a quiet crisis unfolding inside the development offices of nonprofits across this country. It doesn’t make the front page and won’t generate the kind of urgency that a budget shortfall or a federal funding cut triggers. But it might be the most consequential threat to the long-term health of the philanthropic sector that I’ve witnessed in four decades of this work.

Senior fundraisers—the relationship architects, legacy builders, and mission storytellers who have spent careers learning the art of transformational giving—are retiring. Not only are we not replacing them, but we are failing to attract young professionals into the field. And as the pipeline narrows from both ends, the transactional, quota-driven, relentlessly metrics-obsessed culture we have built is accelerating the exodus of those still in the middle.

Without a fundamental cultural transformation in how we practice, recruit, and sustain fundraising as a vocation, the trend will only continue.

The Numbers Are Not Ambiguous

The average tenure of a development professional today is less than eighteen months. In a profession built on relationship-building, in which a major donor relationship can take three to five years to mature into a transformative gift, our people leave before they hit their stride.

Why? For one thing, 84 percent of fundraisers feel “tremendous pressure to succeed” in their roles, and 55 percent feel “often unappreciated” in their work. Half of chief development officers surveyed by CompassPoint planned to leave their positions within two years; 40 percent were not even sure they would remain in the fundraising profession at all.

The financial cost of this churn is staggering. Because it takes an average of four years for a fundraiser to reach full potential in a role, the departure of a development professional with four or more years of tenure can cost the organization as much as five times that person’s annual salary in lost revenue. And this internal crisis connects directly to the crisis facing donors: the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s 2024 report shows a 4.5 percent decline in total donors, the fourth consecutive year of decline, while first-time donor retention hit its lowest recorded rate, only 19 percent. As I have written, just 3 percent of donors now account for 78 percent of total charitable dollars given: We are narrowing at the top while hemorrhaging at the base. We have too few experienced relationship builders left to reverse that trend.

Our Workforce Problem Is a Culture Problem.

The reasons why gifted, mission-driven professionals leave, but talented young people do not enter, go much deeper than compensation and career pathways. Those things matter, of course. But the core issue is the pervasive, stubborn, and ultimately self-defeating transactional culture that has taken root in too many development offices across this country.

When organizations treat their fundraisers as quota machines rather than relationship architects, they tell the fundraiser and donor simultaneously that the gift matters more than the giver. When we judge development professionals solely by dollars raised and calls made and asks completed, we strip the work of its humanity. Then we wonder why the best people leave. The real drivers of fundraiser departure are unrealistic expectations set without adequate resources, unengaged leadership, lack of investment in tools and systems, and, most telling, a poor culture of philanthropy within the organization itself. No amount of salary adjustment will fix a culture that treats fundraising as extraction rather than transformation.

The connection to donor outcomes is equally direct: when donors feel they are only contacted for monetary transactions, they do not stay. Transactional cultures produce transactional donor relationships. Transactional donor relationships produce declining retention and declining revenue. The result is burned-out fundraisers operating in rote, transactional mode pass that fatigue directly to their donors. You cannot fake genuine connection, and you cannot manufacture the kind of authentic relationship that transforms a one-time gift into a decades-long partnership (when you are simultaneously grinding through unrealistic prospect lists with the clock ticking on a job you already know you are about to leave).

Learning From Other Professions

Ours is not the first profession to face this double squeeze of aging senior practitioners and a failing recruitment pipeline. Nursing offers a particularly instructive case study, with experienced nurses retiring in large numbers, insufficient new nurses entering the pipeline, unsustainable workloads driving mid-career burnout. Sound familiar?

Rather than waiting for the problem to resolve itself, leading healthcare systems invested aggressively in new pipeline architecture. The American Hospital Association documented approaches including earn-while-you-learn apprenticeship models, high school pipeline programs (Grady Health in Atlanta launched a Teen Experience and Leadership Program so oversubscribed it had to turn hundreds of applicants away), simulation-based training centers shared across multiple institutions, and upskilling investments like UC Health’s $50 million Ascend leadership program. They also invested in reconnecting clinicians to purpose, explicitly calling for ways to reconnect clinicians to purpose and provide the support, training and technology they need to thrive.

Purpose, not just pipeline. The core insight is that talent development is not a passive HR function, but a strategic mission imperative: build intentional pipelines, invest in the culture people will be entering, and connect the work to purpose, not just performance.

What would it look like if the fundraising profession took these lessons seriously?

1. Anchor fundraising apprenticeships in relationship work. We need formal, paid apprenticeship models that pair emerging fundraisers with senior practitioners in real cultivation and stewardship, not data entry and event logistics. The apprentice should be in the room, at the lunch, witnessing what transformational giving actually looks and feels like.

2. Build high school and community college pipeline programs. The nursing field learned that you need to introduce the profession early and make it tangible. Nonprofit organizations partnered with community colleges could develop “Philanthropy Explorer” programs that introduce mission-driven fundraising careers before students choose their path, the same way healthcare systems now send professionals into high schools to recruit the next generation of nurses.

3. Create purposeful retention models for senior practitioners. Rather than simply watching experienced fundraisers retire, organizations should build intentional phased-retirement structures that keep senior wisdom in the building. Part-time mentoring roles, Emeritus Fundraiser designations, project-based consulting arrangements: these create structured ways to harvest and transfer the relational capital that walks out the door when a 25-year major gifts officer retires.

4. Conduct culture audits before hiring. If transactional culture drives talented people out, every organization preparing to hire a development professional should first conduct an honest culture audit. Are expectations realistic? Does leadership understand the relationship cultivation cycle? Does the organization invest in its team’s professional growth? (If the answers are no, hiring is not the solution. Culture repair is).

5. Tell the profession’s story compellingly. Fundraising is routinely portrayed as asking people for money, which is to say, as awkward, transactional, mercenary. We must tell a different story: the planned gift that funded a cancer research center, the scholarship that changed a first-generation family’s trajectory, the donor whose giving became the fullest expression of a life well-lived. This is what we actually do. We need to say so loudly, and often, and in the places where the next generation is listening.

6. Build university-nonprofit practicum partnerships for lived learning. Schools with nonprofit management and public administration programs should be creating structured partnerships with local fundraising organizations, not internships where students stuff envelopes, but genuine co-creations where emerging professionals lead donor stewardship projects, develop case statements, and sit across the table from real philanthropists. This is where vocation is formed.

7. Create a Transformational Culture Certification for nonprofits. A recognized standard, think of the “Best Places to Work” model applied specifically to philanthropic culture, that recognizes organizations committed to transformational fundraising practices would signal to job seekers that this organization values relationships over transactions, invests in its people, and practices the kind of philanthropy that both donors and fundraisers want to be part of. The talent market would respond.

The Transformational Imperative

The greatest threat to the future of fundraising is not the economy, not demographic change, not even declining donor participation, as alarming as those trends are. The greatest threat is the failure of imagination about what this profession is and who it is for.

When we build cultures that grind fundraisers down with unrealistic goals and by treating them as revenue-generating units rather than relationship stewards, we send a message to young people that this is not a profession worthy of their gifts. We also send a message to donors: you are a means to our ends, not a partner in a shared vision.

The professions that have navigated this crisis most successfully did not simply recruit more aggressively. They asked deeper questions: Why are people leaving? What would make young people want to enter? What kind of culture would make talented professionals choose to build their careers and legacies here?

The answer, in every case, was the same. Purpose. Belonging. The sense that the work matters and that the organization sees the whole person, not just the performance metric.

That is the transformational argument. Not just for how we treat donors. For how we treat each other.

The chair left empty by the retiring major gifts officer, who spent 30 years building relationships with your community’s most generous families, will not be filled by better job postings. It will be filled by organizations that have built the kind of culture that makes a gifted young professional say: I want to spend my career here. I want to learn from these people. I want to be part of something that takes both the donor and the fundraiser seriously as full human beings.

Billions in donor-advised funds (DAFs) sit like honey crystallizing in forgotten jars—sweet but inert—while urgent social needs multiply beyond the glass. According to a recent report from the Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative, DAF assets in the United States reached $326 billion in 2024, up more than 27 percent in a single year. The pile grows faster than the giving. Most of these billions are not on their way to anywhere.

A donor-advised fund works like a charitable holding account. A donor contributes cash or assets, takes the full tax deduction in that moment, and then recommends grants for nonprofits on whatever timeline they choose. The accounts are housed by sponsors, think community foundations or the charitable arms of financial firms like Schwab and Fidelity. The deduction is immediate, but the giving is optional and sometimes never occurs. That gap is the problem.

I have spent 20 years assembling capital for the populations and problems the market won’t reach on its own, from a $2.1 billion urban infill program in São Paulo to refugee entrepreneurs and a women’s loan fund built across CDFIs, commercial banks, and community foundations. The capital is rarely unwilling. It just needs a catalyst, someone to move first, de-risk the thing, and prove it works. That is exactly what idle DAF dollars could be, and exactly what they are not when they sit still.

In an average year, more than a third of DAF accounts make no grants at all, according to the 2024 National Study on Donor Advised Funds. The imbalance sharpened in 2024 rather than evening out: Contributions to DAFs increased 37 percent or nearly $90 billion over 2023, but only about a quarter of total assets reached working charities. The donors filling these accounts are disproportionately high-income households, the same households that capture the largest tax benefit the moment they contribute. As federal spending contracts, more of the nation’s charitable safety net leans on those dollars, and more of those dollars are sitting still. Philanthropy faces its moment of truth. Will we deploy these resources effectively, or watch them calcify?

My solution is radically simple: Establish a national ranking of DAF sponsors based on a single metric—the percentage of total assets deployed annually. Every sponsor with assets over $500 million would self-report one calculation: dollars deployed to charitable causes divided by total assets under management. No complex impact measurements, no elaborate theories of change—just one number that cuts to the heart of philanthropy’s purpose.

A Simple Metric

The disclosure would do the one thing the current system never forces: make stillness visible. Right now, a sponsor that deploys 4 percent of its assets and one that deploys 40 percent look identical from the outside. Both advertise their charitable mission. Both collect their fees. The difference, the only one that matters to the nonprofits waiting on the other end, is invisible to donors choosing where to park their giving. A published ranking could end that. It converts deployment from a private virtue into a public scoreboard, and scoreboards change behavior precisely because they are monitored.

This pressure works through the donor, not around them. A donor choosing between two sponsors can now see which one moves money and which one hoards it, and no reputation-conscious sponsor wants to sit at the bottom of a list every prospective client, journalist, and board member can read. That flips the incentive. Today a DAF sponsor profits by growing assets under management, because management fees scale with the pile, so the rational move is to gather and hold.

This ranking rewards the opposite. It pays to deploy, which means it pays to go find the deployment worth bragging about. The best sponsors stop being passive custodians and start scouring the landscape for the deals that change things: the early housing model, the unproven intervention, the breakthrough no one else will fund yet. None of this requires a new law or mandated minimum payout. It requires only that the number exist, in public, where it cannot be ignored.

Moving Resources

Critics will argue this oversimplifies the nuanced work of philanthropy. They’re right, but that’s the point. A single ratio cannot capture a theory of change or weigh the patience some causes genuinely require. But it answers the one question every other metric lets sponsors avoid: whether resources are actually moving to meet society’s needs.

The resistance to ranking DAFs is rarely about nuance. It stems from a culture of deference to engaged donors and a quiet fear of losing business. That fear points exactly the wrong way because intervention is already underway. In November 2023, the US Treasury and the IRS proposed the first regulations on DAFs in nearly two decades, the opening move under a 2006 law that had sat unimplemented ever since. The proposed rules are largely definitional. They define what a DAF is and which distributions are taxable. What they pointedly leave untouched is the question that matters most: How fast the money must move. But the direction is set. Regulators have shown they will act, and the deployment question is the obvious next frontier. The only choice left for the industry is whether it shapes that standard or waits to have one imposed.

Bringing Light to DAFs

Here’s the opportunity: A single metric ranking system that brings sunlight to the DAF industry. The concept is up for grabs, free for any organization with the courage to implement it. Will a community foundation step up? A national research organization? A consortium of progressive DAF sponsors? The idea belongs to whoever seizes it first.

This pressure to deploy isn’t just about moving money—it’s about catalyzing the kind of innovative, high-risk investments that philanthropy was built for. Philanthropy’s real advantage isn’t scale; governments and markets dwarf it. It’s the tolerance for risk and failure. It can fund the unproven idea, the early idea, the bet no agency could defend on a ballot, and no seed investor could defend to her partners. That’s precisely the capacity that goes dormant when funding sits idle in donor-advised funds. Imagine DAF sponsors competing to fund pilot universal basic income programs that governments can scale or backing breakthrough clean energy technologies too early-stage for federal grants. Picture them seeding community-based mental health interventions that could reshape public health policy or testing new models of affordable housing that state agencies can adopt. This is what philanthropy should be doing—taking the smart risks that government can’t, proving what works, and creating templates for public policy. Not sitting on billions while waiting for regulation to force our hand.

One number. Published annually. No excuses. The time for action is now, before these resources become bones in an ancient riverbed—a monument to what could have been, while the world moves on without us.

In a classroom in Uganda, a teacher writes a short paragraph on the blackboard: Nagawa ali ku ssomero ne banne. Abaana babuuka omuguwa. Omuguwa gwe babuuka gukutuka. Abaana basigala mu nnaku. Translation: “Nagawa is at school with her classmates. The children skip rope. The rope breaks. The children feel sad.” The teacher reads it aloud. The students repeat it in chorus. Again. And again. Twenty-three times. By the end, most students can recite the passage perfectly, but none can actually read and comprehend it.

This is the tragedy of educational systems focused on rote instruction. Children who learn only how to repeat familiar passages are not equipped with the skills they need to decode new words or read with understanding. Yet this approach to teaching is dominant across many low- and middle-income countries, and it’s one of the reasons why a staggering 70 percent of children in these countries can’t read by age 10. In response, many governments and development partners in countries such as Uganda, Liberia, and India have introduced “structured pedagogy” programs, which feature carefully sequenced lesson plans; a strong focus on phonics; teaching at an appropriate pace for early learners; and teacher training and coaching. However, even in programs that incorporate these “ingredients,” classroom practice often looks no different.

This points to a deep challenge for education reform: not just knowing what works, but ensuring that the necessary conditions are in place for what works to take hold in practice. The design of educational programs and the systems in which teachers operate—specifically, what systems prioritize and reward—shapes what happens in the classroom. Without engaging with these underlying incentives, even the strongest interventions will struggle to change practice.

Why Ingredients Alone Are Insufficient

Although school systems can generally provide the components of structured pedagogy programs at low cost, how they come together—the “recipe” that makes them work—ultimately determines whether or not students truly learn.

In their book Building State Capability, Harvard researchers Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett, and Michael Woolcock categorize change processes according to the capabilities needed for implementation. They point out that some tasks, such as distributing vaccines or fertilizers, are largely logistical; they require many people, but each person performs a standardized action, and success is largely a matter of compliance. Shifting instruction through a structured pedagogy program, by contrast, falls into a category the researchers call “implementation-intensive service delivery.” These tasks also require many people, but each person acts autonomously, often in ways that go against behavioral norms and political pressure. Tasks like these also tend to be less successful than logistical tasks, and there are few examples of improvements sustained at scale.

It’s tempting to treat structured pedagogy as a logistical challenge—to assume that school systems and teachers who have the right ingredients can improve student learning across contexts. But successfully scaling up a structured pedagogy program requires that teachers fundamentally shift their behavior—their instructional practice—for many hours, every day. This often requires that they break away from approaches they experienced during their own education or have employed for many years, and adopt new ones.

Research tells us that changing the behavior of any group of people is difficult and that it generally happens only with strong intrinsic motivation. Teachers are no exception. They will make dramatic changes only if they are highly motivated to do so. And, tragically, most education systems don’t incentivize practices that improve learning.

Why Systems Fail to Promote Deep Learning

Learning improvement is common rhetoric within education systems, but it’s seldom the organizing principle for decision-making, promotions, or budgets. Senior officials tend to define success according to metrics that travel easily through budget hearings, such as the number of classrooms built, teachers recruited, or textbooks delivered.

Improving foundational learning—which includes literacy, numeracy, and core socio-emotional skills—is far more challenging. Better outcomes in reading comprehension or basic math are difficult to achieve, slow to materialize, and hard to attribute. Furthermore, evidence shows that many government leaders underestimate the learning crisis. In a survey by the Center for Global Development, for example, policy makers from 86 percent of low- and middle-income countries assumed children in their country were able to read better than they actually could.

Institutions that neither encourage nor incentivize effective instruction—even if they have the right components on paper—struggle to achieve meaningful changes in instructional practice. Treating low learning outcomes as a layered challenge of politics, culture, and behavior rather than a purely logistical delivery problem fundamentally changes what the recipe for success looks like across the system.

The Top Layer: Politics

One of the reasons governments and donors often assume that learning is taking place is because education’s purpose can seem self-evident. But most education systems in low- and middle-income countries fail to prioritize learning, focusing instead on goals such as access, process compliance, and patronage. As just one example, the majority of speakers at the Transforming Education Summit in 2022, a gathering of global education leaders in the wake of COVID-19, talked about edtech, employability, and inclusion, but very few spoke about improving learning—and when learning isn’t the primary measure of system success, it’s unlikely that it will shape decisions on budgets, policy, or implementation.

Encouragingly, several countries are building momentum around prioritizing foundational learning. South Korea, Vietnam, and Brazil are historical examples of countries that have aligned their education systems with the purpose of learning and have achieved dramatic improvements in learning outcomes as a result. More recently, in 2020, India made foundational learning the central goal of its education system, and there are already signs of success in improving learning outcomes. And, across Africa, initiatives such as the Foundational Learning Exchange, a high-level African conference focusing on foundational literacy and numeracy, and the Foundational Learning Initiative for Government-led Transformation, a government-to-government collaboration aiming to improve learning, are beginning to shift attention in a similar direction, with several countries stating that foundational learning will be a major policy priority.

The Middle Layer: Culture

Commitment from government teacher trainers, classroom supervisors, and advocates who can translate policy into a culture of effective instruction is another necessary part of the mix, even though building this cadre of “culture catalysts” from scratch is no easy task. Many people in these roles have never experienced high-quality instruction themselves, and must learn both new approaches to teaching and how to cultivate those practices with teachers.

Still, it’s possible, and Luminos Fund’s work in Ethiopia helps illustrate what can happen when it’s successful. Since 2022, the fund has worked with the Ethiopian government to design and scale structured pedagogy programs that improve foundational skills while also helping shift the culture of the system around the classroom through hands-on training and coaching with government-employed classroom supervisors. Recent focus group discussions with supervisors involved in the program revealed a cultural shift in how they approach their role; rather than treating supervision as a box-checking administrative exercise, they now see themselves as enablers of effective instruction. As one supervisor in Sidama explained, “Teachers now invite supervisors to observe their classes ... We work together like a family to support student learning.” A supervisor in Tigray remarked, “Before, my approach with teachers was more controlling ... Now I focus purely on supporting teachers, and our relationship has become more horizontal.”

These shifts have led to dramatic gains in learning outcomes. Luminos research showed that learners in the classrooms with structured pedagogy read four times as fast as those in the classrooms without it. And improved learning outcomes in turn increased the intrinsic motivation of supervisors and teachers.

This kind of change often requires a deliberate “show, share, shift” approach—showing what effective instruction looks like, sharing best practices through extensive and practical training, and ultimately shifting norms and incentives across the system. It’s a resource-intensive process, particularly in the early stages, as new behaviors and expectations take hold, but up-front investment to create a culture that values and prioritizes learning is essential to the future success of programs.

The Frontline Layer: Behavior

To move from rote instruction to approaches that build solid foundational skills, teachers themselves must undergo a profound behavioral shift.

The Delhi school system’s ambitious reform to improve foundational literacy illustrates both the challenge and the possibility. Teachers initially resisted it, seeing the new initiatives as administrative drudgery in an already over-burdened system. Deeply ingrained practices, such as a rigid focus on finishing the syllabus, reinforced a business-as-usual inertia that proved difficult to break. Gradually, however, as the system moved away from top-down monitoring and introduced mentor teachers to provide peer support and bridge the gap between policy and the classroom, progress emerged. With sustained support, some teachers recognized the need to understand the learning levels of students in their classroom and teach accordingly, rather than rushing to complete the curriculum.

This kind of change is both cognitively demanding and emotionally risky. The purpose and pressures of the education system in which teachers have built their professional identity deeply influences them. Abandoning the safety of the blackboard requires practice and significant support. Instructional change is ultimately a social process; teachers are more likely to adopt new practices when they see them working in neighboring classrooms and when a new set of professional norms reinforce those practices. When these conditions are in place, teachers move from being the friction in the system to being the drivers of its success.

The work to delineate the ingredients of effective instruction is vital, but governments, donors, and implementers must focus on the recipe that allows them to work in practice. The success of reform depends on what the educational system values and incentivizes. Only where learning outcomes become a shared objective, pursued at all levels—by the education minister, the supervisor, and the teacher—can effective instruction take root and bloom.

Governments and funders have invested heavily in evidence to guide public spending and policy decisions over the past two decades. Randomized controlled trials, evidence clearinghouses, and tiered standards promised a way to move beyond ideology and toward what works, particularly in systems under pressure to justify decisions and demonstrate accountability. In many ways, they delivered on that promise, introducing rigor, discipline, and a shared language for accountability into complex public systems.

Yet, despite this investment, outcomes have not improved at the scale many expected. Across workforce, education, health, and human services, governments continue to struggle to translate evidence into lasting improvements in people’s lives. This gap has prompted renewed debate about whether evidence-based policymaking has reached its limits—whether clearing higher bars of proof alone can meaningfully improve results at scale. From my work with state and local governments, the more difficult conclusion is that evidence has been asked to do work it was never designed to do.

What Paying for Outcomes Revealed

A reentry initiative at Rikers Island illustrates the gap between evidence and outcomes directly. New York City implemented a cognitive behavioral therapy program intended to reduce recidivism among young men. The intervention had a strong evidence base. The financing vehicle—the ABLE Social Impact Bond, the first of its kind in the United States—was structured so the city paid only if recidivism fell by 10 percent or more. The financing worked as designed. An independent evaluation found no impact.

What went wrong was not the evidence base but the circumstances in which the program was attempting to create these outcomes. Conditions inside the facility were not what the program required to succeed. Coordination between the city’s correction and social service agencies was fragmented. The way services were actually delivered to young men on Rikers did not match the conditions under which the program had originally been tested. Each of these failures was knowable, but the contract had no mechanism to surface or respond to them.

This pattern is not unique to one project. Across jurisdictions that have invested in outcomes-based contracting—structures in which payment depends on whether programs achieve predefined results—the same dynamic has played out. Governments can change how they pay for results or whether they fund evidence-based programs. That alone does not determine whether results are achieved. The problem runs deeper than any single contract or program structure.

The Limits of the Evidence Base

Evidence can identify interventions that have worked under specific conditions. But it does not account for whether those conditions exist in practice or whether systems are capable of creating them.

The scope of what is captured in the evidence base is narrower than policy designers often assume—and the consequences are significant. Researchers have documented for decades that rigorous evaluations of social programs almost always fail to find meaningful impacts. Of the 13 large randomized controlled trials the federal government has commissioned to evaluate major congressionally authorized programs, 11 found either no significant positive effects or effects that faded shortly after completion. The programs that do clear the bar for strong evidence represent a narrow slice of the decisions governments face every day—yet policy frameworks treat that bar as the organizing principle for how public dollars get spent.

In many areas, no well-established, evidence-based programs exist that match the needs of the population being served. In others, programs that have demonstrated impact in one setting have not produced the same results elsewhere. The Nurse-Family Partnership, for example, a nurse-led home-visiting program for first-time, low-income mothers, showed strong outcomes in its original trials, but community replication has consistently produced smaller effects. Researchers found that nurses in replication sites were not retaining families at the same rate as in controlled settings. Evidence generated in one context does not reliably predict results in another.

When evidence-based programming becomes the primary organizing principle for funding, systems tend to align around compliance with approved models. Funding flows toward programs that meet evidence thresholds. Frontline teams are expected to implement those programs with fidelity. Data is collected to document adherence. Evaluation is used to determine whether predefined outcomes were achieved.

The result is consistency in how programs are administered, but not necessarily improvement in outcomes. Without structured systems for continuous data collection and learning, teams have no clear way to respond if the promised outcomes stall. Data gets reviewed after the fact rather than during implementation. Staff may not have the authority to adjust course even when problems are visible. Differences across populations or settings are treated as deviations from a model rather than signals that something needs to change.

Where Policy Is Heading

Recent federal policy reflects a continued effort to strengthen evidence-based approaches. The Evidence–Based Grantmaking Act (H.R. 7025), introduced in January 2026, would require 15 federal agencies to prioritize grant awards for applicants using evidence-based practices, conduct periodic evaluations during grant terms, and make those results public. It also directs the Office of Management and Budget to define “evidence-based” within one year and requires agencies to operationalize that definition through rulemaking and public comment over the following year.

The intent is right. Public dollars should support strategies with demonstrated results, and the field has spent decades building the infrastructure to identify them.

But strengthening evidence standards is not the same as building systems that can act on them. The legislation clarifies what should be funded and how results should be reported. It does not establish what agencies and grantees are expected to do when outcomes do not improve under real conditions, which is, in fact, the central challenge the field is grappling with.

What It Means to Govern for Outcomes

A different approach is already taking shape in some places. In Lane County, Oregon, local leaders brought together probation, behavioral health, and community providers to address how people with severe mental illness move through the supervision system, as part of a HUD and DOJ-funded Pay for Success Permanent Supportive Housing Demonstration initiative. The county drew on the Housing First evidence base—a well-established model that prioritizes stable housing before addressing other barriers—but did not require fidelity to any single program model. The organizing question was not which program to implement but whether individuals were stabilizing and avoiding reentry into crisis.

To support that goal, partners made three structural changes. A dedicated parole officer was stationed on-site at the housing development, with a caseload capped at roughly 50 participants—replacing the standard model of monthly office check-ins. A unified system case plan was introduced across corrections, housing, and service partners, replacing siloed individual plans and ensuring everyone working with a participant was operating from the same priorities. And partners established monthly continuous improvement meetings where leaders reviewed a shared performance dashboard tracking housing stability and recidivism in real time, adjusting referral protocols and staffing when results diverged from expectations.

The results to date are significant. Of the 231 individuals placed in permanent supportive housing through the initiative, 87 percent have maintained stable housing. The recidivism rate for program participants—defined as reincarceration for a new felony—has fallen to 11 percent, compared to 26 percent for the high-risk reentry population in Lane County overall. For the first time, the county is seeing recidivism rates for individuals assessed as high-risk on par with lower-risk populations.

This approach places different demands on public systems. Access to outcomes-level data becomes essential. Staff need the ability to interpret that data and the authority to act on it. Coordination across agencies becomes central, not optional. Success is defined by whether outcomes improve, not whether program requirements are met.

Changing how government pays for results is not enough if the systems delivering those results are not built to learn and adapt. What’s required is the institutional capacity to learn whether programs are actually improving lives and to act on what they find. Without continuous learning built into how programs operate, even well-supported approaches will continue to fall short of their promise.

If federal policy continues to emphasize evidence, it can also clarify how systems are expected to respond when evidence does not translate into results. Agencies could require that grant applications specify how data will be used during implementation to adjust service delivery, not only at the end of a grant term. Evaluation could be structured to inform decisions while programs are operating. Guidance on evidence standards could address how systems should proceed in areas where evidence is limited or inconclusive. Without that clarity, agencies will continue to fund programs based on evidence thresholds without a shared expectation for how implementation should change when outcomes stall.

The question the Rikers experience surfaces is not whether evidence matters—it does. The question is whether our policy and systems architecture is built to use it in ways that actually improve lives. Outcomes depend on whether systems are structured to coordinate, to adapt, and to respond to what they are learning. Evidence-based programs can inform those efforts. They cannot substitute for them.

Development finance institutions (DFIs) and impact investors have long sought to create impact beyond the actual transactions they finance, and the idea that development finance should ultimately be judged by whether sustainable markets develop (rather than whether individual transactions succeed) is not new. IFC’s “Creating Markets” strategy was initially presented nearly a decade ago, as a then-distinctive approach to development finance.

There has, however, been an unmistakable and recent surge in the way these kinds of impacts are taking center stage in the sector. Neil Gregory’s ODI paper on new growth theories argues that DFIs should focus on potential spillover effects rather than direct impact, and recent CGD work by Sam Attridge and Mary Svenstrup on private capital mobilization reaches a similar conclusion (from a different direction), emphasizing that the central challenge is not a shortage of capital but the absence of investable opportunities, functioning local capital markets, and the institutions that connect the two.

It would not be too much to say that the sector, as a whole, has moved toward embracing this rhetoric. British International Investment’s newly released strategy is explicitly framed around “Building Markets,” FMO has been expanding its market creation program, initiatives such as the Private Infrastructure Development Group explicitly frame their work around market building, and networks such as the Catalytic Capital Consortium and the Growth Firms Alliance bring together foundations and investors around the idea that philanthropic and impact capital should be carefully deployed to address market-wide challenges.

All of this is a welcome development for the sector. Economic growth ultimately comes from functioning markets rather than isolated investments. Yet there is a substantial difference between adopting the language of market building and actually changing the nature of how investments are sourced, assessed, and measured. If institutions continue to operate with the same processes and incentives as before, market creation risks becoming old wine in a new bottle rather than a durable paradigm shift.

To ensure this shift becomes a new paradigm, rather than a passing fad, institutions have to change their core approaches and incentives rather than just their communications. To do so, DFIs should:

1. Put Market Effects at the Center of Impact Assessment

Most development finance institutions still evaluate investments primarily through direct effects, using metrics like direct jobs created, proportion of women employees, number of SME loans disbursed, and households reached. Even metrics that are more focused on outcomes rather than outputs, such as local income generated, are tethered directly to the actual investment. This preference is understandable: Direct effects are easier to observe and easier to attribute than indirect impacts, providing a high degree of confidence in the data.

However, the overwhelming share of long-run development impact is generated through the much messier indirect channel of market development beyond the deal’s direct “use of proceeds.” A bank that uses a line of credit to develop a new SME lending methodology or product may reach a few hundred or even thousand SMEs, but replication of the approach could reach an order of magnitude more businesses. The first equity fund in a market may make only a handful of impactful investments, but its viability and the local fund management talent incubated by the effort encourage the creation of future funds that will likely be larger. A successful investment in a pioneer firm bringing new technologies to a sector may generate direct new jobs, but the real impact will come with that firm anchoring a growing sector, birthing new competitors, spin-offs, and suppliers.

Nearly all DFI impact assessment frameworks have at least some incorporation of likely market impact. The IFC AIMM system, for example, is laudable for being particularly transparent about how they do this. But in general, market impact is one consideration of many and can get crowded out by an “everything bagel” of different, small-scale direct impacts.

To truly shift toward a market lens, these systems must consider market effects not only alongside but above direct impacts in both ex-ante assessments and in evaluating success. This probably means accepting an uncomfortably lower degree of measurement precision, and a move toward identifying and tracking credible—but less easily quantifiable—accounts of influence and replication.

2. Move Beyond ‘Additionality’ as the Sole Suitability Test

Additionality remains one of the most important concepts in development finance. Public and concessional capital should not displace commercial investors, and additionality tests play a critical role in avoiding crowding out private capital.

However, if market creation is the goal, then additionality is not enough to justify an investment. A transaction that fills a legitimate but company-specific financing gap for one enterprise and a transaction that establishes replicable financing structures or supports first entrants into new sectors all satisfy traditional additionality tests.

The implications for market development for these transactions, though, are dramatically different: The relevant question is not only whether the necessary capital is available, but rather whether a given investment has the possibility of changing the conditions that made capital unavailable in the first place.

A recent SSIR article by Harvey Koh and Ben Smith on addressing liquidity constraints in impact investing illustrates some ways that market creation can look in practice. Secondary funds, listed vehicles, and public market pathway creation all represent investments that not only have narrow additionality but also build infrastructure and demonstrate approaches that can make a whole financial system work more effectively. Other market creation pathways that go beyond additionality include combining investment capital with deep institutional capacity-building that will endure long beyond the life of the investment, doing the messy policy and legal work to launch a first-of-its-kind locally domiciled fund, designing aggregation vehicles to solve ticket-size mismatches for institutional investment, and incorporating technical assistance in a way that gradually but deliberately moves toward reduced donor subsidy.

3. Acknowledge Trade-Offs

A few years ago, I was at an impact investing conference during which a prominent industry leader stated conclusively that “there is no trade-off between impact and returns.”

This is not true. Investors can indeed achieve both positive financial and impact returns, of course. But this does not mean there are no trade-offs. Pretending these trade-offs do not exist at all would prove disastrous for generating market-level impact.

Market creation involves bearing significant risks, and adjusting return expectations accordingly, in the service of potential outsized indirect impacts. It may require supporting first movers in unfamiliar sectors, financing intermediaries or products with limited track records, investing in fragile markets, dealing with unclear policy environments, or accepting long periods before commercial viability becomes evident. Critically, some of the benefits generated by these investments will accrue to future investors and future firms rather than being captured by the participants in the initial transaction.

If market creation is a serious institutional objective, organizations will need to become more comfortable discussing these trade-offs openly. If they do not, they risk a reversion to investments that satisfy financial return expectations, while generating only limited spillover and market-level impact.

4. Treat Mobilization as a Process Rather Than a Ratio

Capital mobilization has become a central objective across the development finance community, and featured heavily at this year’s World Bank Group Spring Meetings. Unfortunately, this concept is generally translated into transaction-level leverage targets that measure how much private capital accompanies a specific investment. This metric is useful, but from a market-building perspective it misses the forest for the trees.

Market development involves many transactions over a long period of time. Pioneering catalytic investors may never co-invest with (and therefore never technically “mobilize”) the commercial capital providers that come into a much more mature market many years later. But although these later investors are by definition not visible during structuring or even the life of the initial catalytic transactions, they are much more important indicators of market building than the leverage ratios in the pioneering capital stacks.

5. Deepen Partnerships Across Capital Sources

Market creation is inherently a collective endeavor. It requires a combination of capital, policy reform, technical expertise, institutional capacity building, and market coordination that no single institution type, much less single institution, can provide on its own. DFIs and other concessional investors should prioritize considering their role within a broader ecosystem that includes donors, foundations, policy makers, advisory organizations, and commercial investors. The objective should be to combine the distinct capabilities of different actors to address market-level constraints. In practice, this could mean expanding investment activity in a market where donors and local government have effective enterprise capacity-building programs, providing liquidity to secondary funds operating within regulatory frameworks shaped by foundation-supported policy work, or offering guarantees to banks receiving donor-funded technical assistance. While many DFIs have advisory and technical assistance capabilities, they are often modest relative to those of the broader development ecosystem. A market-building approach requires greater coordination with these actors rather than attempting to replicate their functions internally.

More Than Words

The growing embrace of market creation by DFIs, impact investors, and foundations should be welcomed. But whether this becomes a genuine shift in practice will depend less on strategy documents than on the incentives, metrics, and investment processes that institutions use every day, and organizations that succeed will need to be clear-eyed and focused on what’s needed to move from words to actions.

This article is adapted from the full-length essay “Slow Philanthropy: Why giving by the ultra-wealthy often lags behind their ambitions—and what could help move money faster,” published at Bridgespan.org.

One of the most striking stories of this era is the massive accumulation of wealth among the very few. The wealth held by the richest 0.1 percent of Americans now exceeds the GDP of every country in the world except two (China and the United States). And that is before the anticipated wave of wealth as AI companies go public. Meanwhile, about half of the nation’s roughly one thousand billionaires are 70 or older, so a great deal of money will soon flow somewhere. Understandably, this newest gilded age has inspired a lot of writing about what it means for philanthropy and society, and what can be done with all that wealth.

Yet one topic has received far less attention: why the philanthropic giving of so many ultra-wealthy people lags far behind the aspirations they express. I call this pattern “slow philanthropy.”

When you look at what the wealthiest American families give each year, the number is relatively low and strikingly stable. The Bridgespan Group’s research found that families with more than $500 million in assets gave about 1.2 percent of those assets in 2017. When we ran the same analysis for 2023, the figure was essentially unchanged, even as those assets compounded at rates at or above the S&P 500’s long-run average of roughly 9 percent. In absolute dollars, giving rose. As a share of wealth, it stood still.

Philanthropy has been a focus of Bridgespan’s work since our founding 25 years ago (half of our advisory work is with nonprofits and half with funders). Over the past few years, when people have asked me about our strategy as it relates to philanthropy, I invariably conclude with some version of: “When you step back, the meta-question we are always grappling with is: How do you help and motivate philanthropists to give more?” When my conversation partner inevitably asks for the answer, I offer a word salad sprinkled with (I hope) a few interesting observations and end by saying, “I’m humbled by how hard it is to change giving patterns in philanthropy.”

Until we better understand what is holding philanthropy back—what truly keeps capital from moving at greater scale and greater speed—we won’t make meaningful progress in helping people bring their giving more fully in line with their highest aspirations. This gap between aspiration and action is consequential not only for philanthropy but also, most importantly, for the people and organizations whose work strengthens our human and natural communities, expands opportunity, and improves lives.

What Adds Friction to Philanthropy?

After reading a detailed Bridgespan article on barriers to greater giving, a thoughtful observer complimented my colleagues and then wondered whether we were making the issue too complicated: “If a billionaire gives away a lot of money, they will no longer be a billionaire. And all things being equal, they’d rather be a billionaire than not.”

Yet speaking privately with ultra-wealthy individuals about their giving or reading the letters Giving Pledgers write announcing their philanthropic intentions, many appear deeply committed to those aspirations. The large gap between aspiration and action suggests something more complicated is at work.

Some of the friction comes from the external conditions around them. For instance, in its effort to “solve problems,” philanthropy has overpromised and underdelivered—breeding disillusionment in the quest for “transformative impact” or “population-level change.” Afterall, the kinds of change such ambitions seek often unfolds across generations, not a single lifetime. Philanthropy also now operates under far greater public scrutiny, with more people subscribing to Stanford scholar Rob Reich’s observation that “Big philanthropy is an exercise of power and in a democracy, power deserves scrutiny not just gratitude.” At the same time, a booming wealth-management industry designed primarily to preserve and grow fortunes, not give them away, can slow philanthropy, too. Add in a pervasive sense of precarity that’s felt, improbably, even by billionaires, and the result is a climate that encourages caution rather than bold giving.

But the more revealing frictions are often internal. Looking more closely at how donors make decisions, four recurring patterns emerge. First, failure feels worse in philanthropy; while a for-profit investor might celebrate a portfolio of ten investments that had two “home runs,” five average performers, and three underperformers, donors rarely think about their philanthropy this way. Second, concerns about inefficiency and waste take on outsized importance, reinforcing habits such as low overhead expectations and onerous grant terms (despite mountains of evidence challenging those practices) that create a self-fulfilling cycle and narrows the set of organizations deemed “fundable.” Third, decision rights also prove surprisingly hard to let go of. It is not uncommon for major donors (even those with professional staff) to insist on approving every grant. Yet for most philanthropists, philanthropy is a part-time activity, and there is no realistic way to give money away thoughtfully and at scale without delegating (unless giving massive gifts, which are uncommon). Finally, many donors underestimate nonprofits’ ability to productively absorb substantial philanthropic capital, even though recent experience and evidence—exemplified by MacKenzie Scott and Ballmer Group—suggest otherwise.

Cumulatively these frictions, whatever their source, produce a powerful default behavior: delay. Every nonprofit seeking support from a philanthropist is not just competing with other nonprofits, but with a donor’s option to leave the money in the bank—and maybe give later. In the absence of a forcing function, delay is costless to the donor and easy to rationalize. I’ve been in more than one conversation with donors over 75 years old who assert they are going to give most or all their money away but have no plan for doing so. Delay is a feature, not a bug, of contemporary philanthropy.

Where Do We See Philanthropic Capital Flow

To understand what might ease those frictions, it is useful to look at where giving has flowed more freely. Over the past two decades, three areas stand out: bequests, donor-advised funds, and the Founders Pledge.

Bequests

According to recent Giving USA data, charitable bequests reached a record $62 billion in 2025, growing nearly 20 percent and substantially outpacing growth in giving by living donors. Federal tax data indicate that among estates worth $50 million or more, charitable giving has hovered around 20 percent of gross estate value in recent years. Because only about half of estates in that category report charitable bequests, the implied average among those who do give is roughly 40 percent of wealth directed to charity.

Bequests sidestep many of the internal frictions that slow philanthropy. While living, donors often construct elaborate processes and controls around their philanthropy, seeking clarity, confidence, and reassurance about how their money will be used. By contrast, charitable bequests are typically made with remarkably little direction beyond the named organization or the individuals designated to make decisions. As one ultra-wealthy individual explained only partially in jest, “I’ll be gone. I won’t be around to see what happens!”

Donor-Advised Funds

While donor-advised funds (DAFs) date back nearly a century, their rapid expansion over the past 50 years has made them one of the most significant innovations in modern philanthropy. As of 2024, DAFs held roughly $325 billion according to the DAF Research Collaborative and continue to grow faster than any other philanthropic vehicle.

What most distinguishes DAFs is that they allow donors to receive an immediate tax benefit while deferring decisions about where the funds will ultimately go. This feature has faced sharp criticism, with people calling it the “warehousing of wealth” and often suggesting that DAFs ought to at least be subject to a 5 percent payout rate like private foundations.

Yet in practice, DAF sponsors on average distribute funds at rates that compare favorably to those of private foundations. By one common measure—annual grants as a share of prior-year assets—DAFs have payout rates of roughly 25 percent, compared to approximately 7 percent for private foundations. The comparison is imperfect, however, as the average payout rate masks variations in individual accounts, some of which distribute funds quickly and others which more slowly; this and other variables make it difficult to see the flows into DAF accounts and from them into the sector. In any case, DAFs represent a significant and growing source of funds for nonprofits.

While the tax benefit is clearly attractive (and costly to the US Treasury), another feature may account for much of DAFs’ growth: They allow donors to make a binding commitment even if they have not yet determined how or when the funds will be used. It is, in effect, delay with purpose.

Some critics argue that, absent DAFs, this money would otherwise flow directly to nonprofits. Given the complexities and frictions surrounding giving, however, a more likely outcome is that much of it would simply remain in private bank accounts.

Founders Pledge

In 2015, Founders Forum (a global community supporting entrepreneurs) launched Founders Pledge, through which founders commit a minimum of 5 percent of the equity in their early-stage companies to charity. The pledge is typically structured as a transfer of stock into a DAF, from which the donor can later make gifts, assuming the company is successful. Founders Pledge reports that over 2,200 founders have made this commitment, with the value of pledged assets exceeding $12.9 billion, and more than $1.7 billion already flowing into the nonprofit sector.

Like DAFs, Founders Pledge creates a philanthropic commitment before donors must decide exactly where the money will go. It also leverages a simple but powerful proposition: It is easier to give away money one doesn’t yet have.

The Power of a Two-Step Giving Process

All three of these pathways separate two distinct steps in the giving process: making a binding commitment to philanthropy and deciding where the money will ultimately go. It is in that second step—as it has come to be understood and enacted over the past several decades—that the flow of capital slows.

It is worth noting that this kind of two-step process is not new. Early in the 20th century, the founding of community foundations and community chests (later evolving into the United Way) institutionalized similar structures. Today’s examples vary in how they handle the second step. With bequests, donors effectively cede control over allocation only after death. With DAFs and Founders Pledge, they retain authority over the second step.

What all three approaches share is that they make the act of commitment relatively simple while deferring or reshaping the demands of allocation. By separating these two decisions, they lower the hurdle to acting on a philanthropic impulse. The relative simplicity and ease with which donors take the first, irrevocable step may offer one of the clearest insights into what it will take to unlock much greater giving from the ultra-wealthy.

Getting Money Moving Faster

There is not an easy “how-to” guide to accelerate the flow of philanthropy. That said, there are glimmers of possibility—emerging ideas, practices, and developments that may help or point toward new ways of thinking about the challenge.

One place to start is where donors are already taking that first, irrevocable step. We might make those pathways work even better. A simple way to accelerate money flowing into the sector would be to add payout requirements to DAFs (recognizing that there is a debate about how that would affect the use of DAFs.) There are several efforts of this sort being pursued, although they are at the early stages of getting traction.

For bequests, we could make efforts to expand their charitable reach. Today, most charitable bequest dollars either endow private foundations or flow to elite higher education, health, and culture institutions. But what if charitable bequests to a broader range of nonprofits were made easier? Bridgespan research suggests that significantly more giving could be unlocked if an institution were built specifically to facilitate bequest giving to a broader range of issues.

Another opportunity is to make the allocation decision itself easier. Over the past decade, a wave of collaborative funds and new giving platforms have emerged as a meaningful part of the philanthropic landscape. Audacious Project, Blue Meridian Partners, Coefficient Giving, Climate Lead, ICONIQ Impact, Lever for Change, and Renaissance Philanthropy, among many other new players, offer donors an easy way to access expertise and vetted deal flow. These new institutions meet a growing desire of philanthropists to have lean teams and tap into outside institutions for help. Investments in these kinds of institutions may help donors move more money, more quickly.

Even with these kinds of changes, philanthropy in America is a voluntary act. Since mindsets profoundly shape how people act, getting philanthropy to move faster may also require the less straightforward work of shifting norms. (See also an excellent report by National Center for Family Philanthropy and Ideas42 on this topic.) I think of this as restoring the luster of charitable giving.

For instance, what if alongside systems-change strategies, that can be complex and move slowly, we reinvigorate “big charity”: large-scale gifts with direct impact. Scholarship programs, medical debt relief, direct cash transfers, and land conservation often find themselves overlooked because they are not seen as “strategic” or as “solving” the problem—but should they be? In late 2025, several major philanthropic commitments of this type were announced: Michael and Susan Dell donating $6.25 billion to investment accounts for 25 million U.S. children, Ray and Barbara Dalio doing the same for all children in Connecticut, and the Ballmer Group committing $1.7 billion to fund an additional 10,000 slots for early education in Washington State.

Another opportunity is to reacquaint donors with “the gift.” The gift offers a different orientation—one that emphasizes generosity, mutual aid, community, relationships, and moral obligation rather than optimization and ROI. Religious and Indigenous traditions across cultures and centuries are full of stories that center gift-giving, and anthropologists have shown how gift exchange can form the basis of an economy and serve as the fabric of society. Over the past few years, Jason Lewis has written about philanthropy as a “gift” versus a strategic investment. It is worth noting that the most generous individual philanthropist of this century, MacKenzie Scott, refers to her philanthropy as “gifts.”

A third might simply be defining “enough.” At its core, the concept involves clarifying how much wealth people believe they truly need, so then the rest becomes easier to give away. It is an old idea. Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth argued that surplus fortunes carried moral obligations to society. But in a moment of unprecedented wealth concentration, the idea of defining “enough” may find greater resonance than it has in the past.

There are surely other ideas than those offered here. And bigger questions that need to be asked about the implications of the concentration of wealth in society. Of course, none of this is simple. My hope is that by better understanding what slows philanthropy, we can fan the flames of even more experimentation with how to help ultra-wealthy people give at greater scale and with greater speed.

Many nonprofits are data-rich but insight-poor. That means they collect vast amounts of information—for compliance, in CRM systems, health records, or program logs—but lack the internal capability to turn that data into a road map for their mission.

In the social sector, the dominant conversation is funding, but funding alone will not fix an analytics problem. A nonprofit that gets money but doesn’t know how to look at its own data creates a “leaky bucket” effect: No matter how much money pours in, the impact leaks out because the organization is not learning or improving.

Boards and funders need to treat data analytics as essential infrastructure rather than a “check-the-box” reporting task. Building your own data skills can be more a powerful organizational investment than simply raising more money. Most nonprofits already collect more information than they use, but without analyzing it, they repeat the same operational mistakes year after year, turning dormant data into active learning. It also helps organizations tell more credible stories and marshal better evidence of impact. Finally, reducing dependency on outside experts keeps analytic capability in the organization long after any one grant cycle ends.

Diagnosing the ‘Leaking Funnel’

For example, take Hegira Health, a large community-based behavioral health provider in Michigan operating a co-response program with law enforcement. When our collaboration began, data was being diligently locked in raw Excel files. On paper, the program appeared to be a soaring success: Referrals were increasing by 35 percent annually. Yet leadership sensed the program was not reaching its full impact.

By applying a structured diagnostic to their raw referral logs, we visualized their program as a Referral Funnel, which was an immediate revelation for the board. The data, as we framed it, showed a high follow-up rate (76 percent), which showed that staff was working diligently to make contact. However, the engagement rate dropped to 42 percent. This 34-point gap was the leak: For every 100 people contacted, 58 individuals never became active participants.

This analysis made the conversion bottleneck visible, allowing the team to ask targeted questions about intake timing, communication methods, and process friction. It illustrates how headline growth metrics, like a 35 percent increase in referrals, can actually obscure operational weaknesses. By translating raw data into a structured strategy, Hegira Health moved from reactive reporting to proactive intervention, ensuring that more individuals in crisis received the care they were promised.

Data as a Sustainability Engine

Enterprise for Youth, a San Francisco-based organization providing internships to under-resourced youth, faced a paradox: record-breaking revenue but fluctuating donor counts. A donor segmentation analysis uncovered what I call the “Recruitment Treadmill”: Only 30–40 percent of donors each year were retained, meaning the organization had to work twice as hard to recruit new donors just to keep the total count stable.

Mapping the last year of giving across the organization’s entire history uncovered a list of ~9K lapsed donors who had not been engaged since 2020, all former supporters whose relationship with the organization had simply vanished. The data made clear that re-engaging even a small fraction of these existing donors would be far less costly than recruiting new ones from scratch. It also raised a more important question: Why had these donors stopped giving in the first place? That question, which the organization had never systematically asked before, became the foundation of a new stewardship strategy focused on relationships rather than acquisition.

In this way, headline metrics can actually mask retention fragility; investment in analytic capability may yield greater sustainability than continued marketing spend.

When Growth Misleads

A youth mental health technology app, AHADI, developed by an East African nonprofit TAHMEF, collected extensive data on downloads, active users, social media engagement, but lacked a system to analyze these metrics.

When we organized their dataset into a unified tracking framework, the gap between appearances and reality became clear. Monthly downloads had exploded from 2,000 in January to over 101,000 by June. However, the retention rate hovered between just 1 and 6 percent, meaning fewer than two of every 100 June downloaders remained active the following month. Without this analysis, the organization would have reported “100,000 downloads” as a headline success. Layering social media data against app usage revealed the same pattern: Instagram engagement looked strong on individual posts, yet follower counts stayed flat, and helpline conversations peaked at just 23. This was a clear sign that downloads were not translating into real support. The analysis gave leadership an honest picture to share with international funders, replacing an impressive-sounding headline with a meaningful story about where the app was falling short.

This case underscores the danger of equating reach with impact. It serves as a reminder that in the digital health space, a download is merely an invitation; true impact is measured not by how many people enter the room, but by how many find the value to stay.

Building a Data System

The pattern across all three case studies follows the same four steps:

1. Consolidation: Nonprofits rarely lack data, but they lack organized data. The first step is pulling information from scattered spreadsheets, CRM systems, and program logs into a single, clean source.
2. Automated Cleaning: Logic needs to be built directly into the workbook so errors surface immediately as new records are entered.
3. The Three-KPI Rule: Many groups try to track too many metrics, which causes confusion. Instead, they should pick the three most important numbers that help them make decisions every week.
4. Actionable Visuals: Translating those KPIs into visuals that update automatically and that a board member can interpret instantly.

What Funders and Boards Must Do Differently

Nonprofits cannot close the data-utilization gap alone. Funders decide what gets resourced. Boards decide what gets governed. If neither group treats analytics as a basic expectation, it will remain an afterthought regardless of how motivated the staff may be.

1. Treat Analytics as Infrastructure

Do not think of data tools as an extra cost to minimize, but as part of the building. A dashboard that updates itself, a clean list of donors, and a trained staff member should be things that funders want to pay for. Spending $15,000 to help a group understand their data can make a $150,000 program work much better.

For example, the Waterford Community Coalition, a youth-serving nonprofit in Michigan, invested approximately 20 hours in building a structured performance dashboard. The project was valued at $4,324 in pro bono analytics support. The result was not just improved visuals, but year-over-year comparisons that allowed leadership to see trends more clearly and communicate performance more effectively to stakeholders.

The scale of the investment was modest. The shift in visibility was meaningful. Relatively small investments in internal data structure, whether through grant dollars or supported pro bono work, can materially strengthen an organization’s ability to interpret and communicate its impact.

2. New Due Diligence

When funders only look at audited financials and a logic model—necessary but inadequate—they should also assess whether the organization has the capacity to learn from its own operations.

Three questions can quickly answer the question:

1. What are your three governing KPIs, and who owns them? If leadership cannot answer this clearly, performance is likely to be tracked reactively rather than strategically.
2. When did your data last cause you to change a program decision? If the answer is vague, analytics may exist only for reporting—not for management.
3. If a consultant built your reporting system, can your staff maintain it without them? If not, the organization does not have internal capability—it has a dependency.

These questions shift the conversation from how much you spend to how much you understand, signaling to leaders that learning capacity is just as valuable as fundraising growth.

The Ability to See Clearly

Where data exists but it is not systematically translated into insight, neither advanced software nor specialized data science teams is required. What is required is leadership’s commitment to defining a small set of governing metrics, reviewing them consistently, and building internal ownership over time. Organizations that endure and improve are those that can answer, at any given moment: Are we reaching the intended population? Are participants or donors staying engaged? If not, where precisely is the breakdown occurring?

Treating analytics as governance discipline rather than as a reporting exercise may be one of the highest-leverage shifts available to boards and funders seeking durable impact.

This is a letter from an SSIR reader in response to our most recent cover essay. Do you have a response to an article published in the magazine or online? Add your comment here on SSIR.org, or send us a note at editor@ssir.org.

To the Editor:

I was interested to read “Why Don’t Philanthropists Build Anymore” in the Summer 2026 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review. I applaud Sarah Cone for raising this important question, but I’d like to offer a different perspective.

I will paraphrase the essay’s thesis as follows: The world would be a better place if today’s billionaires would apply their brilliance to building new civic institutions, as their Gilded Age forebears did.

I respectfully disagree.

First, the Gilded Age robber barons who founded hospitals, libraries, universities, research institutes, museums, and foundations did so at a time when the United States was still shedding its former identity as a largely agrarian society with an inferiority complex. In the 19th century, the advent of railroads, steel, and massive immigration necessitated new institutions to serve and educate a growing population while proving that this upstart nation could compete with Europe in terms of cultural sophistication and scientific acumen. In the 21st century, those institutions are plentiful—more plentiful than the philanthropic dollars they are continuously chasing.

Second, it simply isn’t true that today’s billionaires don’t found institutions. Eli Broad, George Lucas, and Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales all founded new museums housing their own collections. And many of the country’s largest foundations were founded in the last few decades, such as The Gates Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation, Good Ventures, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the Bloomberg Family Foundation, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation/Arnold Ventures, and the JPB Foundation.

Third, neither the super-wealthy magnates of old nor those of today have shown much interest in solving the fundamental inequities and shortcomings of society. The essay argues that “the Gilded Age philanthropists … built new structures from the ground up when they identified a gap. Today, the gaps are not hard to find. Many areas of civic life are failing and would benefit from new, purpose built institutions.” These gaps were enumerated elsewhere in the essay: prisoner recidivism, lack of proper psychiatric care, persistent drug addiction, homelessness, public defender shortages, and shortcomings in childcare programs, elementary-school education programs, workforce-training programs, special education programs, etc. I don’t believe the problem is that contemporary billionaires are trying to solve these problems the wrong way. The evidence makes it pretty clear that, with a very few exceptions, they are not trying to solve them in any way. The philanthropic interests of today’s billionaires, when those interests exist at all, tend to focus on diseases that have impacted their own families or their personal or business enthusiasms.

But the statement I’d most like to push back on is this: “the philanthropic class largely writes checks to floundering institutions, offering money where institutional imagination is needed.”

I must object to three assumptions implicit in that statement: 1) the nonprofit organizations that are addressing these important issues are floundering; 2) they are floundering not because they are underfunded, but because they lack “institutional imagination”; and 3) that the world would be a better place if these floundering institutions were replaced by new institutions conceived by today’s tech and finance billionaires.

Let’s address each assumption in turn.

First, by and large, the large nonprofits addressing these issues are not floundering (or foundering)—they are, often, doing extraordinary work with limited resources. Examples abound: Community Solutions (Built for Zero), The Last Mile, FreeWorld, Center for Employment Opportunities, Frontline Justice, Scale Justice, Partners for Justice, Gideon’s Promise, American Journalism Project, Report for America, The Marshall Project, Nurse-Family Partnership, and Fountain House, to name just a few.

Second, it is unfair to imply that these organizations are struggling because they lack imagination. The professionals and volunteers of these organizations work week by week, month by month, year by year, to address the very social ills mentioned in the article, and often do so with inspiring effectiveness and creativity, despite limited funds and the dismissive attitude of too many observers. The fact that the leaders of these organizations have not accumulated the wealth of the billionaires listed in this article is not a result of an absence of ability, but rather a presence of values that guide them to apply their ability to civic concerns rather than the accumulation of private wealth.

Third, I am especially uncomfortable with the suggestion that for-profit billionaires are better suited to found and run mission-driven civic organizations than the nonprofit leaders currently doing so. Counterexamples are numerous:

• Bill Gates, having built one of history’s greatest technology companies, apparently assumed that the talent that enabled him to triumph in the technology industry would enable him to pioneer innovative solutions to the shortcomings in secondary education. First, he launched a new small-schools initiative, which struggled for a decade before he abandoned it. Then he launched an Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new evaluation methods which did not, as hoped, significantly affect student achievement, graduation rates, or teacher effectiveness or retention.
• Mark Zuckerberg similarly assumed he could mastermind a transformation of American schools, starting with a test case in Newark, New Jersey. As documented in Dale Russakoff’s book The Prize, this hubristic plan went badly wrong because it prioritized the assumptions of wealthy tech elites and politicians over the actual needs and voices of the Newark community.
• As mentioned in the essay: Palmer Luckey (Oculus, Anduril Industries), “spent time developing a concept that, had he pursued it, would have been among the most genuinely Carnegian philanthropic acts of the 21st century: a nonprofit private-prison chain designed to be paid only when its former inmates stayed out of prison after release … Luckey ultimately abandoned the project … and went on to build a defense-technology company now valued at tens of billions of dollars.” We are told in the article that he abandoned the project because it would have involved too much lobbying. Such is life on the mission-driven side of the tracks.

Why do billionaires so often fail in these self-styled ventures?

Of course, I don’t know for sure. But I can offer a few educated guesses.

First, because building impactful mission-driven institutions is hard. Not, I assume, harder than building enormously profitable technology companies. But hard in a different way. Michael Jordan was a world-famous athlete, but he couldn’t hit a curve ball as well as countless less-famous baseball players. Different situations call for different skills.

Second, based on what I can see from the metaphorical bleachers, building a massive company means you usually get to focus on the markets, products, services, and processes that will best enable you to reach your goals, and dispense with those that slow you down. Building a civic institution usually means redoubling your efforts when constituencies and circumstances prove especially problematic. Entrepreneurs accustomed to top-down decision-making and the white-knuckle thrill of watching investments turn into robust returns are bound to lose interest when change is slow, and challenges persist.

The bottom line is this: I believe Sarah Cone and I, and most readers of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, will agree that in a world where scarcity is the norm, there is no shortage of at least two things: urgently important civic needs and individuals with overwhelming fortunes. May the latter be inspired to channel their wealth in service of the former. I’d ask only that they learn from and support the brilliant professionals who have already shown what they can do when given the necessary resources.

It was the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, a massive global summit to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit and envision “the future we want,” as the tagline went. Thousands of people from all over the world gathered in Rio de Janeiro. In a ballroom, philanthropists, UN leaders, rock stars, and the entire staff of Virgin Unite were listening to Richard Branson speak. But off to the side, Henry Timms, then executive director of the 92Y, and Aaron Sherinian, Chief Communications and Marketing Officer for the UN Foundation, were conspiring to create a day in which people could celebrate giving. They beckoned Susan McPherson, then vice president at the communications agency Fenton, over to help. While in the background, people were applauding and clinking drinks, the three were drawing on a napkin, envisioning a counterbalance to the consumerism of Black Friday. Five months later, Giving Tuesday was born, with one key goal: as McPherson described it to us, “to celebrate all those who give, volunteer, and care, especially at a time of the year when so much focus is on purchasing.” Since 2012, it has grown into a movement in nearly 100 countries that each year catalyzes billions of dollars to worthy causes, most of it in places its founders will never visit. “None of us could imagine how much it would grow all these years later,” McPherson reminisced.

They had no idea that scribbled on that napkin was a blueprint for change that would endure. But they could have bet on it.

How do you know whether what you fund will outlast you?

That question has been hanging over the field. In SSIR, Sarah Cone recently argued that too much of today’s philanthropy moves money around without building anything that lasts—that what is missing is not longevity so much as institutional form equal to the time horizon of the problem. She is right about the diagnosis. Roman aqueducts still carry water, medieval universities still produce scholarship, and Carnegie’s libraries still lend books—because they were built with endurance in mind. These examples are powerful. But they can also narrow our imagination about what durable impact looks like.

The larger picture is more hopeful than it first appears. Field-shaping philanthropy today often looks different than the brick and marble archetypes sculpted for us more than a century ago. Many of today’s field-building donors came of age in a world shaped by markets, networks, and technology. Their giving reflects that, and manifests in different forms, as a standard, a market, a movement, a public institution, or a shared backbone organization for a field. Those choices can make it (literally) harder to see the impact of their giving. Still, when these efforts are designed well, they endure for the same basic reason Carnegie’s libraries did: The gift creates something others are ready and able to sustain.

Through our social-impact advisory firm, the Starfish Institute, we worked with a large philanthropy to design an intentional approach to sunsetting that would shift them from strategic philanthropy to legacy-level investments with enduring impact. To ground that work, we studied dozens of examples of enduring philanthropic impact and distilled five dimensions—and five corresponding questions to ask about any prospective gift, investment, or strategy—that surfaced across the most enduring ones.

Durability: Will It Last?

We began where Cone also starts, with Andrew Carnegie’s libraries. Between 1883 and 1929, Carnegie funded the construction of more than 2,500 public libraries, reaching nearly every state and more than a dozen countries beyond. Many still stand, and more than a century later most still lend books, host community rooms, and anchor the civic life of the towns around them. (Talia’s local library in Brooklyn, N.Y., is a Carnegie library, and its shelves have served up inspiration in the form of books for her three daughters since they could chew on the pages of an illustrated board book.)

Their durability wasn’t luck, and it wasn’t sturdy masonry. It was written into the terms of the gift. Carnegie paid only for the building, and only if the town first supplied the site and committed, in writing, to fund the library’s operations, staff, and upkeep in perpetuity—with annual public support of at least one tenth of his original grant and free access for all. In California alone, 122 localities took that bargain. The effect was to turn a one-time private gift into permanent public infrastructure: From the day it opened, a Carnegie library was owned and sustained by the public that used it, not by Carnegie. He built a system, not a set of programs, and designed it, from the start, to outlast him. Because the libraries were to be sustained entirely by public funding and local governance, they were also a model of the second quality of enduring philanthropy: They were designed for independence.

Independence: Can It Stand Without You?

In 2000, an early commitment from the Gates Foundation seeded Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which was created to take on the challenge of getting the world’s poorest countries reliable access to life-saving vaccines. From the outset, Gavi was built not as a program a foundation would run but as a shared system that governments, vaccine manufacturers, multilateral agencies, and civil society would co-own. Rather than buy and deliver vaccines itself, it built the machinery beneath them, such as pooled procurement that drove prices down, shared data and technical infrastructure, and co-financing agreements that required recipient countries to pay a rising share of vaccine costs over time, eventually graduating off Gavi support entirely as their economies grew.

That co-financing rule was the mechanism that gave Gavi the independence necessary to endure. It was designed to phase the original funder out and transfer funding to permanent owners over time, and it has. Since the policy began in 2008, recipient countries have put in more than $1.9 billion of their own funds; 55 vaccine programs first introduced with Gavi money are now financed entirely by the countries themselves. Along the way, Gavi has helped immunize more than 1.2 billion children.

While this engineered independence makes Gavi stand out as an example, its initial gift was also catalytic, helping spark additional follow-on funding and actions—which is another quality that emerges clearly across other examples of philanthropy with enduring impact.

Catalytic: Does It Spark More Than It Spends?

When the $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition launched in 2021, funded by the Musk Foundation, carbon dioxide removal was still treated by many people as speculative or dismissed as “greenwashing.”

Over four years, the competition convened a global ecosystem of innovators, researchers, students, and investors, helping shape the next generation of carbon removal technologies and catalyzing rapid industry growth at a critical moment for climate action. Of the 1,300+ teams of innovators from 88 countries that came into being as a result of the prize, more than half were formed after the prize was announced and might never have worked on carbon removal without the public challenge the prize created. The prize helped legitimize the industry and brought disparate organizations working on disparate facets of the problem together, helping them see themselves as part of a broader field.

The prize also provided a framework for evaluation across a diverse range of solutions. To win, a team had to remove at least 1,000 metric tons of CO2 in a year and prove it to independent verifiers.

That is the catalytic power of a well-designed prize. A fixed pool of philanthropic money can summon far more talent, capital, and institutional attention than it could fund directly. By XPRIZE's post-prize accounting, the $100 million purse helped unlock more than $3.3 billion for carbon removal and removed hundreds of thousands of metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. The 2025 grand-prize winner, Mati Carbon, is now scaling enhanced rock weathering across farms in India and Africa.

The prize money was only a fraction of the activity it set in motion, yet it effectively catalyzed a whole ecosystem into accelerated action, simultaneously pointing the way to another key characteristic of change that endures: systemic impact.

Systemic Impact: Does It Change the Game?

Starting in 1991, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation began a long campaign against tobacco, investing more than $700 million of its own funds and drawing other funders into the work. Over time, that funding helped build the infrastructure needed to challenge one of the most powerful industries in the world.

The strategy worked on several levels at once. RWJF funded research that documented tobacco’s harms, coalitions of “SmokeLess States” that organized for tobacco policy across the country, and a national advocacy hub, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. The aim was to change the environment around tobacco: evidence to reshape public understanding and spur pressure, public pressure to change policy, and policy to make smoking less visible, less accessible, and less socially acceptable.

By the late 1990s, the case against the industry had become much harder to ignore. State attorneys general sued tobacco companies to recover the public costs of treating smoking-related illness, and the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement became one of the largest civil settlements in American history. It required the companies to pay states more than $200 billion over time, restricted major forms of youth marketing, opened industry documents to public view, and created funding for a national campaign to prevent youth smoking.

The settlement created and funded the American Legacy Foundation, now Truth Initiative, to carry the work forward. Its “truth” campaign gave young people a different way to understand smoking by exposing the industry strategy behind teenage addiction. Decades later, the institution is still using that basic approach, now adapted to youth vaping and nicotine addiction more broadly. Teen cigarette smoking has fallen from nearly 23 percent in 2000 to under 2 percent today, even in the face of e-cigarettes and vaping.

This is what a systemic bet can produce, a long, many-sided investment that changes law, public opinion, advocacy capacity, and institutional ownership at the same time.

Transferability: Can Others Own and Evolve It?

Returning to where we began, GivingTuesday may have started in 2012 as an idea on a napkin, but it has grown far beyond that moment. Part of its success stems from the fact that it was built to be given away. Its founders made the brand, the logo, and the campaign playbook free for anyone to use and adapt. That openness is what enabled the idea to transfer so seamlessly, letting it take whatever shape a place needed, whether for a local synagogue’s day of service, GivingTuesday Brazil’s Dia de Doar, or a flood-relief drive run by volunteers in Pakistan.

Within a few years, what began as a $500,000 investment evolved from a marketing idea into a global movement embraced by millions. It catalyzed community-based generosity campaigns, launched efforts in every country and territory on the planet, and normalized a new annual ritual alongside major spending holidays. In the United States alone, donors gave an estimated $3.1 billion on a single GivingTuesday in 2022, and 37 million people took part.

By 2019, the movement had outgrown its parent and spun off as an independent nonprofit. The founders’ design principle—own as little as possible so everyone else can own the rest—is exactly why it kept growing after they let go. It turns out that sometimes napkins can be as durable as marble.

Why They Last

The five dimensions are easiest to describe one at a time, but, in practice, they work best together. For philanthropic investments to endure, they must hit multiple of these qualities at the same time. Durability without independence is an Ozymandias, crumbling the moment a donor’s attention moves on. A catalytic spark without transferability smolders out with its initial gift. Endurance results from the compound effect of these elements.

Fortunately, none of this requires a Carnegie-sized fortune. Smaller donations can have outsized impact and endure well beyond their initial funding with the right set-up. Thinking along these five dimensions is a great place to start.

As with any analysis that learns from successes, there are undoubtedly efforts that met these criteria but, having floundered or fizzled out, are now lost to the dustbin of philanthropy archives. Meeting these five criteria significantly enhances the likelihood of success but is no sure-fire guarantee of it.

At the same time, there are urgent challenges that demand immediate response that are no less vital to our overall personal and societal wellbeing, not just for disaster or emergency relief but to attend to the everyday unmet needs of the hungry, the ill, the dispossessed, the abused. We often use the metaphor of a double helix to describe what makes any effort strong: Across any giving strategy, two strands—one the incremental and daily and the other systemic and enduring—can be braided together to reinforce and strengthen not just each other but the resulting impact.

Which returns us to the question we opened with, the one worth asking of anything you invest in whose enduring impact you care about: Will what you fund outlast you? Whether you have $100 million dollars or $100, if you want to leave a legacy, ask these five questions before you begin.

In the past year, philanthropists have been forced to ask what we do when the ground shifts beneath us, and the crisis in our home communities touches every aspect of life. Each of our cities lived through something no American community should have to endure: Large-scale federal immigration enforcement operations that took lives, separated families, tested our constitutional freedoms, undermined businesses and jobs, and strained the limits of our civic infrastructure.

In the face of these conditions, our philanthropic responsibility has had to evolve, to balance mitigating immediate harm with advancing long-term mission. How to act decisively amid legal and political uncertainty (and the erosion of the rule of law)? This is our new reality. Every one of us must adapt and respond.

What we’ve witnessed in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis (and beyond) is merely the prelude to what is still coming. When a government decides that some residents can be stripped of due process, rounded up without warrants, held in inhumane conditions, and face no legal check and no political consequence, it has already established a template for undermining American democracy and our nation’s highest ideals. However, the response of our communities offers us a playbook. Neighbors showing up for neighbors, diverse sectors uniting, and immigrant- and people of color-led organizations building mutual aid networks with remarkable speed and effectiveness.

Institutions must now be just as brave. We write this as three foundation presidents whose communities’ civic infrastructure is holding, but not without strain. What follows is a set of hard-won lessons from three cities about what it takes to protect and prepare communities, defend democracy, and stay ready for the next fight.

1. Preparation Is a Long-Term Investment

What looked like rapid coordination was actually the result of the sustained, general operating support for our grantees that had prepared them to withstand a moment like this. In 2024, when the California Community Foundation mapped the landscape of immigrant and civil rights defenders across the state, we found exhaustion, high leadership turnover, and significant gaps in regional coverage. The strategy was clear: raise money quickly, make it accessible, and close the gaps. One gap that stood out was underinvestment in the Central Valley and Central Coast regions of the state: Through funder organizing, we were able to target resources where communities needed them most, doubling the amount that went to support these regions with $25 million directed toward the Central Valley and $24 million to the Central Coast.

When the immigration enforcement raids began in Los Angeles, the rest of us knew we could be next. In Minnesota, immigrant-led and immigrant-serving organizations had sounded the alarm months before Operation Metro Surge arrived; McKnight heard them and moved resources accordingly. The Immigrant Defense Network, COPAL MN, Unidos MN, Fe y Justicia, and CAIR-MN built legal clinics and trained people on how to exercise their constitutional rights and de-escalate violence. By the time of the surge, more than 30,000 Minnesotans had already been trained as constitutional observers, volunteers armed with nothing more than phones and whistles.

It is because of their bravery that we have video footage and eyewitness accounts that reveal the truth of what happened on our streets. It is the reason we know the names Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both shot and killed by federal agents.

Preparation also means investing in democratic infrastructure. Since 2023, MacArthur, Knight, McKnight, and many other foundations have supported Press Forward, a national initiative with state and regional chapters keeping local newsrooms open, resourced, and growing. Local journalism is oxygen for democracy, allowing people to make safe decisions and hold institutions accountable, and those investments paid dividends. The Chicago Sun-Times broke important ground in reporting on Gregory Bovino’s background when little information about him was publicly available, which Press Forward supported. Outlets like L.A. TACO, THE RAID, and Sahan Journal (also supported by Press Forward) were the windows through which the rest of the country watched the worst of what a government can do (and the best of what a community can be).

The question every funder must ask now is whether the communities they serve are ready, and what they need to be. Every investment should be in service of that answer.

2. Community Readiness Requires Trusting Communities

Our sector has a habit of letting planning distract from taking action. But community leaders in each of our cities showed us that there was no need to reinvent solutions or issue requests for proposals to find the right partners. We just need to connect to the people already doing the work and be ready to resource them.

Immigrant and refugee-led networks have been on the frontlines of moving money, food, services, and care to those in need. Mutual aid networks and crisis response funds like Stand With Minnesota, Immigrant Rapid Response Fund, and the Los Angeles Neighbors Support Fund moved faster than any formal system ever could, raising and distributing millions in funds and in-support for urgent needs like food, housing, and essential surges, as well as legal support and community safety resources. The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights led Know Your Rights training and hosted a Family Support Hotline staffed in more than 20 languages.

We did not build these networks. We backed the people who did.

When circumstances demand it, we must also be willing to give resources directly to families, as we saw during the COVID pandemic. However, this time—when people were trapped in their homes for months, when businesses lost customers—and workers—and shut their doors, and when paychecks stopped, even though rent was still due—there was no government relief, only government provocation.

For McKnight, direct relief had never been part of our model, but we listened to the need and adapted by deploying millions in emergency rent and utility bill relief: $2.6 million to keep Minnesota families housed—moved through trusted partners like the Family Housing Fund, Neighbors Helping Neighbors, and Esusu to deliver rapid grants alongside a revolving fund of zero-interest microloans, and a $300,000 grant to the Citizens Utility Board of Minnesota's Lights On, Homes Warm fund as Cold Weather Rule protections expired and households across the state faced a collective $156 million in past-due utility bills. Each investment was designed to meet an immediate need while seeding longer-term stability for families. For us, the acute crisis is directly connected to our long-term mission and affirms the need for philanthropy to deliver tangible benefits in people’s lives today.

3. Protecting Democracy Demands Coalitions as Deep as the Threat

Attacks on immigrant communities are attacks on democracy itself—on due process, on the rule of law, and on the principle that people cannot be detained by masked agents. Responding requires a coalition that is broad and deep, rooted in the most affected neighborhoods and connected to the small businesses, faith communities, and block-level organizations that sustain civic life.

United for Chicago demonstrated what that looks like in practice. Built with MacArthur's support, the coalition spanned business, philanthropy, civic organizations, nonprofits, and faith leaders, and was designed around the everyday people, organizations, and small businesses that anchor communities. Together, the coalition responded to tactics that break civil norms, such as due process and basic human dignity, by speaking with a unified voice, when needed, and tapping into sector expertise on specific issues without splintering. The Resurrection Project prepared communities for anticipated immigration raids by expanding its removal defense team, launching rapid response legal workshops, and creating an online portal for community members to report enforcement activity. The Illinois Restaurant Association and the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce created the #ChicagoBitesBack restaurant guide to show solidarity and invest in independent businesses significantly impacted by federal immigration agency tactics. They made clear that Chicago would not be divided against itself.

In Minnesota, no single actor or entity was responsible for how the region navigated the moment. Everyone played a part. Much of that capacity traces back to lessons learned in 2020, from the neighbor-to-neighbor communication networks, neighborhood groups, and parent associations that formed in response to George Floyd's murder, which never fully dissolved. Our community’s agility in raising and deploying resources is tied to this moment as well.

You cannot spend a crisis forging alliances or finding your way into communities. By the time the moment arrives, those relationships must be firmly in place. 

4. Images Must Be MADE to Be Worth a Thousand Words

Images and stories make the human cost of injustice undeniable in ways that op-eds and think pieces cannot. One of the most defining images of the anti-immigrant crackdown was of 5-year-old Liam Cornejo, in his unmistakable bunny hat, the hands of a federal agent on his shoulders.

Our platforms can make moments like these impossible to ignore. In Los Angeles, the California Community Foundation turned its own building into a statement, projecting billboard-sized stories of people impacted by enforcement operations onto its downtown headquarters, alongside the faces of ordinary Angelenos and a single question: Am I Next? McKnight launched the Best of Minnesota campaign to tell a different story than the one being broadcast nationally. Drone footage of the marches reached millions—sweeping, undeniable images of ordinary families and neighbors standing together in subzero cold to defend their community and their country.

Being a funder and convener is not enough. We have to be leaders unafraid to use our voices and our visibility to make sure the human impacts are seen, amplified, and connected to the larger story being written.

5. If We Are Not Taking Risks, Who Will?

There was a time when it would have been inconceivable for the federal government to be overrunning neighborhoods in American cities. That time is over, and standard operating procedures no longer cut it. We cannot let theoretical risk overshadow real harm when the unthinkable is already happening.

We saw everyday people respond to extraordinary risk with extraordinary courage, not waiting for permission or a strategic plan. Foundations have to be willing to do the same: to adapt, to move quickly, and to match the boldness of the people we exist to serve. Across our three foundations, that has meant defending individual rights, due process, and civil liberties through investments in legal services and organizations. It has meant supporting work that strengthens democracy and community, even when doing so invites scrutiny from the very forces seeking to undermine them.

The unbreakable spirit we witnessed in our three cities reminded us of why our cities were targeted in the first place. They are places made stronger by people of many cultures, experiences, and talents, working and living side by side. If philanthropy is looking for an opportunity worthy of risk, it is investing in people and communities who refuse every effort to divide them.

An Era of Permanent Disruption

Efforts to divide, destabilize, and overwhelm communities have not been (and will not be) limited to federal enforcement actions. Our cities were also absorbing the shocks reshaping the country at large: volatile markets driving up the price of gas and groceries, rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, diminishing federal services and resources, and a fragmented media environment. Navigating overlapping pressures that compound one another demands that we think and act across the full complexity of community experience.

Foundations that stay in traditional lanes—responding only to what they have historically funded, or that allow risk to outweigh courage—will not be equal to this moment. These five lessons are more than a playbook for when a crisis comes to your town. They are a posture for an era of permanent disruption: investing early and in community leadership, building coalitions before you need them, using your voice and your visibility freely, and being as brave as the people in the streets.

When Operation Metro Surge moved through Minnesota, it tested whether years of organizing had built enough civic infrastructure to hold our fear, grief, urgency, and moral clarity—and turn those feelings into power.

Communities under threat feel the stakes immediately. People are afraid. They are angry. They want to do something. Yet a surge of emotion does not automatically translate into political power. Fear isolates. Urgency scatters. A one-time mobilization can rise quickly and disappear just as fast as it came together.

In Minnesota, what looked like rapid response was, in truth, the result of organizing. Through the democracy organizations ISAIAH, Faith in Minnesota, and We Choose Us, we work with congregations, mosques, childcare providers, small businesses, workers, and community leaders across the state to build the relationships and public leadership that democracy requires. For years, organizers and leaders had been inviting people into public life through relationships: sharing stories, listening across differences, analyzing power, moving institutions, and taking action together. Those practices can seem ordinary when the stakes are lower. In crisis, they become protection.

Where We Practice Acting Together

Civic infrastructure is the living architecture of democracy: the relationships, institutions, trainings, communication systems, safety practices, legal support, and coalition tables that allow people to move together when the moment becomes urgent. It includes trusted leaders, but it also includes the pathways that connect them: the clergy formation that prepares faith leaders for public moral action; the base-building that turns concern into leadership; the rapid communication that separates fact from rumor; and the coordination spaces that keep organizations from duplicating or contradicting one another. Civic infrastructure is where people practice acting together before a crisis requires it.

That preparation was not abstract in Minnesota. Just 25 days before Renee Good was killed, nearly 5,000 Minnesotans gathered for “A Light in the Storm,” ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota’s full-day anti-authoritarianism training and public meeting that had taken more than a year to organize. The gathering advanced a “yes” to a Minnesota rooted in care, dignity, affordability, and belonging, while also naming a “no” to fear, abandonment, and the erosion of democratic life. The gathering trained people to understand the threats facing our state, neighbors, and families, and to see themselves as responsible for shaping what would come next. When the crisis deepened less than a month later, that infrastructure moved from theory into practice.

In the weeks after Renee Good’s killing, community leaders helped organize major public actions, including the Day of Unity, Peace, and Service on January 9 and the Day of Truth and Freedom on January 23. The Day of Truth and Freedom issued a statewide call to collective action: no work, no school, no shopping, alongside public witness grounded in dignity and solidarity. That same day, more than 100 clergy protested at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, calling on institutions to stop cooperating with deportation operations and to stand with Minnesotans. All the protestors were arrested. The public witness drew on relationships, training, and a shared moral frame built over time. Small-town clergy, metro clergy, bishops, and congregational leaders stood together because they had already practiced protecting their neighbors in public. Their witness gave people across the state a visible example of moral leadership under pressure and helped more faith leaders see that they had a role to play.

Public actions like these mattered, but they were only the visible edge of the work. Beneath them were invitations, leader calls, trainings, safety planning, legal support, communications discipline, and follow-up in the days, weeks, months, and years before. ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota work to build this backbone through leadership development, clergy formation, political education, base-building, and institutional organizing across congregations, mosques, childcare centers, small businesses, and community networks. We Choose Us helps connect that power across a broader pro-democracy ecosystem so leaders, organizations, and communities can move together when conditions shift quickly. The work is slow until it suddenly has to move fast.

The invitation to engage stayed simple and human. Protect your neighbor. Refuse isolation. Do not allow institutions with power to pretend they have no responsibility. Not everyone who showed up shared the same politics, analysis, or organizational home. They did not need to. People enter public life because something happening in front of them violates what they know to be right. Organizing helps that first step become something deeper: belonging, leadership, courage, and the ability to bring others along.

The crisis also pushed organizations to take stock of the ecosystem and the role each of us could play inside it. ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota brought a disciplined organizing practice: Leaders who knew how to move from fear into action, clergy formed for public moral leadership, and institutions prepared to take responsibility beyond their own walls. We Choose Us brought alignment across the broader pro-democracy field, helping groups with different structures, cultures, and theories of change move with a shared sense of purpose. Mass mobilization groups like MN5051 and Indivisible, small arts and culture groups, immigrant community organizations, trades workers, mutual aid networks, and more decentralized or protest-oriented formations all carried different kinds of power. The response grew stronger when we stopped trying to make everyone play the same role and started asking what each formation could carry. In crisis, organizations need to know who is in the field, what they can move, and how they can act together.

That ecosystem approach also shaped corporate actions. After federal immigration agents reportedly detained workers inside a Target store in Richfield, Minnesota, ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota helped organize clergy and community leaders to press Target to take responsibility for the safety of its workers, customers, and communities. More than 100 clergy held a press conference, walked to Target Corporate Headquarters, and began a sit-in, asking to meet with CEO Brian Cornell. The action made a clear moral claim: Corporations have power, and communities can organize to demand that they use it. This action grew from the same infrastructure as the airport witness: clergy formation, disciplined communications, relationships with labor and community partners, and leaders prepared to move together. Across the state, local leaders also organized more than 30 Target store actions. The lesson for nonprofits and funders is practical: Civic power grows when communities know how to move the corporations and institutions that shape daily life.

Staying Engaged

The response to Operation Metro Surge also revealed unfinished work. In every urgent moment, people come forward. Some join a team, attend a training, take responsibility, and stay. Others sign up somewhere, attend an action, or ask how to help, then disappear back into daily life. That does not mean they did not care. It means our movements need better ways to absorb people when urgency suddenly expands.

In Minnesota, organizations connected more people to trainings, teams, and action. Groups recognized that a mass response had to become more than a one-time mobilization. And still, some people came in and left, and we may never know who they were. One of the most important capacities in democracy work is the ability to turn a surge of participation into durable organizing.

This requires more than a sign-up sheet. Organizations need absorption strategies that are relational, redundant, and trustworthy. Our common tools for engagement cannot always hold at scale. We learned this in real time at large public gatherings and actions, where digital tools that seemed efficient in planning did not always work in practice. QR codes for registration, commitment forms, and next steps broke down when thousands of people strained cell service and broadband. Some people also hesitated to share personal information because they worried about surveillance, data security, or how their information might be used. Low-tech options, paper systems, trained volunteers, multilingual follow-up, trusted data practices, and clear explanations of why information is being collected all matter.

Organizations also need leadership ladders, volunteer coordination, and next steps that do not depend on a single platform or moment. The pathway of engagement has to move people from attending to belonging, from belonging to leadership, and from leadership to moving others. This is backbone work, but it is not separate from democracy work. It allows democracy work to last.

Other gaps in engagement came from uneven infrastructure. Response systems can fragment. They can depend too heavily on last-minute coordination. Funding can arrive only after the crisis becomes visible. After a major public moment or meaningful win, alignment can loosen as organizations return to their own campaigns, institutions, calendars, and funding realities. The urgency that brings people together does not automatically create the structure that keeps them together.

Finally, movements lose power when they focus only on what they oppose. A shared “no” can bring people together quickly: no to fear, no to isolation, no to abandonment, no to silence. Lasting civic power requires a larger “yes.” During Operation Metro Surge, we heard a larger “yes” taking shape in conversations with leaders, clergy, organizers, and community members. People were searching for a way to name the responsibility they felt to one another. One of the clearest words that emerged to describe this sense of concern was neighborism: the belief that we belong to one another, that protecting one another is a public responsibility, and that democracy should organize around care. Neighborism was not a policy platform. It was a moral and civic claim about what people owe one another. The next step is to translate that moral claim into public systems, institutional behavior, and organizing strategies that make safety, care, voice, and dignity real in daily life.

Investing in Organized Community

For funders, the lesson is clear: If funding only follows crisis, it will always arrive too late. Organizations can only move quickly when they have already built capacity. Funders should invest in the slow work that makes fast action possible: organizing staff, leadership development, communications capacity, multilingual access, data systems, safety planning, and coalition coordination. They should also fund what happens after the peak: absorption, follow-up, reflection, training, and shared agenda-building that turns temporary alignment into durable civic power.

Funders should also measure power, not just activity. Large turnout, strong statements, and visible actions matter. Better questions about building power go deeper: Did people become less isolated? Did new leaders emerge? Did institutions become more willing to act? Did communities most affected gain a stronger hand in shaping what happens next? Did the work leave behind more capacity than it used?

Our practical advice for nonprofits follows from the same lesson: Build before the moment. Know who is in the ecosystem before crisis requires people to move together. Design public actions with absorption in mind, including low-tech and high-trust ways for people to take next steps. Value the backbone work: coordination, logistics, data protection, safety planning, communications, and staff capacity. Stay together after the peak long enough to learn and move toward the next shared horizon. Be ready with a bigger “yes,” not only a necessary “no.”

Operation Metro Surge showed that fear can isolate people, but organized community can interrupt that isolation. Power does not come from message alone, turnout alone, or crisis funding alone. People build power through relationships, institutions willing to act, leaders prepared to move, and organizations disciplined enough to turn urgency into lasting civic infrastructure.

When Etsy launched in 2005, its founders set out to build a different kind of online marketplace. They wanted to give artisans a place to sell handmade goods directly to buyers: an alternative to eBay, which Etsy founder Rob Kalin saw as a “faceless corporation” that crowded out small makers. “The industrial revolution and consolidation of corporations are making it hard for independent artisans to distribute their goods,” Kalin said at the time. “We want to change this.” The company paid employees fair wages and a share of the company’s profits, built a community workshop in its Brooklyn headquarters where local crafters could learn and create, and cultivated a seller community that grew to more than 1.4 million active sellers by 2014. In the process, Etsy demonstrated that e-commerce could be done differently.

As the company grew, it became a certified B Corp, a designation recognizing its commitment to balancing profit with social purpose. In 2015, Etsy went public. But going public handed power over the company’s direction to shareholders. When Etsy’s stock dropped sharply in its first year of trading, activist investors started to push the company to grow its profitability and new leadership was brought in, focused on conventional growth metrics. In 2017, Etsy dropped its B Corp certification. The marketplace built to serve independent makers began optimizing for search algorithms, advertising revenue, and seller fees, and allowed the sale of mass-produced goods that undercut the artisans the platform was created to support.

What changed at Etsy was not its core business. What changed was the set of forces shaping what decisions the company could make: who owned it and what those owners expected. After its IPO, the company did not have the room to prioritize its founding mission over short-term financial performance. Etsy is just one example of many, where good intentions are eroded, and where the original intent fades away as the company prioritizes financial metrics above all else. In short, Etsy is an example of a company that stopped being able to make values-led decisions.

Freedom of Choice and Values-Led Decisions

A values-led decision is a strategic business choice primarily guided by values above purely financial considerations. Values can include environmental stewardship, economic inclusion, worker dignity, community responsibility, and religious faith. When the cosmetics chain Lush temporarily closed its UK stores in solidarity with people in Gaza, that was a values-led decision. When Malden Mills continued paying employees after a devastating factory fire, or when Chick-fil-A closes on Sundays, forgoing revenue so workers can rest and worship, those are values-led decisions. But what determines whether a company can make decisions like these?

The answer is a combination of factors—ownership, governance, capital, stakeholder relationships, financial position, market conditions, political environment—that shape what values-led decisions are available to a company at any given moment. The totality of these interconnected factors is what we call freedom of choice. An analysis of more than 600 cases of values-led business decisions across industries, ownership types, and stages of growth found that these factors, taken together, define the range of decisions an individual leader can make. They also point to clear ways both businesses and civil society can expand leaders’ freedom of choice.

Companies with high freedom of choice can take actions that would be difficult or impossible for others. Mars, the privately held food and confectionery company, developed an “Economics of Mutuality” model: a profit-and-loss framework that measures outcomes for farmers, workers, and the environment alongside financial results. Mars can do it because its family ownership, now in its fifth generation, insulates the company from the quarterly earnings pressure that constrains many of its peers. Thomson Reuters, though publicly traded, benefits from the Thomson family’s majority stake through the Woodbridge Company and a special “Founders Share” that protects Reuters’ editorial independence. Operating from this position, Thomson Reuters undertook a third-party human rights assessment and created a Human Rights Crimes Resource Center—showing leadership where most competitors have not taken comparable steps.

High freedom of choice, though, defines what a company can do—not what it will do. Vanguard was set up as a mutual, making it independent from outside investors. It used that independence to build a low-cost, customer-first model that has reshaped the investment industry. But the same company retreated from climate commitments, leaving the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative in 2022 for example.

Companies with lower freedom of choice can still make values-led decisions, but the opportunities are narrower. Dick’s Sporting Goods was publicly traded, in a politically sensitive product category, with a customer base that included gun-rights advocates, yet it stopped selling assault-style rifles after the Parkland shooting, absorbing a $150 million revenue hit. What made it possible was a specific alignment of factors: cohesion between the CEO and his board, and the company’s financial strength at that moment. Costco, also publicly traded, has consistently defended above-market wages and its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In both cases, financial performance and stakeholder alignment created enough room to act despite the constraints of public ownership.

One important clarification: Freedom of choice does not always mean freedom to do anything. Some companies increase their future freedom of choice by deliberately limiting their options in the present. Patagonia transferred ownership to the Patagonia Purpose Trust and the Holdfast Collective, legally binding future decision-makers to use the business profits to fight the environmental crisis. Epic Systems refused outside investment for over four decades and placed voting shares in a purpose trust, ensuring the company can never be sold. In both cases, narrowing the range of possible decisions overall widened the range of values-led decisions available.

Taking Action to Expand Freedom of Choice

Freedom of choice is a diagnostic lens: an invitation to look deeper at the factors that constrain or enable values-led decisions. Understanding which factors are in play, and which can be influenced, is what makes freedom of choice useful not just as a description of conditions, but as a guide for action.

While some factors such as macroeconomic conditions or political environment are largely outside of an individual’s business’ ability to influence, most factors can be shaped either immediately, or over the long term.

Factors within a leader’s direct control include management and financial systems, corporate culture, and the composition of the leadership team. For example, are bonuses based only on financial performance, or do they consider other types of employee contributions? These levers tend to be readily visible and actionable.

More impactful, and too often overlooked, are the factors a company controls but only at significant inflection points such as founding or change of control. A company’s corporate form and ownership structure will determine who is in the driver's seat over the course of the company’s life, and what rules constrain them. Bob Moore chose to sell Bob’s Red Mill to its employees to ensure the company continues to prioritize their needs long after he left. When Ginkgo Bioworks went public, it granted employees super-voting shares—a decision when it went public that kept the company’s governance in the hands of its employees.

Also within a company’s control, but harder in practice to shift, is the choice of sector the business operates in. The structural characteristics of a sector shape competitive dynamics, operating requirements, and growth potential. These include barriers to entry, margins, and the maturity or decline of an industry. In addition, many industries face regulatory and reputational scrutiny while essential goods and services like medicines and utilities face expectations of broad access at affordable prices. CivicaRx, a nonprofit pharmaceutical manufacturer, was founded to address a market failure in generic drugs—its nonprofit ownership structure enables it to offer insulin at a fraction of typical market prices, a model well suited for the industry within which it operates.

Beyond factors that can be directly influenced, there are “shared influence” factors: the orientation of investors, boards, customers, employees, and relationships with civil society and government. Leaders cannot dictate these factors alone, but they can shape them—and savvy leaders will see external stakeholders as allies in this work. The Frontier Coalition, launched by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, and others, expanded freedom of choice through collective action: By pooling demand for carbon removal technology, they changed the economics of a constraint no single company could have shifted alone.

Of course, the decisions leaders make can also reduce freedom of choice. Any decision to raise external capital, or go public, can provide resources a company needs, but also comes with sustained pressure for financial results, often at the expense of values. At Unilever, CEO Paul Polman spent a decade embedding sustainability into governance—linking executive pay to impact performance, creating sustainability oversight at the board level, and attracting long-horizon investors. But the company’s public ownership left it exposed. In 2017, a hostile takeover attempt revealed how vulnerable Unilever remained to short-term pressure. Polman was later ousted, and much of his agenda was reversed.

By considering a wide range of factors, partnering with stakeholders, and thinking long-term to take advantage of key inflection points, business leaders can expand their company’s freedom of choice and in turn make values-led decisions stick over time.

What This Means for Civil Society

For civil society leaders, funders, and intermediaries, freedom of choice should inform how you engage with business leaders. Instead of treating all companies as similar actors whose primary variable is willingness, this lens can help identify what is possible for a given company right now—and what would need to change to make more ambitious action available. For example, during the anti-apartheid movement, employee and consumer pressure moved Polaroid to withdraw from South Africa in 1977. Companies like General Motors, with far larger operations in the country, had less freedom of choice—and took years longer to act.

Policymakers and advocates can also push to clarify what fiduciary duty entails. The prevailing norm treats shareholder value maximization as a legal obligation—but corporate directors in fact have broad discretion to consider long-term corporate interests, not just short-term shareholder returns. Challenging this misperception through policy, business education, and industry norms would expand freedom of choice for the many leaders who have more room to act than they think.

In addition, it should be a priority to scale up alternative ownership models. When Spirit Airlines collapsed earlier this year, over 125,000 people pledged $88 million in just a few days to buy it as a community-owned cooperative. The public appetite is there. But most business leaders are still unfamiliar with models like worker cooperatives, steward ownership, or employee ownership trusts—let alone how to implement them. Scaling starts with awareness, through business education, practitioner networks, and public storytelling about what these models make possible. But awareness alone isn’t enough without the legal and financial infrastructure to act on it. There are promising examples underway: The bipartisan American Ownership and Resilience Act would create federal loan guarantees to finance employee ownership transitions in the United States; Germany’s coalition government committed to creating a dedicated legal form for steward-owned companies; Colorado recently signed the A-Corp into law as a new corporate form for artist-owned businesses. These kinds of enabling structures make it easier for leaders to choose alternative ownership when the moment is right.

For business leaders, the opportunity is to recognize freedom of choice as something that can be actively shaped, especially at key inflection points. Our research identified 26 specific mechanisms that companies use to operationalize their values and expand their freedom of choice over time. These include legal and governance tools like benefit corporation registration, purpose trusts, and dual-class shares; internal practices like integrated accounting and board alignment; and external strategies like coalition-building and supply chain standards.

The lesson from the more than 600 companies making values-led decisions we identified is that those decisions are neither rare nor marginal. But whether those choices are available—and how wide the range of possible action is—depends on context: a company’s freedom of choice. Understanding that context, and working to shape it, is how values-led decisions move from isolated acts of conviction to a normal part of how a business operates over the long-term.