Most students will spend more time at work than in any other activity after graduation. If we want public education to prepare students for human thriving—the vision Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka propose in “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools”—we must prepare them to make meaningful contributions through their work and to pursue careers that leverage—and continue to advance—their full potential.

McGuire and Wilka rightly challenge a system that presently defines success through narrow, self-referential metrics: test scores, grades, graduation rates. They ask us to consider goals more longitudinally, across a lifetime. That longitudinal view necessarily includes career success—and this shouldn’t be controversial. Four in five high school students say the main reasons to go to college are to get a good job and make more money. For students and their families, thriving isn’t abstract.

Yet today, schools struggle to deliver on this promise. Although K-12 systems still define success by college enrollment, data suggests only 23 percent of high school graduates will finish college and get a job requiring their degree. We spend billions annually on high school career and technical education (CTE) training through the Perkins Act, yet only 18 percent of the CTE credentials students earn are actually in demand. The result: Over 7,000 CTE students per year earn Beef Quality Assurance certification, at best preparing them for low-wage, dangerous jobs in meat packing with little prospect for advancement. Meanwhile, credentials that unlock good jobs go undersupplied.

These failures compound over time. More than half of Americans are stuck, working below their potential: 37 million in low-wage work, 31 million college graduates in jobs that don’t require a degree, 17 million who earned degrees but hit a career wall, and 13 million who couldn’t regain their footing after employment gaps—often women who took time away to care for family. This isn’t just individual disappointment. It undermines the American promise of upward mobility and erodes the economic competitiveness on which our shared prosperity depends.

New Imperatives for What Students Must Learn

Ensuring that students succeed means rethinking what we teach them—and how deeply we teach it. Three imperatives stand out: (1) doubling down on liberal arts fundamentals, (2) expanding the definition of foundational skills, and (3) raising the bar on proficiency. Together, these redefine what it means to be prepared for work and for citizenship in a changing economy.

Doubling down on liberal arts fundamentals. It has become popular sport to ridicule the worth of the liberal arts. Yet claims that liberal arts have no economic value are belied by employers themselves. Skills like communication and collaboration rank among those most sought in job postings and prove the most durable over the course of a career. These are meta-skills—the skills to acquire new skills, assuring human agility in a dynamic economy, especially amidst the portent of artificial intelligence disruption. Burning Glass Institute analysis indicates that core liberal arts capabilities comprise an increasing share of work activity as people advance into positions of greater responsibility.

These are not only the skills of employability; they are the skills of democratic life. The liberal arts cultivate judgment, dialogue, interpretation, and shared problem-solving: capacities essential both for functioning workplaces and for functioning republics. Reorienting education toward careers and toward democracy is not a trade-off. It is the same project.

Expanding what counts as foundational skills. When Burning Glass and American Student Assistance studied skills that span high-value work across domains, we found a portfolio wider than just the three Rs. It increasingly includes digital and data skills, and the business skills to apply them to real-world problems. For example, project management and data analysis are essential in careers from finance to nursing and propel people up the ladder. Yet in our survey of middle- and high-school teachers, many failed to recognize this broader portfolio: While 81 percent saw communications skills as essential, less than half said the same of data analysis. Worse, teachers themselves don’t believe we teach these skills well today; teachers in high-poverty classrooms are significantly more likely to rate them as important yet significantly less likely to believe that their schools teach them effectively.

Raising the bar on proficiency. Today, many students fail even basic benchmarks, with continued declines in achievement. Twelfth- graders score at a 33-year low in reading and a 20-year low in math. A third lack basic reading skills. The arrival of AI creates a new urgency. As AI automates tasks formerly done by entry-level college graduates, students must graduate with capabilities they would normally develop after several years in the workforce. Our research shows that in fields offering strong prospects for upward mobility, early rungs of the career ladder, where young people learn their trade, are being automated. As AI raises the bar on proficiency, students will need to be able to start their careers in the middle, rather than at the beginning—starting day one of their first job at a skill level previously expected after several years in the workforce.

Rethinking Curriculum and Instruction for the Age of AI

These three imperatives define what students must learn. But a second question follows: How must curriculum itself evolve when the nature of work is changing so rapidly? The rise of artificial intelligence does not replace these priorities. It intensifies and reshapes them. To prepare students for thriving careers, we must now reconsider not only which skills matter, but how technological change reorganizes the value of those skills across disciplines.

Today’s public school curriculum is largely an artifact of the Cold War space race, prioritizing subjects like trigonometry, physics, and foreign language—plus the organizational skills to support widescale industrial mobilization. We now face a new technological transformation, but discussions among educators often focus narrowly on AI’s classroom role as an instructional tool. That misses the point. AI doesn’t just change how we teach; it changes what students need to know. By reshaping how we work, AI elevates some capabilities while reducing the importance of others.

Our analysis across 20 state curricula reveals that the curricular implications are nuanced. AI impacts skills in every subject, yet none of the 140 learning objectives we studied will disappear—many will simply need rethinking. Take, for example, research readiness: Source validity assessment and evidence evaluation become more critical, while report writing and research planning may require less emphasis. These shifts aren’t marginal. They reshape what we consider to be foundational to modern education and work.

This pattern reflects a deeper dynamic. The interplay of AI automation and augmentation creates a new set of power skills for the 21st century. AI makes certain capabilities like writing and data analysis simultaneously more efficient and more effective, transforming them into force multipliers in the workplace. But they require a different pedagogy. Similarly, contrary to widely held belief, skills like coding and design aren’t eliminated by AI but, rather, democratized through it. This puts competency in these skills within reach for far more people, while they also become essential to far more careers. Computational thinking—the ability to incorporate coding into one’s work—becomes a capability many more professionals will need.

A New Architecture for Schooling

Preparing students to thrive in their careers also challenges us to rearchitect the structure and format of schooling itself to make career planning and preparation more central. This includes:

Career guidance grounded in labor market reality. Every student needs visibility into post-completion opportunities and better tools for decision-making—including considering options that don’t involve college. Yet we force students into a false binary: “academic” education versus “career” education, asking them to choose with remarkably little guidance about long-term implications. All students need both. While employers unquestionably value foundational skills, they also badly need workers who show up job-ready. Many careers offering the highest rates of economic mobility require that students build applied skills beforehand.

Some starting jobs are “launchpads”—they increase by fourfold the chances that graduates will become top earners by age 40. By focusing exclusively on channeling students to college, our current guidance system misses opportunities to prepare students for these jobs—let alone to help them distinguish these launchpads from dead ends.

Meaningful work-based learning for every student. Experimentation is natural to human development, yet students get little opportunity for iterative refinement of career goals and preferences, leaving them to make major decisions in the abstract. Work-based learning lets students try on different careers before committing. In our current high-stakes system, by the time a student realizes a career is wrong for them, it’s often too late.

In our research on post-secondary career success, internships play a singularly important role: A single internship halves the risk of underemployment. A forthcoming Burning Glass Institute study shows that internship participation rates are the biggest factor distinguishing colleges whose graduates outperform their peers in long-term career outcomes. What would it take to ensure that every student gets at least one meaningful work-based learning experience?

But the value of work-based learning is evident across the full educational lifecycle, writ large, even if it is structured differently at each stage to reflect developmentally appropriate forms of engagement with real work. In secondary school, work-based learning is primarily about exploration and informed choice, such as short-term job shadowing, employer-connected projects, or part-time industry experiences that help students understand career pathways before committing to them. In post-secondary education, the emphasis shifts to launch. Internships, clinical placements, and apprenticeships provide sustained, skill-building experience that enables students to translate academic preparation into career entry with momentum.

The value of work-based learning persists into the workplace itself. In fact, the underpinning of career advancement is skill acquisition. In that context, work-based learning represents a key mechanism for mobility. Worker training, employer-supported reskilling, and learn-while-you-work transition programs allow people to adapt to technological change or move into new roles without stepping away from employment.

Seen this way, meaningful work-based learning is not a single intervention but a structured progression—exploration, launch, and mobility—supporting career development across the lifespan.

From launching careers to sustaining them. Such changes could improve markedly how effectively students launch into careers—a good start. However, on average, Americans make 12 transitions over the course of their professional lives. Each is an opportunity to move up or get stuck. Ensuring that public schools cultivate skills to navigate those transitions would be significant progress. But the greatest transformation required for thriving careers is restructuring our education system to enable learning beyond our first two decades, to reconceive public education as a resource available across the arc of a career. This is hardly a fanciful idea. In an era of declining fertility, lengthening lifespans, and the ongoing technological reinvention of work, a growing number of educators and social scientists argue that human capital must be developed across the life course, not concentrated in the first two decades.

That would be a major departure from the system we have today, which offers few viable paths for returning to school and building new skills over time. Traditional universities are organized around degrees that take too long to earn for on-demand learning. Community colleges would be a natural infrastructure, but the significant majority of funding and programming focuses on transfer degrees—at least in theory, preparing young adults for four-year universities—rather than the workforce training these institutions that is most needed. Our workforce system itself is too underfunded to be viable. Despite a graduate glut, the US government spends 54 times more on funding college degrees through the federal Pell grant program alone than it does on training through the Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act, the primary source of funding to our workforce system.

Some might mistake this as a call to refashion public schooling as vocational preparation. Educators often bristle at the suggestion that they bear responsibility for ensuring that students make a good start, arguing that education prepares students for the twentieth job, not the first. But our research shows that the first job often determines access to the twentieth. More than half of all graduates start in jobs that don’t require their degree; 44 percent remain underemployed a decade later.

Toward a New Vision of Education for Thriving Lives

Teaching applied skills and investing time in career exploration isn’t just about tactical training. Through these activities, students develop a set of capabilities for navigating transitions: learning to seek out opportunity, evaluate decisions, identify and acquire the skills needed to enable new directions, and to experiment and iterate over time. These are meta-skills for lifelong growth.

In the bestselling 2017 book Janesville: An American Story, Amy Goldstein describes workers upended by the closing of a GM plant in Wisconsin flooding the local community college and training programs. They knew they needed to reskill, but their learning skills were decades out of date, and they had little guidance on how to make reskilling choices. For many, the attempt became an expensive lesson in frustration. With the coming wave of AI-driven disruption, we cannot afford failed attempts at second chances.

Ultimately, the combination of more rigorous education in core foundations, greater opportunity to build applied skills, and new focus on career awareness and experimentation represents a framework for enduring purpose, versatility, and growth. It also represents a basis for cultivating civic agency. Learning to navigate institutions, collaborate across differences, and make informed decisions about one’s future are not only career competencies but also the foundations of democratic participation.

What emerges is not a shift away from education’s traditional purposes but a deeper fulfillment of them. Preparing students for work, for citizenship, and for lifelong growth are not competing aims but rather mutually reinforcing. The same meta-skills that enable people to adapt across careers enable them to deliberate, participate, and lead in civic life. The same liberal arts capacities that sustain democratic culture also power innovation in the economy. And the same commitment to learning across a lifetime that supports career mobility sustains human flourishing more broadly. The central task then is to move beyond false choices: between liberal arts and technical training, between career readiness and civic formation, between economic productivity and human development. The future demands their integration.

Discourse about aligning education with the future of work often centers on “how” questions. It’s time we addressed the “what” questions. What capabilities do students need to thrive in this century versus the last? What investments raise the bar for everyone, enabling students to outperform AI? What skills enable students to acquire new skills throughout their working lives? What structures can extend public education’s promise to support a lifetime of growth and of thriving? Without a new vision, we will continue producing students primed not to succeed in their working lives, but to be replaced.

Public education in the United States was envisioned as a great equalizer: a way for every child, regardless of circumstance, to have a fair chance at a fulfilling life. In practice, however, that vision was never fully realized or universally extended. Horace Mann's 19th-century advocacy for universal schooling, and later John Dewey’s link between education and democracy, carried ideals that were aspirational then and remain unfinished now.

In "A Democratic Vision for Public Schools," Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka argue that recent decades of reform narrowed our understanding of what schools are for, tilting toward what can be measured and managed, and away from the civic and human purposes that make public education a public good. Their invitation, one I share, is to step back from today’s tactical debates and ask a more foundational question: What is the purpose of public education, now, in a diverse democracy under strain?

While public education has become more inclusive over time, inequities in opportunity, achievement, and outcomes have persisted. The world has changed, technologically, economically, and politically, and yet schools have stayed remarkably static. Families are leaving those traditional structures at an astonishing rate in favor of public charter, private, homeschool, microschool, and even less formal options.

At the same time, young people are increasingly skeptical of the "school deal": The promise that years of hard work in school will translate into a stable, secure life. For many—especially those furthest from opportunity—rising college costs, economic precarity, and rapid technological disruption cast doubt on whether traditional pathways still lead where they once did.

In this moment of eroding trust, we cannot afford to treat education as an incremental project. The question before us is not just how we improve schools, but why we have them—what purposes they can and must serve.

If we are serious about fulfilling education’s democratic purpose, we must be willing to build and try radically different models: where young people help shape what and how they learn, connect their studies to the real world, and develop the skills to thrive in a rapidly changing society.

Revisiting the Purpose of Education

Public education has always reflected both America’s aspirations and its contradictions. It has opened doors for millions, yet it has also mirrored and reinforced the inequities of the broader society.

Too often, we’ve talked about education as something you pursue for yourself—to get ahead, to earn more, to climb higher, and to secure your own success. That framing has shaped everything from policy decisions to dinner-table conversations. But when education is treated as a private transaction rather than a shared public good, it becomes harder for people to see why everyone should support and sustain it.

McGuire and Wilka describe how a market-oriented era of reform helped shift schooling toward individual returns: choice, competition, and outcomes defined by standardized measures. Whether one agrees with every aspect of their diagnosis, I think they are right about the consequence: When purpose narrows, so does imagination. And when imagination narrows, schools become easier to dismiss, defund, or dismantle because fewer people can articulate what, beyond individual advancement, they are for.

Reclaiming the purpose of education begins with understanding that thriving individuals and thriving communities depend on one another. Education is how we prepare young people to lead meaningful lives while strengthening the communities and democracy they inherit.

These aims reinforce one another. When students learn to think critically, to collaborate across lines of difference, and to contribute to something larger than themselves, they not only shape stronger futures for themselves; they strengthen the civic fabric that binds us together. Education at its best helps young people learn how to work with others, debate and discuss ideas, and build trust-based relationships that nurture belonging and heal divides.

For that reason, the next chapter of education cannot narrowly focus on raising test scores or recovering learning loss, important as those goals are. It should focus instead on building the capacities that sustain a healthy democracy: discernment, collaboration, ethical reasoning, empathy, and the courage to shape solutions for problems we cannot yet see. It should also be guided by a collective vision for what education makes possible—one that inspires young people to see themselves not only as learners but as builders of a future that is more just and more connected than the society we have today.

From Incremental Change to New Models

For decades, reform efforts have sought to improve public education by tweaking what exists. We’ve revised standards, reshaped accountability systems, introduced new curricula, and layered in new technologies. Yet we’ve rarely stopped to question the design of the system itself.

Incremental change has improved outcomes for some, but it has not altered the broader trajectory, and our K–12 system remains far from where it needs to be. Preparing young people for the demands of today’s world will require something bolder: school models that are fundamentally different, not just marginally better.

At NewSchools Venture Fund, our role is not to scale a single model, but to invest early in leaders and designs that challenge the traditional boundaries of schooling. For example, with early funding from NewSchools, BELIEVE Academy, a charter school in St. Louis, opened in 2024 with a clear mission: integrate academic rigor with hands-on healthcare pathways from day one of high school. Students work in simulation labs alongside healthcare professionals and earn industry-recognized certifications while completing college-credit coursework. Through partnerships with BJC HealthCare and St. Louis Community College, students graduate prepared to enter high-demand medical careers or pursue higher education with significant credits already earned.

Similarly, at Discovery Polytech Early College High School, a public district school in Springfield, Massachusetts, learning is organized around interdisciplinary, project-based experiences connected to real-world problems. Students collaborate on long-term projects, present their work publicly, and build portfolios that demonstrate mastery over time. Assessment extends beyond traditional tests to include exhibitions, performance tasks, and community engagement. The result is a school model that rethinks time, evaluation, and the role of teachers to better prepare students for both college and civic life.

These schools are not incremental adjustments to the factory model. They are structural redesigns—rethinking schedules, partnerships, assessment, and the role of community—to ensure that learning is connected to contribution and long-term possibility. In doing so, young people aren’t just gaining skills; they’re expanding their sense of possibility and developing a deep sense of purpose that will carry them through their lives.

When students discover that their learning holds both personal meaning and public value, the impact compounds outward. Communities gain new ideas, leadership, and creativity. Local economies grow more resilient as young people see viable futures where they live. And civic life becomes stronger as graduates bring curiosity, empathy, and critical thinking into how they engage with others.

In these new models, school becomes a place where learning feels alive because it is lived—and success is defined by how students use their knowledge to improve their lives and the world around them.

The Human Core of Learning

As technology continues to reshape how we live, work, and learn, the most essential skills are the ones that make us human. Critical thinking, ethical reasoning, creativity, empathy, and discernment have always mattered, but in an age of artificial intelligence, they’ve become indispensable.

The next generation of learning must help young people understand not only how to use AI and emerging technologies, but how to think about them: conceptually, tactically, and ethically. Every profession will soon—if not already—require some fluency in AI. More importantly, every person will need the judgment to decide when and how these tools should be used.

Across the country, AI solutions are springing up, promising to transform how students learn and how teachers teach. The potential is extraordinary, but so are the risks. Used thoughtfully, AI can deepen personalization, free teachers’ time for connection, and expand opportunity. Used carelessly, it can magnify bias, spread misinformation, and narrow learning to what can be easily measured. Some of the most promising efforts illustrate what it looks like to use AI in service of deeper learning rather than efficiency alone.

Coursemojo, for example, is an AI-powered teaching assistant designed to improve reading and writing in grades 3-10. Founded by two former teachers and middle school principals, Dacia Toll and Eric Westendorf, Coursemojo was built to help teachers address one of the most persistent challenges in classrooms: supporting students at very different levels at the same time. Mojo supports teachers by turning existing curriculum and assignments into interactive, conversational experiences. When they need it, students receive scaffolded support, feedback, and follow-up questions without being given the answers, while teachers gain real-time insight into how students are thinking. In a quasi-experimental study of more than 2,200 sixth graders, students using Coursemojo significantly outperformed their peers on state ELA assessments with an eight-point advantage. The gains were especially strong for students furthest from opportunity, reducing achievement gaps for students with disabilities by two-thirds and for economically disadvantaged students by half.

Other human-first AI models are showing similar promise. PeerTeach, for example, uses AI to strengthen peer learning and student-to-student relationships, rather than to increase isolated screen time. The platform supports student pairing and adapts practice problems, but the learning happens through conversation: Students explain their reasoning, ask questions, and coach one another through challenges. In a mixed-methods study, middle school students demonstrated statistically significant growth, with mean proficiency increasing from 38 percent to 65 percent. Here, AI is designed to facilitate human interaction and accelerate learning—not substitute for it.

There is vast potential in AI to personalize practice, surface insights, and extend access to learning in powerful ways. But not every problem can—or should—be solved by a machine. Human judgment and moral reasoning will remain essential skills for both the workplace and democratic life.

In their essay, McGuire and Wilka describe how recent decades of reform narrowed schooling toward what could be easily measured and managed. The risk with AI is that it will reinforce this pattern. If we treat school as a set of measurable outputs, AI will be deployed to optimize for those outputs, such as test scores, whether or not they reflect what students actually need to learn or who they need to become. But if we start from a broader purpose—human thriving in community—AI can be used in service of that aim, supporting deeper learning rather than replacing it.

The most promising new school models show what this looks like in practice. They use technology to expand learning in tangible ways by providing timely feedback, opening access to real-world problems and resources, and personalizing pathways. At the same time, they’re anchoring school in human connection, belonging, and shared purpose. In these environments, students learn that AI is not a substitute for judgment, and that the skills needed to use it responsibly are the same skills needed for life.

In this sense, the work of reinventing school is inseparable from the work of renewing democracy. The question before us is not only how we prepare students for a world shaped by technology but how we prepare them to shape that world themselves.

Redefining the Role of Teachers

As we design and scale new models of learning, we also need to reexamine the core role of the teacher. If we want students to experience something radically different, we have to create systems that allow adults to work differently, too.

In these new models, teaching becomes a shared endeavor, extending beyond the walls of a classroom and inviting a broader circle of people to support young people’s growth.

Community leaders, industry experts, and caregivers all have a role to play in helping students connect learning to life. When a local engineer mentors students on renewable energy projects, or a grandparent volunteers to record oral histories for a social studies unit, students gain not only skills but relationships, perspective, and purpose.

At the same time, we need to redesign the role of professional educators to make this broader vision possible. Today, teachers are expected to guide students through complex, interdisciplinary challenges; to help them use technology and AI ethically and creatively; and to cultivate curiosity, compassion, and critical thinking. But the systems around them haven’t evolved to match those expectations. Too many educators are overburdened and under-supported, with little time to collaborate or reflect. Even the tools meant to help them often add to their workload instead of freeing time for connection and innovation. Great teaching requires protected time to co-plan, examine student work and data, and iterate. Schools need the operational backbone to free up that time.

Some emerging models are showing what it looks like to redesign around that reality. Serving newcomer students nationwide, the Internationals Network organizes teams of five to six teachers around a shared cohort of 75–100 multilingual learners. These teams meet regularly—often daily—to coordinate language development across subjects, align instruction, and personalize support. This structure fundamentally changes how teaching happens. Instead of working in isolation, teachers work as a team, bringing different expertise to support the same group of students and ensuring each student is known across contexts. The result is a more coherent and connected experience for students.

CommunityShare shows how technology can expand and reimagine the role of the teacher. In many schools, the responsibility for connecting learning to the real world falls almost entirely on classroom teachers. CommunityShare’s digital platform, professional learning, and coaching are designed to change that. Through their “digital human library” teachers are matched with scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and other local professionals who co-create real-world learning experiences with students. Across 18 communities, CommunityShare has reached more than 2,100 educators and 89,000 students, with teachers reporting stronger engagement, deeper critical thinking, and clearer connections between school and future opportunities. Notably, 90 percent of surveyed educators say the experience increased their desire to remain in the profession.

Together, these models and their early results signal the potential for a different vision of how technology can support teaching, one that expands what teachers can do and creates the conditions for higher-impact work.

When we broaden who counts as an educator and position teachers as facilitators of learning rather than deliverers of information, we build stronger schools and stronger communities. Students gain access to real-world expertise, and teachers can focus on guiding thinking, building relationships, and supporting deeper understanding. In these environments, adults and young people learn alongside one another, modeling the shared responsibility that a thriving democracy requires.

A Marshall Plan for Education

For more than 20 years, education leaders have called to “reinvent the factory model of schooling.” That call remains right, but it’s also incomplete. The deeper challenge before us is about purpose and imagination.

McGuire and Wilka argue that we are in a paradigm transition, a period of instability when old assumptions are breaking down and new ones have yet to take hold. In moments like this, institutions either retrench or reinvent themselves. Public education cannot afford the former.

We have the opportunity, and the obligation, to build schools that earn public trust by fulfilling a purpose people can recognize, value, and believe in. Education must create the conditions for every child to thrive, knowing that the strength of our democracy is built on their success.

What would it look like to treat this moment with the urgency of a Marshall Plan for education? If we made a national commitment to prepare young people for a world that’s changing by the day? It will take a shared commitment to a direction and set of principles that will ensure we can serve young people far better than we have before.

In this future:

• Each young person develops the knowledge, skills, agency, compassion, and moral judgment to chart their own path, sustain well-being, and contribute to shared prosperity.
• Learning experiences are rooted in real-world purpose, helping young people see who they are and how they matter.
• Communities work together with schools and other learning settings to cultivate belonging, agency, and trust—seeing every young person as a future maker and a whole person, not just a student.
• Education serves democracy, nurturing the capacity to work across differences, discern truth, and act for collective flourishing.

In this way, education can fulfill its purpose by investing in individuals and equipping them to build strong communities and contribute to a healthy democracy. I believe we can get there, and the genesis for this movement is already underway. But reinvention will not happen through aspiration alone. It requires building a new architecture for how we collaborate, invest, and define success, anchored by a few clear, shared commitments.

First, a coherent north star. We should be able to say, simply and confidently, that every young person deserves strong academics, real preparation for life and work, the ability to participate in civic life, and a deep sense of belonging. Those are goals we can share nationally, even as communities design learning in ways that reflect their own values and context. Without shared guardrails, variation can widen inequity. With shared purpose, variation becomes a strength.

Second, a new way of working. For too long, education innovation has operated on a “lone hero” model—organizations with similar goals competing for funding, recognition, and scale. That approach has helped a few ideas grow quickly, but it has also left others behind and discouraged shared learning. A common public good requires a more collaborative architecture: Innovators and educators working side by side, sharing learning, building infrastructure together rather than jostling for limited resources.

Third, a new approach to funding. If we want different results, we have to fund the work differently. One-time grants cannot sustain structural redesign. We need patient capital—investment that gives leaders time to build, test, learn, and improve. That means funding not just new schools or models, but the enabling conditions that allow them to thrive: strong tools, professional learning, research, and implementation support. Funding for lasting change requires long-term commitment, and the courage to invest in collaboration and shared capacity, not just the next promising idea.

Fourth, true co-creation with communities. As learning expands beyond traditional classrooms, communities will rightly seek the freedom to shape education around their histories, aspirations, and values. But localization must be paired with shared responsibility. The broader ecosystem—funders, policy makers, intermediaries—must help build common definitions of quality, shared ways of learning from evidence, and funding structures that strengthen capacity over time. The goal is not a return to top-down mandates, nor a landscape of disconnected efforts, but aligned local leadership in service of a shared national purpose.

Fifth, disciplined learning and accountability. The north star defines where we are going. Accountability ensures we are getting there. We must be willing to try new models in real settings, learn from what works and what doesn’t, and refine accordingly. We must also hold ourselves accountable to a more comprehensive picture of student thriving, not just test scores, but academic growth, readiness for life and work, civic engagement, and long-term well-being.

Education is how a society renews itself. If we choose reinvention over retreat, our schools can help create a prosperous future defined not by scarcity or fear, but by opportunity, shared prosperity, and democratic vitality—one where young people find purpose, communities find connection, and every child knows they belong.

That is the promise of public education. And it is still within reach.

Addressing complex social challenges at scale requires strong, well-connected networks that can coordinate action, share learning, and adapt as conditions change. Whether in philanthropy, social investment, member alliances, or regional platforms, networks play a vital role in mobilizing resources, surfacing innovation, and supporting solutions across diverse contexts.

Yet a fundamental challenge persists: Many networks lack clear, current visibility into who their members are, what they do, and how their efforts align. Reliance on outdated directories, infrequent surveys, or anecdotal knowledge limits collaboration, progress tracking, and access to relevant opportunities. These gaps are often most acute in fast-changing or under-resourced environments, where information is fragmented or rarely updated.

In response, a growing range of networks—including grantee communities, professional alliances, funder collaboratives, and industry-wide partnerships focused on shared social or environmental goals—are beginning to adopt more dynamic, data-informed approaches. Tools such as AI-enabled analysis, automated research, and real-time feedback mechanisms are helping these groups replace static records with living, evolving views of network activity tailored to their unique data environments, geographies, and organizational types.

For the better part of a decade, our AI and data analytics company, Impact Intelligence has helped a range of networks—including international member alliances, funder collaboratives, professional associations, and alumni and awardee groups—understand what is happening across their communities and how best to serve them over time. In the process, we have noticed some common blind spots that thoughtfully designed, AI-supported approaches can bring to light.

What follows are snapshots of three core analytical capabilities that networks can apply incrementally, as well as a case study highlighting a shared analytical platform and a framework that organizations can use to rethink their own network intelligence.

Three Core Analytical Capabilities

1. AI-powered text analytics. General-purpose text mining and media analysis tools are now common across sectors. But more specialized applications designed for social and environmental contexts (for example, analyses drawing on publicly available publications and datasets from organizations like the OECD or the World Health Organization) can identify patterns such as recurring challenges highlighted across reports, shifts in policy focus over time, or regions where organizations consistently report certain issues. These insights help networks see which issue areas and members need the most attention and resources at any given time.

Take the Bayer Foundation, which sought to strengthen how it supports and engages alumni of its Women Entrepreneurs Award, a global program backing early-stage, women-led social enterprises. During our work together on the initiative, Peng Zhong, the foundation’s director of social innovation, explained that the program was responsible for managing an expanding, geographically distributed group of entrepreneurs. This made it difficult to consistently track how alumni enterprises were evolving. Important developments—such as new partnerships, media recognition, awards, and expansion into new markets—often surfaced late, intermittently, or only when alumni proactively shared updates. As a result, much of the network’s progress remained opaque, limiting timely engagement and evidence-based decision-making.

To address this, we introduced a monitoring approach. By continuously scanning organizational websites, media coverage, and other public channels, the system created a live, regularly refreshed overview of how alumni organizations were progressing over time. The system also generated curated monthly highlights that surfaced notable milestones and success stories across the portfolio, providing both immediate visibility and periodic synthesis.

The monitor freed a lean team from doing manual research and replaced fragmented, ad hoc tracking with a more reliable evidence base. While traditional criteria—such as financial statements and readiness assessments—remained central to evaluating ventures’ initial investment readiness, the monitoring insights provided ongoing validation of those early judgments. They helped the team sense-check assumptions over time, flag ventures requiring closer support or review, and increase confidence that selected awardees for the Women Entrepreneurs Award and accelerator program continued to demonstrate observable momentum. This enabled a shift from reactive tracking to more proactive engagement, better-targeted introductions, and more informed communications with funders and partners.

2. AI research agents with human validation. Many organizations already use this approach: AI agents identify potential organizations, initiatives, or trends at scale, and human researchers then review, refine, and enrich these findings. The key is to focus human analysis on areas where judgment, local knowledge, and ethical considerations matter most.

One example comes from our work with Google.org and Asian Venture Philanthropy Network (AVPN) on the AI Skilling initiative in the Asia-Pacific. The challenge was to understand a highly diverse and fragmented landscape of AI transition and digital skilling efforts across multiple countries, languages, and sectors, where no comprehensive or up-to-date mapping existed. In response, the project used AI research agents to scan more than 400,000 public sources, identifying approximately 20,000 digital skilling programs and highlighting skills that AI advances would likely affect. A survey of nearly 3,000 individuals across eight Asia-Pacific countries—capturing perspectives on barriers to access, relevance of training, and unmet needs—complemented this initial mapping. Human researchers then reviewed the combined findings, validating program classifications, identifying regional differences, and ensuring that groups such as women, persons with disabilities, and workers with low digital literacy were meaningfully represented.

The resulting analysis informed specific design decisions for the AI Opportunity Fund: Asia Pacific, including which learner groups to prioritize, how to differentiate support across countries, and how to embed outcome measurement into funded programs. For example, the identification of distinct skilling clusters helped the fund focus resources on workforce segments facing the highest transition risk, while survey insights shaped requirements around job readiness, accessibility, and continuity of learning. In this way, the research translated directly into how the organizations structured and deployed funding, rather than remaining a standalone study.

3. Voice-based interview agents. Sometimes, the fastest way to understand a community is simply to ask. But for many networks, especially those working across regions or languages, traditional survey and interview methods fall short. Scheduling interviews is logistically complex, and language diversity creates additional friction. And response rates for written surveys tend to be low, particularly when respondents are busy, under-resourced, or uncertain about how their input will be used. For many teams, participating in formal research also competes directly with day-to-day delivery work.

AI-powered voice agents that conduct conversational, multilingual, and on-demand interviews via the web or mobile phone can offer a practical alternative. Participants respond in their own words and at their own pace, without needing to coordinate calendars or navigate complex interfaces. This approach can be particularly useful for networks engaging social enterprises, nonprofits, small businesses, community-based organizations, or schools that have limited time or administrative capacity.

Voice interviews also address the rigidity of text-based surveys. Participants often share more detailed and emotionally rich insights when speaking aloud, especially in their native language. When responses are vague or incomplete, the voice agent can ask follow-up questions and probe deeper. This adaptive questioning makes the method especially valuable for exploratory research, impact validation, and learning-focused evaluations, where context and nuance matter as much as standardized metrics.

In 2025, our Interview Agent, an AI-powered platform for conducting and analyzing stakeholder interviews, supported an assessment of a flagship sustainability award backed by a national government by conducting in-depth, asynchronous interviews with representatives from winning organizations around the world, many of which have limited public information available. Traditional interviews were not feasible given the number of winners, time zone differences, and tight project timelines.

Interview Agent enabled each organization to share detailed reflections in their own words, including the outcomes of their work, the role the award played in enabling those outcomes, lessons they had learned, and their approaches to validating impact data. In some cases, the platform conducted separate interviews with different team members to help build a more complete and balanced picture of each organization’s experience.

The platform then analyzed these qualitative insights to provide a holistic view of how the award influenced winners’ visibility, credibility, access to opportunities, and ability to deliver sustained impact—findings that informed sustainability reporting and strategic planning in turn. This reduced the time and effort required to gather insights while expanding the reach and inclusiveness of the process. As a result, the dataset better reflected the diversity of experiences across geographies, organization sizes, and operational contexts, strengthening both the credibility and usefulness of the findings.

Case Study: Shared Analytical Platforms

The challenge to maintain a current, actionable understanding of member activity while operating across regions with different priorities, languages, and contexts is especially familiar to international networks, but it applies to funders, intermediaries, and large organizations working with regional chapters or country-level partners as well. These organizations often struggle to see what their members or partners are doing across regions, where efforts overlap, and where gaps or collaboration opportunities exist. In this context, a shared analytical platform with regionally tailored dashboards can help improve visibility, coordination, and cross-network learning.

One example comes from our work with several regional venture philanthropy networks—including Latimpacto, African Venture Philanthropy Alliance (AVPA), and AVPN. Together, these networks represent more than 1,000 foundations, impact investors, corporations, and international NGOs. Like many membership-based networks, they had access to large amounts of information about their members, but when we started working with them, that information was fragmented across websites, reports, news coverage, and informal updates, making it difficult to see patterns or identify opportunities for collaboration in real time.

Rather than adopting a single, uniform model, the networks focused on building a shared analytical platform that they could adapt locally. Each network collaborated on the design of its own monitoring approach, shaped by regional priorities and strategic questions, while still aligning on baseline categories to compare activity and trends consistently.

For example, Latimpacto emphasized a need to distinguish between rural and urban community development in Latin America and to develop more nuanced categories of marginalized communities, including economic vulnerability, identity-based exclusion, and racial marginalization. AVPA wanted greater visibility into catalytic capital and financial instruments in Africa, reflecting ongoing regional debates about innovative financing mechanisms. And AVPN expressed growing interest in tracking faith-based giving in Asia, given its cultural and strategic importance in many markets.

These inputs fed into the shared platform, known as Social Investment in Action, allowing partners to see both region-specific insights and structured views of member activity within their own network. The platform is continuously updated with new activities each month, providing a current and evolving picture of the landscape. Baseline categories included areas such as social causes, beneficiary groups, and types of support, including both financial and non-financial contributions. For example, users could explore how their organizations distributed activities across different causes and deployed various forms of capital and support. The platform organized all data within a consistent framework, while allowing networks to define and apply categories according to their unique regional priorities.

Over a four-year period, the approach surfaced more than 54,000 documented member activities—drawing on public sources such as news articles, organizational updates, and announcements—and helped map more than $4 trillion in social investments. This allowed the networks to explore where capital was flowing, which issue areas were gaining momentum, and where opportunities for collaboration were emerging. It also changed decision-making. Network teams shifted from periodic, retrospective reporting to ongoing analysis, cross-regional learning, and more-targeted support for members based on real-time signals rather than anecdotal updates.

Manuela Jiménez López, Latimpacto’s knowledge coordinator, shared in a meeting with our team that members initially used the Social Investment in Action - Latin America (SIAL) platform to track capital flows and emerging themes but later began using it in more-practical ways. One member organization, Fundación Grupo Social, for example, was conducting an analysis across sectors (including environment, water and sanitation, road infrastructure, income generation, and education) with the aim of identifying potential national and international partners for future collaboration. In the past, this would have required weeks of manual research, personal outreach, and reliance on partial or outdated information. As Fundación Grupo Social noted, the SIAL platform’s ability to filter data by social causes and SDGs made it possible to move from fragmented, organization-level research to a more comprehensive, “macro” view of the ecosystem. This enabled the team to map potential partners more systematically and initiate connections through Latimpacto more quickly, more proactively, and with greater confidence.

The takeaway is not the creation of a bespoke platform, but the design principle behind it: separating a common analytical backbone from locally defined categories and priorities. Even at smaller scales, this approach can help organizations build shared intelligence that supports coordination and learning without forcing uniform reporting or erasing regional nuance. In this case, the implication for the field is that strengthening knowledge infrastructure can be as important as mobilizing capital itself.

A Framework for Rethinking Network Intelligence

For networks and community-based organizations new to these approaches, one of the most useful starting points is ecosystem mapping—creating a baseline view of what organizations are involved in what, how they are connected, and where information gaps exist. This does not need to be complex. A network might begin by listing its core members, partners, and funders, then grouping them by geography, issue area, or role. From there, it can add simple layers of information, such as who each organization collaborates with most often and where activity appears concentrated or sparse.

Developing a shared internal knowledge base is another good place to start, as it helps preserve institutional memory. This can include notes from past engagements, such as program interactions or partnership discussions, summaries of member activity, and links to relevant external sources, including media coverage and organizational websites, all organized so that members can update them over time.

It is also useful to step back and examine how the network gets work done. Mapping a typical process, such as how staff collect member updates or identify partnerships, and then imagining what that process would look like if time and resources were not constraints, can be revealing. Comparing this “ideal state” with current, staff-intensive workflows helps clarify where automation or AI-supported tools might add value, and where human judgment or relationship-building should remain central.

The following questions can help organizations guide this reflection:

• Do we have a reliable picture of what our members or partners are doing right now? Can we quickly see which members are actively delivering programs, expanding into new regions, or forming new partnerships, or are we relying on annual reports, outdated directories, or informal updates?
• Where are the blind spots in the information we already collect? Smaller organizations, rural initiatives, or groups working in less visible issue areas may be underrepresented because they lack the capacity to produce regular reports or respond to surveys.
• Where would small, low-risk experiments help us test what AI can meaningfully support? One starting point might be piloting automated analysis of public updates from a subset of members, such as newsletters or websites, before applying it across the full network.
• What lightweight hardware or software could help us listen better, not just report more? Short voice-based interviews, simple digital forms, or automated monitoring of public sources can help capture insights from members who rarely engage through formal reporting channels.

A growing array of digital tools and resources can support these early steps. Nonprofits beginning to explore responsible AI can take advantage of programs such as the AWS Nonprofit Credit Program, which provides promotional credits to help organizations modernize their infrastructure. The Microsoft Azure grant offers annual service credits and a structured pathway that begins with migrating existing systems to the cloud and can extend to building AI-supported applications. Google also offers freely accessible courses on AI literacy and foundational AI skills, which can help teams build shared understanding before introducing new tools or workflows.

Setting clear priorities helps focus limited energy on the needs with the greatest potential impact, and small, low-risk pilots create space to test and learn, allowing teams to adapt as they discover what works. Over time, organizations can scale the approaches that demonstrate value, strengthening both internal workflows and their capacity to act on real-time intelligence.

Philanthropy’s misunderstanding of risk and the “guardrails” funders impose to minimize it have created a paradox: Under-resourced nonprofits that will never be fully equipped to effect the lasting systemic change that philanthropy seeks. This misalignment stems from investing in programs without also investing in institutions.

While there have been promising shifts toward trust-based philanthropy and flexible, multi-year grants in recent years, unrestricted funding for nonprofits comprises less than 40 percent of grants from private foundations. Funders continue to rely on guardrails, such as restricted, project-based funding, short-term grants, and extensive reporting requirements, as their primary tools to help ensure returns on social investments. But when nonprofits do not have enough liquid unrestricted net assets (LUNA) to cover their liabilities, they are at risk of stagnation, illiquidity, and even insolvency. In other words, nonprofits also need to build their net assets.

There is a solution: Enterprise capital for nonprofits, or multi-year, unrestricted funding that strengthens their financial position. While enterprise capital shares characteristics with other funding approaches like general operating support, its purpose and uses are different. Rather than providing revenue to cover day-to-day expenses, enterprise capital builds net assets, enabling nonprofits to make investments in revenue-generation strategies, maintain resources to mitigate cash flow mismatches, and adapt to shifting macro environments like the government funding uncertainties of the past year. By strengthening organizational capacity, financial resilience, and adaptability, enterprise capital helps nonprofits and funders alike deliver the ambitious systemic change they seek.

Undercapitalizing Creates Risk

Funders and nonprofit leaders often think about effective funding for nonprofits in terms of ensuring enough revenue to cover recurring expenses, such as program administration, operations, and staff salaries. Many nonprofits have strong, long-standing relationships with funders who provide general operating support or programmatic support that covers these costs. On paper, organizations may even appear wealthy given the expanding size of their budgets. This, however, masks the fact that they are increasingly asset-constrained. As the budget expands, monthly expenses increase, meaning there are fewer resources (net assets) available to cover costs should funding delays or disruptions occur.

For example, a youth-services organization in New York experienced rapid revenue growth ($10 million revenue increase over five years) but did not grow its balance sheet in parallel. This created a dangerous mismatch between its expanded operations and its financial foundation. The nonprofit provides essential services to vulnerable youth, and a large portion of its revenue comes from state government contracts for housing and mental health services. Since payment is only received once services have been delivered, the organization must spend cash upfront before it is reimbursed.

Many of the nonprofit’s funders had given unrestricted support for several consecutive years, but few funders had provided enterprise capital specifically to align with the organization’s business model. As a result, net assets were low when compared to the overall budget, and two-thirds of net assets were restricted, leaving the organization with limited resources to continue operating through funding disruptions. The organization was effectively one small disaster away from illiquidity, despite successful fundraising, an outstanding reputation, and a track record of program delivery. By neglecting the balance sheet, funders overlooked a critical ingredient for protecting programs and advancing financial sustainability.

For funders of organizations like this one, the analysis is simple: What financial resources does the enterprise require to continue operating without risk of running out of cash? For well-capitalized organizations—those with sufficient levels of LUNA—the answer may simply be more general operating support or full-cost program grants. For others, the solution could be a one-time enterprise capital injection that enables them to build new revenue streams, access low-cost working capital loans or lines of credit, or deploy cash to function as a financial reserve.

From Budgets to Enterprise Sustainability

Funders can protect their social investments by shifting from a sole focus on their grantees’ annual income and expenses to a comprehensive focus on the business model as revealed through both the budget and the balance sheet, the latter of which reveals capital structure and liquidity position. Think of a nonprofit’s capital structure like a building’s foundation. The programs and services are the visible structure above ground—what funders and the public see and admire. But without a solid foundation below, even a seemingly sturdy building will erode over time.

A nonprofit’s capital structure is the financial position invisible to most observers but essential for stability, growth, and weathering storms. Just as a building’s foundation must be proportionate to its height and designed for local environmental conditions, a nonprofit’s capital structure must be aligned with its business model, growth trajectory, and the funding environment in which it operates to ensure that the type of funding—long-term, short-term or permanent—matches the uses of funds. A true risk assessment requires funders to examine the balance sheet to understand whether a nonprofit’s foundation can support its structure.

In the for-profit world, investors understand this intuitively. For-profit companies build their capital structures with equity investments that allow businesses to innovate, expand, and absorb risk, and are supplemented with working capital to smooth cash flow and long-term debt for major investments aligned with revenue-generating activities. Tech startups often operate at a loss for years (sometimes decades) while building infrastructure and market share, backed by patient equity capital from investors who understand that building a sustainable business model takes time. Why don’t we extend the same patience when funding the big ideas that will solve society’s biggest social problems?

Many nonprofits receive general operating support and program grants that help meet budgetary needs but do little to address the overall financial position of the organization. In addition, they often lack access to low-cost working capital to match receivables and payables and operate with little to no growth capital for infrastructure investments (such as investment in staff, technology, or real estate) or revenue-generating activities.

A healthy capital structure is one in which funding is designed to align with an organization’s assets, liabilities, and net assets. For example, a nonprofit affordable housing developer needs multiple years of flexible funding to support the equity required to raise debt and to succeed during the development process, given the long-term nature of real estate development. This long-term source of funds matches a long-term use of funds.

Capital Structure to Weather Uncertainty

Big Thought, an education nonprofit in Dallas, is an example of an organization that was able to use enterprise capital to build its financial foundation before the storm hit.

Big Thought began in 1987 as a small organization with a $300,000 annual budget, working to close educational opportunity gaps in marginalized communities, and faced the typical challenges of unpredictable funding cycles (from the public and philanthropic sectors) and restricted grants. In response, Big Thought sought longer-term support to sustain the organization. This included $12.85 million in enterprise capital funding from the Wallace Foundation between 2011 and 2024 to support the design and implementation of multiple programmatic initiatives. The funding provided the foundational capital to launch the Big Thought Institute, an initiative to collect and document best practices in learning methods and systems, and Thriving Minds, an after-school program serving both educational institutions and community organizations. Over the past decade, these programs have leveraged $36.6 million in additional funding from both the public and philanthropic sectors, illustrating the scale of implementation and capacity enterprise capital helped make possible.

These enterprise investments, and the organizational infrastructure and revenue pathways they enabled Big Thought to build, have been essential in helping the organization survive and thrive despite recent seismic shifts in public and private funding since the pandemic, including recent federal cuts and changes in philanthropic priorities. Despite these cuts, Big Thought has not had to compromise mission delivery because enterprise capital enabled the organization to invest in diversified revenue pathways while exploring how to lower operating costs through technology applications.

Rethinking Risk for Greater Impact

For funders seeking to maximize impact, the path forward requires four fundamental shifts:

1. Focus on net assets, not just the budget. Balance sheet strength is fundamental to sustainable mission delivery. This begins with training your team to read the financial statements of their grantees and identify the strength (or lack thereof) of their net assets in the context of their mission and lines of business. Funders should design an underwriting process that not only assesses an organization’s mission alignment and staff capacity but also includes a review of the balance sheet’s role in achieving its goals.
2. Consider the risk that short-term, restricted funding may create for nonprofits. Evaluate whether restrictions actually enable grantees to operate programs efficiently and maximize impact. If you are providing general operating support, are you growing the organization’s balance sheet in parallel? Deepen your understanding of how an organization operates—both internally and in the communities it serves. Reflect on the full range of services and capacities necessary to achieve its impact and how the provision of additional funding for net assets can supplement both program and service delivery.
3. Identify non-financial ways to support your grantees. Check in on grantees. Ask what services they need while being transparent about what you can offer. Candid conversations offer the platform to align the goals of both grant maker and grantee by ensuring that the funder understands the realities driving the grantee’s success and raising up all the elements that must be addressed to ensure the impact that both funders and grantees expect.
4. Respond to the moment. The financial realities of this moment place a special premium on moving more quickly and creatively to address the ongoing challenges facing the social sector. Consider how new financial collaborations can overcome specific institutional constraints to move more funding faster.

As numerous studies and MacKenzie Scott’s giving have demonstrated, enterprise capital works. The nonprofit sector doesn’t need more guardrails—it needs funders willing to invest with the scale and patience necessary to solve society’s most vexing challenges.

Both funders and nonprofits have long seen due diligence as a vetting exercise that primarily supports decisions to fund organizations or not. Yet when funders set about due diligence in the traditional way—assessing financial health, governance structures, and legal compliance through rigid, standardized procedures—they can overlook the realities in which nonprofits operate. This approach, which stems from a widespread corporate mindset, perceives risk primarily as a threat that funders should identify and mitigate, if not avoid. It also exposes a fundamental contradiction in the sector: Funders that adopt due diligence practices of the corporate world are often reluctant to embrace the same level of risk that profit-driven organizations take in pursuit of financial return. Due diligence then becomes a binary risk assessment based on criteria that are detached from the environments in which grantee partners operate, when it should be a meaningful exploration of organizations’ potential. And while its intent is rightly rooted in accountability, it has evolved into an overly complex process, particularly for grassroots organizations operating in resource-constrained or politically sensitive contexts.

As the philanthropic and development sectors’ awareness of these limitations has grown, so has consensus that funders need to fundamentally rethink the purpose and value of due diligence frameworks. What if funders viewed due diligence principally as an opportunity to develop deeper relationships with grantee partners? By shifting the focus from scrutiny to support, could philanthropy use due diligence as a catalyst for nonprofit growth? What would this transformation require from philanthropy? And what kind of practical changes could funders apply to their own compliance processes to ensure that their funding is effective and delivers meaningful impact?

Drawing on regular exchanges with nonprofits, peer funders, consultants, and researchers, AmplifyChange—a UK‑based funder supporting sexual and reproductive health and rights across Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East—identified three shifts philanthropy needs to make to meaningfully transform compliance practices. These include using new terminology, taking a strengthening-oriented approach, and adopting a different perception of risk.

1. A Shift in Language and Attitude

Deliberately training due diligence assessors to approach their work with empathy and respect can transform the assessment process into a constructive and trust-building experience. Placing the focus on learning, rather than ticking boxes and identifying weaknesses, reframes due diligence as a conversation where funders pay as much attention to organizations’ strengths as they do to areas for growth.

The language funders use throughout the process is therefore important. Jargon that emphasizes failings rather than opportunities for growth can create confusion and anxiety. It can also demotivate grantee partners and exacerbate power imbalances. Rather than “due diligence,” for example, funders can use words that demonstrate a genuine interest in potential partners, such as “getting to know your organization better.” They can also replace words such as “gaps,” “shortcomings,” and “findings” with more supportive terms, such as “areas for growth,” opportunities for improvement,” and “recommendations.”

Assessors should also strive to deeply understand an organization’s internal practices and culture. Many organizations have policies on paper that they rarely apply. Instead of yes/no questions, for instance, funders can incorporate open questions that allow potential partners to explain how they operate in detail and provide examples to help elucidate intent. Including meetings or calls in the process also gives organizations the chance to explain their processes and practices more fully.

Finally, whenever feasible, funders should engage locally rooted due diligence consultants who can offer deep contextual expertise, including knowledge of local nonprofit laws, applicable regulatory requirements, and local language fluency. Their involvement creates an environment where organizations feel more comfortable sharing information openly and candidly. It also indicates that funders recognize their limited understanding of the local context and are taking steps to address it.

In several African and South Asian countries, for example, it has become increasingly difficult for nonprofits to receive foreign funding without meeting rigorous registration and banking requirements. In one case, an organization based in Bangladesh completed its due diligence assessment, with a recommendation to the funder to approve the grant. However, it subsequently became clear that the organization did not hold the appropriate registration to receive foreign funding.

Hiring a due diligence consultant with strong local expertise from the outset could have prevented false hope and subsequent disappointment, and saved both parties considerable time and resources. This situation also presented a significant reputational risk for the funder, as it could have suggested gaps in its due diligence approach.

2. A Shift in Approach Toward Learning Together

When due diligence identifies areas where organizations’ structures and processes could benefit from improvements, funders should consider taking a strengthening-oriented approach that embeds local context.

Consider a low-capacity grassroots organization operating in a fragile setting—a conflict‑affected country or a country under an authoritarian regime. The organization works in an environment where corruption is widespread, formal banking systems are unreliable, staff face serious safety risks, their operations are subject to intense scrutiny, resources are scarce, and recruiting qualified personnel (particularly in finance and compliance) is extremely challenging. A traditional due diligence process would likely flag this organization as high risk and unfundable. Reasons may include the absence of robust governance structures, a heavy reliance on manual bookkeeping with unexperienced finance staff, a lack of essential financial policies and procedures, and weak internal controls environment.

Integrating these contextual realities into the assessment process helps funders identify the organizations most capable of driving lasting and meaningful change. With appropriate financial and human support, these organizations can strengthen their resilience by adopting tools and practices that help them navigate profound uncertainty. A strengthening-oriented due diligence approach, then, would ask: What support would enable this organization to thrive and effectively accomplish its mission? Generally, the answer is grantee-led, adaptable, and long-term capacity-building plans, which may include hiring an experienced consultant to support the implementation of new policies and processes, providing board and staff training, or acquiring an accounting system.

This approach helps lay a strong foundation for effective and lasting partnerships, but it should also extend far beyond the due diligence phase. By offering day-to-day support, being available to answer questions about donors’ compliance requirements, providing access to guidance repositories, and delivering capacity-building opportunities such as in-person and in-country convenings, funders can demonstrate their ongoing commitment to the organizations they invest in.

The evolution of Conseils et Appui pour l’Education à la Base (CAEB), an organization in Mali that supports community development and humanitarian programming, illustrates the success of this long-term, learning and strengthening-oriented approach. Since AmplifyChange provided CAEB with a $10,000 grant in 2017, CAEB has grown to manage its own regional fund, Dambe Fund. To implement improvements identified during its due diligence process, CAEB allocated part of its initial funding to organizational strengthening: staff training, acquiring IT systems and equipment, developing essential policies, reinforcing its governance structure, and participating in AmplifyChange’s in‑country convenings and virtual training opportunities. Over time, CAEB secured more than $5 million in long‑term funding from AmplifyChange, giving it the stability it needed to build a strong team of programming and finance experts, and making it a highly robust organization capable of attracting support from other donors. Before becoming a grant maker itself, CAEB staff shadowed the AmplifyChange team to learn from them and later adapted AmplifyChange’s internal processes to their local realities. This approach is especially strategic in countries where structural and security constraints limit access for US and European funders.

Another approach to continuous learning is actively soliciting feedback from partner organizations. Although many funders do this, feedback from nonprofits often suggests that funders do not always consider or fully understand their perspectives, particularly when there is no follow-up. Creating structured and dedicated channels for open dialogue—whether on platforms like Circle or WhatsApp, during in-person meetings or workshops, or via a survey provider—helps funders understand the evolving challenges and aspirations of grantee partners, and refine their operational workflows, internal processes, and decision-making accordingly. It also strengthens trust and transparency. These conversations should go beyond assessing the mechanics of the process itself and open up forward‑looking dialogue on topics such as opportunities for non‑financial support; issues related to equity, inclusion, and power dynamics; and long‑term impact and learning.

Engaging with other donors is also a powerful way to strengthen internal processes and uncover innovative grant‑making approaches. Practical, example-driven conversations—for instance, exchanging experiences on developing a common due diligence framework, exploring how artificial intelligence can support compliance functions, or comparing practices around risk‑tolerant funding models—can be especially valuable. Funders operating outside the region they fund should consider meeting with regional and local grant makers about their due diligence and financial monitoring processes to understand on-the-ground realities and considerations they may otherwise overlook.

3. A Shift in Risk Perception

Philanthropy must also acknowledge that grantee partners working in complex or hostile environments bear significant risks, including physical and security risks, psychosocial and well‑being pressures, community and reputational risks, and operational and financial vulnerabilities. Funders genuinely committed to achieving meaningful impact must be willing to embrace these risks rather than shy away from them. Doing so requires a shift in mindset, from risk aversion to risk-sharing, and a willingness to support organizations that may not meet the conventional standards of compliance but are nonetheless essential within their communities.

To be effective, funders need to develop thoughtful, proactive risk-mitigation strategies in close collaboration with in-country partners, whose local knowledge is invaluable to shaping solutions that truly fit the context. For example, formally registering an organization focused on LGBTI+ issues in Ethiopia is legally impossible and criminalized. If a funder requires that all organizations working on this issue are legally registered before it provides support, none will qualify—even though they might be the key to changing social norms and legal reform.

Openness to alternative approaches, particularly those shaped by local insights, helps funders build trust from the outset, and many practical and compliant options exist—including fiscal sponsorship, funding channels outside traditional banking systems like Wise or Amanacard, and support for legal pathways to register in neighboring countries. These forms of flexible support not only allow nonprofits to operate in restrictive environments but also give them a chance to grow, strengthen their governance and internal controls, and ultimately become more resilient. In these cases, embracing risk is not an act of recklessness; it is an organizational, strategic imperative.

Supporting the development of civil society organizations is essential to ensuring that they remain robust, credible, and impactful within their unique contexts, and the first step toward making that possible is a thoughtful due diligence process. Transforming due diligence requires more than a few small tweaks; it demands a fundamental reorientation of language, behavior, and strategy among funders. But when it is reframed as a collaborative process rather than just a prerequisite for funding, it becomes a very powerful tool.

When Henry Ford built the Model T assembly line in 1913, the 800 percent increase in productivity (over craft-based production) made the American middle class possible. But it required a bargain: Workers would check their humanity at the factory door for eight hours a day. The system was perfect. Humans needed to adapt to it.

My great-grandfather took that bargain. He worked in an auto factory in Dearborn, Michigan. One day, walking to the water fountain during a break, he had a heart attack and died on the spot. The line kept moving.

It is a cruel irony that even though their purpose is to facilitate human flourishing, human services organizations inherited this same operating system, designed for human extraction. Community health centers, addiction recovery programs, homeless services, mental health agencies—all of them operate on MECE hierarchies, need-to-know information flow, and compliance-focused performance metrics—with chain of command as the answer to every question. The sector attracts people who want to make a difference, then it manages them using assembly line logic.

The result is predictable: The most dedicated staff burn out fastest, not despite their commitment but because of it.

What’s missing is not better leadership training or more resilient employees. It’s a different kind of system, what I call a breathing organization: One whose structure allows its people to move between activation and recovery with ease, not as cogs in a machine, constrained by the system, but as human beings with agency over their own rhythm. In a braced organization, people cycle between effort and exhaustion, between compliance and collapse; the breath is always held or shallow, waiting for the next demand. A breathing organization is designed so the exhale is actually possible.

We never stopped running Ford’s mechanistic operating system. We just moved it from the factory floor to the office, from manufacturing to knowledge work, from making cars to making policy. Best practices. Performance reviews. KPIs. Even "wellness programs" often function as optimization tools: How do we make humans tolerate the assembly line better?

The problem isn’t that these systems optimize for the wrong thing. Ford optimized for widgets per hour. What do modern human services organizations optimize for?

If the assembly line represents one way of coordinating human effort, the tea ceremony represents another.

The Tea Model

In 16th-century Japan, warlords optimized for something different. During the Warring States period (1467-1603), when the country fragmented into rival domains and violence saturated daily life, an unexpected cultural institution flourished: the tea ceremony. This wasn’t a coincidence: Tea masters like Sen no Rikyū didn’t create peaceful retreats from power, but, rather, bounded spaces where power could be negotiated without bloodshed. Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, two of Japan’s most ruthless warlords, used tea gatherings to rank allies, signal favor, and formalize status.

The tearoom became a diplomatic venue where armed rivals could meet without drawing blood, in short; it didn’t replace political maneuvering, but gave it choreography, dance steps instead of lock steps. It forced rivals to be human instead of war machines.

Here’s what matters for organizational design: The structure that enforced hierarchy also regulated nervous systems. When enemies entered a tearoom, the architectural constraints did real work. The nijiri-guchi (crawling-in entrance) forces everyone—regardless of rank—to bow low enough that a samurai must leave his sword outside. The prescribed movements eliminate the cognitive load of social improvisation. The ma (negative space, deliberate pauses) aren’t breaks from the ritual—they’re structural elements as essential as the movements themselves. Shared focus on a single object—the bowl, the scroll, the flower arrangement—created what modern polyvagal theory calls a “co-regulatory environment”: mutual cues of safety that allowed threatened nervous systems to downshift from hypervigilance.

The ritual didn’t eliminate the samurai’s sword, but created conditions where the sword could be set aside temporarily. Then the ritual was repeated. Daily. For lifetimes. Until the nervous system pattern became embedded.

The lesson is not to import tea ceremonies into boardrooms; the tea ceremony was not a model of egalitarianism or enlightenment. But ritual architecture can be engineered to shape nervous systems, and such engineering is as important as strategic planning or financial management. Physical constraints, prescribed movements, and structural silence can coordinate human nervous systems under stress. And our rituals of quarterly reviews, status meetings, org charts, and “professional development” do coordinate human behavior.

The question is: toward what end? The assembly line had rituals—time cards. Factory whistles. Synchronized movements. Coffee breaks measured in minutes—all designed to extract maximum output from human bodies. We inherited those rituals and moved them into Outlook calendars and Slack channels.

In human services, where stress is chronic and resources are perpetually scarce, the need for structured co-regulation is even greater than in corporate settings. The question isn’t whether to have rituals that shape nervous systems—every organization already has them. The question is whether those rituals are designed for sustainable coordination or extractive efficiency.

From Rituals to Infrastructure

Tea ceremony thrived during Japan’s most violent centuries because it created pockets where a different reality was possible, and repeated them until they became infrastructure. This is also what distinguishes genuine organizational transformation from one-off interventions: That it isn’t performed once and abandoned, but practiced daily, refined across generations, and embedded into the social fabric until its nervous system effects become predictable and reproducible. Tea masters had 500 years to perfect what modern change management consultants are asked to accomplish in a quarterly engagement. And while you don’t have five centuries, you do have Monday morning. The rituals you design now will either extract or sustain the humans who come after you.

Modern organizations tend to attempt transformation through the opposite approach: intensive one-time interventions followed by return to normal operations. What is needed is not another retreat, or better workshops. What it takes is designed repetition of new nervous system patterns until they become the default.

Tea masters understood that you don’t transform a nervous system with information. You transform it with repeated embodied practice in structured environments until new responses become automatic. Organizations always have rituals—punch clocks or town squares, chain of command or crawling-in entrances, need-to-know information flow or mission control windows. The question is what are our rituals actually building? (And are we willing to repeat them long enough to find out?)

Four Principles of a Breathing Organization

What does it look like to redesign organizational rituals for sustainable coordination rather than extraction?

1. Design for shared reality, not need-to-know. Make critical work visible by default. Ask: What does everyone need to see to act wisely? Open dashboards. Transparent workflows. Physical or digital spaces where different staff levels intersect without requiring permission.

Ask: Where do different staff levels physically intersect? What information is visible to whom by default rather than by request? When someone outside their domain flags an issue, what’s the structural response—gratitude or gatekeeping?

2. Build silence into coordination. Replace performative “Any questions?” moments with structural pauses. Thirty seconds of silence after proposals before discussion. Two minutes of individual writing before group conversation. Silence isn’t dead time—it’s the neurological shift from reactive to reflective processing.

This isn’t comfortable at first. The initial silence feels excruciating. People check phones, shuffle papers, and avoid eye contact. Then, over repetitions, the nervous system learns: This pause is safe. Thoughts can form that wouldn’t surface in immediate reaction. The person who never speaks first begins contributing. The person who always speaks first begins listening.

After six months of practiced silence, it stops being “that weird thing we do” and becomes “how we process and make decisions.”

3. Measure sustainability alongside output. Don’t abandon performance metrics—supplement them with leading indicators of organizational health. How many people are still here in three years? What percentage of staff report having space to think, not just execute? How often do junior people successfully challenge senior decisions? How many ideas come from outside assigned domains?

In human services, this means measuring not just clients served per full-time equivalent, but: How many staff are still here after two years? What percentage of frontline workers report having time to build genuine relationships with the people they serve rather than just processing cases? How often do line staff successfully advocate for system changes based on what they’re seeing? These aren’t soft metrics. They’re leading indicators of whether your organization can sustain its mission when federal funding contracts and labor markets tighten.

At one human services organization I work with, staff demonstrated this principle during the 2025 SNAP crisis. When long lines of clients formed outside in the cold waiting for emergency food assistance, frontline workers didn’t wait for leadership permission. They saw what needed to happen, moved vending machines out of a staff break room, and began processing food orders there. The improvisation worked so well they kept the new system after the crisis passed. The CEO has been praising them ever since—not because they followed protocol, but because they trusted their intelligence enough to override it when the mission required it. No policy authorized this. The culture allowed it.

That’s what breathing organizations do: They create conditions where staff can access collective intelligence in real time, not just when leadership approves.

4. Require leaders to submit to the rituals. If leaders bypass the rituals, the system dies. No VIP lanes. No “we’ll skip the pause this time.” I’ve worked with organizations that installed every right practice—designed silence in meetings, distributed authority, sustainability metrics—and watched them wither within months. In one community mental health organization, leadership created protocols for staff-led case consultations with structured reflection time and cross-disciplinary input—then kept canceling them when productivity metrics dipped. When a senior leader interrupted the 30-second pause to “move things along,” the nervous system lesson was instant and permanent: The ritual is performative, not real.

The most critical ownership is the leader’s ownership of actually maintaining the conditions for ownership. Which means staying vigilant about how you let people fail, how you keep yourself in check, whether you personally honor the pauses and protocols you’ve designed. If you don’t, no one else will. And your culture won’t change.

This is what tea masters understood viscerally: The host enters through the same small door, performs the same careful movements, and observes the same silence. The ritual has no exemptions. Status doesn’t excuse you from the form—it obligates you to it more completely.

It’s About Time

We’re facing what 16th-century Japan faced: social fragmentation, economic anxiety, the erosion of meaning-making structures. The tea ceremony didn’t solve those problems. But it created infrastructure for remaining human inside them. Modern organizations face the same choice: Will our rituals serve extraction or sustainability? Compliance or adaptation? The Model T or the breathing organism?

Tea masters had five centuries. You have the span of your leadership tenure. But the principle is identical: New nervous system patterns require repeated practice in structured environments. One leadership offsite cannot override decades of assembly-line muscle memory. What can override it is different structures, embodied by leadership, practiced by everyone, until they become normal. Not because they’re better ideas, but because they’re consistently reinforced realities.

The question isn’t whether these practices sound good. Most people would agree they do. The question is: Are you willing to practice them repeatedly, through the awkward early stages when they feel inefficient, until they become embedded? Are you willing to measure their effects over years rather than quarters? Are you willing to redesign physical and informational architecture, not just adjust meeting agendas? And most critically: Are you willing to submit to the structures you create?

Everybody’s getting ready for the annual social sector lollapalooza in Oxford, and there have never been so many sessions with the word “scale” in the title. There seems to be a collective recognition that the problems are looming, the clock is ticking, and we’ve got hard choices to make. If anything, the consensus is validated by a predictable backlash on this very platform, ranging from the plaintive “Does Everything in the Social Sector Have to Scale?” to the unhinged “Scale is a Myth! Embrace the Long Defeat!”

For all this attention, there are as many different interpretations of “scale” as there will be sessions, and a coherent discussion of anything must start with a shared definition of what it means. Let’s try this one more time: Scale is about exponential impact. It’s a curve, not a line.

Hear me out. The best way to define scale is to look at it alongside the two other kinds of impact, steady and linear. They look like this:

While we’re at it, we need a simple definition of impact. Try this: “A material change in the world attributable to your efforts.” When we’re talking about steady, linear, and exponential impact, we’re presuming that there is impact, and it has to be said there are still far too many organizations, projects, and initiatives that create little or none of it. They’re zombies: They consume money, they do stuff, but they don’t accomplish anything. If we funders were doing our job, we would identify them, defund them, and put them out of business. Enough said.

To make sense of these three kinds of impact, we need context, so consider Sub-Saharan Africa, where 800 million people live on less than $3 a day, a massive burden of poverty that comes with a host of attendant ills. When problems are that big, the differences between these three kinds of impact—and their corresponding kinds of organizations—really matter. Let’s look at the three kinds of organizations and their implications when we need to solve problems this big:

Steady Impact. This is work that has local impact without big growth ambitions. Local organizations can have a profound impact in the lives of people and their communities but aren’t focused on growth beyond their borders. I’m talking about things like food banks, clinics, community centers, and scholarships—the best of them are grassroots projects that are deeply rooted in the communities they serve. Impact and money are tightly coupled—if you want to keep impact coming, you’ve got to keep the money flowing.

When there’s real impact, this is a great choice for funders who need to feel a strong connection to particular people and places. It won't solve problems, though—you could have hundreds of thousands of local projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, and while they’d do a lot of good, they wouldn't move the needle.

Linear Growth. These organizations respond to the size of the problem by growing; by churning out ever more services for ever more people. Money and impact are still tightly coupled in a linear relationship: If you want to create more impact, you have to raise a corresponding amount of money. At their best, these organizations function kind of like a Coke machine: You put your money in, and you get a reliable product—impact—out.

The combination of reliable impact and demonstrated growth is attractive to a lot of funders, especially the effective altruism crowd. It’s a perfectly good use of money. But given the size of the problems, the math isn’t in your favor. Think about a great outfit like GiveDirectly: If they give $1000 in cash to 10,000,000 families in poverty, that’s $10,000,000,000 a year to cover a fraction of the population that needs it. Drilling boreholes for water costs $10,000 a pop, so 100,000 of those will set you back a billion dollars. Community health workers will do a remarkable job for $100 a month, but we need a million or so of them—that’s another $10 billion a year. Even simple stuff like mosquito nets and deworming pills require many organizations and a ton of money to meet even approach the need.

I could go on with examples like this all day, but you can see how the need quickly outstrips the capacity of philanthropy (not to mention its attention span). With linear growth, big ambitions drive ballooning budgets and rev up the fundraising hamster wheel. You can do a lot of good, but you can count on hitting a funding ceiling long before you’ve made a big dent in a big problem.

Exponential Scale. Here we’re talking about a curve, not a line—about going from linear to exponential. The crux of that transition is to decouple philanthropy and impact. This is scale—this is how you make a big dent in a big problem—and the key to that uncoupling is a transition to the doer and payer at scale. The doer at scale is whomever is implementing the idea at problem-solving scale. The payer at scale is whomever is paying for it at that same kind of scale.

Philanthropy can get things started, but it’s never enough to achieve exponential impact. NGOs can develop ideas and prove them out, but the NGO sector has never proven to be a reliable and efficient way to scale much of anything. It turns out that for the most part, government is the only realistic doer at exponential scale, and while we all indulged in the fantasy that Big Aid would be a reliable payer at scale, it turned out to be just that, a fantasy. That leaves government as the only realistic payer at scale. So outside of market-based solutions, when we’re talking about scale, we’re talking about governments as both doer and payer.

In this vision of scale, the role of the NGO—and, hence, of philanthropy—is to develop solutions that can be scaled via governments, prove and refine those solutions, and then work with government to achieve ownership and adoption.

Moving to Recruiting

An NGO that is serious about scale goes through three stages on the way to exponential impact:

• In R&D, the organization is mostly a lab, iterating and experimenting to get to a scalable model.
• Going into Growth stage, the organization becomes more like a factory, churning out replications, tuning the model, and exploring economies of scale.
• In Scale stage, exponential impact is enabled by a shift from factory to recruiter.

Not that many organizations make this last transition. Recruiting means that you de-emphasize doing stuff yourself and you recruit (and enable) others to do it. You stop building more factories, and you start building something that looks like a sales and customer service team.

Lab, factory, and recruiter imply three transformations of an organization in sequence. Every organization should maintain a lively lab, and scaling organizations may still find an important, if limited, role for factories. But an organization on its way to exponential scale moves through these three stages, each with its own different people and skill sets. These stage transitions often require leadership transitions as well, but there are occasional founders who can navigate all three.

In graphic form, it looks like this:

I hope that this is achingly obvious by now, but I’ll beat it to death: Growth and scale are not the same thing.

Confusing the two comes at a cost—you only have so much bandwidth, and they require different activities and skillsets. Growth and scale can even be in opposition, especially when working with governments. If you keep building factories in a country, the government will get the distinct idea that you are trying to do the job for them. Those factories can create a parallel system that actually undermines governments’ efforts to do things themselves. And a lot of organizations think that just by having visible factories doing a thing in a country, there will be a painless handoff or transition to governments doing the thing. This never happens. Thoughtless growth can set back the prospect of scale in a country, if not doom it entirely.

To be an effective recruiter, to sell your idea to a government and help them make it their own, you need a serious sales and customer service team. Most organizations, even if they recognize this, do a half-assed job of it (even half might be generous): They don't develop the muscle, they don't use state-of-the-art methods, they don’t give it enough heft, and they don’t devote their best talent to it. If you want to see a great idea achieve exponential impact, you need a badass team to work with governments—and you’re going to need to make substantial investments to help governments do their best work. If you’re lucky enough to get Big Bet funding, this is what you should use it for.

If you lead an organization that is making that big shift from factory to recruiter, your chief problem will be that most funders don't get it. Funders refer to the result as “indirect impact,” as if it's the poor cousin of “direct” impact. That’s backwards. Direct impact is just the limited progenitor of exponential impact. Exponential impact accomplished by the doer at scale counts a lot more.

An essential job for any funder is to decide which of these flavors of impact—steady, linear, or exponential—they want to fund. Given how fundamental that it is, it’s astonishing how many funders go through interminable strategy processes while failing to do so. Mulago has gone all-in on scale. A good funder friend of ours likes to maintain a portfolio with a balance of the three. That’s not unreasonable, but it is fundamental to your job to make sure that you understand the difference and decide.

If we want to solve much of anything, though, we need a lot more funders to understand and choose exponential impact. Scale really is the impact jackpot. Growing the factory is still the default move and real change is going to require a lot more funders to throw their lot in with scale, to fund NGOs that want to develop scalable solutions, prove them out, and enable the doers at scale to deliver them.

What it will take is a lot more of this, with a lot more discipline:

1. Funders choose exponential impact—scale.
2. Doers devise awesome scale strategies
3. Funders fund those strategies.
4. Doers stick to and execute on those strategies

If any one of these doesn’t happen, the whole thing goes sideways. Because of their heft and influence, Big Bet funders have a special responsibility and are often prime offenders. I’ve seen too many organizations with a perfectly good scale strategy enticed into building a much bigger factory instead. It’s hard to resist the temptations of an eight-figure grant, but because most Big Bets are a one-time thing, they can drive these organizations off a fiscal cliff. We blame the organization leaders when it’s every bit as much the fault of the funder.

With linear growth, every additional unit of impact requires a corresponding unit of money, so more impact means more money and more organizational growth—forever. However, if you’re doing exponential growth, and you’re making that shift from factory to recruiter, it can look like this:

Decoupling money and impact provides the way out of a cycle nobody likes. We need to scale ideas, not organizations! The same money it takes to run a limited number of factories can drive a whole lot of recruiting and enabling. When governments are the doer at scale, smart NGOs have an awesome value proposition: “You want to do solution X? If you’ll own it—you do it and you pay for it—we’ll join you in a joint venture to help you deliver it, and we’ll do it for free.”

That means no more “transitions” and no more “handoffs” to government ownership, no more bullshit “in kind” government contributions. And most important, no more disappointment when governments deliver solution X and don’t get the same results you did. Of course not! You specialize in X and they don’t. In truth, your own results are only briefly relevant—what matters is what happens when a government does X, and the only RCT that matters is the one that happened with full government implementation The result of government ownership and delivery isn’t some kind of sad “voltage drop,” it’s the thing that reveals the true promise of any idea.

So, any impact is worth funding. Exponential impact—scale—is the least understood, and certainly underfunded, especially given the problems we’re trying to solve. Imagine what could happen with an army of NGOs able to drive exponential impact without the crushing burden of endlessly bigger budgets. Growth isn’t enough, and business as usual won’t cut it. Do scale. Fund scale.

On August 28, 2025, the Ecuadorian government enacted legislation that severely limits the fundraising capacity of nonprofit organizations across the country. Based on the new Organic Law of Social Transparency, officials froze the bank accounts of at least 10 indigenous civil rights leaders between September and October 2025, and to date have filed lawsuits against at least 60 social leaders and nonprofit representatives for alleged unjustified private enrichment. Once regulation is fully underway, the law will impose significant bureaucratic burden and strict sanctions on nonprofit organizations.

Officials have taken these actions in the name of controlling the cash flows of organized crime, but in reality, the government is using the law as an authoritarian measure to cripple civil society and critical, politically opposed voices. In the last decade, other Latin American governments have implemented similar laws, almost always under the premise that organized civil society has become a space for money laundering or facilitating foreign political influence. This is despite the fact that no empirical evidence has shown that civil society is necessarily more susceptible to such crime than any other sectors, in Latin America or elsewhere. Countries with similar laws include El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Perú, and Venezuela, where nonprofits have suffered a significant loss in resources and in some cases been completely silenced by the governments in power.

What follows is an analysis of the Ecuadorian case that seeks to contribute to the regional discussion on the challenges for organized civil society and potential solutions, including how nonprofits might strengthen alliances among themselves to exert influence.

Heightened Administrative Burden

The Organic Law of Social Transparency sets new rules for how the country’s approximately 75,000 Ecuadorian nonprofits register, report, and operate. Many aspects of the law align with the wider global trend of strengthening philanthropic compliance. For example, the law intends to optimize the management and administration of public assets, and to make the management of philanthropic funds more transparent by reinforcing compliance with international standards.

However, it also aims to transform the internal governance of nonprofit organizations, with significant administrative and legal implications. Among the main aspects of the law is the designation of a single supervisory body for nonprofits, the Superintendency of Popular and Solidarity Economy, which was created in 2011 and is already overstretched. Once this government office begins full regulation, it will determine how many nonprofits there are and what they do, and then classify them as low-, medium-, or high-risk based on factors such as the volume of resources they manage, origin of their funds, and territorial scope.

The law also mandates that nonprofits must implement new systems to guarantee transparency—including the development of internal codes of ethics, reports on management and use of resources, corruption risk management systems, and social and economic impact assessments—and the appointment of an internal transparency officer to serve as a liaison with the Superintendency. Nonprofits classified as low-risk will have to submit the information stipulated in the law every two years, while medium- and high-risk nonprofits will have to do so annually.

These measures fail to consider the wide variety of sizes and structures of Ecuadorian civil society organizations, including small community-based or grassroots organizations that operate with minimal budgets and rely on volunteer work. Many organizations will find it impossible to meet the additional administrative and financial burdens, as it may require hiring multidisciplinary teams to cover legal, accounting, and auditing requirements. This puts them at risk of being taken over, temporarily suspended, or closed by the regulatory agency.

Arbitrary Use and Account Closures

More broadly, the law aims to strengthen the state’s power to prevent, detect, and control irregular capital flows, money laundering, and the financing of illicit activities. In the current context of insecurity and violence that Ecuador is experiencing, concern over is not undue: Notably, Ecuador ended 2024 with a homicide rate of 38.8 percent, making it the most violent year in history and placing Ecuador as the third most violent country in Latin America. Meanwhile, the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental organization that investigates suspected money laundering operations, places Ecuador at a medium-high risk of money laundering and terrorist financing.

The law includes an amendment to the existing Organic Law for the Prevention, Detection, and Combat of Money Laundering and the Financing of Other Crimes, which establishes the legal framework for preventing the use of the economic system in illicit activities. According to this reform, the Financial and Economic Analysis Unit (UAFE)—which enforces the Financial Task Force’s standards and reports to the executive branch of Ecuador’s government, and whose director is appointed by President of the Republic—can now block nonprofit bank accounts without a court order, based solely on National Intelligence System reports of suspicious transactions or its own intelligence.

Even more concerning is that the new oversight body has the power to dissolve organizations for reasons that lack a rigorous definition, such as threats to "public order" or "state security." This leaves organizations subject to dissolution processes that are not framed within international law and could affect due process, since involuntary dissolution should occur only in cases of clear and imminent danger, with due judicial guarantees. The law thus generates a real risk of discretion and arbitrary use of state power.

Several civil society organizations have suggested that these reforms pose a clear threat to their fundamental rights to freedom of expression, political autonomy, and civic participation, and their concerns have not been unfounded. According to the investigative journalism platform, GK City, the public prosecutor's office continues to investigate the more than 60 citizens whose accounts were closed last fall—including indigenous leaders, local authorities, lawyers, and representatives of various nonprofit organizations—for unjustified private enrichment, and several of them report that their bank accounts have been frozen since mid-September without prior notice.

These investigations occurred in the context of nationwide mobilizations against the implementation of a September 2025 executive decree to eliminate fuel subsidies that have historically kept agricultural and transportation costs low. In response, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), the country's largest social organization, declared an indefinite national strike and lead protests later supported by farmers, students, and civil society organizations, creating a national movement calling for economic reforms and changes to government policies. During the protests, the CONAIE announced that state orders had blocked the bank accounts of several of its national leaders, as well as affiliated regional and local organizations, without prior notice. In a public statement, the organization called the orders a clear state intervention and attempt to intimidate. The President of the Republic himself confirmed this during a televised interview, when he highlighted that one of the strategies to manage the strike was to block its sources of financing by applying the new Organic Law of Social Transparency.

A month after the national strike ended, three Amazonian collectives—The Ceibo Alliance, The Union of Those Affected by Texaco’s Oil Operations, and Pakkiru—requested that an anti-corruption judge revoke the freezing of their bank accounts, a measure the UAFE imposed for alleged crimes during the national strike. The judge ruled in their favor and emphasized that the measure was unjustified, as the UAFE had presented no information or evidence that the organizations posed any threat to security and public order, nor that they financed violent acts of terrorism. The Pachamama Foundation, which has worked in Ecuador for more than two decades, also denounced the freezing of all its bank accounts and the opening of a criminalization process against its executive president.

It is worth noting that while the law empowers the UAFE to freeze funds for up to eight days without a court order, in most of these cases, it exceeded the stipulated time frame and did not release the funds. These measures caused severe disruption to numerous organizations, impacting operating expenses like payroll, the continuation of development projects, the achievement of performance indicators, and the timely disbursement of funds by funders. Even organizations outside of Ecuador have criticized the law. As the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law notes, “While the law is presented as aligning with international standards, its vague rules, heavy sanctions, and intrusive oversight risk restricting civil society.”

Lawsuits of Unconstitutionality

When the law was first proposed in August 2025, more than 40 civil society organizations and nonprofit networks issued a joint statement to Ecuador’s National Assembly expressing their opposition to it, arguing that it violated fundamental rights and limited nonprofits’ financial and operational sustainability. According to the statement, by linking nonprofits to illicit activities such as money laundering through narrative and without presenting verifiable data, the government undermines the legitimacy of nonprofit actions, discourages international cooperation, and prejudices access to international and philanthropic funding.

Since then, different nonprofits have filed seven lawsuits challenging the law’s constitutionality. The first challenged it in its entirety, claiming that it flagrantly violated the principle of “unity of subject matter” by addressing multiple issues (including mining, taxes, and control over nonprofit financing) when the Constitution of Ecuador requires that bills refer to only one subject. Meanwhile, a group of 11 nonprofits filed a lawsuit arguing that the law conflates various legal issues, including tax reforms for nonprofit organizations, and the CONAIE and 13 civil society organizations filed a suit citing, among other things, the lack of pre-legislative consultation during the law's approval process, and the potential elimination of rights of indigenous peoples and nationalities. They further denounced the legislation as an attempt to eliminate social organizations, limit public debate, and persecute protest in the country.

It is important to mention that, as a precedent, more than 50 organizations have filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of different, previously enacted emergency laws. The Constitutional Court of Ecuador has suspended several of these laws—including the National Solidarity Law, which focused on the criminal economy, and the Public Integrity Law, which focused on state contracting processes—due to procedural flaws in their approval and their heterogeneous content (a mix of economic, criminal, and security matters).This has led to a hostile relationship between the executive branch and the court, with the former attempting to promote the narrative that the tribunal is a political obstacle. However, international organizations such as Human Rights Watch have criticized these attacks, and the suspensions nevertheless offer encouragement for nonprofits to continue pursuing legal action.

To that end, in February 2026, the court admitted at least four of the seven lawsuits nonprofits filed challenging the Organic Social Transparency Law’s constitutionality, opening the door to a real possibility that the court could repeal it. Nonprofits in Ecuador continue to evaluate response actions, including the prospect of appealing to international human rights bodies to raise awareness of the impacts, and to press for the analysis and resolution of the lawsuits filed.

The Power of Alliances

Compliance with rigorous regulatory regimes can help nonprofits gain reputational advantages, as they signal a commitment to good practices, transparency, and integrity. They can also help nonprofits ensure that funds they receive from donors are in accordance with their social impact. However, as the case presented here illustrates, governments and agencies can also establish legal frameworks with the intent of controlling and limiting the power of voices within civil society who oppose economic, social, and extractive policies. These frameworks not only constitute a violation of the right to freedom of association and expression and the autonomy of nonprofits, but also reveal an unprecedented strategy for dismantling and criminalizing nonprofit organizations, and undermining political and civil liberties. The case of Ecuador adds to the wave of authoritarian practices sweeping across Latin America, with the enactment of laws that, due to their biased and unilateral nature, pose a threat to organized civil society in the region and limit its ability to obtain funding from international development cooperation or philanthropy.

This situation underscores the importance of nonprofits strengthening alliances among themselves to exert influence—whether through legal tools that guarantee due process, or through local and international advocacy—and curb abuses stemming from these legal frameworks.

Nonprofits can also work together to analyze new laws and create recommendations for the field, including ideas for reform. In Ecuador, several nonprofits have conducted participatory workshops to identify the main challenges they will face as government agencies continue to implement the Organic Social Transparency Law. This has resulted in a guide that helps civil society organizations organize information about their operations and identify their responsibilities under the law. The workshops also culminated in a series of technical recommendations that aim to make the application of the law "proportional, predictable, and operationally viable.” Recommendations include the establishment of co-creation and validation mechanisms through technical working groups, pilot projects, and feedback processes; the simplification of nonprofit registration; a clearer definition of the law's implementation phases; the development of an interoperable technological platform with data protection guarantees; and the development of regulatory adjustments that integrate with existing transparency mechanisms in the sector.

While it is unlikely that governments will choose to significantly reduce the burden of compliance or refrain from using it to exert control over the social sector, programmatic alliances within civil society remain indispensable for limiting the negative impacts of legislation like the Organic Social Transparency Law. Working together, these organizations can find ways to maintain their access to funding, retain their political and social freedoms, and continue doing the social work the world so badly needs.

When 10 social change leaders gather in a room to discuss big bet giving, you might hear 15 different opinions. One fact, however, will be shared by everyone: We have entered a big bet bull market.

When it was originally defined by Bridgespan as social change gifts of more than $25M, only 18 “big bets” were identified in 2000, growing to 125 in 2020. That year, the sector’s big-bet bigwig, Mackenzie Scott, began her journey of unparalleled generosity resulting in 78 such gifts—or 430 if you lower the giving threshold to Bridgespan's current definition of $10M+—with no end in sight (especially considering Scott’s net worth remains still north of $35 billion). By 2048, $18 trillion is predicted to land in the laps of charities from the intergenerational wealth transfers of US high-net-worth families (the dominant funding source for big bets).

Much has been written in these pages about the “before” of Big Bets—how doers can become big-bettable and why donors should give big bets—as well as the “during,” how doers decide to deploy big bets and how donors can shape those decisions. But vanishingly little has been said about the “after.” How can doers, with their donors, sustain their impact post-big-bet?

With the acceleration of big bet philanthropy in the past decade, the sector now has a rich dataset of “sunsets” to learn from. Our analysis of post-big bet funding models shows four dominant funding pathways that doers pursue to sustain the resource levels they deem necessary.

1. Extending the big bet with the original funder. Spurred by tantalizing, post-big-bet impact opportunities that doers are raring to seize, some big bet donors are realizing that they can generate superior social return on investment simply by staying the course.

For instance, the Audacious Project, responsible for mobilizing $4.6 billion over the past eight years in support of 70 bold projects, recently launched a first-ever “reinvestment pilot program,” providing a secondary funding round to three grantees to continue to scale their work and sustain their impact. This initiative is meant to demonstrate the value of “providing a longer runway for organizations creating transformational change.” One such recipient, Last Mile Health, advocated hard for its “unfinished business” of demonstrating effective community-based primary care at the local level, scaling these interventions through government, and shaping the future of community health financing programs continent-wide through Africa Frontline First. This was particularly timely in light of last year’s 21 percent drop in development assistance for global health. With Audacious Project’s renewed financing of $20M over three years, Last Mile Health will improve healthcare access for more than 56 million people, a reach six times beyond what they had planned in their first Audacious proposal.

2. Attracting the next philanthropic big bet. Some big bet recipients have focused on leveraging the increased external visibility and impact built during their initial big bet to pursue a second big bet from a different funder.

For instance, VisionSpring, which tackles vision impairment in LMICs, credits its 2022 MacKenzie Scott gift with building the operational and absorptive capacity, the confidence, and the reputation to attract significant follow-on philanthropic investment from new funders, including as one of the anchor partners in the recently announced $75 million Bloomberg Philanthropies Vision Initiative. VisionSpring used the unrestricted funds from its Scott gift to build out implementation capacity that’s hard to fund—e.g., supportive supervision, training, and monitoring and evaluation—and made investments in technology, people management, and financial systems. As a result, they could effectively ramp up program delivery, increasing vision screening and eyeglasses dispensing by 40 percent in the past 18 months and laying the groundwork for further rapid scale-up under the Vision Initiative.

Audacious and Bloomberg aren’t the only big bet funders who have seen the value in doubling down on a winning horse: recognizing certain funders may be inclined to invest after an initial de-risking big bet period, efforts such as Lever for Change’s Bold Solutions Network and Gates Philanthropy Partners are designed to connect philanthropists with leading solutions from their portfolios.

3. Launching a university-style capital campaign. Social change organizations can learn a thing or two from their not-for-profit brethren in higher education, who are responsible for all ten of the largest recorded capital campaigns in US history. Universities raise exorbitant amounts by articulating a bold vision, sizing the resources required to achieve it, creating giving tiers and shovel-ready donation opportunities that push wealthy alumni to give bigger by giving together, and leveraging quiet period “early commits” to bring those top supporters’ peers to the table.

Some big bet doers are catching onto the idea that campaigns like these are a powerful way to retain some of their initial big bet donors and attract new ones to help fund a next strategic vision. For instance, at our organization One Acre Fund, one year before the expiry of our largest big bet in 2025, we launched a fundraising campaign to support 10 million smallholder farm families to generate $1 billion of new profits and assets by 2030, while improving systems outcomes across our markets. We sought to fill five “seats” each at three different funding levels, which would collectively raise the unrestricted funds that backstopped the required restricted fundraising and earned revenue to fund our five-year plan. As of this writing, we have raised about 80 percent of our ambitious goal.

Another example of a successful university-style campaign comes from Lambda Legal, the oldest and largest national NGO in America dedicated to LGBTQ civil and legal rights. Lambda Legal used the largest grant in its history–from none other than MacKenzie Scott—as the lynchpin of its multi-year “Unstoppable Future” campaign. The initial big bet served as a validator to other prospective funders, marking Lambda Legal as an organization capable of absorbing transformative funding investments. The campaign ultimately secured 17 gifts at the seven- and eight-figure levels. In addition to these principal gifts, Lambda Legal was able to build on what felt like “lightning in a bottle” momentum from the campaign to secure $200M+ in legacy pledges.

All told, Unstoppable Future clocked in as the largest comprehensive fundraising campaign in American LGBTQ history, and allowed Lambda Legal to amplify its impact by deepening its bench of portfolio-specific staff and litigators, establishing a robust pro bono attorney clearinghouse, increasing its litigation docket capacity, and investing in education and community outreach.

4. Shifting to government as the primary payer. A final funding pathway we have observed involves leaning on the proof-points developed and philanthropic leverage generated during the big bet period to entice government to fund outcomes during and after the big bet.

For instance, Youth Villages, one of the largest child welfare organizations in America, used growth capital from big bet investments made over the last decade by Blue Meridian Partners to achieve the “white whale” of spurring state government to adopt and permanently finance transition programming for young people who have recently graduated from foster care. They used the big bet funds to hire specialized new teams to research state-level policy priorities; identify and pursue new government funding opportunities; and partner directly with state governments on innovations to address their individual needs. Youth Villages’ innovation here was launching their own Requests for Applications for government agencies interested in adopting their evidence-based LifeSet program; by offering initial co-financing that tiers down over time, Youth Villages is leveraging their Blue Meridian funds to crowd in sustainable government payers who will take on financial responsibility for project delivery in the long term. And, the technical assistance they provide government applicants during the competitive RFA process, as well as ongoing support to their network of selected implementing agencies, has ensured LifeSet’s program outcomes remain strong.

The result? Nearly all of these grants have since converted to full public funding, and many have unlocked additional program expansion fully financed by government dollars. Over the last nine years, Youth Villages has granted over $35M in 15 states, which have successfully catalyzed over $120M in government funding commitments.

Many Paths to Sustaining Impact

These represent the dominant pathways we have seen, though big bet doers have spoken about others, such as results-based finance, and some choose strategic directions outside of programmatic or organizational growth post big bet. Moreover, notably the doers we spoke with haven’t necessarily confined themselves to pursuing just one pathway. Many hedge their bets by pursuing two at the same time.

For instance, the aforementioned VisionSpring credits its initial big bet with also developing the conditions in India—which bears the largest burden of uncorrected vision globally—for the government to step in as a payer at scale. VisionSpring deployed unrestricted MacKenzie Scott funds to conduct large-scale vision screening in communities with vision-intensive occupations like tea, coffee, rug making, and weaving. These targeted programs demonstrated operational feasibility and made the income and livelihoods impact case to government counterparts. Subsequently, state agencies have increased their tender-backed programs for vision correction with eyeglasses–leveraging underdeployed federal funds–and some states have signed onto the global WHO SPECS 2030 strategy.

Similarly, as noted above, Last Mile Health is co-leading Africa Frontline First, an initiative to integrate community health workers into national payrolls and health systems alongside well-capitalized, primarily donor government-funded multilaterals, such as GAVI and The Global Fund, demonstrating successful pursuit of the fourth funding pathway. Finally, Youth Villages has successfully pursued the first in addition to the fourth funding pathway, having received two additional big bets from Blue Meridian, which they are using to continue their investment in government co-funding described above.

Important lessons for doers and donors as they plan for life after the big bet.

1. Most importantly, big bet funding gets already high-performing, ambitious organizations to dream and achieve bigger. It is wise to assume they will not be interested in anything other than continuing their breakneck pace of impact growth (even as they are becoming more efficient at service delivery, requiring less philanthropic investment per impact achieved, and less inclined to solving the problem on their own).
2. The post-big bet period offers follow-on funders an opportunity for low-risk and high-impact return per dollar invested. This should appeal greatly to high-net-worth individuals who are happy to crowd into and stick with winning companies in their private investing, and who may be time-starved in their philanthropy. The philanthropic sector would do well to create vehicles that appeal to these funders.
3. Big bet doers and their donors should “begin with the end in mind,” ideally planning well before the expiry of the initial big bet for the pathways to be pursued to sustain impact thereafter. Design choices can undoubtedly be made to programming, infrastructure, and fundraising to increase the odds of a successful post-big bet period. And it is vital for donors to see themselves as true partners, providing the transparency for their own likelihood of re-upping, ideally along with advice and connections for the work to carry forward.

As a sector, we would be wise to remember that the most successful social change initiatives took decades, not years, to achieve their ultimate goal. Hopefully, with a roadmap in hand—with four pathways already blazed by some early movers—the way ahead can become a little clearer for us all.

Many funders agree that now is the time to give boldly. Nonprofits are reporting increased demand for services while experiencing reduced revenue from all sources, including more than $60 billion in cuts to overseas development aid. For nonprofits deemed “high risk” before the polycrisis of recent years, it was already difficult to obtain funding; now it is next to impossible. At the same time, the number of organizations and regions in which cross-border philanthropy can flow without facing substantial hurdles decreases daily. Widespread sanctions regimes and new regulations restricting the receipt of foreign funds are effectively cutting off resources to critical causes, and bans in countries that target or criminalize interventions that protect homosexuality, reproductive rights, or refugee status are proliferating. In some countries, unfettered government access to citizen data in the name of national security puts vulnerable communities at risk of persecution.

Nonprofits working under these circumstances face multilayered obstacles, making them either invisible (unable to fundraise openly) or unfundable (unable to meet donor requirements), or both, and the stakes are high. Funders often think of risk in terms of the legal and financial consequences of making a grant—whether it will lead to a fine or penalty, affect their reputation, or fail to meet the requirements of a qualifying distribution. However, as legitimate as compliance risk considerations are for donors, they stand in crass disproportion to the threats confronting grantees in countries with conflict and closing civil spaces. As one funder we spoke with expressed, “All we’re doing is legal compliance—that’s a totally different risk than the risk undertaken by our partners, whose lives are often on the line. Our partners have been jailed and killed.”

We recently interviewed seven private foundations and three public charities that provide funding in obstructive regulatory contexts and that, for the purposes of this article, we anonymize to avoid bringing unwanted scrutiny to them or their grantees. Several give globally to diverse causes, while others focus on specific issues and/or regions. Each funder spoke to the urgency of understanding risk, rather than letting fear drive decision-making. “Foundations have a lot of money, but compared to government funds, it’s actually quite minuscule,” said one large foundation executive. “The money is not the most important value; what’s important is the ability to take risk. Governments don’t have that ability. We can fail in ways that governments can’t.” Another mid-size public charity funder told us, “In this moment, it feels [like] there is a greater risk in not funding. … It’s incumbent upon philanthropy to move resources. That is our job. If we’re not doing that, then what are we doing and why? How can we expect our partners to be efficient and impactful if we can’t ourselves?”

From these conversations came 10 practical recommendations for funders looking to make informed, risk-related decisions that support increasingly invisible causes and partners. While they are meaningful in any context, they are particularly important for funders working in complex environments, as they take into account the heightened need for a deep, contextualized understanding of risk and the ability to respond appropriately in uncompromising circumstances.

1. Understand the challenges and power of anonymity. According to Human Rights Watch, “At least 67 countries have national laws criminalizing same-sex relations between consenting adults.” Many LGBTQ+ communities can no longer safely publicize their work, and therefore do not appear on crowdfunding sites, public databases, or eligible intermediary lists. So is the case with many human rights groups, journalists, women’s health advocates, migrant networks, and anti-authoritarian activists with global scope. Several funders emphasized the importance of employing local people to identify groups like these and verify their legitimacy. One intermediary funder that works in more than 70 countries across the Global South shared that its “staff are deeply rooted in these places, and are familiar with the risks and know how to navigate them.”

At the same time, anonymity may protect against the appearance of foreign influence that some governments use to shut down nonprofits. As Human Rights Watch recently described, “By stigmatizing independent civil society, media and other dissenting voices as ‘trojan horses,’ ‘foreign agent’ laws have offered a convenient framing to delegitimize and isolate them.” After witnessing shifting government sentiments toward human rights defenders in the Global South, another funder that focuses on grassroots organizations recently made the decision to stop highlighting grantees on its website entirely. Meanwhile, to prevent the possibility of unintentional exposure, a mid-size foundation that does not have its own website only allows staff directly working on a grant to access sensitive program data. As one large foundation told us, “We see transparency as an important value in philanthropy, but not if it’s going to be weaponized against us or our grantees.”

In situations where total anonymity is not possible (such as via Form 990 reporting), funders should be clear with their partners of the potential risks of engagement, for example, explicitly informing all grantees that even data securely maintained within the foundation is subject to subpoena.

2. Standardize, but contextualize, due diligence. Most funders recognize the importance of due diligence, but many exercise it in ways that grantees find confusing, overwhelming, and inconsistent. Creating clear processes and articulating them in plain language to grantee partners makes risk management less burdensome on grantees and more efficient for funders. This is especially so in places where limiting information sharing helps protect grantees from unwanted exposure or where grantees need a clear avenue to escalate risks to the funder.

An intermediary funder we spoke with who has been working in high-risk places for 40 years described its practice of fully systematically sharing its diligence processes with grantees: “When [we] put in place the systems, then we can be transparent about our requirements with our partners, which means being transparent about what we’re asking for, why, and how we do it. We can then also have the conversation with them … to determine whether there is anything that could put them at risk.” Though the specifics may change as new requirements emerge, this approach still provides consistency for grantees.

That said, context matters. Funders may need to adopt expedited processes for high-risk and urgent grants, or otherwise plan for longer timelines in countries where registration or banking delays are inevitable. In some countries, such as Egypt and Bangladesh, government approval to receive foreign funds can take months, and countries like Vietnam and Pakistan require government approval of grant agreements. Many of these approvals also require that grant agreements specify project deliverables, which the government can approve or reject individually. For funders that prefer to provide general support, it may be counter-intuitive but necessary to restrict a grant in this way. Funders may also need to release grants in smaller tranches or on specific timelines. A large private foundation that gives frequently in Mexico, for example, explained that its grantees sometimes request that it push end-of-year grants to the new year to reduce reporting thresholds.

Grantees, which can explain the impact within their own contexts, typically drive these decisions. But in all situations, funders should use due diligence exercises to openly discuss the risk that each party brings and to mutually strengthen compliance in ways that benefit grantees beyond the grant in question. Funders can also use diligence exercises to identify gaps in grantee practices that may be preventing them from accessing larger grants.

3. Lean on formal and informal donor networks. Attesting to a nonprofit’s good work in one issue area or region can help other funders complement and build on existing work and diversify funding streams for less visible organizations. A smaller human rights foundation we spoke with explained that another funder’s support of schools and medical care directly reinforces local human rights protection and the overall health and safety in the region where it works: “Network, network, network. We are constantly talking with people who are navigating the same risks we are and sharing responses. We get advice on good lawyers to consult with, where things are in the court system, and where to identify other good networks.”

Leveraging networks of donors and advisors in this way is also a proactive method of defeating authoritarian tactics. As another, larger foundation expressed, “It’s so important that a number of funders and organizations work together, because keeping us apart is the goal of those who want to shut down civil society.”

4. Engage mission-aligned counsel with specific expertise. Several funders spoke to the importance of finding the right kind of counsel. The same funder who mentioned using donor networks for legal advice said, “Your in-house counsel won’t be an expert on all things. When you have a group of lawyers with diverse expertise talking to each other on all of these issues, keeping each other informed, then you’re getting all of the issues covered.” Funders should also select counsel based on mission-alignment and find someone who understands that the goal is not to avoid all risk, but to identify and balance competing risks.

Other strategies we heard included connecting grantee partners to trusted counsel so that they also benefit from their expertise and asking attorneys to reuse advice they prepare in other circumstances in cases where it can benefit the larger ecosystem. This kind of information sharing among expert counsel, donors, and grantees, can help standardize how all parties understand their obligations, strengthening the sector’s response to evolving regulatory standards.

5. Build and maintain trust between boards and staff. Despite differences in organizational size and culture, one common approach emerged from our conversations with funders: Build operational trust between board and staff. The funder that gives globally to grassroots movements described its practice this way: “We start from a fundamental commitment (with the board) to moving resources into places that need it. That orients us in the right direction in terms of what we mean by risk. … Trust is built by the consistent practice of doing the analysis, identifying the risk, building the systems, and bringing that to the board.”

A smaller foundation emphasized how “oversharing” enables its board to respond holistically to each event, saying it takes “board engagement to the next level so that nothing comes as a surprise to them and they are fully aware of the … risks.”

Nurturing trust includes openly discussing “what didn’t work,” whether or not it is a time of crisis. As a larger foundation shared, “During the times of non-crisis is when you build the muscle memory for crisis times, when you earn that trust and goodwill. … Then, if things are going badly, we’ve already invested in that exercise, it’s not just a reaction to crisis. The board knows that leadership and staff are being honest and thorough, and can have confidence in each other.”

6. Learn from your grantees. Regarding the do-no-harm principle, all interviewees fully defer to their grantees. As one of the mid-size foundations we interviewed put it: “Trust your grantees and partners, and rely on their guidance. It starts with frank and open conversations. We must be aware that [the foundation is] not the front line of defense; it’s the partner. We ask [partners] questions about how their receipt of funds might be perceived. Not every recipient is the same.”

While this advice holds for all grants, regardless of complexity, it is especially true in places where foreign funds carry risk to grantees. Only organizations on the ground in these regions can speak to the practical risks and implications of a foreign grant. A public charity intermediary we spoke to cautioned, “Don’t assume you know the level of risk that they are or are not willing to take. You may be surprised by their position on this. It starts with that conversation, and then you build a process around that. Don’t let fear be your guide. A lot of boards want to have impact, have legacy, and be strategic, and this is one of the ways that you can do that.”

Grantee partners can also help explore appropriate, secure, and accessible communication methods. These are inevitably questions of context, not preference. For partners facing persecution risks, avoiding digital communication altogether and relying on site visits can offer safer, trust‑building exchanges. Conversely, one intermediary funder working in China told us that using highly secure digital platforms enables safe communication with both donors and grantees while minimizing potential backlash for local partners.

7. Understand the intermediary landscape. The landscape of local and regional intermediaries is growing, and many funders rely on them to help diversify their giving at scale while supporting local ecosystems. The fact that most intermediaries are public charities that do not face the same stringent rules as foundations also gives them more options.

Using an intermediary does not relinquish funders from the responsibility of conducting due diligence on intermediaries or final grantees, and it’s important that funders and intermediaries have the same communication style and risk management approach. One funder who has for many years given in regions with active conflict noted that sometimes intermediaries’ compliance practices are less robust and can “water down” funders’ own compliance systems: “[Using intermediaries] is a nice way to reduce operational burdens, but it can become too risky because their actions will ultimately be tied back to us and thus could amplify the risk.”

8. Be flexible and responsive. The call for more flexible grantmaking was prevalent in our interviews, though funders defined and exercised it in different ways. Importantly, flexible grantmaking does not imply a trade-off of compliance practices; it allows grantees to pivot in volatile surroundings, enabling agility within their strategic setting. This is another practice that benefits grantmaking in all contexts, however, in regions with political instability or natural disasters, flexibility is the only way to meet changing demands.

One of the smaller foundations we spoke to explained that having a strong theory of change in place enables it to shift operations nimbly since doing so fits into a larger strategic framework. “Make sure you know what you’re doing and why. Maybe the ‘what’ evolves, but the ‘why’ doesn’t.”

The funder that supports grassroots movements in the Global South provides long-term, core, unrestricted support. However, it starts most of its grantee relationships with a one-year “catalyst grant.” This typically includes a site visit by local staff, enabling both parties to learn from each other and deepen the funder’s understanding of local realities. In this way, grant expenditures are flexible, but the relationship and risk management practices remain strong components of the partnership.

9. Fund infrastructure and ecosystems. An effective tool to tackle new sanctions, conflict, or simply the outcome of a measured risk analysis is to fund, as one intermediary funder described it, “ecosystems of change, not just individual entities or single issues … [including support for] the safety and protection of movements on the ground. Such groups often don’t have the capacity to access legal resources. How do we contribute to creating an enabling environment in their countries?”

Similar tactics that most of the funders we interviewed use include funding local intermediaries or pro bono networks, or supporting research entities that shed light on particular issues and help solve problems. Several funders mentioned the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) and the Charity & Security Network as examples.

Philanthropic infrastructure and ecosystems are equally valuable. Multiple funders talked about working with other funders on systems change, and using formal and informal donor networks to shift practices and advocate for a better understanding of risk allocation and compliance.

10. Pursue your mission with courage. Funders exist to fill gaps and meet urgent needs. Relinquishing this mission when they face risk can mean relinquishing their raison d’être. One of the foundations we interviewed, which primarily gives in a high-conflict region, spoke to what it means to be courageous: “We don’t actually have a choice—we have to be courageous because this is our only lane. What other funders are now learning is that they’re coming for all of us. Don’t think that you can just put your head down and it will pass. … The point is that we need to be able to look ourselves in the mirror and know that we did everything right. What helps you sleep at night is that you know that you did the right thing to the best of your ability, that you know you always made the legally compliant choice.”

In the words of one of the intermediary funders: “After 40 years, we have never made the decision to step back from this work. To achieve a more just society, we have to support efforts to oppose authoritarian and oppressive regimes [everywhere] because it supports the rest of the globe. It’s all about getting educated about what the law requires, and how to put processes in place that ensure you are meeting the requirements in the grantor and grantee jurisdictions. We always find a way.”

As these and other funders point out, there is more than one way to fund regions and organizations facing invisibility, and none requires meaningfully increasing risk or harm to either the funder or grantee. Staying informed, collaborating with other donors, and finding the path that fits within your entity’s size and risk tolerance is within every funder’s capability. As a mid-sized foundation stated it: “The worst thing we can do as funders is to give away our power by taking a position that it is too risky for us to engage.”

In the United States, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the nation’s educational report card) peaked in 2013 and have since stagnated or declined. The percentage of eighth graders failing to meet basic proficiency in math and reading has reached record highs. To address these problems, federal, state, and local governments have poured billions of dollars into smaller class sizes, longer school days, enhanced curricula, and teacher training.

But the evidence increasingly points to a more fundamental challenge: The skills gaps that drive these outcomes start long before children ever reach a middle-school classroom—often before they reach any classroom at all. Parents are the people with whom young children spend most of their time, and it is within families, not schools, that early skill differences take root.

Over more than a decade of working with low-income families, our research has shown that inexpensive, technology-based tools parents can use with their children—including text-delivered conversation prompts, digital libraries, and math apps—can meaningfully help parents close early childhood skills gaps. Yet these proven tools fail to scale because there is no institutional buyer to purchase them, no distribution channel to deliver them, and no trusted intermediary to bring them to families. We propose reversing the sequence: build the institutional market for parenting interventions first, and innovation will follow.

The Parenting Gap

Between birth and age 18, a child who never misses a day of school and attends two years of preschool still spends only 15 percent of their waking hours in classrooms (assuming approximately 1,100 school hours per year across 18 years, with 16 waking hours per day). The remaining 85 percent is spent with family and caregivers. This matters most for children from low-income families, who are less likely to have access to the enriched home environments—including shared book-reading, rich conversation, and educational play—that drive early skill development. Research shows that by kindergarten, children from the lowest-income families enter school scoring more than a standard deviation below their highest-income peers on reading and math assessments, and they rarely climb higher in the skills distribution.

What distinguishes families that build strong skills is not money. The Baby’s First Years experiment gave low-income mothers $333 per month and found no effect on children’s cognitive outcomes after four years. What matters is parental investment in activities that build children’s skills. This is not rote teaching but instead, consistent, stimulating interactions such as open-ended conversation, asking questions, and other joint activities that build vocabulary, curiosity, and reasoning.

The evidence suggests that inexpensive, high-quality technology-based tools can meaningfully support parents in engaging in these activities and building the skills that matter most for their children. Across randomized trials with low-income families, the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab we codirect at the University of Chicago has found that text-based conversation prompts tripled parents’ use of open-ended language with their children. Our research also showed that a preloaded digital library used for an average of just seven minutes a week moved children’s language scores from roughly the 40th to the 50th national percentile, and that math apps used by parents without college degrees closed roughly one-third of the initial child skills gap. So, why aren’t these solutions more widespread?

The Missing Market

Like all parents, low-income parents want to help their children succeed. Research from our lab consistently finds that when low-income parents learn about effective, low-cost digital tools, they embrace them. But what is missing outside the lab is access and awareness. The gap is not motivation. The gap is structural: There is no institution whose job it is to find those families, acquire the tools on their behalf, and get them into parents’ hands.

Consider the contrast with schools. Epic, the digital reading and audiobook platform for children designed to promote reading practice, comprehension, and vocabulary, reached 90 percent of US elementary schools and was acquired for $500 million in 2021. Epic succeeded not only because it was effective, but because schools could buy it at scale. Quality alone is never enough—one needs a buyer. Schools are a functioning, albeit imperfect, market for ed tech like Epic. They have budgets, incentives to improve child outcomes and ease administrative burdens, and decision-makers who can evaluate and purchase products. Developers compete to serve that market. Innovation follows.

Parents with young children at home have no equivalent point of contact. Preschools serve only half of all children, even fewer from low-income families. Pediatric clinics see children too infrequently and are not in the business of parenting support. Home-visiting programs, which send professional health practitioners directly into families’ homes, reach only 150,000 families annually, a tiny fraction of those who could benefit. None of these institutional settings promotes digital learning tools, none has universal reach into the home, and none has the purchasing power to bring effective digital tools to parents.

This is the missing market. Parents use digital tools when available and welcome support that makes their job easier. The problem is a shortage of two things that schools take for granted. The first is a procurement mechanism with the mandate and purchasing power to evaluate, acquire, and distribute digital tools at scale. The second is being seen as a trusted institution that engages all families and provides effective learning tools for use at home. Schools have both. That is why the ed tech market for classrooms is dynamic and competitive, while the market for home-based digital parenting tools barely exists.

Creating the Market

What the ed tech market for schools demonstrates is that institutional buyers transform innovation. When schools have budgets and purchasing power, developers build for them. We propose replicating that dynamic for parents. In each state, a “Digital Tool Learning Center” would serve as a universal point of contact and distribution mechanism, enrolling every child at birth and providing families with a tablet for exclusive use with the center’s vetted tools. Developers, who now have an incentive to have the state purchase their digital tools, would be more inclined to submit their tools to rigorous evaluation. The more states that do this, the bigger the market—and the stronger the incentive to build tools that actually work.

Here’s the logic: First, enroll large numbers of families who want support. Second, secure funding to purchase tools on their behalf. Third, create competition among developers to build the tools families need and want. In that sequence, innovation flourishes because there is a market waiting for it.

The Learning Centers also address a second barrier: skepticism of technology-based learning tools. A trusted institution that vets these tools, endorses them to families, and supports their use can distinguish a good digital tool from the ineffective ed tech that has soured parents and teachers on the category.

With millions of families enrolled on a common platform, developers would have a real market to compete in. Learning Centers could evaluate and distribute tools that promote language development, math, and parent-child engagement at scale. Once that procurement infrastructure exists, targeted innovation funding makes sense: guaranteed purchase commitments to pull the best tools to market and competitive grants to push the development of new ones.

This is the logic behind advance market commitments for vaccines: Philanthropy and science establish proof of concept, governments create the institutional infrastructure that guarantees a market, and private innovation scales what works. The parallel for digital learning tools is direct. Philanthropists and researchers must fund the rigorous demonstrations that prove which tools work and build the evidentiary base that overcomes skepticism. State and federal governments must build the institutional infrastructure—Learning Centers with universal reach and purchasing power—that creates a real market. Only then does developer competition make sense, with entrepreneurs building for a market that procurement infrastructure has made real.

From Concept to Reality

Consolidation of existing state departments can also help generate opportunities for a universal point of contact and a distribution mechanism. Illinois offers a concrete example of how a single point of access institution could work in practice. In June 2024, Governor JB Pritzker signed legislation creating a new cabinet-level Department of Early Childhood, consolidating preschool grants, subsidized childcare, and day care licensing under a single agency. By July 2026, Illinois will have consolidated purchasing power over programs serving all children under 6. That agency could evaluate technology-based tools, negotiate a statewide license, and deploy them to every enrolled family. More importantly, it could enroll families at birth or when they move into the state, reaching even parents who never touch the formal early childhood system. Illinois has roughly 125,000 births per year. The market that does not exist today could come into existence within a single legislative session.

Illinois is not alone in creating departments that can serve as a universal point of contact and a distribution mechanism. Ohio’s Republican governor created the Department of Children and Youth with a mandate to be “laser-focused” on children’s issues, while New Mexico’s Democratic governor established an Early Childhood Education and Care Department to house all prenatal-to-age-5 programs under one roof. Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Virginia, and Connecticut have taken similar steps, creating dedicated early childhood agencies that serve as a single point of access for families and, critically, a unified procurement channel for evidence-based programs and tools.

Sequence Matters

The conventional approach to social innovation—fund the supply, then hope demand materializes—has repeatedly failed in early childhood. Dozens of evidence-based interventions sit on shelves. Promising pilots never reach the families who need them.

The alternative is to reverse the sequence. As a market emerges, philanthropists and researchers can take the lead and fund rigorous demonstrations that prove which digital tools work, building the evidentiary base that gives parents, teachers, and policy makers reason to trust them. As states and the federal government move to build the institutional infrastructure, developers will find it in their interest to develop effective digital tools and financially support research to prove their value for students and families.

The children entering kindergarten today will form the workforce of 2050. For the first time, we have the tools to meaningfully close the skills gap before they ever set foot in a classroom—not through more spending on schools, but through tools that reach parents during the hours that schools never will. What we lack is not knowledge, not resources, and not willing families. What we lack is the institutional architecture to turn scattered proofs of concept into something every parent can access. That architecture is buildable. The question is whether philanthropists, governors, and legislators will act in the right order—and soon enough to matter.

What do the coronavirus, a nuclear chain reaction, and Alcoholics Anonymous have in common?

At the beginning of 2020, a concept that was once largely confined to epidemiology was released into everyday use: R₀, or the “spread rate.” If R₀ is greater than one, an epidemic spreads; if it’s less than one, it fades out. This concept quickly became central to public policy discussions because it articulated a simple but decisive structural property of the way some processes reinforce themselves over time, and grow, while others gradually die out because they do not. If a case generates more than one additional case on average, growth becomes self-sustaining; if it does not, continued external input is required to maintain the process, or it will diminish to nonexistence.

The same principle appears in other domains; A nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining, for example, only when each reaction triggers more than one additional reaction. The key question is not how much effort or energy exists in the system, but whether the process reproduces itself as it goes.

Most nonprofits operate through a different logic. Resources are raised, services are delivered, and when funding stops, most of the activity stops with it. Of course, nonprofits are not pathogens or physical systems. The analogy should not be pushed too far. Yet it’s worth asking if a comparable dynamic could exist in the social sector, because the social sector often treats very different organizational logics as if they were the same. When sustainability becomes the universal benchmark, leaders and funders can end up making two opposite mistakes at once: continuing to subsidize models that could be designed to renew part of their own growth, and demanding self-sufficiency from organizations whose work should never be judged that way in the first place.

Not every organization should work this way. Many should not. But where such self-propagating growth becomes possible, when it does occur, we would do well to understand how.

This article proposes a simple way to think about that question for nonprofits: the Pay-It-Forward Threshold.

Real-World Examples

Two-thirds of United States nonprofits that receive government grants could not even cover their own expenses without it, let alone grow, according to the Urban Institute’s recent analysis.

Meanwhile, organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous grew from two founders in 1935 to over two million members, with no centralized leadership or external funding. Without implying that other organizations should necessarily imitate AA wholesale, it’s worth noting that something in its design allows participation to generate further participation. Alcoholics Anonymous is not unique in this respect. Many organizations, in different ways, manage to turn participants into contributors who help extend the system.

The examples below each demonstrate a different mechanism of continuity, collectively answering the question: If impact can sometimes spread through the people reached, what organizational designs make that possible?

1. Alcoholics Anonymous: “Therapeutic transmission.” In Alcoholics Anonymous, “stabilized” members help other alcoholics, in part, because doing so supports and maintains their own sobriety. In this sense, their pay-it-forward contribution is not merely altruistic, but is woven into recovery itself.

   The design lesson is straightforward: Continuity is strongest when helping others is not an external burden added after the fact, but part of how the original transformation is maintained. 

2. Rotary International: “Role-embedded social transmission.” Between 1905 and 1925, Rotary grew from 12 members to more than 108,000, corresponding to an average transmission rate of roughly R ≈ 1.58 per year (meaning each generation of participants produced about 1.6 new participants). Rotary grew because the benefits of membership—professional networks, local prestige, civic identity, and regular access to business and community ties—made recruiting others a natural extension of participation. Existing members had a clear reason to invite new ones, and chapters provided a stable social structure that made replication relatively easy. Transmission can be embedded not only in therapy or formal obligation, but also in the social value of belonging.

   Rotary also shows how fragile this kind of transmission can be. In many places, its growth slowed as the social role once played by local business clubs weakened: Professional networking moved into other institutions and digital platforms, patterns of civic association changed, and younger professionals often became less willing to commit to the formal routines that had sustained chapter life. The lesson is that social transmission requires continuous maintenance. When the underlying value proposition erodes, the loop can break quietly even when the organization itself remains intact.

   

3. Habitat for Humanity: “Contractual transmission.” Habitat for Humanity helps families access affordable homeownership through a structured model that combines local affiliates, volunteer labor, donated resources, and participant contribution. In many cases, future homeowners are required to contribute substantial “sweat equity,” helping build homes—including those of other families—before receiving their own. The model, therefore, links receiving the good to helping produce it.

   The design lesson is that when the good delivered is tangible, and the pathway is clear, contribution can be made a condition of access rather than an optional extra. In such cases, the organization does not have to hope that beneficiaries will later give back, out of the goodness of their hearts: Reciprocity is designed directly into the model.

4. Big Brothers Big Sisters: “Depth over transmission.” In Big Brothers Big Sisters, mentors are carefully screened, matched one-to-one with youth, and supported over time through sustained relationships. The program’s model emphasizes selectivity, continuity, and the quality of the match, which makes expansion more demanding than in interventions that can be standardized or replicated more quickly.

   The design lesson here is fundamentally different from the previous cases: Some forms of impact are quality-constrained rather than transmission-constrained. In relationship-based interventions like this one, trying to maximize transmission can undermine the very conditions that make the model effective. Low transmission, in such cases, is not a sign of weak design but may be the right organizational choice.

The most common mistake in sustainability debates is to turn one growth logic into a universal standard. The value of the transmissive lens is not that it tells every organization what to become. It’s that it helps distinguish where self-propagating growth may be possible from where continuity must be funded.

In some domains, asking beneficiaries to become the engine of further growth is simply structurally inappropriate. Emergency response is the clearest example: Distributing water after an earthquake has a transmission rate near zero, and trying to raise it would make little sense. The work’s success depends on speed, logistics, and reliable delivery—not on whether recipients later become distributors.

The same often holds for pure redistribution. When an initiative exists to transfer money, food, shelter, or legal protection to people who are structurally deprived of it, the value lies in the transfer itself, not in turning recipients into a growth mechanism. Many other collective-action problems also fall into this category. Efforts to improve air quality, reduce corruption, preserve wetlands, or change procurement rules may create enormous public value while remaining dependent on durable institutions, regulation, and professional coordination.

In such cases, a low transmission rate does not signal weak design. It simply reflects a different organizational logic.

The Pay-It-Forward Framework

Social organizations typically measure inputs and outputs. They track money raised, people served, volunteer hours, or program completion. More rarely, they track the extent to which a system converts beneficiaries into contributors. Yet two organizations can help a similar number of people today while heading toward very different long-term trajectories.

• Some forms of impact are consumptive. External resources are used to deliver a service, the beneficiary benefits, and the organization must raise new resources to do it again. If funding stops, most of the impact stops with it.

• Other forms of impact contain a transmissive dimension. Some participants also become contributors—by mentoring, referring, recruiting, hosting, teaching, or helping others enter the system. Under those conditions, impact can continue or grow without proportional increases in funding. Each former participant becomes a potential channel of recruitment, support, or replication, reducing acquisition costs and extending reach over time, a dynamic reminiscent of Everett Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovations and the epidemiological concept of the basic reproduction number (R₀).

This transmissive potential is not merely theoretical. As Amartya Sen argues in Development as Freedom, development depends on agency, on the capacity of people not only to receive help but to act and shape outcomes themselves. Many social programs observe the same dynamic through the “helper therapy principle,” in which helping others often reinforces one’s own progress. Research on volunteering points in this direction.

When organizational design enables this motivation to translate into action, a simple dynamic emerges: People who were helped begin helping others in turn. If each participant eventually helps two more people, those two help four, four help eight. In such a configuration, the number of beneficiaries doubles each generation, becoming roughly a thousand times larger after ten cycles.

A useful way to track this dynamic is through the transmission rate: The average number of new people each former participant helps reach, recruit, or support. Once that number rises above one, the organization crosses the Pay-It-Forward Threshold.

Suppose a nonprofit runs a six-month job-readiness program for young adults. In one cycle, 1000 participants complete the program and in the next, 1500 do. The next question is simple: How many of those 500 additional participants entered because former participants helped bring them in? If 300 did—by referring friends, encouraging them to apply, helping with onboarding, or mentoring the next cohort—then participant transmission equals 300/1000 = 0.3. The remaining 200 are explained by the organization’s usual funded channels: staff outreach, partnerships, advertising, or recruitment campaigns.

This gives leaders a way not only to observe, but to actively test and improve transmission. Even modest rates matter: A rate of 0.3 already means that 30 percent of growth comes through participants themselves, reducing reliance on external funding.

This is not the only metric every organization should pursue. But where transmission is part of the model, it becomes an unusually important operational signal: actionable, design-sensitive, and exponential in its effects.

(To make this question more practical, we have also created a simple, freely available tool that allows organizations to estimate their own Pay-It-Forward rate.)

What Changes in Practice

For policy makers, the framework offers a way to distinguish between two different evaluation logics. In consumptive domains, the right questions often concern depth of impact and cost-effectiveness per unit of investment. In transmissive domains, one additional question becomes relevant: Is the model increasing its capacity for renewal over time? Applying a single standard to both types of initiatives wastes resources in both directions.

For organizational leaders, the first question is not “How do we maximize transmission?” but “Does our model contain any real transmission potential at all?” In some organizations, the honest answer will be no, or not much. In others, transmission is possible but under-designed. The strategic shift is then to move from asking, “How do we recruit more participants?” to asking, “Under what conditions do existing participants become contributors?”

That change in question leads to more concrete design work. Leaders can examine where the chain most often breaks. Do people benefit from the program but never re-enter it in a contributory role? Does alumni engagement remain symbolic rather than functional? Is there no visible pathway from receiving value to helping deliver it? Are contribution opportunities too vague, too costly, too late, or too detached from the original benefit?

Seen this way, “transmission” is not an abstract aspiration, but a series of design choices: onboarding, peer roles, rituals of handoff, chapter formation, referral pathways, light-touch contribution before high-commitment contribution, and incentives that make participation easier to pass on.

Every other civic club of Rotary's era relied on external outreach, and most are now defunct. Rotary prospered because it made a different design choice: It embedded transmission into the membership experience itself.

For funders, the framework changes what kind of sustainability question it makes sense to ask. Too often, “sustainability” is treated as a uniform criterion. But the relevant question is not simply whether an initiative can survive with less grant support. It is whether the underlying model contains a plausible path of renewal through the people it serves.

Three questions become especially useful. First, does this intervention contain a credible mechanism by which participants or beneficiaries help carry the model forward? Second, what share of current spending supports direct delivery, and what share supports the mechanisms that make renewal possible? Third, can the organization observe signs of renewal from ordinary operational data, even imperfectly?

The funding implications differ accordingly. Consumptive programs may deserve stable long-term support. Transmissive programs require upfront investment to build transmission mechanisms, after which external funding can gradually be replaced by internal renewal.

The point of the Pay-It-Forward Threshold is not to rank one model above the other, but to ask a better strategic question: Under what conditions can impact pass through the people reached rather than ending with them? The answer does not determine the initiative's value, but it determines its appropriate design, its realistic funding trajectory, and the criteria by which it should be evaluated. Not all impact should sustain itself. But when it can, it should be designed to.

The proliferation of global regulatory regimes in recent years, coupled with pre-existing requirements for institutional funders, has made cross-border philanthropic compliance an expensive, onerous, and far-reaching exercise. Funders around the world—including in the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East—have increasingly felt its impact.

The aim of these legal and regulatory obligations, from government filings to risk management assessments, is to ensure that funder and grantee actions don’t support illicit activity. But given their growing burden, it’s important to take a look at who philanthropic compliance really serves. Governments who leverage sanctions to influence policy, or regulators who seek to protect public funds? Private funders whose legal status and reputations are at risk, or communities that the rules seek to safeguard from abuse?

The answer should be all of the above, and in many cases it is. But one group tends not to benefit: civil society organizations (CSOs). Defined here as formal and informal nongovernmental and nonprofit groups, pseudo-government entities, and hybrid for-profit vehicles that are principally focused on the betterment of society, CSOs are commonly unclear about what these systems expect of them, even as they spend significant resources on demonstrating their legitimacy and their effective use of government and philanthropic funds. Regulators, donors, and banks expect them to account for their donors, partners, and subgrantees, tracking risk exposure across jurisdictions. CSOs that need funding to survive willingly take on this liability if it is their only way to fund their work. As the International Council of Voluntary Agencies, a global NGO network, writes:

Most donors and intermediaries enforce a “zero-tolerance approach to risk” rather than a “zero-tolerance approach to inaction” … This leads to risk transfer from international to local [organizations], with donor conditions passed on to downstream partners who often lack the resources and logistical capacity to comply. … Inadequate coverage of administrative and overhead costs further prevents [NGOs] from investing in [organizational] development, risk management, and safety measures. Additionally, [NGOs] face numerous administrative and financial hurdles, including duplicative partner capacity assessment and reporting processes, highly earmarked funding, delayed payments, rigid requirements to return unspent funds, short expenditure windows, and inflexible conditions for no-cost extensions. Risk management measures, including due diligence, auditing and counter-terrorism requirements exacerbate these difficulties.

This reality intensifies the power imbalance between those giving money and those asking for it. In recent years, funders have sought to change this dynamic by committing to trust-based philanthropy, locally led development, power-shifting, and a reduction in application and reporting requirements. And yet, faced with vague and mounting menaces of legal and reputational risk, little has changed in practice.

Philanthropy can maintain strong compliance while also encouraging trust, transparency, and greater diversity in giving, but funders must first understand the extent of existing compliance and where there is room to better operate within the limits of the regulatory reality. Funders have an opportunity and an obligation to identify what true risk is to their missions and operations, and how that risk impacts their grantees. They must move from a zero-risk approach to one that dissects context-specific risk and works directly with grantees to minimize harm on both sides. Only then can they make informed decisions based on reality, not fear, and deepen the impact they seek to achieve.

A Half-Century of Regulatory Expansion

Three moments in history stand out in the evolution of philanthropic compliance, particularly for US funders and international grantees: the US Tax Reform Act of 1969, the regulatory aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and, most recently, a global trend of authoritarian drift. Each provoked a series of new regulations impacting compliance and cross-border funding.

The Tax Reform Act of 1969 introduced the “private foundation” as a separate charitable vehicle subject to penalties for self-dealing, minimum annual payouts, limits on investments, and new diligence obligations for grants to non-charitable or foreign entities. Tax practitioner K. Martin Worthy observed, “These provisions frequently have been described as the most far-reaching legislation affecting private philanthropy in our two hundred-year history.”

Critiques of the amendments pointed to greater administrative costs and less funding for organizations. In 2015, after reviewing almost 50 years of data, economist Benjamin M. Marx wrote, “Donations and entry dropped precipitously. Proxy variables suggest significant deterrence of abuses, but half of the decline in donations can be explained by the increased cost of running a foundation. The results highlight the potential for large reductions in the benefits of regulation when the cost of compliance affects … charitable giving.”

While early evidence that funders had increased their payouts to meet the new requirement may seem to contradict this, payouts refer to all expenses related to the operation of a foundation other than investment expenses, so the total annual payout requirement would capture compliance costs as well as grants. Thus, it is not surprising that higher compliance and administrative costs would result in higher annual minimum payouts.

In any case, the legislation was a pivotal moment for the US philanthropic sector, in that it introduced a panoply of new, baseline obligations for private foundation compliance across all aspects of operations.

In 2001, the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States birthed a new set of requirements intended to prevent support for terrorism. The USA Patriot Act, the UN counter-terrorism resolution, and FATF Special Recommendations that followed shaped anti-terrorism financial policy around the globe. They also pointed to the nonprofit sector as particularly vulnerable to abuse.

Twenty-five years later, little has slowed the regulatory war against terror. One of the most problematic aspects of the requirements is that they are highly ambiguous but carry “strict liability,” meaning regulators can penalize funders even if funders were unaware of a violation or took ample measures to prevent one. A common response from funders has been over-compliance, leaving grantees struggling to keep pace. Smaller organizations are particularly vulnerable, as described in a joint “Submission to the Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights” in 2025:

The “strongly recommended” compliance programs for the sanctions regime, and associated overlapping federal criminal laws (anti-money laundering, material support laws, wire fraud, etc.), are incredibly burdensome for smaller civil society organizations in particular. … The consequences are so severe, and the punishments so grievous, that this chills the operations of these small nonprofit organizations, jeopardizing their work and limiting the aid provided to those most in need.

Large philanthropic institutions have more capital to spend on these exercises, but ultimately at a cost to the number of grants they can distribute, the kind of organizations they can support, and their relationships with these partners, as Barnett Baron, prophetically remarked in 2004:

Requiring grant-makers to collect detailed information about a prospective grantee’s staff, trustees, donors, sub-contractors, and bankers, even if they are not directly involved in the program to be supported by the proposed grant, will inevitably raise questions about the role and objectives of U.S. grant-makers. In some cases, prospective grantees may view grant-makers as agents of the host government, which may be a repressive one, or as agents of the U.S. intelligence community. This could jeopardize the ability of U.S. foundations to operate effectively, and in extreme cases could even put in-country staff at physical risk.

Much has been written on this topic, including by the Charity & Security Network (US), Human Security Collective (Netherlands), Brot für die Welt (Germany), and the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. The impact on civil society continues to be significant.

Finally, the global rise of authoritarianism has also increased compliance obligations worldwide. In 2026 alone, governments introduced or adopted new laws specifically aimed at making it harder for CSOs to receive foreign funds in Angola, Georgia, Sierra Leone, Israel, and Vietnam, and local governments in Peru, Ecuador, Hungary, and Benin adopted a wave of laws and in 2025.

The increase in laws restricting NGO activities and funding over the past two decades is partly due to post-Cold War geopolitical shifts toward authoritarianism, and the continued impact of the war against terror and isolationist policies. The latter have introduced onerous foreign agent registration laws in many democracies, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the European Union. As described by Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, professor of law at the University of Notre Dame:

Cross-border funding is a critical resource for NGOs in many countries for a variety of reasons, including limited domestic resources and the lack of a domestic philanthropic culture. At the same time, such funding is often viewed with suspicion by the governments of these countries … because they are concerned about potential challenges to government authority, foreign influence, and possible cultural conflicts. While such concerns are generally not sufficient to justify limiting or regulating such support under international law, they provide motivations for governments to do so while publicly relying on other, more defensible justifications, such as national security and accountability.

This kind of regulatory behavior is commonly associated with authoritarian regimes, where non-democratic decision-making enables one ruling party to censor whole segments of society. However, the term “authoritarianism” may more generally describe behaviors characterized by a governing party’s imposition of rules that materially deprive citizens of rights or freedoms, which may also manifest in democratic societies.

These developments sit within the larger context of pre-existing and growing regulatory regimes. Taken together, philanthropic compliance is an expanding web of obligations and prohibitions that funders attempt to address through vastly divergent methods, that, as noted above, typically manifest in inconsistent and often excessive diligence requirements for grantee partners.

Leveraging Compliance to Meet the Moment

While these events have powerfully influenced philanthropic regulation over time, philanthropy itself—which has been slow to address the impact on grantees—may be partly to blame for the state of compliance today. Commitments to give more directly, more equitably, and more transparently have stalled in the face of political attacks, risk aversion, and a lack of investment in infrastructure. Indeed, funders’ risk-avoidant response to overreaching regulatory action gives oxygen to authoritarian rulemaking, whose very purpose is to silence civil spaces and societies. Broadly speaking, philanthropy’s retreat from what it perceives as risk and its standard offloading of risk to grantees further strains a sector struggling with diminished funding and government repression.

Legal counsel and tax advisors, who often aim to eliminate rather than understand risk within a larger philanthropic mission, often view risk narrowly as legal and reputational, rather than considering the risk of failing to achieve meaningful impact. What about the risk to communities if CSOs cannot deliver medical care, or schools shut down, or governments imprison activists?

This series sheds light on how philanthropy can leverage compliance to meet the moment. Articles include: practical tips from bold and compliant funders who give globally; an analysis of Ecuador’s new foreign funding regulations in the context of Latin America’s closing civil spaces; how one intermediary uses due diligence as a means to empower and resource its grantees; and how some NGOs in Asia are using compliance as a form of resistance. Each presents a political, legal, or regulatory obstacle that stifles or slows international philanthropy, and articulates concrete ways in which philanthropy and civil society can better understand or overcome that obstacle.

Philanthropy faces an opportunity. Even amid increased persecution and a rapidly evolving regulatory environment, the sector can both protect itself and strengthen civil society. Compliance practices offer a ready mechanism for philanthropists to gain greater awareness of local context, strengthen mutual accountability, and create learning paths to appropriately address risk. Importantly, this means not just identifying risk, but understanding how to manage it in a way that is proportionate, intentional, and fit for context—and ultimately using compliance as a means to advance, rather than obstruct, healthy and sustainable partnerships.

Last year at Skoll, I went for an early morning run along the Thames with a founder who had won it all. Every award. Every fellowship. She’d graced every stage. And she was exhausted. Not so much from the late-night cocktails in an ancient, low-lit library the night before, but the world she herself had created. The world of a development darling.

As we started ducking willows and streaking past sketchy houseboats, she started venting. “At this point,” she said, “it’s past 10, and I can feel the 200 emails just breeding in my inbox. I’ve been standing there sipping the same lukewarm glass of Riesling for the better part of two hours. And it happens. I get cornered, and I can see the question coming from a million miles away ‘So, what’s your vision for scale?’ Rather than roll my eyes, I just let the talking points spool. I give him what he wants: I say the magic words: scale, RCT, and AI.”

In Oxford, those are the magic words: “AI, RCT, and scale.” They make a donor’s pupils dilate. Toss in “government adoption” like a sprig of rosemary, and suddenly you’re very interesting. The formula works, but everyone knows it’s theater—the preferred performance we pretend leads to impact.

But it’s Oxford, you gotta play the game. They say you don’t come to Skoll to scare the horses. But Paul Farmer, for all his grace and gentleness, loved to grab the gate and give it a good hard shake. Bringing Farmer’s ghost into Skoll means scaring those locked in their sanctified paddock, saying things that might make the room shift in discomfort, questioning conversations about sustainability, scale, and why we ask the poor to settle for less.

Imagining Otherwise

Imagine a world where, instead of playing games at Skoll, or Davos, or UNGA, the founder sits across from a donor and says, “Here’s the budget. Here’s the strategy. Here are the KPIs for the next 3 years. It works out to roughly $2 million USD. Do you want to underwrite 10 percent of this every year for 3 years—unrestricted?” Not a project. Not a pilot. But rather a stake in the ground.

And $2 million is really all you need. It’s not some magic made-up number. The only reason a reliable NGO that serves a million people would need more than a $2 million budget is because a donor wants to give it to them. And if they don’t take it, someone else will.

If you can build a focused, three‑year strategy with a real budget and a handful of sharp, honest KPIs—you don’t need to fill out 200 grant applications and chase 100 donors. You only need 20 people and institutions who believe in you and the vision enough to carry 10 percent each.

It’s not scale. But it’s sanity.

And imagine a world where you, as a founder or CEO, don’t have to fundraise all day, every day, because you built a fundraising strategy that guarantees the necessary annual dollar amount needed to achieve the organizational goals for three to five years, which in turn would allow you to focus on the actual work, rather than fundraising for the work.

The Problem Is Us

The uncomfortable truth is that the reason this world is imaginary isn’t donors. It’s us, all the founders and the CEOs, that keep selling the dream of scale. We’re the ones touting “national adoption by 2030” in our theory of change. We promise cost-per-beneficiary numbers that look like they were calculated by an actuary with a drinking problem. We drink the Kool‑Aid because we’re terrified that if we don’t, the money will go somewhere else.

The truth is that none of this is really “sustainable,” and it’s almost certainly not going to “scale.” But you do the work anyway. This is about acts of service. You do this because no one else will, because once you've actually seen the problem you can't un‑see it. People don’t become founders so they can swan around UNGA making small talk and searching for the last almond croissant, they do it because kids are dying of diarrhea and mothers are bleeding out from eclampsia. Everyone loves to gripe about donors, but it’s the founders and CEOs who keep promising scale, who keep drinking the Kool‑Aid. This isn’t a donor problem. It’s a doer problem.

This is the long defeat, a phrase Paul Farmer borrowed from Tolkien, who took it from the Bible. You’re fighting not because you think you can win, but because it’s the right thing to do. You can’t look away. And the goal is not to win, or defeat poverty, it’s to bring people along, and inspire them to fight the long defeat too.

Paul Farmer looked at a human being, understood the obligation, and then bent money, logistics, and politics until reality got closer to what justice required. Cost per beneficiary, in that frame, isn’t rigor. It’s a failure of imagination—the moment you accept that the only lives that count are the ones that are cheap.

The long defeat isn’t about giving up on impact; it’s about dropping the pretense that the work will neatly “pay for itself” or glide into government adoption.

Don’t look at the work from a cost-per-beneficiary standpoint, look at the work from equity of access, or even better, an equity of outcomes standpoint. That’s the only real indicator: I have kids, are the kids in this village getting access to the same vaccines my kids have access to?

That’s the only indicator.

Everyone loves to complain about donors. And a lot of that is earned—short horizons, unnecessarily forensic due diligence, the fetish for novelty. But donors didn’t invent the cult of scale on their own. Doers say, “Yes, we can go national in five years,” when we know that what we can honestly do is make three districts radically, irreversibly better—and then encourage the state to steal shamelessly from the model. We put “sustainable” in every other paragraph when we know full well that someone, somewhere, will have to keep paying salaries and supervision as long as we expect pregnant women to have the same level of care our wives did, and children on the island of Komodo to get rotavirus vaccines the way our daughters did.

Paul Farmer’s cardinal sin was not that he ignored money. He raised oceans of it. His heresy was that he refused to let cost‑effectiveness be the outer boundary of his moral imagination. He treated “What’s the cheapest way to do the minimum?” as the wrong question. The right question was “What if it was your daughter? What if it were your son?”

Then you figure out how to fund that, piece by piece, forever if you have to.

Embracing the Long Defeat

The long defeat doesn’t mean we abandon discipline. You still need detailed budgets where you can explain the price of soap, KPIs that mean something, and strategies that don’t burn your team out.

Today, the 1000 Days Fund works intentionally across the province of East Nusa Tenggara, (think Komodo), home to 1.4 million women of reproductive age, 700,000 children under 5 and 54,000 community health workers. These numbers are on par with Liberia. The projected budget for 2027 is $1.8 million USD. And 1000 Days Fund delivers.

But a donor will read this and say, “Yeah, but what’s your vision for scale?” To which I would respond, “Name me one NGO in the last 20 years that has scaled the way its donors prophesized."

I’ve done it a few times, asked a donor to give me the name of an organization that has truly scaled in the mythic way we all romanticize—government payer, national coverage, boring budget‑line‑items. Their eyes drift toward the ceiling as I wait for the inevitable, “Well… it’s complicated.”

And it is complicated.

Scale is something donors love to talk about; government as payer is something they purport to be perpetually on the horizon. But it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes. It’s not going to happen. We’ve been waiting 40 years and it hasn’t happened. If you spent 40 years failing to do the thing you said you would do, don’t you think, in all your grace and wisdom, you would try something different? But you don’t. You just do the trendy thing which is sell yourself the idea of scale.

If you were smart you would consider seeding the next generation of local founders—the ones who can push the government’s hand through credibility and proximity. That’s what leverage looks like. Leverage is scale on fire. Scale is one darling NGO chasing Bigfoot. Leverage is a dozen $2 million USD NGOs all fighting for the same thing, the formalization of community health workers in Indonesia, for example.

But we don’t have these conversations. We don’t want to scare the horses.

The harsh reality is that we’re chasing ghosts. The government as the payer is a myth, now more than ever. Scale as it is being sold right now is a myth. The mythical handover to government funding remains perpetually on the horizon, always promised but never delivered. Rather than acknowledging this reality, the sector continues to pursue ever-larger budgets that distance organizations from the communities they sought out to serve.

Scale Is the Responsibility of the State

In health and development, only the state can truly scale. NGOs can prototype, de‑risk, even deliver beautifully, but only the state can convert innovation into everyday service delivery. The state is the only actor with the fiscal architecture, mandate, and legitimacy to transform pilots and programs into public goods. But the state is not going to absorb a $20 million USD budget.

If the state knows an organization is running on $20 million and providing a service like school lunches or health care for free, the government would be acting against its own interests to absorb that budget. Until donors accompany doers to the government offices and see behind the curtain, we’ll continue to sell the myth every year in Oxford. And if the state isn’t ready, for whatever reason—weak governance, corruption, sharp inequality or the hard facts of archipelagic geography and infrastructure—then the organization fueled by righteous indignation and dedicated to ending decades of abandon and neglect can’t just pick up and move to Sweden. They have to stay and fight the long defeat.

The $2 Million Thesis

Imagine if an organization, instead of chasing its next zero, simply said: “We’ve done the math. We know the price of soap. Two million dollars a year is enough.”

This isn’t moral math, it’s simply easy. Put simply, if you’re running an organization with a budget north of $2 million, you’ve got an obligation beyond your own growth curve. The real mark of leadership isn’t just about raising more or scaling, it’s about using your position and reputation to pull others up. Start writing checks out of your operating budget and seed the most promising smaller orgs you can find. Then put your name and reputation to work lighting their path, opening doors, and making sure the next generation gets further, faster. That’s how you build an ecosystem. Anything else is just posturing.

More importantly, if you can find 20 donors to cover 10 percent of your budget with multiyear unrestricted funding, you can do the work, you don’t have to chase money and schmooze at UNGA. You can just do the work. That’s why $2 million is the perfect number. For some orgs, it might be $5 million. But the founder has to ask themselves this question: When was the last time I was in the field? Have I lost my edge? How close to lukewarm is this Riesling?

Every dollar above that line would go toward seed funding local organizations—the ones institutional donors admit are “too expensive" to do the due diligence on and “too early” or “too risky” to take to committee. Instead of a $20 million juggernaut, you build a network of $2 million ones—each competent, rooted, and context‑aware.

Over time, what emerges isn’t a network of unicorns, but an ecosystem of healthy organizations Paul Farmer would be proud of. Together, they embody something that looks a lot like actual systems change: distributed, resilient, and capable of lasting without being dependent on the charisma of any single founder.

The health sectors of places like Komodo, East Timor, and West Papua don’t need another glossy unicorn with a keynote slot at Davos. They need a coalition of $2 million founders and CEOs who can sit in sweltering heat and argue for why community health workers deserve a line item in the district budget.

When the run ended that morning, and we stood with our hands on our hips in the hotel parking lot, I asked the question that had been smoldering the whole time.

“So, what happened,” I said. “With the donor. The one you fed the line about scale and the RCT and AI.”

She blinked once. A pirate’s smile appeared. “Oh, he lapped it up,” she said. “Loved every word. Said that as soon as he got back to Chicago, he would suggest to his committee with a $10 million grant.”

Then she winked like an actress stepping offstage and disappeared into the hotel, ready to perform development’s most enduring illusion: that chasing scale is the same thing as fighting the long defeat.

Later that day a donor listened to the whole idea of raising enough unrestricted funding to sufficiency and seed an ecosystem, before finishing his coffee and ending the meeting by shaking his head and straightening his tie, “Gutsiest move I ever saw, man.”

“Zack,” he said as he stuffed his notebook away in his leather attaché, “I gotta tell you this, you know, you’re a lot like black licorice. Not a lot of people like black licorice, but the people who do, really like it.”

Which is, among other things, a pretty good name for an NGO.

Over the past decade, an awareness of harm to Native communities in this country has grown within the social sector. In our work at the Kataly Foundation, we now often hear people offer land acknowledgments, naming the tribe on whose land they live, at the start of calls and webinars. Events and conferences we attend also frequently begin with tributes and celebrations of Indigenous people. Alongside these acknowledgements is an increasing recognition of the movement to return Native land to Native communities, often referred to as Land Back.

The NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led organization, defines land back as “a movement that has existed for generations with a long legacy of organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands.” This process is also often referred to as rematriation, defined by Corrina Gould, co-founder of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Tribal Chair for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, as “work to restore sacred relationships between Indigenous people and our ancestral land, honoring our matrilineal societies, and in opposition of patriarchal violence and dynamics.”

These efforts aim to reestablish Indigenous self-governance and political authority over territories, to advocate for communal land ownership, and to preserve language and traditions.

Interest in this movement is growing and philanthropy has the potential to play a much greater role in resourcing Native communities for land rematriation. As funders consider how to engage, it is essential to understand that the journey through rematriation is as delicate and complex as it is powerful and restorative.

This article explores the background, process, and lessons learned from one land back initiative with the Nisenan (nee-see-naan) Tribe, as well as key takeaways to consider for future efforts.

The History of the Nisenan Tribe and Yulića

For tribes like the Nisenan, who have long been erased from both land and legal systems, reclaiming ancestral territory moves beyond justice. It is cultural survival.

The Nisenan are the Indigenous peoples of what is now referred to as the Sierra Nevada foothills. Their tribe and way of life was severely impacted by the 1849 gold rush, which reduced their population from 9,500 tribal members to 500 in the span of less than two decades. In 1913, the Nisenan Tribe was granted “federal recognition” and allotted 76 acres for their reservation, the Nevada City Rancheria. But in 1964, the federal government used the Rancheria Act to overturn that recognition and auctioned off their reservation. Afterwards, the Nisenan Tribe became nearly invisible on their own homelands. Because land is foundational to every Indigenous community’s way of life, without a continued connection in the coming generations, the tribe would cease to exist.

Yulića (you-lee-cha), one of many sacred Nisenan sites, was part of a 232-acre parcel of land that the Quakers owned and where they built the John Woolman School at Sierra Friends Center. Founded in the early 1960s by visionary Quakers from the San Francisco Bay Area, the school, retreat center, and gathering place was a living embodiment of Quaker values of peace, simplicity, stewardship, and equality. For more than half a century, the campus served as a hub for Quaker education, gatherings, youth programs, and spiritual development.

In 2020, a devastating fire severely damaged the land and infrastructure of the center. This fire, in combination with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, led to mounting financial strain for the Woolman School. In 2022, the Woolman board decided to shut down all programming at the center and sell the property. When they began considering potential next steps, they were guided by both their Quaker values and the land’s deeper history, beginning their exploration of rematriating the land to the local Nisenan Tribe.

The Land Back Process and Challenges

Shelley Covert, Nevada City Rancheria Tribal Council Secretary and executive director of California Heritage: Indigenous Research Project (CHIRP), first met the Quaker community through a Quaker initiative called “Right Relations.” This initiative provided Quaker community members opportunities to learn about the Quaker’s history with Indigenous communities, including their role in running Indian boarding schools and the deculturalization of Indigenous communities, from Indigenous community members. When the Woolman board decided to sell the center, Shelly reached out to contacts she had met through the initiative to ask them if they would be willing to rematriate the land to her tribe.

Initially, the Woolman board and broader Quaker community understood rematriation primarily as synonymous with gifting land. However, they came to understand that rematriation can take multiple forms, especially when it prioritizes Indigenous sovereignty, equitable terms, and long-term healing. Some in the greater Quaker community wanted Woolman to gift the land to the tribe, but in order to settle Woolman’s debts, the board ultimately decided a sale would be necessary.

CHIRP entered the rematriation discussions with intention and respect for multiple perspectives. While they acknowledge the legacy of Indigenous Americans’ genocide and many Indigenous tribes being landless in their homelands, they also understand the reality that many private property owners cannot afford to gift their homes or land to Indigenous tribes, as was the case with the Woolman School. For this transaction, rematriation meant the tribe was given the first right of purchase, creating space for CHIRP to raise funds without competition, and the land was offered to the tribe at a price roughly half of the estimated market value.

Yet before any funds were raised, the tribe had to gain consensus on accepting donations for the capital campaign, which they called “Homeland Return.” Some members saw the funds as an act of goodwill, while others did not want to be recipients of what they viewed as charity. However, once there was an agreement amongst the tribe, CHIRP launched its campaign and began reaching out to allies and the broader community to participate.

Because the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe is not federally recognized and not able to directly hold land or accept funds to purchase land, CHIRP, with its nonprofit status, became the legal vehicle for this land purchase.

Lina Shalabi, program officer for the Restorative Economies Fund at the Kataly Foundation, first learned about the land back effort from a Quaker in her community who grew up going to the retreat center. The Kataly Foundation, whose mission is to support the self-determination of Black and Indigenous communities, as well as all people of color, has funded multiple rematriation and land back efforts since it was founded in 2018. Each one has been unique and required different levels of involvement.

When Lina heard the Woolman board was offering the tribe the first right of purchase, she shared the funding opportunity with Kataly’s Restorative Economies Fund and the Mindfulness and Healing Justice program. Both collaborated to fund this effort, making a $565,000 grant to CHIRP in early 2024.

Despite strong goodwill from both the tribe and Woolman board, there were tense moments that stalled negotiations throughout the process. Cassandra Ferrera, a realtor, facilitator, and co-founder of Center for Ethical Land Transition (CELT), was brought in as a mediator after the process had reached a stalemate. CELT brings technical knowledge and a deep cultural awareness to land transitions, ensuring transactions are reparative, relational, and rooted in justice. Since no two transitions are the same, CELT’s approach is grounded in openness, trust-building, and the honoring of Indigenous leadership.

Using CELT’s framework, A Compass for Ethical Land Transitions, Ferrera introduced a shared vocabulary that emphasized relationship over transaction, and healing over haste.

This new, more relational lens allowed negotiations to move forward. When local concerns, such as casino development, forest management, and numerous regulatory challenges emerged, each was addressed with respect and shared intentions for the land. CELT’s role also ensured that the real estate and legal mechanics did not overpower Indigenous intention and sovereignty. Throughout the process, Ferrera centered Shelly Covert’s leadership and voice.

With CELT’s guidance, the Woolman board and CHIRP navigated a demanding, 12-month journey involving extensive coordination surrounding infrastructure, insurance, permitting, land conditions, and maintenance. Everyone involved, including the real estate professionals, recognized it as one of the most complex transactions they had ever encountered.

After the two groups entered into a contract, the broader community, including private and public funders and donors, rallied around the tribe’s vision of land justice. Yulića was successfully transferred into Indigenous hands.

The relationship that formed between the Nisenan Tribe and the Quakers during the land sale provided a deepened mutual understanding of their respective communities and continues beyond the land transfer. As part of the final negotiations, it was agreed upon that one of the Quaker elders would continue to live on the land and that the local Quaker group could gather on the land as tenants of the meeting house. Several Woolman board members and Quaker community members remain active supporters of CHIRP and its mission to preserve, protect, and perpetuate Nisenan culture.

Yulića now provides a safe and private place for ceremonies that have not been performed publicly in over a century. Cultural revitalization, especially amongst the Tribe’s youth, is central to CHIRP’s vision for the land and growing community. Most recently, CHIRP was awarded a three-year youth programming, substance abuse, and culture revitalization grant as they continue to inhabit the land.

In the long term, the vision is for Yulića to serve as tribal housing, with elders having first access to any completed structures. There is also a plan for an internal wellness hub where tribal members can come together for cultural practices and healing from historical trauma. The ultimate hope is to piece together enough parcels of land with springs, wetlands, and burning grounds to reestablish a full cultural landscape that will allow the tribe to live in harmony on the land as their ancestors once did.

Lessons for Future Rematriation Efforts

Since Native communities carry the heaviest cultural and emotional burden in land back initiatives, it is imperative to center Indigenous voices and experiences throughout the entire process. Dominant systems can often override or minimize Native leadership, so a more relational process should supersede legal and logical steps.

Funders should defer to Indigenous leadership to offer guidance for how much or little engagement they desire, instead of making assumptions about what the tribe wants or needs. Building strong, trust-based relationships with Native communities before a land deal is discussed is enormously beneficial in this work. The dynamics that follow allow for proactive communication and respect for boundaries that can lead to successful rematriation efforts.

In many cases, facilitators are essential for trust to be established and maintained during the process. For this project, CELT was invaluable. Cassandra helped to create a shared language and understanding between the tribe, the funders, and others when talks stalled. If real estate and legal professionals, for example, are unfamiliar with Indigenous values or lack cultural sensitivity, facilitators can step in to offer explanation and repair. Without this unique support, rematriation efforts can stall or, even worse, replicate harm.

Involved parties must also be open-minded about how expectations for what works in the dominant culture must be adjusted to each unique circumstance. Western real estate systems and legal norms are not designed for Indigenous ways of relating to the land. This process is slower, more intuitive, and more holistic. Flexibility and boldness to engage in new, helpful ways are necessary.

As tribes continue to build out their vision for their people, allies have many opportunities to come alongside this work. Landowners can consider donating land or offering it to Indigenous communities at a discounted rate. Individuals and organizations can stay connected to the journey of healing the land after the sale to learn about their evolving needs. Some choose to make ongoing financial contributions to tribes; for example, the Shuumi land tax is a voluntary payment made by non-Indigenous residents of the Lisjan Territory in the San Francisco Bay Area that helps Sogorea Te’ Land Trust sustain its work of education, advocacy, and stewardship.

A New, Strategic Vision for Philanthropy

Rematriation is not a new idea in philanthropy, however there is much more that can be done. Namely, funders can shift their mindset to the longer term through their grant-making. The biggest lesson Kataly has learned in rematriation efforts is the amount of support that is needed beyond the process of purchasing the land. Land transitions tend to rally a lot of excitement and support, as the need is definable and obvious. But the momentum and celebration tend to drop off quickly after the title transfer. It is a huge milestone, but it is only the beginning of cultural revitalization and community care.

A much longer, more emotionally taxing chapter follows—one of healing the land, and nurturing the emotional and spiritual healing of the tribe. Many Indigenous groups are descendants of those who have survived genocide and, despite living in modern times, are not fully assimilated into Western culture. Shelly Covert shared that “getting the land has given us space to process how much is gone and who is gone.” Rematriation is undoubtedly cause for celebration, but being on the land also brings grief; there is a reckoning of all that has been lost in both traditions and generations.

Funders can support land back initiatives by strategically making more multi-year grants to tribes after land has been rematriated, alongside one-time capital contributions. Funding can go beyond the requisite expenses of insurance, property taxes, and fire mitigation into a more interconnected perspective that supports Indigenous communities’ healing with their ancient ties to the land. Nwamaka Agbo, Kataly Foundation’s CEO, believes that to do this work on a generational scale, it needs “a response commensurate with the harm you are trying to solve.” Funders can shift into a longer-term vision involving patient investment that will make this work truly successful.

While no formal dynamic model exists for land rematriation, Yulića added to a growing body of lessons and frameworks CELT is translating into case studies and public learning tools to support the broader land justice movement. By showing up consistently, listening deeply, and respecting sovereignty as non-negotiable elements of ethical land return, we can be vessels that identify and remove barriers, support the essential work of more intermediaries like CELT, and engage in political education within the philanthropy sector to grow the ecosystem of people and organizations funding this work.

As individuals, we can be truth-tellers, willingly sharing the United States’ history of genocide and displacement of Indigenous, Black, and other communities who have faced marginalization.

Looking to the Future

Momentum is building for land back opportunities, and as funders become increasingly interested in supporting such efforts, they should be aware of the complexities that are inherent to the process. The rematriation of Yulića was far from simple, yet it highlights what is possible when relationship, respect, and justice guide the process. Understandably, CHIRP believes that “rematriation” in its truest sense still remains an aspiration. Their hope is that the word will someday reflect restorative and healing justice in the absence of financial barriers to tribes.

Yulića’s return to the Nisenan Tribe was not a perfect model, but it is a powerful one. It shows there is a complexity to land back that goes beyond simply moving money. It reflects both the limitations and the possibilities of land rematriation within our current legal and economic systems and realities. Ultimately, by centering the tribe’s vision and leadership, this effort lays the groundwork for future land back efforts and provides an outline of how land back projects can be better held by funders and sellers.

For at least two decades, one question has structured much of how philanthropy and the social innovation ecosystem think about change: Can it scale? The question appears in grant applications, accelerator programs, and strategy documents. It makes sense: If a solution works for one community, surely the ethical imperative is to help many more? In a world of vast unmet needs, scale promises efficiency, reach, and speed.

Yet something curious has happened as this logic has spread. Increasingly, promising ideas, organizations, and forms of collective action are all filtered through the same lens, held to the same standard. If it cannot scale, why would it be worth investing in?

This assumption has reshaped the architecture of civil society. It has influenced what kinds of organizations get funded, what kinds of knowledge are valued, and even how social problems themselves are defined. But as geopolitical instability grows, inequality deepens, and social systems fracture in new ways—as the world, in short, ceases to behave like a scalable system—it is time to ask the uncomfortable question: Must all social innovation be designed to scale? Where does “scale thinking” make sense, and where must we re-imagine our way of thinking about progress and innovation?

When Scale Is the Only Default Logic

Scale has become such a powerful organizing idea in philanthropy and development because, at its core, scale thinking is built around growth: the idea that a successful system is one that can reach far more people without a proportional increase in resources. In this framing, the most valuable solutions are those that can expand rapidly while maintaining efficiency. Measurement therefore becomes inseparable from design. If growth is the goal, the ability to demonstrate growth, through metrics such as users reached, households served, hectares restored, or units delivered, becomes central to how value is assessed.

This orientation toward scale has deep roots in development practice. Over the past three decades, governments and development institutions have increasingly searched for replicable models that can be transferred across geographies. Microfinance is one of the most cited examples. What began as locally embedded lending groups evolved into large-scale financial systems serving millions of clients worldwide, supported by standardized metrics such as repayment rates and borrower numbers.

These proof points have guided many of the trends that we now see around scale thinking in the social sector. If an intervention works in one place, the next question quickly becomes whether it can be replicated elsewhere at scale.

Yet researchers studying social innovation suggest that impact spreads through multiple pathways. They distinguish between scaling out (replication across sites), scaling up (influencing policies and institutions), and scaling deep (shifting relationships, cultural norms, and local practices). Other scholars describe scaling wide, where ideas spread through decentralized networks rather than a single expanding organization.

Each pathway has its own role to play. However, operational demands of scale thinking require one to think about some of the building blocks consistently: replicability, standardization, and measurable outputs. The implication is often that complex social processes may need to be simplified into stable models that can travel across contexts, often referred to as “datafication of civil society” by sociologists.

In practice, this can shape which kinds of solutions are prioritized, which organizations receive support, and how social problems themselves come to be defined.

Community organizing, collective stewardship, and cultural shifts rarely translate into easily tracked metrics. For example, take the case of watershed restoration. Building check dams and recharge structures can scale quickly across districts and produce impressive numbers, such as hectares treated and structures built. But whether those gains last often depends on something less visible: local agreements about groundwater use, crop choices in dry years, or who decides when a borewell goes deeper. These decisions are negotiated through trust, local institutions, and leadership within communities. Often harder to count, but they often determine whether resilience endures.

The question, then, is what do we stand to lose if scale thinking becomes the predominant lens of looking at social change? When scalability matters, what kinds of change can it meaningfully carry? What might progress look like if impact were judged not only by how far a solution travels, but also by how well it strengthens the systems around it: the communities, ecosystems, and institutions that allow change to endure?

A World That No Longer Behaves Like a Scalable System

The limits of scale thinking are becoming clearer as the world itself becomes less predictable. Climate volatility, geopolitical fragmentation, and economic shocks are producing systems that behave less like stable machines and more like living ecosystems. In such conditions, solutions designed once and replicated everywhere can quickly reach their limits. What communities need is the capacity to adapt: to learn, reorganize, and respond as circumstances change.

Societies rarely transform through replication alone. Change more often emerges from ecosystems of actors, relationships, and institutions that learn, negotiate, and adapt within specific places. When innovation begins with the realities of people and landscapes, rather than with the assumption that solutions must scale, different possibilities come into view.

For philanthropy, the task may not be to simply support what works at scale, but to cultivate the conditions in which many forms of change can take root. One way to think about this is through navigation. In uncertain waters, ships matter. But ships alone cannot chart the course. They rely on lighthouses that illuminate shifting terrain and bridges that connect otherwise isolated efforts. Civil society increasingly needs this kind of infrastructure: institutions that help actors see the landscape clearly and work together across it. Yet philanthropy still tends to fund the ships (the organizations delivering visible programs) while the quieter systems that help the fleet navigate together remain underbuilt.

What Philanthropy Can Do Differently

1. Fund the bridges. Philanthropy can invest more deliberately in social infrastructure: convening platforms, shared governance systems, and knowledge networks that allow many actors to collaborate. The Ecological Restoration Alliance, for instance, brings together restoration practitioners, scientists, and community organizations to develop shared protocols and learning systems across landscapes. Rather than scaling a single organization, the alliance strengthens the field’s ability to act collectively.
   
2. Back technology that communities steward. Digital platforms can scale while still centering community agency. The local disaster mapping effort in Indonesia, which builds on participatory disaster-mapping approaches pioneered by platforms like PetaBencana, enables citizens to report hazards in real time and contribute to open disaster maps used by communities and governments. The technology works precisely because it is co-designed with users and embedded in local response systems rather than imposed from above.
   
3. Invest in the commons. Shared resources such as open data systems, restoration protocols, training networks, and collaborative tools often act as the soil from which innovation grows. One example is CoRE Stack, developed by the Commons Tech Foundation, which provides open, modular digital infrastructure designed specifically for community-led organizations. Rather than building proprietary platforms, CoRE Stack focuses on shared digital public goods, identity systems, registries, consent layers, and governance protocols that many actors can adapt for their own contexts. Funding such commons-based infrastructure enables diverse organizations to collaborate and innovate without each having to build their own technology from scratch.
   
4. Build the missing middle. Between grassroots organizations and large global institutions sits a fragile but critical layer of intermediaries: regional networks, knowledge hubs, and field-building organizations that translate ideas across contexts. These actors mentor emerging groups, document learning, and maintain collaboration across ecosystems of practice. For example, the Consortium for Agroecological Transformation exemplifies this approach by supporting networks of farmers, researchers, and grassroots organizations to transition agricultural landscapes toward agroecology.

Looking Beyond Scale

Scale thinking has its place. Some challenges, such as mass vaccination campaigns, disaster early-warning systems, or digital infrastructure for financial inclusion, depend on solutions that can move rapidly across vast populations.

But many of the transformations we now seek from restoring degraded landscapes to rebuilding social trust do not travel in quite the same way. They are shaped slowly on the ground: through experiments that falter before they succeed, through neighbors learning how to respond together in moments of stress, and through local civil society organizations that stay present long after the urgency of a crisis fades. Over time, these everyday negotiations over water, livelihoods, risk, and responsibility begin to form something more durable. Because when crises arrive, systems rarely rise to the occasion overnight; they rise to the level of readiness that has quietly been built in ordinary times, through relationships, trust, and shared norms.

In a world defined by complexity and uncertainty, the task ahead may lie as much in cultivating these enabling conditions as in expanding solutions themselves—strengthening the lighthouses and bridges that help the whole fleet find its way.

In the morning hours, when the streets of most cities are at their busiest, Gunsan is quiet. Cars appear only intermittently on the roads, and empty shops with fading signs outnumber the ones that are still open. Restaurants have ample seating even at lunchtime, and vacant houses are becoming more common along the side streets. The massive cranes and port facilities lining the harbor serve mainly as reminders of the city’s past rather than as working infrastructure.

In a city that has lost its sense of motion, speaking about possibility is no easy task. But in 2019, a Korean organization specializing in entrepreneurship education, Underdogs, saw an opportunity to restore Gunsan’s vitality. The idea was to first create an environment where young entrepreneurs could identify local social challenges through their own distinct lenses, and then work to materialize business ideas aimed at solving those problems. Underdogs theorized that this would generate countless experiments, narratives of success and failure, and new relationships and networks—and that the dynamic energy produced through entrepreneurial activity would reanimate the city.

The organization’s Localize Gunsan initiative proved out this theory. In just three years, 17,774 people visited its centralized community and co-working space. Entrepreneurs and local groups worked together to develop a total of 502 Gunsan-related services, and 26 teams opened stores and spaces by activating underused properties.

The mission and structure of these efforts varied widely. One young entrepreneur created Gunsan Sumgim, a seaweed brand, after seeing his father’s locally grown seaweed distributed under other regions’ specialty labels. The Gunsan Bam Cooperative, which launched in response to the lack of cultural life for young people in areas that become even emptier at night, opened a food zone in the center of Gunsan’s tourist district and organized events like World Cup watch parties and outdoor concerts. And Hammer Design, founded by a third-generation carpenter who felt a deep concern over historic buildings falling into abandonment, transformed vacant structures into spaces for Localize Gunsan startup teams.

These and other projects succeeded in infusing Gunsan with new economic and social energy. But developing an effective entrepreneurial ecosystem and finding ways to actively counter community-level and psychological inertia were essential to bringing them to life. Localize Gunsan highlights the power of multi-layered, longer-term support for entrepreneurs, and offers both inspiration and lessons for funders, entrepreneurs, and communities looking to revitalize declining cities.

From Industrial Powerhouse to Structural Decline

Gunsan is a port city located on the west coast of the Korean Peninsula. With the push for heavy and chemical industrialization in the 1970s and 1980s, Korean businesses established large-scale facilities—including the Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyard and Korea GM—in different areas of the city, generating stable jobs in the shipbuilding, automobile, and machinery industries. At its peak, Gunsan’s production output reached 12 trillion won (about $8.9 billion), accounting for 43 percent of total exports from Jeollabuk-do, a province in southwestern Korea. However, in 2018, the withdrawal of two major factories marked the end of Gunsan’s prosperity. Employees and tens of thousands of residents who were connected to local supply chains lost their jobs. Many left the area in search of new jobs, weakening the local economic, educational, and cultural ecosystems.

Other regions of Korea have experienced similar decline due to deindustrialization. Cities that prioritized manufacturing during this era unified around major firms, leaving them with little capacity to diversify and absorb the risk of corporate withdrawal. Today, as a result of lower birthrates, an aging population, and a continued concentration of people in the Seoul metropolitan area, 27 percent of Korea’s regions face 소멸위험지역’, or “the crisis of local extinction,” meaning their ability to function as self-sustaining communities is at risk. Local governments have tried to attract young people through subsidies and an array of policy measures, but these efforts have rarely translated into sustained settlement.

Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

Rather than saying, ‘I’m going to change Gunsan,’” says Underdogs CEO Sangrae Cho, “many people came [to the initiative] saying, ‘I want to try something fun—something different.’” Sangrae explains that applicants for Localize Gunsan were motivated less by “overcoming regional crisis” and more by “trying to reshape their own lives.” For young people exploring possibility, moving to a new city or region can open up space for experimentation. But for them to perceive it as a place of opportunity, the resources and supports that allow for experimentation must come with it.

Founded in 2015, Underdogs has supported the creation of social enterprises and social ventures across a range of social issues. Since its establishment, Underdogs has backed the growth of numerous organizations through incubating and accelerating programs focused on youth and social innovation, as well as region-based entrepreneurship projects developed in collaboration with public and private partners. In particular, it has continually developed and refined practice-centered entrepreneurship education methodologies—moving beyond theory-based instruction—in response to rapidly changing social problems and operating environments.

Underdogs judged that entrepreneurs could reframe the many challenges Gunsan faced as diverse opportunities to test and expand new ideas. It also expected that in a city where youth outmigration was accelerating, young entrepreneurs would be valuable human assets in their own right—and that attracting them to the area could be a win-win strategy for both the place and the entrepreneurs.

To move the idea forward, Underdogs adopted the role of a pacemaker organization, or pacer. The SSIR article “Pacing Entrepreneurs to Success” describes pacers as entrepreneurial support organizations that provide long-term services to enable companies in emerging markets achieve their goals. Surviving in an existing market is difficult enough; achieving goals while building a new market is even harder. Pacers commit to support lasting from one year to a lifetime, including continuous learning opportunities, access to business networks, peer connections, and customized services tailored to demand.

In the Korean context, Underdogs supports young entrepreneurs who are pioneering the “emerging markets” of deindustrialized cities to achieve regional revitalization. In Gunsan, it aimed to create an ecosystem where entrepreneurs could push beyond local constraints—an environment where the work of funders, entrepreneurs, and community members complemented one another and created conditions in which entrepreneurs could persist.

Underdogs’ collaboration with SK Innovation E&S, one of Korea’s leading conglomerate affiliates, played a major role in ensuring that Localize Gunsan was compelling to young entrepreneurs. As part of its social contribution efforts, the company provided stable investment backed by corporate capital to Localize Gunsan, and offered participants comprehensive and realistic supports, including housing and workspace, business funding, and entrepreneurship education. It also connected entrepreneurs to Social Value Connect, South Korea’s largest platform for sharing and scaling social value, and the SK Happiness Foundation, and supported market access so that businesses could expand beyond the local area to the national level.

Above all, SK Innovation E&S upheld the principles of “support, but do not interfere” and a three-year commitment. This simplified decision-making processes and enabled Underdogs’ distinctive speed and intensity to fully manifest. Rather than demanding immediate results, it encouraged entrepreneurs to set key performance indicators related to sustainable growth. It also supported an annual Localize Festival, a celebration and platform led by Localize Gunsan entrepreneurs in partnership with local small business owners, where entrepreneurs could test ideas in real community settings, build and renew local relationships, and reflect on how their roles in the local ecosystem were evolving. This annual rhythm reinforced entrepreneurs’ sense of ownership and accountability to place, normalized iteration and adjustment over time, and aligned with the program’s longer-term commitment to growth over immediate results—ultimately creating conditions in which entrepreneurial capability could deepen and mature. In these ways, SK Innovation E&S combined private-sector agility with corporate capital and networks to create a field of play where entrepreneurs could build capability and grow.

Meanwhile, Local Friendly, one of the teams of entrepreneurs participating in Localize Gunsan, began connecting entrepreneurs with the local community. Led by Sujin Kim, an entrepreneur with a background as a Young Women's Christian Association activist, Local Friendly hosted convivial shared meals—such as tteokbokki (simmered rice cake) and samgyetang (ginseng chicken soup) parties—and oversaw Do It Together, an urban regeneration-style project in which local youth and entrepreneurs came together to renovate vacant buildings. The team’s nonprofit-activist identity was evident throughout their work—so much so that other entrepreneurs would ask, “Why are you working so hard on something that doesn’t make money?” The hospitality and connections the group cultivated helped Localize Gunsan’s entrepreneurs cohere to a tightly bonded youth community that ran together within the ecosystem and energized one another.

The contributions of local coach Kwon-neung Cho and Professor Zoo-sun Yoon of Chungnam National University’s Department of Architecture were also important. As a Gunsan-born entrepreneur, Cho played a role in helping entrepreneurs experience the city’s appeal, build closer relationships with the local community, and settle in more securely. He also provided practical advice and support for starting and operating businesses in the region, helping entrepreneurs reduce trial and error along the way. Meanwhile, Professor Yoon introduced domestic and international cases to Underdogs and the entrepreneurs, and interpreted the distinctive characteristics and significance of Localize Gunsan in theoretical terms, strengthening confidence in the project’s overall direction.

Finally, the Gunsan city government provided support so that Localize Gunsan’s entrepreneurs could go the extra mile. Entrepreneurs who registered as Gunsan residents became eligible for city-operated programs such as the Startup Hope Nurturing Project, which provided subsidies to young entrepreneurs, and the Youth Stay Program, which offered near-free, one-room studios in which to live. Notably, the design of Youth Stay Program emerged when the city was exploring support options and a young entrepreneur conveyed entrepreneurs’ housing struggles, demonstrating how a public institution can identify needs through youth voices and translate them into policy.

Breaking Through Inertia

This ecosystem of sustained support laid the groundwork for Localize Gunsan. But for entrepreneurs to generate regional innovation in Gunsan, they had to overcome multiple layers of inertia. At the community level, inertia included a declining local economy and stagnant mood, increasing youth outmigration, and wariness toward outsiders. At the individual level, entrepreneurs faced psychological inertia—fear of failure and a desire to maintain stability—as well as cognitive inertia, or overconfidence in existing knowledge and learned patterns of thinking.

To break through these barriers and generate dynamism, Underdogs developed a practice-centered, entrepreneurship education approach called “act-preneurship” that prioritizes four practices: immersion, peer learning, action, and adaptability. Below is a closer look at each of these in action.

1. Design for immersion. Entrepreneurship is creative work, and creation demands immersion and focus. Designing well for it requires both the “hardware” of physical space to initiate immersion and the “software” of relationships— interactions, culture, and emotional bonds—to sustain it.

Before Localize Gunsan formally launched, Underdogs leased a three-story building to serve as a gravitational center that made immersion possible. It designed the first floor to accommodate a café and a space for coaching and education for entrepreneurs, and designated the second floor as a coworking space where entrepreneurs could work at any time day or night. A shared kitchen on the third floor allowed participants to cook and eat together, and the rooftop was well-suited for parties. Underdogs also secured nearby guesthouse lodging so that Localize Gunsan entrepreneurs coming from outside the city had a place to live. This meant that, rather than experiencing work as something separate from life, participants could develop a sense of coherence between what they did and how they lived. Routines, relationships, and ways of thinking could begin to revolve around the work they were engaged in, and in turn, those lived experiences could continuously inform and reshape the work itself. Underdogs CEO Junghun Kim explains: “At first, there were a lot of complaints. But we believed that for an entrepreneurial community to form, above all else, it was essential to spend an absolute amount of time together.”

Underdogs also stationed an operator, or community host, at the building to closely observe entrepreneurs and provide tangible and intangible supports, such as connecting them to mentors and procuring relocation funding for participants who needed to move due to space constraints. In the first year, one of the operators, Seul-ki Lee, noticed that working, eating, and sleeping in such close proximity effectively fueled entrepreneurs’ immersion and creativity, but that their stamina and energy declined overall. In response, she organized a club initiative to help participants take mental breaks and regain momentum through rest and play. Lee reflects, “Since we were starting a new life in a new place, I realized we needed to support not only entrepreneurship itself, but also the overall conditions that made it possible to live well in Gunsan.”

2. Build capacity through peer learning. Population decline in deindustrialized cities naturally weakens local talent, information, resources, and networks, and local-government revitalization programs often restrict eligibility to residents. Well-designed peer learning efforts can bring the strength and diversity needed to produce creative and effective local solutions. Building the right environment and structure can increase the frequency of contact and density of relationships, and the right composition of peer groups can improve the depth of learning and the quality of growth.

During the recruitment process, Underdogs created entrepreneurial teams composed of entrepreneurs with projects in different stages of development, with different areas of focus, and from different regions. Teams included new entrepreneurs and existing founders, split into incubating and accelerating tracks. Startup projects ranged from game content for tourists, travel magazines, and video production, to cat-friendly villages, food-truck cooperatives, and community hotels. By region, 11 teams were from Gunsan and 15 were from outside.

These teams shared helpful ideas and feedback formally and informally throughout the program, and their diversity fueled growth. For example, entrepreneurs born and raised in Gunsan engaged with entrepreneurs who had accumulated experiences in the metropolis of Seoul. While the Gunsan-born entrepreneurs lacked the experience and career background of their Seoul counterparts, they connected Seoul-based entrepreneurs with local networks and shared insights only locals would know.

“We saw outcomes because the social mix worked,” Kim says. “Regardless of individual success or failure, peer learning occurred as people watched and learned how others actually made things happen.” An entrepreneur who opened a photo studio through Localize Gunsan recalls: “If the other entrepreneurs hadn’t been there, I don’t think I would have rented a space and opened a studio on my own. As a consumer, I was used to only seeing finished products and services. Watching other teams go through the startup process made me realize, ‘This is how it works. Everyone starts like this. You have to build it piece by piece.’”

Underdogs also encouraged collaboration between teams. It assigned different teams to plan collaborations with others, and grouped together teams facing similar problems. These efforts to actively connect teams in different ways deepened the entrepreneurs’ understanding of one another and of each other’s business ideas, and opened up new possibilities. For example, the design-focused Blue Mustard Studio collaborated with Mangchi Design, an enterprise specializing in remodeling idle spaces, to renovate abandoned houses in the city center. One entrepreneur, who collaborated with another startup team, explains, “Because we knew where and how the other team was running their business, we could pinpoint exactly where synergy with our own business might emerge.”

3. Promoting action, not words. Creating new dynamism in a city that has lost its vitality can give rise to tension and conflict between entrepreneurs and the local community. “When we first came to Gunsan,” recalls Underdogs Partner Daeun Park, “the local community looked at us with suspicion. … And there were major concerns that we might overlap with existing entrepreneurs in the area.” Building trust and ensuring that different community members see each other not as competitors but as partners requires that entrepreneurs actively and continuously connect with residents, merchants, and other entrepreneurs.

To clearly signal from the outset that Localize Gunsan would collaborate rather than compete with local small businesses, for example, Underdogs excluded applicants hoping to enter the food and beverage sector, since most of Gunsan’s existing businesses operated in that space. Instead, it selected Gunsan-based entrepreneurs and teams whose business models could coexist with and benefit the local community. In addition, as part of orientation, entrepreneurs walked around Wolmyeong-dong, the area where the centralized community and co-working space was located, greeting residents and handing out rainbow-colored rice cakes. They also created and shared specific “living rules,” including smiling and greeting residents first, making one Gunsan acquaintance per day, and communicating kindly with neighbors.

Through consistent efforts to expand points of contact, relationships with residents began to change. One entrepreneur describes how actively engaging with community members throughout the entire entrepreneurial process can change mindsets on both sides: “When I talk with local residents, I listen carefully and respond strongly. That attitude helps me even when I work elsewhere. It’s like I’ve become sly—but also more seasoned and flexible. Even the convenience store owner, who’s now a regular in my life, used to say, ‘Why are you here? Just go to Seoul.’ Now, when I stay in Gunsan during holidays, he takes care of me and says, ‘Gunsan is a good place to live.’”

Underdogs’ emphasis on action accelerated the speed of trust-building in the community and, in turn, the development of the entrepreneurs’ work. Rather than sitting in an office polishing proposal language on a laptop, the repeated act of meeting residents, stakeholders, and tourists on the street as an essential part of testing and refining ideas helped entrepreneurs grow and made their businesses more sustainable. Cho Kwonyung, a Gunsan-native entrepreneur, describes Underdogs’ action-first coaching as “brutal.” “They treat you like a friend, but when it’s coaching time, they push hard. When entrepreneurs came up with an idea, they’d say, ‘Go test it in the field,’ ‘Bring people and prove it.’ They’d conduct check-ins with entrepreneurs whether it was dawn or midnight.”

With constant prompting from Underdogs, the 26 teams gained a sense of belonging within the community that became a driving force, transforming their work and relationships in Gunsan from short-term projects into a part of life they wished to continue. Consequently, the community itself became a condition enabling sustainability. The entrepreneurs' continued presence and growth, in turn, created a virtuous cycle that further solidified the community.

4. Respond adaptively in crisis. The most effective strategy for preparing for an uncertain future is not sophisticated forecasting or perfect planning, but the embodied ability to sense change and adapt quickly. Just as K-pop artists endure intense training to build capability before they debut, a high-intensity coaching process strengthens entrepreneurs’ capacity to adapt. And since survival requires evolution, adaptive capacity is an essential competency for getting through crises that will continue to come.

Following its first, 13-week education program, and in line with its action-oriented style, Underdogs launched the Localize Festival—and event where entrepreneurs showcased their projects across the city and received real-time feedback from experts, residents, business partners, and tourists. The festival produced measurable outcomes—sales, visitor counts, media mentions—but it also created an unmeasured one: striking scenes that reversed the extinction anxiety hanging over Gunsan’s empty streets. Throughout the festival, communities inside and outside the region saw Gunsan’s young entrepreneurs as a force for revitalization.

However, the program’s second year brought a variable no one anticipated: the COVID-19 pandemic. For entrepreneurs who had worked largely through offline stores under the banner of revitalization, everything came to a halt. Movement between regions was restricted, and tourist foot traffic disappeared. The Underdogs coaching approach—verify results through execution, then revise and refine—no longer worked.

Shrinking revenue and an unpredictable outlook threatened the sustainability of the entrepreneurs’ new businesses. Yet at the same time, the flexibility and local understanding they had built through continuous, field-based learning proved their value. Some entrepreneurs shifted their business focus toward residents. For example, Wolmyeong Studio, which had taken concept photos for tourists, learned that Gunsan residents traveled to cities such as Jeonju, roughly 30 miles away, to take ID photos. In response, it began offering ID-photo services for local residents. Underdogs meanwhile converted the Localize Festival to an online format, showcasing projects in new ways. For example, the team selling Gunsan’s specialty seaweed shipped seaweed to people participating in the Localize Gunsan Festival online in advance and taught them how to grill it via live broadcast.

Underdogs also collaborated with entrepreneurs in Gunsan, Gangneung, and Jeju to introduce their local brands to residents in Seoul. And to help entrepreneurs persist through the crisis, Underdogs commissioned them to produce promotional programs—magazines, tours, and workshops—that publicized the Localize Gunsan project.

Sustaining Change

By establishing itself as a pacemaker organization and adopting these four practices, Underdogs succeeded in infusing the region with energy and innovation through Localize Gunsan. All 26 startup teams incubated and accelerated through Localize Gunsan completed the program.

In 2022, the formal education program of Localize Gunsan—which had supported and nurtured young entrepreneurs in the city for three years—came to an end. The intensive support and structured training of its early phase are no longer in place, but the relationships formed and the choices made through the project continue to shape the future.

“I decided to stay in Gunsan,” says Lee. “I’m renting the building we used during Localize Gunsan and trying to make something work there. I guess that makes me an entrepreneur now. Living in Gunsan, rather than Seoul, just feels a bit more interesting and enjoyable—and I wanted to keep going here.”

The inertia surrounding regional decline remains complex and deeply entrenched. Localize Gunsan proved effective in generating concentrated change over a short period of time through an act-preneurship strategy centered on external resources and a community of young entrepreneurs. Yet sustaining this momentum requires an integrated and organic support ecosystem that can be maintained over time. While the fact that a community of entrepreneurs—who have internalized a culture of action—has chosen to remain in Gunsan and continue experimenting is a significant outcome, it also leaves important questions unanswered.

What do entrepreneurs need to sustain their projects? How might the role of pacemaker organizations evolve? And how can cities build and continuously support a balanced support ecosystem rooted in local human resources, including residents, community groups, educational institutions, local businesses, and civil society organizations? Cities and regions like Gunsan now need to find ways to not simply maintain their speed of recovery, but to set a new pace for expanding local vitality.

A version of this story was originally published by SSIR Korea.

The stakes of professional development are well documented and often framed in terms of career ownership and individual responsibility. But professional development also unfolds within relationships and institutions that shape how people learn to exercise voice, authority, and disagreement. While many organizations promote the value of disagreement rhetorically, leaders often lack the skills to steward constructive disagreement themselves or, importantly, teach others how to disagree well.

Amid today’s rapid organizational, social, and technological change, leaders across sectors often observe that it has never been harder to lead. But it may also be harder to be a professional more broadly, as discontent with organizations and institutions becomes increasingly visible, particularly among younger workers. The question is not whether disagreement will emerge in organizations. It will. The question is whether leaders and teams will develop the capacity to engage with it constructively.

Developing this capacity is possible, and the necessary tools are at hand. Leaders can cultivate it by recognizing how power and influence shape interpersonal relationships, designing the conditions for voice, modeling the relational practices that make disagreement productive, and embedding these practices into everyday organizational routines.

Power, Dependence, and Influence in Work Relationships

Many early-career professionals enter organizations assuming that working hard, staying agreeable, and avoiding tension will lead to growth and recognition. However, these instincts can limit development and learning, both for individuals and for organizations that need diverse perspectives to adapt to the dynamism of even the most stable external environments.

This is not simply a matter of individual confidence or ambition. As decades of social science research show, context shapes agency. Unspoken rules about cultural norms determine who feels able to speak up, ask questions, or challenge assumptions. Left unaddressed, organizations inadvertently train people to stay silent precisely when they need to engage with and learn from constructive disagreement.

At the same time, recent societal-level tension has prompted debate. Sociologist Richard Emerson’s seminal work on power-dependence relations is helpful for leaders and team members alike in making sense of these tensions and how to move forward. Emerson emphasizes that power in organizations is rooted in patterns of dependence between people, and that power is neither inherently good nor bad. Rather, it describes a reality: To the extent that one party controls access to resources that another values, a power relationship exists.

In most organizations, power is strongly correlated with authority—the formal structures and roles that legitimize and shape power. But power and authority are not identical. Authority confers power, but power can exist without formal authority. Emerson also distinguishes influence from power as the use of power in relationships. Whether influence stabilizes trust and cohesion or deepens distance depends on how people exercise it.

Because influence shapes how others experience dependence in organizations, it also shapes whether disagreement feels possible, risky, or futile. For leaders, navigating these dynamics requires empathy—the ability to take on others' perspectives and understand their experiences, motivations, and concerns.

Importantly, leaders are not the only people who exercise influence within organizations. Team members also shape the dynamics of disagreement by how they interpret events and frame concerns, especially in moments of disagreement informed by intergroup differences. If they use influence carelessly—or weaponize it by attributing moments of interpersonal tension primarily to structural dynamics, bypassing the relational interaction itself—they can stifle other voices, even among those with formal authority.

Balancing Candor and Psychological Safety

Many organizations try to encourage openness by promoting norms of candor and straightforwardness, asking people to set aside ego and prioritize team outcomes over personal discomfort. However, promoting candor in ways that support both individual and collective well-being requires more deliberate effort. Disagreement does not emerge fully formed, nor does it improve simply because leaders grant team members permission to speak up. People learn how to disagree by observing what leaders reward, ignore, or subtly discourage.

Normalizing disagreement is a core tenet of creating a learning organization, one that facilitates the creation, acquisition, and transfer of knowledge through open discussion and systemic thinking. Although generally embraced as a management best practice, the specific ways organizations design and structure effective learning over time vary by context and by leadership approaches. One design principle in question is the extent to which organizations and leaders should support psychological safety—the shared belief that people can take interpersonal risks—alongside the evaluative pressures and accountability structures that sustain effort, candor, and direct feedback.

The investment management firm Bridgewater Associates illustrates this tension. Under the leadership of founder Ray Dalio, the firm built a culture explicitly designed to institutionalize disagreement across levels of hierarchy. The company implemented systems that supported “radical transparency” and “radical truth-telling,” with the aim of surfacing the best ideas and producing stronger organizational results. Managers frequently recorded meetings, which were archived and made broadly accessible within the organization; employees rated one another and their ideas in real time; and systems encouraged the acknowledgement of mistakes as a way to normalize learning from failure.

While many employees remained for decades and described the environment as intellectually rigorous and generative, others found the consistency of public feedback destabilizing, particularly early in their careers. Turnover among new employees was high, and those who stayed often described needing significant time to adapt to the firm’s norms of radical transparency.

A compelling comparison comes from the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the Wikipedia volunteer community. The foundation relies on deliberative norms and encourages contributors to publicly debate sources and interpretations, often through extended dialogue. While this can slow decision-making, it ensures that disagreement remains grounded in evidence and shared standards rather than personal conflict. It also speaks to the importance of designing for disagreement with organizational strategy and operating models in mind. Wikimedia’s approach to disagreement is well-suited to its work on public knowledge sharing.

These cases raise design questions rather than verdicts: What leadership and staff practices best support the conditions under which disagreement remains productive?

Four Disciplines for Productive Disagreement

Managing disagreement well is not a one-time leadership intervention; it requires developing specific skills and abilities over time. The following four disciplines highlight areas where leaders and team members can build the habits and relational capacity that make disagreement a teachable practice.

1. Understand power, not just authority. For leaders, this means being curious about and cognizant of what team members value. For staff, it means understanding what colleagues, managers, and the organization value. Without this awareness, leaders and staff may misread where they or others have influence and raise concerns in ways that generate frustration rather than change.

In our work with organizations, we often see younger team members contest their organizations’ response to high-profile social issues. In many cases, they quickly gain peer support through internal forums or informal channels but bypass the leaders or structures responsible for decision-making. This limits their influence and can invite defensiveness rather than engagement.

Leaders face similar constraints in navigating power dynamics. A senior manager, for example, may privately agree with a team’s concern about a policy but lack unilateral authority to change it. Rather than dismissing the concern or promising action they cannot take, effective leaders should explain how the decision-making process works and where team members can apply their influence, ideally early on. By helping team members understand the distribution of authority and responsibility across the organization, leaders make latent power dynamics visible and help employees exercise voice more strategically and effectively in their context.

2. Practice inquiry before persuasion. It is important that leaders and team members approach disagreement with disciplined inquiry rather than immediate persuasion, and be honest and self-aware about their motivations for expressing dissent.

John Dewey, a foundational scholar of reflective thinking and individual and organizational learning, emphasized the importance of disciplined and honest inquiry and of discussing reflections with others. Without discussion, people are susceptible to their own biases about intentions. These and associated assumptions can lead people to engage others in ways that escalate disagreement into destructive conflict rather than supporting repair and shared learning.

A core question for staff to reflect on before expressing dissent is whether, by voicing their concerns, they intend to further the goals and work of a broader collective—the team, the organization, one or more formal or informal groups to which they belong, or some combination of these—or their own?

In our work with one organization, a long-tenured team member initially planned to criticize leaders in an organization-wide meeting for failing to listen to staff concerns. After discussing his concerns with colleagues newer to the organization, he recognized that most team members did not share his frustration and that it stemmed largely from how leaders had communicated prior decisions rather than the decisions themselves. Raising the issue as a question about how future decisions could better incorporate team input led to a far more constructive conversation with leadership.

3. Build and sustain trust through repair. Navigating and teaching disagreement requires that leaders first build a foundation of interpersonal trust—an environment where people feel known, respected, and taken seriously. Investing in meaningful conversations before conflict arises and consistently demonstrating curiosity, care, vulnerability, and follow-through create the conditions for people to express and listen to dissent in good faith.

Leaders can build trust between team members by handling tension well. Even when trust erodes, they can rebuild and even strengthen it by acknowledging the importance of relationships, repairing harm, and taking deliberate steps to create or restore the interpersonal capacity for candor, collaboration, and future disagreement.

Conflict-avoidant leaders may be inclined to simply forget moments when it is clear that trust has eroded, such as when someone bursts out during a verbal disagreement, does not feel accountable for a mistake, misunderstands expectations and intent, or causes relational harm. But leaving these moments unaddressed allows tension to accumulate, making future disagreements more difficult and personal. Rather than asking, “How do we move on?” leaders should ask, “What would it take to repair the relationship?”

4. Turn disagreement into deliberate practice. Leaders reinforce learning by creating opportunities to reflect with honesty after difficult conversations. They talk to team members about what worked and what did not, and what they would do differently next time. These debriefs turn isolated experiences into shared knowledge and build organizational muscle to navigate differences over time. Whether leaders can do this work depends greatly on their organization’s learning and development systems. Equally important is how leaders model engagement in these moments. Vulnerability and curiosity are not soft skills; they are leadership and instructional tools. When leaders acknowledge uncertainty, ask genuine questions, and share the areas in which they would like to grow to support their team and organizational goals, they make disagreement more possible and constructive for others. This does not mean oversharing or abandoning authority. Rather, it means that leaders demonstrate learning alongside their team members.

Turning Disagreement Into Collective Capacity

These disciplines help build interpersonal capacity, but they matter only if organizations treat that capacity as part of the system itself. Governance, compliance structures, strategic alignment, and cultural context all shape how organizations navigate disagreement. But none of these operate independently of human capacity.

Without the ability to engage with disagreement constructively, governance becomes performative, systems become punitive, alignment becomes coercive, and culture fractures under strain. At its core, disagreement is where power and influence become visible in everyday organizational life. Capacity does not replace structure. It makes structure viable.

By treating disagreement as an ongoing practice to develop and a teachable skill, leaders can turn moments of friction into opportunities for learning. Questioning, dissent, and uncertainty become signals that people are taking responsibility for the work they share.

Organizations are among the most influential civic classrooms that adults encounter, and the workplace is one of the few remaining institutions where people regularly interact with others who have different perspectives and interests. What people learn about dissent, authority, and repair in the workplace can travel into communities, institutions, and democratic life more broadly. Teaching disagreement well is, therefore, both an organizational leadership responsibility and a civic one.

The day after the Affordable Care Act was signed, I was at a forum with many of the nation’s leading children’s health experts. The vast majority applauded the measure but bemoaned the missed opportunity: If kids had been the top priority in the drafting of that bill, every child, including those with severe health issues, would have been guaranteed access to the top-flight medical care of their choosing. It was an especially aggravating oversight, given how inexpensive kids are relative to the federal government’s nearly $2 trillion (yes, trillion) health care budget. Comprehensive care for kids would have essentially been “budget dust”: a sprinkling on top of the cake, relatively speaking, but a game changer in absolute terms.

Other interests with better-funded government lobbyists got much of what they wanted from the bill: i.e., hospitals, providers, and insurance companies. Children’s advocacy groups were certainly paraded around to help win final passage (“It’s for the kids!”), but a dearth of advocacy dollars kept them from being at the negotiating table to truly prioritize kids.

Why did this happen? Why have there been so many missed opportunities to make public investments and reforms that would help children? It’s not because kids don’t vote. After all, "private equity" doesn’t have that many voters, per se. And billions are donated annually on behalf of kids. Why hasn’t it been enough?

The problem is that, for far too long, charitable support for kids has been disconnected from systemic change, being primarily geared, instead, toward direct service programs. That’s perfectly understandable. Donors like to quickly see, firsthand, the impact of their giving. But when that giving doesn’t scale, it only impacts hundreds or thousands of kids, not millions of kids, and doesn’t lead to shifts of billions of dollars.

This kind of massive missed opportunity simply doesn’t exist in the same way in other sectors, where it is more generally understood that government policy, regardless of which politicians are in power, is where the money is. Only when it comes to kids do we see this over-reliance on private donations for (what should be) a public good. I have never seen a city planning department, county DA’s office, state transportation agency, or the Pentagon have a fundraising drive to secure basic supplies and services like public schools regularly do.

Relying so heavily on private support is a losing strategy. If every available philanthropic dollar were donated to direct service supports for kids, right now, it would fund no more than a few days of what government programs provide. Think early childhood, education, health, social services: the pot of available dollars and the opportunity for impact is simply much greater in the public sector, providing a far higher return on investment than direct service giving.

Other sectors focus heavily on advocacy for this reason. For seniors, Social Security and Medicare have had monumental impacts on lessening poverty and ensuring access to medical care (and these programs have received consistent government funding for decades, thanks, in large part, to AARP’s advocacy). The business sector spends millions annually on top-notch government relations teams that lobby effectively for tax breaks and policy changes for their benefit. And at the state and local level, labor spends a significant amount of its members’ dues on advocacy efforts. Ironically, the opportunity for public funding for kids far exceeds these other interests, given the strong public and bipartisan support for the well-being of children.

Children’s well-being would be dramatically improved if philanthropic donors, specifically individual donors and small family foundations, dedicated at least 10 percent of their kids’ charitable giving to advocacy organizations with strong government relations teams. Imagine if a donor or foundation that wants to help foster children, in addition to giving directly to foster care agencies and other direct service programs, contributed 10 percent to advocacy organizations fighting on behalf of foster youth. In California, a recent $500,000 advocacy campaign led to a new, ongoing public investment of $30 million a year for a 24/7 statewide helpline dedicated to helping foster kids and families.

If your goal is to improve education, in addition to giving directly to schools, devote 10 percent to organizations advocating for needed reforms and increased funding. After all, also in California, a $3 million advocacy effort led to a more equitable school finance system that guaranteed billions of additional dollars annually for English Learners and kids in poverty. While philanthropic support for nonprofits that provide direct services is essential, this comprehensive approach of contributing to both direct service and advocacy organizations is critical to getting all kids the supports they need.

My organization, Children Now, has achieved huge victories for kids through advocacy by building two tandem pillars of strength: a strong government relations team with decades of combined experience in California government, and the Children’s Movement of California, a unique network of more than 6,200 diverse organizations that push for major reforms and funding for kids through collective action campaigns. After parents, communities, and even youth themselves set the agenda, our policy, communications, and government relations experts work to enact that agenda. A key ingredient is the power of the Children’s Movement, which brings hundreds of groups together to speak at the same time to push issues over the top. Our model has helped secure over $8.1 billion in new state childcare funding, health insurance for almost every child in California, landmark legislation to require age verification for social media and gaming sites, historic school funding reform, and universal preschool for 4-year-olds. And that’s with a fraction of the funding for advocacy that other sectors receive. So much more lasting support for kids is there for the taking.

Donors want kids prioritized. That’s been shown by the billions of dollars donated in support of kids each year. But if at least 10 percent of those donations were dedicated towards advocacy organizations with strong government relations teams, the return on that investment would be billions more, and the long-term impact would benefit millions more kids. That shift in philanthropic funding is how we ensure every kid has the opportunity to reach their full potential.

First, thank you for being a reader of SSIR. As you may have noticed, we have made a few changes to our website. In short, we've revamped our paywall so that non-subscribers are able to read a limited number of articles each month before they are prompted to create a free account and then, eventually, required to upgrade to a paid subscription.

We believe this is the best way to balance our mission to spread social innovation knowledge as widely as possible with our need as a nonprofit media organization to generate a sustainable amount of subscription revenue. If you're already a subscriber, thank you so much for your vital support. If you're not, please consider subscribing to help us continue to support the incredible global community of social change leaders.

What follows is a somewhat longer explanation of these changes and our thinking.

What Are We Doing?

Starting today, we are instituting a metered paywall on SSIR's website. For many readers who only occasionally visit SSIR, not much will change; you will be able to read a limited number of articles for free each month. After that, you'll need to sign up for a free account to continue reading. To be transparent, this means we'll be able to send those readers our weekly newsletter and other occasional emails—adding more engaged readers to that list helps us promote our events and makes our newsletter more attractive to advertisers. Having readers signed in to free accounts will also help us better understand reader traffic across the site and what articles are most valuable. Eventually, if a reader continues to access more articles within the same 30-day period, a paid subscription will be required.

Notably, this means that many previously locked articles, including most of our print magazine articles from the last two decades, will now be open to readers who have not used up their monthly free articles.

The other major change we're making is we are increasing our subscription prices to keep in line with the market. We've always intended to keep SSIR affordable, and we haven't raised our prices in years, despite significant cost increases. We've updated our subscription options to include a new monthly digital-only option to offer some flexibility for those who can't commit to the cost of a full annual subscription.

Why Are We Doing This?

Most of our readers are likely well aware of the many challenges facing media and journalism businesses, and we don't need to rehearse those here. Although SSIR is published at Stanford University, we are a nonprofit media organization, and we primarily rely on earned income to fund our work. In the 23 years since we were founded, our business model has evolved to depend on a mix of subscriptions, events, webinars, sponsorships, advertising, and a small amount of philanthropic support. As mentioned above, we believe a metered paywall is the best way to strike a balance between keeping SSIR open and accessible and nudging our regular readers who can afford it toward subscribing. We hope those who rely on the work we publish and produce, who appreciate our high standards, and especially those who work in and support the social sector—and who understand that nothing is ever truly free—will continue to support us.

We also believe subscriptions are the most sustainable way for us to fund SSIR's future and to make sure our small team can focus on best serving the social change community with rigorous, editorially independent work. We want to spend as much time as possible collaborating with our contributors on great ideas and as little time as possible worrying about how to make or raise more money.

How Will This Affect Readers?

If you're already a subscriber, you shouldn't notice much difference. You’ll still enjoy unlimited access to everything we publish, and our new account tools make it easier for you to log in and manage your subscription online. You should have received an email from us with a link and instructions for activating your existing subscription in the new system.

If you're not a subscriber, you may encounter a little more friction as you navigate the site. We hope you'll consider at least signing up for a free account so you can read the site more freely and get our weekly newsletter where we've been publishing some exclusive Q&As with SSIR contributors in addition to the usual digest of new articles. Ultimately, it's paid subscriptions that help us continue our work.

If you want to support SSIR further, we've made it easier to buy a gift subscription for a friend or colleague. We've also revamped our group subscription options, which are a great way to give your entire organization access to SSIR at steeply discounted rates.

What Next?

We are instituting this system out of optimism. In the more than two decades since SSIR was founded, virtually everything in media, governance, society, and the world of social innovation has been called into question, if not undergone fundamental disruption. Yet we are still here, learning, growing, and adapting along with our inspiring community of readers.

We hope you’ll be here with us for the next two decades, and more.

If you have questions about this transition or feedback on how we can best serve your needs as a reader, please reach out to editor@ssir.org.