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

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

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

Freedom of Choice and Values-Led Decisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking Action to Expand Freedom of Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What This Means for Civil Society

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

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

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

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

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

I am not famous. I do not work in philanthropy. I am a woman who grew up in public housing in South Minneapolis. My net worth is negative. And yet in May of 2026, Time named me one of its 100 most influential leaders in philanthropy, a sentence that feels very strange to type. It felt even stranger from inside the room, at a dinner in New York, where I found myself seated somewhere between Chance the Rapper and Idris Elba, trying to decide what, exactly, a person is supposed to do with her hands in that situation.

In January, I built Stand With Minnesota, a website that helped direct more than $40 million to mutual-aid networks, community organizations, foundations, and crowdfunding campaigns across Minnesota, in less than four months. And when the McKnight Foundation asked me to reflect on what philanthropy could learn from me, from the website I built, and from the people of Minnesota, what first came to mind was not especially diplomatic: Put the bag on the table and walk away.

I know that sounds flippant, especially to people who are accountable for how institutional resources are stewarded. It is not meant to dismiss that responsibility, nor diminish the important roles that we each must play before, during, and after crises. But I want to question where decision-making power sits in moments like these. I want to provoke philanthropic institutions to think deeply about what they need to do to more effectively respond as communities come under greater challenge.

This is not always what endears one to the philanthropic sector. But trying to find a more graceful way to say it led me to the heart of what I believe: Giving can be simple. Giving is human. Community knows what it needs. And, more often than not, community is much better at meeting the moment than the institutions built to serve it.

Community Is Simple

The urge to help one another is one of the oldest things about us. We are social creatures, after all. Just a few generations ago, my ancestors on both sides were living subsistence lives, in which survival required everyone, every person had a role to play, and our fates were connected. Our interdependence was not sentimental; it was how people stayed alive.

Agriculture, industrialization, and the long march of American individualism pushed many of us away from that kind of interdependence. We became more focused on the nuclear family, the private home, the locked front door, than on the community at large. Decades of policy pushed us even farther apart. We were sold the lie of scarcity: As wealth pooled at the top, people at the bottom were left to fight one another for crumbs.

These are some of the reasons why mutual aid has surged. When needs are high, people want to help. Every week online, I amplify calls from people trying to meet the most basic needs: housing, food, prescriptions, transportation, and legal fees. In the face of authoritarian violence, people are crowdfunding for some small measure of safety. There are immigration fees to pay, relatives in detention to visit, children to keep housed, families to keep fed. Trans people are raising money to flee states where their very existence has been turned into a political target.

The question, then, is not whether people want to give. They do. The question is whether philanthropy, as a sector, is capable of meeting this moment. Are institutions living in the same reality as most Americans? Can foundations, structured as they are, move at the speed history now demands?

From what I have seen, the answer is no, or at least not quickly enough, and not in the moments when it matters most.

This isn’t because people inside these institutions don’t care. It is because they are working within structures that make it difficult. I know this because, in the moments when Minnesota most desperately needed resources on the ground, our funders often could not move at the speed of very real and urgent needs. But ordinary people could. And the difference wasn’t will; it was design. It was who was allowed to act, how quickly decisions could be made, and how much trust existed in the people closest to the situation.

The Speed of Need

The people who came to my website not only moved millions of dollars into mutual-aid networks, but GoFundMe campaigns were being fulfilled so quickly that I had to change the links hourly. Within days of the site’s launch, shortly after Renee Good was killed, thousands of people had stepped forward to fund the infrastructure our community needed to keep people safe. But even when foundations in our state had their hearts in the right place, it took weeks before the first emergency funding reached some of the organizations doing work on the ground. It took months to help emerging groups find fiscal agents, bank accounts, and pathways into traditional funding systems.

One of the first problems we had to solve during Operation Metro Surge was how to keep immigrant families housed when they could no longer safely work. Some families had lost breadwinners overnight, as people were taken off the streets or sent to detention despite having legal status. Parents were hiding. Children were afraid. Rent was still due. Too many people in philanthropy told us that the problem was too large to solve.

Community members refused to accept that. Neighbors established rent funds. Volunteers built systems to raise money quickly and move it directly. Across the Twin Cities, PTAs created funds so families in their schools could stay housed. While government agencies and nonprofits continued to search for solutions, community moved.

At first, some foundations told us they would never fund rent. We kept pressing. Eventually, we convinced philanthropic partners that the investment was not only necessary but urgent. We paired larger contributions with matching funds. We created rent-adoption programs, where neighbors could pay their neighbors’ rent. We continued to crowdfund. We made it possible for people to help one another at the scale of the crisis. So far, we’ve paid nearly $40 million in rent.

Foundations must follow laws and regulations, and some constraints on what they can do are very real. But there needs to be a deeper recognition that unprecedented times require unprecedented action. The real question is how much room institutions are willing and able to find within the constraints they operate within, and how much they are willing to change when they are prevented from meeting the moment. It also means identifying what is needed before a crisis hits and being prepared to move and act differently when things don’t follow a neat playbook.

The Community’s Playbook

Our democracy and our collective future are under threat. If philanthropy wants to play a role in building a just future, then it needs to be willing to find new channels, new structures, and new forms of trust.

And who already has those solutions? Not the big consultants. Not the biggest donors. People do. The people in your community. The people whose boots are on the ground. The people closest to the harm. The people closest to the need.

We need funding that moves faster, more nimbly, and through more creative channels. Stand With Minnesota, the website that helped point this enormous amount of money in the right directions, cost less than a thousand dollars to build. Securing funding to expand it took months and was far more difficult than it should have been. But imagine what would have passed us by if I had not already had a platform from which to raise that money myself! How long would it have taken an organization to raise the funds, hire the staff, and build something similar? Would the moment have passed? Would the money have gone, as it so often does, to a few large organizations with the capacity to receive it? What would have happened to the 20,000 people whose rent we paid for five months? The hundreds of families we reunited with donated SkyMiles?

We need money that can fund work like this. Money that can move in hours and days, not weeks and months. We need to recognize that mutual aid is extraordinary, but it cannot carry the burden alone. People want to give. People want to help. People want to live in a village again.

We all have a role to play, and it’s important we reflect on what we each do best and what we can each do better. Philanthropy can help till the soil. It can plant seeds. It can show people what might grow when resources are placed in the hands of those who already know what to do with them. At its best, it makes community action more possible and less fragile.

Or, to put it less delicately: You can put the money on the table, trust your community partners, and watch what happens when you step back. Not to withdraw, but to make space for the people who are already carrying the work.

When communities are praised for their resilience in times of crisis, we often hear stories about people showing up for one another, neighbors helping neighbors, and organizations stepping forward. What those stories often miss is the years of relationship-building beforehand, developing the leadership, infrastructure, and trust that make resilience possible.

During Operation Metro Surge, in the winter of 2025-26, many looked at the response in Minnesota and asked how immigrant communities mobilized so quickly. How did thousands of people know where to go? How did families find support? How did organizations coordinate legal services, communications, rapid response, mutual aid, and community defense at such a scale?

The answer is simple. The response began months earlier, when the decision was made to prepare for what was coming, together. After the 2024 federal elections, organizations across Minnesota could see that immigrant communities were likely to face unprecedented challenges in the years ahead. Rather than waiting for those challenges to materialize, we asked what it would take to build the infrastructure necessary to protect communities before a crisis arrived.

Those conversations led to the creation of the statewide Immigrant Defense Network, which today brings together more than 100 organizations, institutions, faith communities, service providers, and community leaders, all committed to protecting immigrant communities and strengthening democracy across Minnesota and the Upper Midwest. But what began simply as a convening quickly evolved into a shared commitment to collective action, community defense, and long-term power building.

The lessons we learned from building and sustaining this network are not unique to immigration. They are lessons about how communities prepare for uncertainty, how organizations build trust, and how movements create the capacity necessary to respond when people need them most.

1. Networks must be built around purpose (before they are built around structure).

Many networks begin by debating governance models, decision-making processes, and organizational charts. Those questions matter, but they are not where trust begins. Trust begins with shared purpose. From the beginning, the organizations that formed the Immigrant Defense Network understood that we would not agree on everything. We represented different constituencies, organizational cultures, geographies, faith traditions, and strategies. What united us was a shared belief that immigrant communities deserved dignity, protection, opportunity, and the ability to live free from fear.

That common purpose became the foundation for everything that followed. It allowed organizations to collaborate without losing their individual identities. It created space for disagreement while maintaining alignment. Most importantly, it ensured that the network remained focused on the people we existed to serve rather than the institutions participating in it.

Too often, networks become centered on organizations. The strongest networks remain centered on communities.

2. Effective networks distribute leadership rather than concentrate it.

As the network expanded, it became clear that no single organization could coordinate a statewide response. The scale of the challenge required shared ownership. Instead of creating a centralized structure, therefore, the network adopted a distributed leadership model, in which different organizations assumed leadership roles based on their expertise, relationships, and capacity. Some led organizing efforts, others coordinated legal services, while others focused on communications, policy advocacy, family support, or regional organizing.

Together, these interconnected efforts created a stronger and more resilient ecosystem than any individual organization could have built on its own. Distributed leadership is more than just a management strategy. It is a recognition that communities possess diverse forms of expertise and that lasting movements are built through shared ownership. When leadership is distributed, networks become more resilient, less dependent on individual personalities, less vulnerable to burnout, and more capable of adapting to changing circumstances.

3. Representation is not symbolic; it is essential.

Many organizations understand the importance of diversity. Fewer understand the importance of designing networks in ways that allow diverse perspectives to shape decisions.

The Immigrant Defense Network sought participation from organizations serving different immigrant communities, different regions of the state, and different sectors of society. Faith leaders, labor advocates, educators, legal service providers, healthcare advocates, rural organizers, communications professionals, and directly impacted community members all brought unique perspectives to the table.

This diversity strengthened the network. Challenges facing immigrant communities intersect with education, healthcare, labor markets, public safety, housing, economic development, and civic participation. Building a network capable of responding to all of those challenges required bringing together people who understood those intersections. Representation was not pursued because it looked good. It was pursued because it made the work better.

4. Preparedness is infrastructure.

When people think about community response, they often imagine volunteers showing up during moments of crisis. But before a rapid response action can occur, someone must build the communications systems. Someone must train volunteers. Someone must develop legal referral pathways. Someone must establish family support protocols. Someone must create multilingual materials. Someone must coordinate data systems, leadership structures, intake processes, and response plans.

None of this work is glamorous (and much of it is invisible), but all of it is essential. When enforcement actions intensified across Minnesota, our communities benefited from investments that had been made long before those moments arrived, relationships that had already been built, training that had already occurred, and systems that had already been developed. Information could move quickly because trust already existed.

Just as communities invest in emergency management systems before natural disasters occur, they must invest in community infrastructure before social and political crises emerge.

5. Community defense cannot be limited to directly impacted communities. We must build partnerships, and train leaders.

One of the most powerful aspects of the network's growth was the willingness of allies to step forward and ask how they could contribute. Faith leaders, students, retirees, and small business owners all wanted to help.

The future of immigrant justice will not be built solely by immigrant-serving organizations. It will require partnerships with educators, labor unions, small business owners, faith communities, farmers, local governments, and elected leaders. It will require people who may not identify as part of an immigrant-rights movement but who understand that the health of their communities is tied to the well-being of immigrant families. The strategic vision adopted by the Immigrant Defense Network recognizes this reality. Building lasting change requires expanding beyond traditional advocacy spaces and cultivating relationships across sectors that have not always worked together.

Good intentions, however, are not enough. People need real pathways into action. For this reason, the network invested heavily in training and leadership development. Community members participated in Constitutional Observers training. Over 35,000 volunteers learned how to serve as constitutional observers. Organizations received support in rapid response coordination, storytelling, de-escalation, and community organizing. Rather than treating leadership as something reserved for professionals, the network approached leadership as a skill that could be cultivated throughout communities. The result was not simply more volunteers. The result was more community capacity.

When people understand their role, they are more likely to participate. When they participate, they build confidence. When confidence grows, leadership follows. Finally, we learned that some of the most important partnerships come from places movements do not traditionally look.

The strength of communities is revealed during crises.

The greatest lesson from our experience, simply, is crisis does not build strong communities, it reveals them. The response began long before the operation itself, when organizations chose collaboration over competition, when leaders invested in trust before they needed it, and when communities developed infrastructure before it was needed.

The implications are clear: If we want communities capable of responding to future challenges, we must invest in the conditions that make collective action possible, now. We must invest in relationships. We must invest in leadership development. We must invest in training, infrastructure, communications, and network building.

Most importantly, we must trust impacted communities to lead and to support them in moments of crisis. Immigrant communities have always demonstrated resilience. The question before us is whether institutions are willing to invest in the structures that allow that resilience to become power. Because when communities have the relationships, leadership, and infrastructure necessary to act together, they can do more than respond to crises. They can protect families, strengthen democracy, and build the future they deserve.

I. The Recognition Problem

When national leaders and funders describe a successful social movement, they tend to name the same organizations repeatedly. The largest ones. The most centralized. The most institutionally connected. This is not driven by bad intent. It reflects the pull of visibility. But repeated enough, a partial story hardens into the accepted version, and the accepted version shapes what lessons get drawn for the next community under pressure.

This is not only a narrative problem, it is a resource allocation problem. Organizations that receive recognition receive investment. Organizations whose work remains invisible remain underfunded, even when their relationships and their presence made the visible success possible.

The racial dimension of this pattern is not incidental. In Minnesota, as elsewhere, the organizations most likely to be named and celebrated after a successful campaign are disproportionately white-led, professionalized, and institutionally connected. Those most likely to be overlooked are disproportionately led by people of color and immigrants who built their organizations from within the communities they serve. This follows the same lines of power and visibility that shape philanthropic resource flows more broadly.

Minnesota’s response to Operation Metro Surge in late 2025 and early 2026 offers one of the sharpest recent illustrations of this dynamic. It also offers a way to think clearly about what civic infrastructure is made of, why the recognition problem persists, and what it costs.

II. What Happened in Minnesota

In December 2025, the US Department of Homeland Security deployed what it described as the largest immigration enforcement operation in United States history into the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area. Operation Metro Surge eventually involved more than 3,000 officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The operation explicitly targeted Somali and Southeast Asian refugee communities, the overwhelming majority of whom hold legal status. Federal agents killed two United States citizens on camera, sparking national outrage. A federal judge found that ICE violated at least 96 court orders in the first month of the operation. The City of Minneapolis estimated more than $203 million in economic damage in January alone.

Community resistance was immediate and sustained. On January 23, 2026, between 50,000 and 100,000 people marched through temperatures cold enough to cause frostbite as part of a coordinated general strike. Over 700 businesses closed in solidarity. More than 100 clergy submitted to arrest through civil disobedience. Labor unions, immigrant rights organizations, faith communities, student networks, and mutual aid groups sustained daily action for weeks, contributing to the federal government’s eventual drawdown of forces. The Immigrant Rapid Response Fund raised approximately $14 million from more than 65,000 donors across all 50 states and 45 countries. Millions more were raised by mutual funds across Minnesota, as well as from the independently created website standwithminnesota.com.

From the outside, this response looked like something that appeared suddenly. It did not. It was built.

Before going further: Minnesota’s response should not be understood as an uncomplicated victory. More than 4,000 people were arrested. Two were killed. Families were separated, businesses collapsed, households were evicted, and workers lost months of income they will not recover. The harm was real, and the effects are ongoing. This piece focuses on the organizing infrastructure that made the resistance possible, and that focus should not be read as a claim that the resistance was sufficient, or that the people who bore the greatest cost share equally in any sense of triumph. Both things are true. The infrastructure worked, and far too many people paid a price that no amount of organizational readiness could prevent.

III. Two Types of Organizations, One Ecosystem

The organizing literature has long described the spectrum between centralized and decentralized organizational models. These are not always separate organizations—historically, federated civic associations have held both functions simultaneously. The distinction matters here because the current funding environment has increasingly separated them, concentrating resources in centralized organizations while underinvesting in the place-based work that makes centralized coordination possible. Centralized organizations—think large statewide immigrant rights coalitions, labor federations, or established legal advocacy nonprofits—offer scale and coordination. They aggregate power across geography, communicate to broad audiences, activate allies, and engage institutional actors (media, government, philanthropy) in ways that smaller organizations cannot. During Operation Metro Surge, these organizations played essential roles coordinating large actions, amplifying legal challenges, and connecting the Minnesota response to national attention.

Decentralized, place-based organizations offer something different. They hold what sociologists describe as bonding social capital: the dense networks of relationship through which information travels, trust extends, and collective action becomes possible at the neighborhood level. When a family does not know whether to open the door, the voice they listen to is not a statewide organization they have never encountered; it is the pastor who has been present for years, the worker center organizer who helped resolve a wage dispute in 2022, the neighborhood organization that ran a renters’ rights workshop in their building, the food shelf director who knew to switch to home delivery because she understood how afraid her neighbors were to leave the house.

Earlier this year, the McKnight Foundation convened leaders from precisely these kinds of organizations. What stayed with me was not what they said about the crisis itself but something more basic. Metro Surge, they explained, was not only a crisis happening to their communities from the outside, it was a crisis unfolding inside their organizations, because their staff were members of those communities. The person answering phones was also someone whose family member had been detained. A program director was also a parent keeping a child home from school out of fear. The line between the org chart and the community was not a metaphor; it was a structural description of how these organizations are built.

These two organizational forms are structurally interdependent. Centralized organizations rely on communities already in motion, with trust already built and people already prepared to act. Decentralized organizations rely on the coordination, communications reach, and resources that larger organizations provide. That interdependence is real, and so is the friction. Centralized organizations do not always see decentralized ones as partners. Resources flow toward legibility. Trust built over decades in a neighborhood does not automatically translate into a seat at the coordination table.

IV. The Gyms on the Corners

Political scientist Hahrie Han argues that people are not born knowing how to be civically active; they learn it through structures and relationships that build that capacity over time. Her research distinguishes between organizations that mobilize, activating existing capacity when a moment demands it, and organizations that organize, building new capacity through sustained relational work. Both are necessary, and neither replaces the other.

Han uses the metaphor of a gym to make this concrete. People do not become strong by wanting to be strong. They need a place to train, equipment, coaches, and other people to work alongside. Civic capacity works the same way. Many of the people who marched in the Twin Cities on January 23, some for the first time, had been in training long before that moment. They had attended meetings at worker centers, volunteered with faith groups, participated in get-out-the-vote drives, or shown up in smaller ways that taught them collective action was possible and meaningful. The gym was already open. They already knew where it was.

Minnesota has invested in those gyms for a long time. By “Minnesota,” I mean a combination of philanthropic funders, state and local government programs, and community-generated resources, each playing different roles at different scales. That investment has supported organizations on street corners, in community centers, and inside small, under-resourced groups that rarely produce outputs fitting neatly into grant reports, including culturally specific and community-rooted organizations that seldom appear in published research. The results of that investment are not always legible in advance. When a moment like January 2026 arrives, they become unmistakable.

Data from the ground reflects how place-based infrastructure functioned under pressure. Food shelf visits across Minnesota dropped 7% in January 2026 compared to the prior year, and by 17% in Ramsey and Hennepin counties, as people became afraid to leave their homes. The organizations that reached those families were the ones that had built trust over years through consistent local presence—they switched to home delivery, made door-to-door calls, and worked through the relationships that government agencies and larger nonprofits could not replicate.

One illustration of how decentralized organizing infrastructure operates in practice: a rapid response network in northern Minnesota began with approximately 30 people in October 2025. By January 2026, after federal agents killed Renee Good, it was filling entire church sanctuaries. Its model is not coordination from a central hub but distributed capacity-building, training people to train others until knowledge is held broadly and locally. The work is difficult to measure precisely because of how it operates. That difficulty is not accidental. It reflects the decentralized nature of the model.

The Latino Economic Development Center, a community development financial institution operating on a major commercial corridor in Minneapolis since 2003, said they received hundreds of calls a day in the first weeks of the operation, from clients, former clients, and people who had simply heard of the organization and knew it could be trusted. That trust was not manufactured in a crisis. It was built over more than two decades of presence.

That is not a communications strategy. It is infrastructure.

Analysis by Candid underscores this pattern. Minnesota organizations entered Metro Surge with institutional muscle memory developed through COVID-19 and the civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd. The capacity that surfaced during the surge had been practiced under pressure. Funders that treated the post-2020 period as infrastructure investment rather than disaster recovery contributed meaningfully to that readiness.

V. How Distortion Works

The response to Operation Metro Surge was not a story of one organizational model outperforming the other. It was a story of an ecosystem functioning, after years of investment across its many parts. The version of this story that names only the larger, more visible organizations distorts our understanding of what occurred and risks misguiding future investment.

The distortion operates through a familiar mechanism. Centralized organizations are easier to identify, easier to contact, and easier to evaluate using conventional metrics. They produce press releases, maintain communications staff, and interface with media and institutional funders in legible ways. Place-based organizations often lack the capacity to tell their own story in the formats that national audiences consume. Their value is relational, embedded, and slow to build. It does not translate easily into the evidence frameworks that philanthropy relies on. So when the story gets told, the same organizations appear. The ecosystem narrows in the retelling. Funders, drawing lessons from the story as told, invest in what they can see.

The ecosystem itself is not undocumented. McKnight Foundation Program Director Muneer Karcher-Ramos has outlined principles for recording this moment with integrity, including the imperative to give credit broadly and specifically across immigrant-led networks, mutual aid hubs, labor coalitions, and community-based organizations that carried the response. His account names dozens of organizations operating across legal services, worker support, culturally specific protection, and neighborhood-level mutual aid. The breadth is there. The question is why that breadth keeps collapsing in the retelling, and what structural forces drive the collapse.

There is a deeper dimension to this, and it cuts closer to the present moment. Forces working against democratic systems have their own logic of erasure. Many of the people who took the greatest risks during Operation Metro Surge, especially those who organized from inside their communities, who moved information and resources and protected their neighbors, benefit from anonymity; publicizing their role in full could harm them, personally or professionally. What gets written down is what was safe to write down. The people with the most to lose, whose organizing was often the most consequential, are structurally absent from any published account.

The result is a story where undocumented people appear primarily as recipients of solidarity rather than as architects of their own resistance. That framing reproduces the very erasure that anti-democracy forces depend on.

When funders and movement leaders draw the wrong lessons from a successful campaign—crediting the visible actors while ignoring the underlying infrastructure—they reproduce the conditions that make the next response slower and less effective. The story told shapes the investment made.

VI. What This Asks of Funders

The lessons of Minnesota’s response are not primarily about crisis management. They concern what must be in place before a crisis arrives.

First, funders must commit to the full ecosystem. Place-based and culturally rooted organizations require general operating support, multi-year commitments, and relationships grounded in proximity. Investing primarily in centralized organizations because they are easier to evaluate leaves the underlying infrastructure underfunded. The Immigrant Rapid Response Fund’s prioritization of culturally responsive, linguistically accessible, deeply rooted organizations reflected a clear theory of how change occurs. The McKnight Foundation has oriented its civic power grantmaking around this same theory.

Second, funders must adopt a longer time horizon. The capacity that emerged during Operation Metro Surge was built across many years and funding cycles. Organizations present in a community for a decade develop trust, institutional memory, and relational density that cannot be manufactured in a moment of crisis. Annualized funding tied narrowly to short-term deliverables is poorly aligned with infrastructure of this kind.

Third, and most directly connected to the argument here, funders and researchers must take responsibility for how the story is told. Which organizations are named, and which are not, shapes what counts as infrastructure. Post-campaign analysis that centers only the visible actors produces a distorted map of what worked. Correcting that distortion requires deliberate effort, including seeking out organizations beyond press releases, asking who built the relationships that enabled visible action, and documenting the full ecosystem.

VII. What Minnesota Teaches

The response to Operation Metro Surge will be studied for years. It mobilized extraordinary numbers of people under extreme conditions. It generated philanthropic and mutual aid responses at unusual speed and scale. It applied sustained pressure that contributed to a drawdown of what had been described as the largest immigration enforcement operation in United States history.

Minnesota was not lucky. The capacity did not appear fully formed in the moment. Minnesota had built something over years, across many kinds of organizations and communities, that was ready when it was needed.

Reproducing that capacity elsewhere, or sustaining it in Minnesota, requires clarity about what it is made of. Worker centers, mutual aid networks, culturally specific community organizing and community development organizations, faith communities that have shown up year after year in the neighborhoods where people live. Those organizations deserve the full story. The full story begins with recognition, and recognition begins by remembering what the gyms on the corners already built.

In 2024, the average global temperature increase exceeded the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold specified in the Paris Agreement for the first time—a stark reminder that the climate crisis is one of the most urgent and complex challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. Its impacts are already transforming ecosystems and societies globally, but some regions are suffering the effects more than others. Mexico, for example, is experiencing more accelerated warming than the global average, according to a recent Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México report. Temperatures have risen 1.8 degrees Celsius from the pre-industrial era to 2024, compared to the global increase of 1.2 degrees Celsius in the same period. What’s more, the country’s average annual temperature is projected to increase between 2.9 degrees Celsius and 5.3 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century, putting its agricultural systems, water accessibility, human health and well-being, and the national economy at great risk.

In Mexico and other disproportionately affected regions, there’s an especially pressing need to increase the ambition and scope of local and regional climate action so that it includes all sectors and organizational types—and universities are particularly well-poised to meet this need. UNESCO estimated that in 2022 more than 256 million people were enrolled in universities worldwide, including about 56 million in Latin America and the Caribbean. This vast reach means universities can be strategic change agents, as each student has the potential to drive structural transformations and promote sustainable solutions within their fields and communities.

For Tecnológico de Monterrey—a private, nonprofit university in Mexico—this reality raised an inspiring question: What would happen if all the universities around the world put their strengths in service of climate action and graduated students with comprehensive sustainability awareness and the necessary skills to act in the face of climate emergencies? Many universities have begun to integrate sustainability more robustly into their academic programs and operations and have even adopted international commitments to decarbonization. For example, more than 1,000 universities worldwide, including 95 in Latin America and the Caribbean, have signed the Race to Zero pledge to achieve net zero emissions in the coming decades. Yet Tecnológico de Monterrey was inspired to try an even more transversal and integral approach, beyond carbon reduction.

In 2021, it launched Ruta Azul, Tec de Monterrey’s sustainability and climate action plan. The plan aimed to advance policies and programs to promote sustainability and climate action by embedding sustainability across all university functions—not just the academic or operational ones—and across all its campuses. The university knew this system-wide approach would be difficult to operationalize because it relied on cross departmental and interdisciplinary collaboration, but ultimately, it helped build awareness, capacity, and sustainability expertise beyond dedicated sustainability staff and make climate action a strategic front for the university. In addition to achieving milestones such as integrating sustainable development into university curricula and reducing the university’s carbon footprint, the plan helped Tecnológico de Monterrey take a leading role in promoting university-led climate action in its region, creating opportunities for dialogue and sharing best practices, and promoting spaces for the education sector to have a voice.

For other universities looking to accelerate sustainability within and beyond their institutions, Ruta Azul offers some valuable insights on how institutions can effectively catalyze climate action.

What It Means to Be a Catalyst

Founded in 1943, today Tecnológico de Monterrey is a private nonprofit university with a presence in 20 Mexican states. It serves more than 87,000 students in high school, college, and graduate education, and has a faculty of more than 11,000 teachers and 32,000 staff members. Given its size, implementing a sustainability strategy across all its 26 campuses presented a significant challenge. Each campus has its own unique circumstances and a population that varies in size, culture, customs, and work styles, and each has its own local policies, social dynamics, and/or faces different climate risks and sustainability concerns.

The development of Ruta Azul began with a diagnosis of the climate crisis in 2021 and a statement outlining the leadership role that universities should assume in this context. As one of Latin America’s largest private university systems, Tecnológico de Monterrey’s multi-campus footprint and extensive community network offered a rare opportunity to test, scale, and accelerate climate solutions at a national level. With this in mind, a dedicated team of sustainability leaders at the university—including Inés Sáenz Negrete, Cynthia Villarreal Muraira, José Antonio Torre, Luis Fernández Carril, and Martín Sánchez Gutiérrez—created a roadmap for the next four years, with concrete actions and goals organized around six areas of action: culture, mitigation, adaptation, education, research, and outreach.

In the years that followed, the plan guided and facilitated progress in these areas, defining baseline metrics, developing new policies and guidelines, and testing pilots. Sustainability also became a recurring topic on the institutional agenda, with the university prioritizing Ruta Azul as one of its 2025 strategic projects.

The recent decision to extend Ruta Azul to 2030 prompted the team to reflect on which of the plan’s elements and actions truly catalyzed climate action. While the term “catalyze” may seem curious in this context, it’s very intentional. In chemistry, “catalysis” refers to the increase of a reaction’s speed through the presence of a catalyst. This phenomenon is fundamental to life. Essential biological processes such as digestion and energy production depend on enzymes—catalytic molecules that speed up biochemical reactions to occur in milliseconds. Without enzymes, these reactions would be too slow to sustain life.

Higher education institutions can similarly serve as catalysts; they can accelerate the transition to sustainability and climate action before the impacts of the climate crisis become irreversible. In fact, the four core mechanisms by which enzymes operate closely align with some of the most important insights from Ruta Azul’s first few years.

1. Activating the First Action

Triggering action and mobilization around any cause or initiative requires significant momentum, especially at the beginning. And while collaboration and co-responsibility reduce barriers that traditionally hinder systemic change within large organizations, they require that institutions find a common goal that unites their community first—a spark that triggers collaboration and makes it meaningful and worth the effort amid uncertainty.

Ruta Azul started by joining important international sustainability commitments. In 2019, Tecnológico de Monterrey signed the Declaration of Climate Emergency and Institutions of Higher Education, a three-point commitment signed by universities and colleges on all seven continents that includes:

• Becoming carbon neutral by 2050 (which later evolved into the Race to Zero commitment to be a “net zero emissions” organization by 2040)
• Mobilizing more resources for climate change research and skills creation
• Promoting climate change and sustainable development education on campuses and in communities

This served as a kind of gateway for collaboration within the institution, and highlighted the need for different departments and groups to work in a coordinated and transversal manner.

A later momentum-building effort was adding Ruta Azul to Tecnológico de Monterrey’s 2025 portfolio of strategic projects. This designation positioned Ruta Azul as an institutional priority and opened the door to more-effective collaborations, including working with academics to make sustainable development a pillar of the new curricula. Today, sustainability is a structural part of students’ education, strengthening both their professional competencies and their commitment to the future of the planet.

It’s important to emphasize that sustainability actions are not an end in themselves, but a means by which to endorse a university’s societal role through science-based climate action, with co-responsibility and growing ambition.

2. Addressing Diversity

Mobilizing different types of people, areas, audiences, or organizations represents a challenge very similar to one that enzymes face. Every individual and group carries unique perspectives, knowledge, ideologies, motivations, and needs around sustainability. Challenges include aligning diverse interests and timelines, limited sustainability knowledge, resistance to change, and maintaining inclusive, consistent communication. The key is to build shared understanding and technical knowledge about sustainability, and then co-create with and tailor strategies for each group.

Being flexible allows institutions to design initiatives that resonate with the realities of each group and build bridges rather than impose solutions. A clear example is Tecnológico de Monterrey’s campus-specific sustainability plans, which reflect the priorities and conditions of each of its campuses and include empowered, local, decision-making committees. Rather than having the central Ruta Azul team outline these plans, the university based them on analyses that local committees carried out. This ensured that local objectives aligned with Ruta Azul but that there was enough space for individual campuses to define their own strategy. Local sustainability committees, each led by a campus director, continue to support the implementation of these plans with resources, instruments, policies, trainings, advice, and constant recognition from the central Ruta Azul team. The university also hosts meetings between local committees and the central Ruta Azul team to share best practices, experiences, and challenges.

Flexibility is also important when it comes to skill development. Ruta Azul provides relevant, useful, and contextualized content and tools that respect each group’s roles and possibilities for action. For example, facilities team trainings cover environmental regulations, processes, and sustainable practices, while teacher trainings focus on sustainable development in their teaching practice and educational trends (in this case, via courses managed by the Center for Teaching Development and Educational Innovation, or CEDDIE). This tailored approach not only improves implementation, but also strengthens each group’s sense of belonging and co-responsibility.

There is also enormous scope for connecting with students. Ruta Azul has collaborated with the Tec 21 educational model, which invites students to resolve challenges linked to real problems like sustainability. It has also introduced multidisciplinary academic challenges—blending areas like marketing, entrepreneurship, and engineering—that address sustainability or climate change issues. One challenge brought together 30 students to design solutions addressing climate risks at the Monterrey campus. Over one week, they proposed initiatives to boost community resilience to floods, droughts, heat and cold waves, and heavy rains—including documentaries with community testimonies, hackathons, climate action committees, and sustainability activities for new students.

So far, Ruta Azul has reached more than 690 students through collaborations involving 26 courses from different disciplines at four campuses. These initiatives communicate that sustainability work is not exclusive to a single discipline and that collaboration is important to success. As student Georgina Martinez explained: "Student participation is essential to foster and promote a culture of sustainability in our environments, not only by creating meaningful spaces for advocacy, but also measurable actions to address the climate crisis. Multi-stakeholder action allows for strengthening and feeding back into existing institutional plans, as well as connecting the student community to collective solutions."

3. Foster the Ideal Environment

Enzymes require a specific environment—the right temperature or pH—to function optimally and catalyze a successful reaction. So do sustainability efforts. Specifically, they need a strong organizational culture that fosters the knowledge, attitudes, values, and behaviors needed to drive change. Only then can sustainability move beyond discourse and become a living, shared practice.

To help create this environment, Tecnológico de Monterrey faculty developed the Sustainability Culture Index (SCI), a proprietary measurement instrument that monitors the culture of sustainability (including appropriation, understanding, and action) among students, staff, and teachers. More than a diagnosis, the SCI is a compass that guides Ruta Azul’s decisions and allows it to design more precise, relevant, and effective initiatives.

Academic Manager Luis Fernández explains, "The inspiration to create this instrument and drive work on sustainability culture came from a reflection by [environmental lawyer] James Gustave Speth. He says that he used to think that the biggest environmental problems were the loss of biodiversity, the collapse of ecosystems, and climate change. But over time, he concluded that the real challenges were selfishness, greed, and apathy, and that addressing them requires a cultural and spiritual transformation—something that science alone does not know how to achieve."

The SCI is based on consolidated conceptual frameworks—including the New Ecological Paradigm, Pro-Environmental Behavior Scale, and ABC Model (Attitude-Behavior-Context—and is structured around four pillars:

1. Knowledge on topics like climate change, environment, and sustainable development
2. Attitudes toward socio-environmental issues, such as limits to growth or rejection of anthropocentrism
3. Ideologies that collectively influence actions, such as greenwashing, scientism, or the myth of overpopulation
4. Behaviors such as responsible consumption, sustainable mobility, and environmental education

This structure helps Ruta Azul understand what people know and think, and how they act. Following the initial measurement, the team outlined concrete actions to strengthen the university community’s knowledge base. These included offering online training related to basic climate change and sustainability concepts, which more than 4,000 teachers and employees have attended, and creating a seminar in which the Ruta Azul core team strategically integrated the SCI findings into the priorities. This included the integration of sustainability training and operational initiatives—for example, training university staff to use landscaping as not only decoration but also an eco-resilience and adaptation strategy.

In 2025, the SCI won an International Sustainable Campus Network Excellence Award in the “cultural change for sustainability” category. Its latest iteration includes new dimensions of analysis, such as pro-environmental attitudes and ideologies, and behavior change in the local context. Ruta Azul also participated in working sessions with the University of Michigan, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and other partners that have created similar tools to enrich the design.

4. Learning to Let Go

Finally, catalysts only enable biochemical processes to accelerate; they don’t become part of the final product. Along the same lines, Ruta Azul’s role is to drive and facilitate action, not centralize it, so that sustainability takes root in processes, decisions, and organizational culture. This involves not only leading, but also transforming, delegating, empowering, and trusting different teams and groups of people to make the mission their own, reinterpret the common objectives from their reality, and grow their impact.

Ruta Azul has embedded itself into the university’s two main missions through decentralization—by permanently integrating sustainability into the teaching curriculum and fostering transdisciplinary applied research that treats the campus itself as a living lab.

On the curricula side, for example, Ruta Azul acted mainly as a strategic consultant, collaborating with the Academic Vice Rector's Office, the CEDDIE, and academic departments on a two-phase plan for making sure all students learned about climate change and sustainability. Phase 1 involved integrating climate change into existing courses; starting in 2023, all degree programs included at least one mandatory course on climate change. Phase 2 focused on integrating a methodology for how to teach sustainability into course design. The methodology, called Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), equips learners with the knowledge, skills, values, and agency to address global challenges, and as of August 2026, approximately 20 percent of all study plans will include ESD-designed courses. Ruta Azul followed and facilitated the design of guides, guidelines, and training, but trusted that both the design teams and the teachers themselves, experts in their pedagogical work, would develop and integrate the academic plans and structures.

Toward a Global Movement

Perhaps the biggest and most persistent challenge facing organizations of all kinds is gaining a shared understanding of what sustainability and climate action actually mean—thinking about it beyond trees, water, and garbage, as a broader concept that involves community engagement and decision making.

Universities can assume a leading role using concrete, catalytic mechanisms that enhance and drive change larger than themselves. While the process may be different for each institution, depending on size, location, or specialty, if every university committed to reducing emissions; fostered a culture of sustainability among its students, faculty, and staff; and made sustainable development education a priority, the university system would become one of the most powerful climate action networks on the planet. In this hypothetical—but entirely possible—scenario, a global alliance of sustainable universities could drive more ambitious public policies, accelerate green technological innovation and, above all, train generations of citizens who are aware of, prepared for, and committed to a transition to regenerative economic and social models. The university would cease to be just a teaching space and would consolidate itself as an agent of change capable of transforming society from its roots.

The multiplier effect of these actions would be immense: Each graduate would take with him or her not only technical knowledge, but also an ethical and sustainable vision that would influence his or her work, family, and community environment. Faculty members who teach by example, students and researchers who seek applicable solutions, and staff members who operate with environmental criteria could create a living network of sustainability on and off campus.

Ruta Azul is an invitation, an example of what can happen when higher education assumes its historical responsibility and decides to be an active part of the solution. The future of the planet may well begin in the classroom, the laboratory, or a student project, and multiply until it becomes a global movement that transforms our way of living, producing, and coexisting with the environment.

Read the Spanish version of this article, edited by Carla Aguilar.

On October 1, 2025, the United States federal government shut down. Among the many consequences was an unprecedented crisis: For the first time in its history, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was poised to suspend benefits to 42 million Americans. In San Francisco, that meant 112,000 residents across 82,000 households suddenly faced the prospect of losing the food assistance that put meals on their tables.

The traditional playbook for food emergencies—food banks, community meal programs, emergency distribution sites—couldn’t come close to meeting this moment. Food banks typically provide one meal for every nine meals that SNAP covers. Even with heroic efforts to scale up operations, the infrastructure simply wasn’t designed to replace an entire federal nutrition program. San Francisco needed something different: an immediate, comprehensive response that matched the magnitude of the crisis.

On October 29, three days before SNAP beneficiaries would see disruptions to their benefits, Crankstart, a San Francisco-based family foundation, and Mayor Daniel Lurie of San Francisco stood together on the steps of City Hall to announce an $18 million public-private partnership that would ensure every SNAP recipient in the city continued to have access to food. Six days after that announcement, the first residents were using new grocery-restricted debit cards to shop at their preferred stores. Within a matter of days, this initiative became a potential blueprint for crisis response in an era of federal instability.

Building the Partnership at Speed

The clock started ticking as the government shutdown entered its third week. The US Department of Agriculture issued a memo stating that on November 1, SNAP benefits would be disrupted, grimly adding, “Bottom line, the well has run dry.”

With this deadline looming, the San Francisco Human Services Agency (SFHSA) began designing a response. SFHSA tiered SNAP recipients by need and asked if Crankstart would help pay for nutrition assistance to just the first tier: households with children and zero-income seniors and adults with disabilities. In response, Crankstart asked: “Would the City cover half of the total cost of feeding all 112,000 SNAP recipients for the month of November?” If so, Crankstart would contribute the other half. This response transformed the scope of what was possible.

Within 24 hours of Crankstart’s challenge grant offer, the city’s Board of Supervisors unanimously approved $9.1 million in emergency funds from the city’s reserves. Together, the $18 million from the city and Crankstart would provide SNAP replacement benefits to San Francisco’s 82,000 affected households—not partial support, not limited tiers, but comprehensive coverage for every family that depended on the program.

Between the challenge and the commitment, Crankstart and SFHSA staff spent six intensive days rapidly designing the mechanism to deliver these dollars to SNAP recipients. The plumbing was critical: Without immediate access to food, hunger and all its deleterious effects would follow.

The partnership architecture required four essential components, each serving a critical function:

• SFHSA served as the operational backbone. The agency brought comprehensive data on every SNAP recipient, designed the program model, and executed a citywide outreach campaign, mailing instructions to eligible households and establishing in-person distribution sites for those without reliable mail access. SFHSA also rapidly trained and mobilized hundreds of front-line program staff to telephonically assist people with card activation.
• Crankstart served as the philanthropic partner that transformed the initiative’s ambition. By accelerating its typical approval processes to meet the crisis timeline, Crankstart unlocked a comprehensive response instead of a limited one.
• The San Francisco-Marin Food Bank provided the essential fiscal infrastructure. As the designated 501(c)(3) intermediary, the Food Bank received and deployed both philanthropic and public funds. Their deep community relationships and trusted reputation lent immediate credibility to the emergency initiative.
• GiveCard delivered the technological infrastructure that made immediate distribution possible. GiveCard’s platform issued prepaid debit cards, verified recipients, restricted spending to groceries, and ensured that funds reached the right households securely—turning policy into purchasing power within days. A mission-driven for-profit company, GiveCard elected to waive card fees and staff costs during this emergency response effort.

The innovation at the heart of this partnership was the decision to move away from the traditional charity model of emergency food distribution. Instead of food boxes with predetermined contents, recipients received grocery-restricted debit cards that preserved their dignity and choice. They could shop at their preferred grocers, select culturally relevant foods, accommodate dietary restrictions and health needs, and maintain the same shopping patterns they had established with their SNAP benefits.

This wasn’t just faster than traditional emergency food response—it was fundamentally different in its respect for recipient agency and its recognition that people know best what their families need.

Speed, Scale, Equity, and Dignity

The San Francisco SNAP response demonstrates a replicable model built on four hallmarks that any jurisdiction can adapt to their local context.

Speed was essential—and achievable. In an arena where government contracts typically take months and large-scale program rollouts can take years, these partners designed, built, and launched a comprehensive emergency nutrition program in under two weeks. This was possible because of pre-positioned infrastructure, existing relationships, and operational agility. SFHSA already had comprehensive data on SNAP recipients, deep local relationships, emergency reserves, a distribution center, and the ability to employ emerging contracting provisions. Crankstart had existing relationships with both the city and the food bank, enabling rapid decisions without the need to build trust from scratch, as well as operating principles that prioritized agility.

Scale was achieved through a challenge grant model that leveraged philanthropic dollars to catalyze matching public investment. Crankstart’s $9 million commitment made it politically and practically feasible for San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors to approve matching funds. The scale also extended to the mobilization of human resources: SFHSA trained over 500 staff members to provide support to residents activating their cards.

Equity was embedded in every aspect of program design. Letters to recipients were translated into five languages, reflecting the linguistic diversity of San Francisco. For the approximately 9,000 SNAP recipients who are either unhoused or cannot reliably receive mail, SFHSA established in-person card distribution locations. They also created detailed training resources and toolkits that were distributed to over 100 community-based organizations serving food-insecure populations, ensuring that trusted community partners could help residents navigate the new system. The 500+ trained city staffers phone and in-person assistance, ensuring no one was left behind because they lacked digital fluency or English proficiency.

Dignity was the animating principle of the entire effort. Recipients received debit cards that worked exactly like their SNAP benefits had worked—at the same stores, for the same products, with the same freedom to choose. Critically, it maintained local grocery supply chains, ensuring that small grocers who depend on SNAP spending didn’t face revenue losses that could force them to waste food or, worse, close their doors.

The Enabling Factors

Crankstart’s operational model made this response possible. Rather than following traditional grantmaking timelines that can stretch across quarters, Crankstart’s board approved its $9 million commitment less than a week after the initial idea emerged. Its willingness to discard conventional approval processes and move dollars in days rather than months created the innovative moment that unlocked the city’s matching funds. This wasn’t just about having resources available—it was about having the institutional agility and board engagement to deploy them when urgency demanded it. Crankstart’s approach demonstrated that philanthropic capital can match the speed of a crisis without compromising due diligence.

Similarly, the city’s decision to maintain emergency reserve funds—and its willingness to deploy them quickly—proved equally essential. Mayor Daniel Lurie and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors had established a $400 million “Federal and State Revenue Risk Reserve” fund earlier in the year to protect against potential cuts in federal funding. This foresight meant San Francisco could act immediately when SNAP benefits froze, rather than scrambling to identify funding sources during the crisis itself. Notably, the city employed emergency contracting provisions, which allowed SFHSA to move at unprecedented speed without sacrificing accountability. Contracts that typically take months were executed in days, and the city’s mailroom worked through weekends to ensure letters reached recipients as quickly as possible.

GiveCard’s pre-positioned platform also mattered more than it might seem: Prior emergency distribution efforts had revealed how difficult it can be to adapt traditional financial infrastructure to the urgency and complexity of a crisis—particularly for clients who need multilingual support and seamless access. GiveCard represented a new generation of emergency technology: purpose-built for this use case, not retrofitted. Recipients could activate benefits virtually for immediate access or receive a physical card by mail, meeting people where they were. When speed was essential, having a partner who could deploy immediately—and deliver a client experience that actually worked—made the difference between a theoretical response and groceries on tables within days.

Lessons and Looking Ahead

The San Francisco SNAP response raises critical questions that philanthropies and local governments must grapple with as they plan for an era of increasing federal safety net instability.

When should philanthropy mobilize government versus replace government? This partnership succeeded in part because it was structured as a challenge grant that catalyzed matching public investment, rather than as a replacement for government responsibility. This distinction matters. When philanthropy steps in to replace failed government services without encouraging public sector partnership, it can inadvertently enable the continued erosion of public infrastructure. When philanthropy instead uses its resources to unlock public investment, to demonstrate innovative models, or to enable rapid response while government catches up—it strengthens rather than weakens the public sector’s capacity to serve residents.

When does an emergency become permanent? The federal government shutdown that triggered this crisis was resolved 12 days after SNAP benefit disruptions began—but that timing was far from certain when the partners committed. Crankstart’s funding covered one month, and there was no fixed plan for what would happen if the shutdown dragged on. The partners predicted the impasse would break before Thanksgiving, but the politics were volatile. Crankstart was prepared to assess the situation in real time and decide whether and how to extend support if SNAP remained disrupted. As state and federal budget negotiations become more contentious and government shutdowns become more frequent, the line between “emergency response” and “permanent infrastructure replacement” becomes increasingly blurred. Local government and philanthropy cannot and should not replace the federal safety net on a permanent basis—but they should be prepared to bridge gaps during crises.

Who bears the risk when replication falls short? San Francisco’s success may continue to inspire attempts at replication. But not every jurisdiction has SFHSA’s institutional capacity, emergency contracting provisions, or Crankstart’s rapid-response philanthropy. When a county with less infrastructure, weaker data systems, and more limited philanthropic dollars attempts this model and falls short—leaving residents without timely aid—who is accountable? We must share the blueprint for success while honestly communicating the prerequisites that made it possible.

What prevents this model from enabling a managed decline of federal responsibility? When local governments and philanthropy prove they can step in during crises, do they inadvertently signal to federal policymakers that safety net funding cuts are survivable? The San Francisco model succeeded brilliantly as an emergency response—but if such emergencies become routine, at what point does demonstrating local capacity undermine the case for federal reliability? It is imperative that we deploy local innovation without providing political cover for the federal abdication that necessitated it in the first place.

A New Essential Capacity

The San Francisco SNAP response demonstrates that public-private partnerships are not an exception to be deployed only in rare emergencies, but an essential philanthropic capacity in an era of federal safety net instability. The four hallmarks framework—speed, scale, equity, and dignity—provides a replicable model that jurisdictions across the country can adapt to their own contexts.

For this model to reach its full potential, several investments are necessary. Jurisdictions should pre-position the technological infrastructure before crises hit, rather than scrambling to build systems in the midst of emergencies. Philanthropies should develop standing relationships with local governments and maintain funds for rapid response. Both sectors should invest in the kinds of equity-based program design that ensures emergency responses reach the most vulnerable community members, including those facing language barriers, housing instability, or limited digital access.

The 112,000 San Francisco residents who received grocery cards during the SNAP shutdown didn’t experience this program as a policy innovation—they experienced it as the difference between feeding their families and going hungry. In an era when federal safety net programs can no longer be counted on to provide uninterrupted support, this kind of rapid, comprehensive, dignified local response isn’t optional, it’s essential.

The question is not whether federal benefit disruptions will happen again. They will. The question is whether communities will be prepared to ensure that when the safety net fails, no one falls through.

In late 2024, we made the case that the ideas driving school reform, from “A Nation at Risk” through the No Child Left Behind era, ideas of choice, competition, and individual return, were inadequate for the pressing problems of education today: what kind of citizens a multiracial democracy requires, what kind of human flourishing public schools should enable, and how institutions can do this work amidst artificial intelligence, polarization, and inequality. These cannot be answered through piecemeal interventions, however well designed, but only by addressing the underlying issue of public education’s purpose.

At the time, we focused our argument on rebuilding the connection between public schools and democracy, because that’s where the need was greatest. We traced the history of education as a public good to America’s founding, with civic preparation as a central task of schools. Through this lens, it’s the turn in recent decades toward school as solely an individual benefit that seems ahistoric. But we also recognized that a debate about purpose must itself be democratic. More than a single answer, we need a conversation with many voices—some aligned, some dissenting, but all thinking hard about what public schools are for.

For this series, we asked 10 authors, with diverse but clear views, to grapple with the changing purpose of American public education. Danielle Allen gives a succinct, radical proposal that public education should prepare people to share power. Kim Smith lays out the shortfalls of the current system, while calling for a new social contract in an age of artificial intelligence. Matt Sigelman likewise takes up the question of AI, arguing that workforce and democratic preparation are the same project. Elizabeth Clay Roy shows us how civics should be lived not just learned, while Kaya Henderson emphasizes co-creating learning with young people. Frances Messano calls for a Marshall Plan for public schools. Mike Matsuda and Sonja Santelises show that durable changes have both technical and political dimensions. John Bailey contends that higher education gives us a model for pluralistic K-12 redesign. And Catherine Lhamon reminds us that the equal promise of public education is not given but hard-won, and in need of renewal.

The resulting question is not whether schools should serve individual flourishing, economic mobility, or democratic life. They must do all three. The harder question is what institutional form can cultivate individual liberty while still requiring young people to encounter, deliberate, and share power with those they did not choose. Our own answer is that public education must become more flexible at the edges, and more democratic at its core.

Agreements on the Future of Public Schools

At a time when the discourse on public schools stresses what’s broken, these articles show a surprising amount of shared ground. The authors differ in emphasis, but taken together their arguments suggest the outline of a broader, bolder vision for public education’s future.

First and foremost, we heard agreement that purpose matters. Frances Messano argues that in our rush to fix how schools are run we overlook why we have them—so miss an opportunity for deeper innovation. Matt Sigelman makes the case that orienting schools toward careers and democracy is mutually reinforcing rather than opposed—and that both purposes are needed. The theme is clear: we cannot deliver the scale of change public education needs unless we start with the purpose it serves.

The authors also asked a version of the same question: what does this moment ask of public schools? Four recurring challenges emerged: young people disconnected from school and one another; polarization and fraying civic health; the disruptive force of AI on both learning and work; and labor-market upheaval that makes preparation for the future feel uncertain. Together, these challenges call for more than incremental fixes; they call for public schools, a long-standing institution, to redefine their core mission.

Despite such challenges, we see real alignment about what we want for young people. Kim Smith writes of flourishing as the rightful goal of learning, while several authors use thriving in a similar way. Liz Clay Roy emphasizes agency, belonging, and moral courage. John Bailey and Matt Sigelman both discuss durable skills, at the intersection of jobs and civics. This is not to claim unanimity—Kaya Henderson points out that much of the content we teach is up for debate. But if we as a sector can stop describing the aims of education in the language of cut scores and measurement tools, and talk more about helping young people live lives of dignity and purpose, that would go a long way toward rekindling faith in public schools.

A fourth point of convergence is relative agreement on the early grades. Intentionally or not, the authors gravitated to reforms that affect teenagers or young adults: apprenticeships, community projects, public debate, and job skills training. Sonja Santelises put it bluntly—we largely know what works in the early grades, so we should just do it. This suggests a truce for education politics: stop relitigating the foundational years, execute with rigor and consistency, and concentrate our boldest redesign on the later grades, where the disagreements truly lie.

A fifth and final point of agreement—and the entrée to our debate—is that the window for re-thinking school is wide open. In our initial article, we used Thomas Kuhn’s frame of paradigms to describe today’s moment of societal transition, when our old rules or institutions feel painfully insufficient, but no new consensus has yet replaced them. Moments like this, when we are clearer about what has failed than what comes next, are unusually open to bold ideas. They are also dangerous, vulnerable to ideologues and authoritarians, and those more eager to dismantle public education than rebuild it. Which is why clarity of purpose matters more than ever.

Beyond Tradeoffs: Defining What Schools Are For

Clarifying education’s purpose allows us to move beyond the false tradeoffs that characterize our current debate on schools. Rather than pitting hard skills against soft, careers against civic preparation, or rigor against well-being, the future of education depends on seeing these as interconnected goals.

For instance, the authors in this series rightly contend that civic and workforce preparation are not opposed, but part of the same project. Matt Sigelman cites jobs data to show that liberal arts skills like discernment, dialogue, and shared problem solving make up an increasing share of the roles workers hold as they advance in their careers. As AI compresses the early rungs of the career ladder, sending recent graduates into previously mid-career positions, these competencies will matter more, not less. As workers navigate careers with multiple transitions, learning how to learn new things, the hallmark of liberal arts, will gain significance. This reinforcement flows the other way as well. Multiple authors emphasized the formative role of work and apprenticeships for attributes like initiative, responsibility, and teamwork—all key for civic and community life as well as shaping an authentic sense of self.

A similar pattern pervades the conversation around screens, disconnection, and youth mental health. Limiting screen time or social media has its place, as does crisis intervention. But helping a young person thrive involves more than wellness interventions; it requires reshaping the environments and relationships that surround young people in ways that promote agency, belonging, and the felt sense that they matter to other people in their community. We call this feeling purpose, and it can be a powerful shield against disconnection. Cultivating purpose is active, best pursued in groups. Ideally it happens with people different from you. It needs productive struggle alongside reflection and support. And it speaks to something greater than yourself. The conditions that give rise to purpose also promote citizenship, and describe the rich, engaged learning experiences that all young people need.

Artificial intelligence may help break these tradeoffs. Frameworks like Durable Skills are helpful starts for naming the AI-resilient skills shared across work, civics, and personal development. But the next steps must get specific, like a recent project from Burning Glass Institute and AI-EDU to map which skills AI automates outright versus augments, because the lesson is not that core skills go away, but that they shift in emphasis. Take writing. Initial claims that AI would supplant all writing have tempered as we’ve seen the dangers of cognitive offloading and the importance of thinking through drafts. But AI will change writing, whether as drafting partner, editor, or surrogate. It will also make evaluating the claims of existing writing, especially writing done with the gloss of AI, even more important. The ancient Greeks called this art rhetoric, and used it to separate an argument that was sound from one that was smooth. The student who can do this for an AI’s output is the same one who can judge a demagogue’s. And it can’t be faked—this discernment depends on having done your own thinking first.

At a deeper level, AI can clarify what education is really for. John Bailey makes this point well. The common advice has been to prioritize the human skills AI struggles with. But chasing whatever AI can't do yet is a race we're bound to lose. A better target would be to ask what requires actual relationships with other humans. Danielle Allen gives the example of nonviolence as a relational capacity that is demanding precisely because it refuses the satisfaction of retaliation. The word satisfaction matters. It connotes the emotions and stakes that can only be stirred through human encounter. By contrast, arguing with an AI is impersonal; arguments in an online forum mostly so. But a well-structured classroom debate, face-to-face, on a real issue with real stakes, exposes you to the pressure of performance, the shame of being wrong, the pride of being right, and having to eat lunch and learn alongside fellow students after the debate is done. None of this can be outsourced, because it depends on the presence of other people who matter to you.

What It Means to Educate Toward Public Purpose

Flourishing, deeper learning, and durable job skills all describe how an individual benefits from an education. But the authors in this series concurred that education also matters as a public good: the foundation for a dynamic economy, strong communities, and healthy democracy. This agreement is notable—usually our debates on education’s purpose start and end with the individual. But if education is a public good, deserving of public dollars, we must define the capacities shared public life requires.

At its core, educating toward a public purpose requires schools that first teach what it means to share power and, second, do so across the differences that define our modern democracy. In describing this we hope to dissolve another false binary—that our only choices are pursuing education as a solely individual enterprise, or defending schools as public goods without attending to their real challenges.

Criteria 1: Learning to Share Power

Danielle Allen introduces an essential frame, that democracy itself is an exercise in power sharing, particularly with people we did not choose and may not like. So too are most aspects of work and community life. Sharing power rests on mutual respect and belonging. It relies on the exercise of agency that does not infringe on the agency of others, on disagreeing without dominating your opponent. Done well it invites collaboration, requires compromise, and cannot be outsourced to AI. Education, therefore, serves its public purposes when it prepares citizens to share power.

This echoes a central quandary today’s young people will face: what it means to share power in an AI world. On our current trajectory, wealth and power will concentrate to a few firms and individuals, particularly as AI creates more value absent human inputs. Basic rules like firm ownership and taxation may prove inadequate, while new forms of cooperation to defray AI risk will be needed. If we still want to live in a democracy, rather than being ruled by a circle of oligarchs and their omnipotent machines, the path forward is new ways of sharing power.

But where can people learn this capacity? Schools are the obvious answer, but they can credibly teach power sharing only if they practice it. That means confronting a crisis of trust cited across the series: among families who doubt schools meet individual needs, students who question school’s relevance, communities wary of the latest reforms, and a public uncertain that success in school still leads to success in life. To be fair, institutions all face declining trust. Even as national trust in public education has fallen, most families still trust their local public schools. But the problem is real, and recalls a bedrock democratic principle—government derives its power from the consent of the governed.

Multiple authors arrive at the same solution: schools must be willing to co-create more of the learning experience with students, families, and the surrounding community. Kim Smith describes a new social contract based on entrusting families and learners with more agency and flexibility. Liz Clay Roy argues that civic formation happens only when learners shift from spectators to active participants. And Kaya Henderson predicates her essay on reconstructing schools alongside young people. Co-creation is how schools put power sharing into practice. It reflects Danielle Allen’s core claim as well, that freedom is not merely being left alone, but having a meaningful hand in shaping the institutions that shape your life.

The best way to teach young people to share power is to practice doing it. We can start by gathering better student feedback, shaping learning for relevance, and inviting students into school decision-making. After all, young people are the actual experts on their school experience, from playground dynamics to classroom rigor and belonging, and we would make real progress on mental health and absenteeism—not to mention academics—if we spent more time asking students what they want from school, trusting their answers, and endeavoring to follow through. None of this is about abdicating adult wisdom, but about having the humility to recognize we don’t hold all the answers.

A final note on sharing power: it’s not just for kids. Schools are more than places of learning; they are civic institutions. They offer a physical space to come together, hold meetings, greet your neighbors, celebrate football games or artistic endeavors. They are also a focal point for relearning how to share power. Promising local experiments have sprouted nationwide: community schools in California, participatory budgeting in Arizona, and school board reform in multiple communities. Education is one of the few areas in which almost all Americans have experience; we should use this common ground, rocky as it may be, to practice the deliberation democracy requires.

Criteria 2: Learning Across Difference

Co-creation and the practice of sharing power don't happen in a vacuum. They unfold within an American democracy that demands certain capacities of its participants, including the ability to disagree productively across difference. This, according to many authors in this series, is a lost art. Catherine Lhamon writes of leading federal Civil Rights enforcement after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, watching with horror the proliferation of hate on college campuses, and realizing that as a nation, we had forgotten how to disagree. Sonja Santelises cites a similar pattern in Baltimore’s K-12 schools—the democratic cosplay of students who show up to protest a school board meeting and receive an adult pat on the head, but who are wholly unprepared for the rigor of public pushback and leave feeling disillusioned, not empowered.

Both examples recall Frederick Douglass’ warning, in his 1857 West India Emancipation address, that “there is no progress without struggle,” and wanting otherwise is to “want crops without plowing up the ground; want rain without thunder and lightning.” Productive struggle is intrinsic to learning and democracy alike, yet we live in a society that avoids it. Our news media sorts by partisan preference; algorithms urge us into echo chambers; apps cater to needs real and imagined. And AI chatbots and companions, as Kim Smith and other authors warn, always validate our preferences, mimicking human attachment without the friction that teaches us to manage conflict.

If friction is the point, it follows that we cannot truly learn to share power if we only encounter people who think and look like we do. To illustrate what democracy fully asks of us, Danielle Allen recalls Martin Luther King Jr.’s distinction between desegregation and integration. Desegregation, which we often call diversity, means physical proximity. While backed by strong evidence, desegregation is only a partial answer, and risks, in King’s words, a school where students sit “elbows together but hearts apart.” Integration is the harder, more affirmative process of lived equality, of learning to hold the humanity of another student in your heart, particularly when their views or background differ from your own.

The core principle that flows from this—learning to share power across difference—also gives us a way to assess the democratic capacity of different school forms. An AI tutor, smart but sycophantic, clearly fails the test. So do K–12 vouchers: they let families exit, but they don't build the muscle of disagreeing productively within a shared institution. We recognize the legitimate frustration some families feel toward school, with exit a signal that a public system is not sufficiently responsive to the people it serves. But is the solution to move toward sameness? Is reducing the capacity of all schools to educate toward democracy, or to turn a democratic institution into a consumer good the answer, especially when democracy is under strain? We think the solution to a democratic shortfall is building more responsive, co-creative institutions—more democracy, not less.

This test cuts both ways. A public school can be diverse in its enrollment but segregated in its halls, tracked in its classes, and full of students who share a building but not power. A student given a perfectly personalized pathway, tuned to their existing interests and values, might emerge with excellent test scores but impoverished in their capacity to negotiate difference or share power. But a school in which diverse families co-construct a shared experience is not just preparation for democracy, it’s embodiment. This is a high bar—both practically and ethically ambitious—but it creates the sort of thick, durable purpose that could sustain public schools as their aims shift in an AI world.

Hub and Spoke: A Design Principle for Public Purpose

Over two centuries ago, James Madison argued in Federalist No. 10 that the cure for faction was not to extinguish the liberty that created it, but to control its effects. Applied to rearchitecting public schools, we want a system that cultivates individual interests, gives learners agency, and prepares them to live choice-filled lives. This is the flame of liberty worth keeping. But the founders also knew that liberty unchecked would divide us, and lead citizens to abuse power rather than share it. We want an institution strong enough to hold a diverse polity together, and counter the forces pulling us apart.

We think of this as a “hub and spoke” public system. Today, secondary schools are mainly hubs—single buildings, relatively unchanged, where the majority of a young person’s learning is meant to happen. Several authors in this series point out, rightly, that one building cannot contain the full range of experiences young people need. But nor is the answer only spokes—places and pathways that let each family pursue opportunity on their own, often with others who already think and live like they do. We need both: spokes tailored to the individual, and hubs for learning and reflection across difference. The relationship between the two makes the system work.

Spokes are about agency and exploration. Learning might happen through service, an outdoor expedition, addressing a community problem, attending a public microschool, or participating in an intercultural exchange. Substantial time is dedicated to work-based learning and apprenticeships for all students, not just those pursuing trades. Spokes can be physical places outside the school walls but online spaces too—an AP statistics course for the rural student without access to a nearby teacher, or an AI simulation of ancient Athens. Done well, spokes make education permeable, letting young people pursue interests, build social capital, encounter adult worlds, and learn through doing. While we focus on young people, spokes also expand opportunities for adult reskilling and lifelong learning.

If spokes are exploration, hubs are a home to return to. Common knowledge, stable relationships, family connections, belonging and formation of purpose. In a hub, learners reflect on what the spokes taught them and make meaning together. It’s where students interning at a local bank, volunteering at a church, and painting a public mural all explain to each other what they are learning, what values they hold, and how their emerging purposes exist together. A hub is diverse in every sense, a sandbox to practice power sharing across difference, where the skills learned are the ones only human interaction can teach. Hubs are also where students co-construct what’s next—plotting learning roadmaps based on their strengths and passions, with mentorship from educators, to be pursued both at the hub and across its surrounding spokes.

Building blocks of this vision exist already, and suggest it’s worth pursuing. Remake Learning in Pittsburgh spreads learning across an ecosystem of local institutions. CivLex fosters a similar ecosystem for civics in Lexington. Community schools and collective impact both rely on coordinating the assets that a community already has. Full-district career pathways and dual credit models provide a starting point for connecting K-12, college, and work-based learning. And Big Picture Learning, with its focus on advisories, relationships, and internships, comes the closest we’ve seen to doing all of these at once.

Teachers, in this model, hold significant responsibility but also more role diversity than in the current system. Educators might act as content experts. They are also guides for inquiry, who know students deeply and help them to co-create learning experiences. Most importantly, teachers are shapers of our civic future. They treat, as Mike Matsuda says, each classroom as a microcosm of society. They are well-trained experts in rhetoric and constructive disagreement; they foster belonging yet encourage curiosity; they instill the discipline to seek truth but question certainty. When students spend time in spokes, who counts as an educator expands further, with learning led by job supervisors, community mentors, and more. All of these shifts will require investment. But as AI takes over more transmission of basic knowledge, it’s worth setting a high bar for what stays human—mentoring a community project, guiding an apprenticeship, adjudicating a passionate debate. This model needs more teachers, not less, but is more flexible, relational, and rewarding—and the work it requires is a cost worth choosing.

Finally, the hub and spoke system resists privatization by design, not by accident: a central guarantee runs through it. Public dollars, public rights, and public accountability all flow through the hub, even as students fan out to learn in workplaces and other private settings. The same logic should apply to credentialing: it should follow learners to where they decide to make their mark, not just reward them for sitting where adults place them. When it comes to budgets, much of what is hard about a hub and spoke structure—scheduling, transportation, and coordination across sites—is rapidly becoming easier with AI. Over time, we could see a shift, from the sums districts spend on logistics and central offices, to pushing more dollars closer to students and supporting a highly skilled cadre of teachers.

The Limits of Design

A hub and spoke design is one idea for fusing the private and public purpose of schools. At the same time, we are wary of treating reform as only a design problem. Yes, design matters. But by centering design and process, we can give ourselves permission to underplay politics, culture, and history. As Catherine Lhamon reminds us, the public schools of Prince Edward County, Virginia, did not close their doors in 1959 because of ill-designed pedagogy or poor strategic planning. They closed them because enough white families did not want to comply with Brown v. Board of Education and share schools with families who were Black. It took a full five years of advocacy, litigation, and public outcry before federal action restored the educational rights of nearly 2,000 Black children.

This problem reverberates today. In 2023, reporting uncovered an Ohio neo-Nazi homeschooling network boasting thousands of members, with lesson plans ranging from baking a cake for Hitler’s birthday to teaching students to say sieg heil in unison. Ohio Department of Education officials reacted with alarm—but concluded they had no power to intervene and the group could continue operating, since the state did not allow public curricular oversight of Ohio’s homeschools. A few months later, when the tumult died down, Ohio’s legislature voted to weaken homeschooling regulation still further, citing the importance of deregulation and parental rights.

Of course this example is extreme—most private educational settings do operate from a place of virtue and good intent. But the further you move from a public guarantee, the easier it becomes to bend truth, spin knowledge, or even peddle hate. This is not a question of a few well-placed guardrails atop a system made for sorting. The problem is structural—a system that treats education as a private choice will always struggle to protect its public purpose. As America’s public schools grow more diverse—the percentage of white students fell from 61% in 2000 to 45% in 2023—these pressures will multiply. We are optimistic that new ideas, like the hub and spoke structure, will provide fresh ways for thinking about old problems of race and class, or tribe and creed. But history warns us that design alone is not enough; the march toward fuller Civil Rights has more often taken legal challenge, federal enforcement, persistent organizing, and moral courage.

We see a more subtle critique of design from Sonja Santelises. In discussing the conceptual benefit of rewarding students based on mastery of material rather than time spent in class, she notes the real challenge that a course in Baltimore Public Schools, even if it confers the same learning as a course offered at an elite private school like Phillips Exeter, will never send the same prestigious signal. No well-designed assessment or competency-based badge will close this gap. No process of convening local leaders will be sufficient. It’s a problem of power, class, and culture, not design. But it’s also a question of how we understand education’s purpose.

This gives us a path forward. If the authors in this series are right—that the competencies that will matter most in an AI-rich labor market are the same as those required by democracy—then diverse contexts gain a new advantage. An elite private school can teach wonderful things. But it is structurally limited in teaching power sharing across difference, because its prestige depends on exclusion. Baltimore is not so limited. As AI compresses complex knowledge work and the value of mere credentials starts to decline, the diversity of Baltimore can become a democratic strength—if we choose to cultivate it seriously. This shift won’t happen tomorrow, not in three years, and possibly not for decades to come. But this is the aspiration of a public education worth defending: an institution whose strength is precisely the difference it holds together.

An Agenda for Purpose

What will it take to create a system that is more flexible at the edges and more democratic at the core, that advances individual flourishing alongside public purpose? We can’t claim this will be easy. In fact, it would be far simpler to give every student an AI tutor, or each family a check and wish them luck. But the bolder, more creative project is to re-found an institution around the full purpose this moment calls for—the attributes that democracy and human flourishing require, that future careers demand, and that no tool can replace. Three lines of work—form, ideas, and beliefs—outline where we might begin.

Start with experiments in form. A hub and spoke model is one way to architect a future education system, but is hardly the only one. What matters is that community schools, apprenticeships, dual enrollment, civic projects, and new approaches to co-creation shift from being scattered reforms to coherent parts of the same public system. States and regions can pilot hub-like spaces for power sharing across difference, along with spoke-like infrastructure for flexible exploration. Schools should experiment with co-creation from the classroom to the school board. And every experiment needs public protections to ensure that flexibility does not become sorting by another name. If the discourse on school reform can feel too small, this paints a richer picture of what innovation can become.

We also need a movement of ideas, guided by the shared recognition that when designing a system, understanding its purpose matters. The workforce field has made real progress in naming the skills young people need, even as these skills are changing. Democracy holds requirements of its participants just as much as the workforce does, and we should treat them with equal rigor. The same holds true for personal purpose and flourishing. We need a robust intellectual project to better define these requirements, understand the experiences that nurture them, and develop guidance on how to do them well. Foundations, universities, think tanks, companies, and nonprofits all have roles to play. But the most important ideas will come from young people themselves, supported by adults, informed by prior knowledge, and equipped with the creativity that comes from seeing old problems with new eyes. Young people also live their lives as an integrated whole, not in the separate circles of education, workforce, mental health, and democracy that define our funding streams. Philanthropy, therefore, has a particular obligation to foster common cause across complementary ideas, and to build a broader coalition than just one field can muster.

The hardest work is changing beliefs—the assumptions and values beneath any school or system, where paradigms exert their quiet pull and change is hardest and most lasting. For decades, we’ve absorbed the ideas that education is a personal endeavor, that its purpose is to acquire basic facts and knowledge, that new technology always makes it better, and that its system is a bureaucracy to escape more than improve. A renewed agenda must challenge these assumptions directly. That will take more than programs. It will take stories, evidence, public argument, and visible examples of schools that are both more flexible and more democratic. Again, philanthropy has a special role to play, with the patience and capital to sow the seeds of a different paradigm. But the deeper work belongs to all of us: to recover the belief that public education is not merely a service families consume but a shared institution through which citizens learn what they owe one another.

Building Schools Worth Defending

Consider a thought experiment: if American public schooling did not exist, could we create it? It’s hard to imagine we could. In our rush to say what’s wrong with public education, we forget how remarkable it remains, that within a single public institution a school-age child can move across 50 states, with over 13,000 districts, to one of nearly 100,000 public schools, and receive an education free of charge. With K-12 public schools today serving 50 million students and employing over 6 million adults, there’s a strong case to be made that, for all its shortfalls, public education remains the broadest shared institution in American life.

To say that public schools are worth defending is not to defend the system as it stands. Too many students are disengaged. Too many families feel unheard. Too many educators are exhausted. Too many schools reproduce the inequalities they are meant to overcome. But nor should we abandon the public promise. The lesson of this series is that education's purpose is larger than any one reform agenda has allowed. Schools must prepare young people for work, but not only work; for individual flourishing, but not private fulfillment alone; for democracy, but as practice not abstraction.

Frances Messano calls for a Marshall Plan for public education. The original Marshall Plan was not charity; it was an investment in institutions, held together by shared ideals, in the conviction that free societies had to be built and not left to circumstance. This is the scale of commitment this moment asks of us, to rebuild not just an institution, but the beliefs that give it life.

The schools that meet this moment will look quite different from the ones we inherited. They will be more flexible, more porous, more connected to the world beyond their walls. They will give young people more agency, more chances to pursue meaningful work, more ways to build knowledge through experience. But they must also become more public, more integrated, and more democratic: places where difference is strength, progress grows from struggle, and power is truly shared. In an age of artificial intelligence, inequality, loneliness, and polarization, we will need many places where young people can discover who they are. But we also need places where they learn how to live together. This is the promise still worth fighting for. This is what public schools, at their best, can be—schools worth defending.

Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka are right. American public education is in a paradigm transition; the neoliberal era they describe overpromised and underdelivered, and the renewed democratic purpose they call for—preparing young people to think critically, sort fact from falsehood, and participate fully in a diverse democracy—is the right destination. Leaders in the reform era believed, in good faith, that if we could measure performance better and create more options, the system would improve. Those efforts produced real benefits: greater transparency, better data, clearer expectations, and new pathways for some students and families. But they did not deliver the scale of improvement, equity, or public confidence we promised.

The central challenge ahead is earning back trust. Trust from students who do not see their lives reflected in what schools value, from parents who are voting with their feet, from employers who no longer assume a high school diploma signals real capability, and from citizens who during the pandemic watched institutions they were told to trust falter when it mattered most.

That erosion of trust is visible across nearly every measure. Less than half of students say their schoolwork challenges them (49 percent) or aligns with what they do best (46 percent). Large majorities of Americans doubt their children will be better off than they are. Eighty-four percent of hiring managers say most high school graduates are not prepared for the workforce, and 80 percent believe readiness has declined. And only a third of lower-performing students say their civic learning helps them understand the world around them.

The next era of public education will be judged less by the elegance of its ideas than by whether it responds, with humility and pragmatism, to the people it exists to serve. It will not be a return to the old neighborhood school monopoly, nor a continuation of market reform under new names. It will be the construction of a pluralistic public system, disciplined by democratic purpose: one that earns back trust, protects civil rights, forms citizens, prepares young people for work and life, and treats public dollars as obligations to public goods.

The Trust Deficit Is Real

Four trends, taken together, describe the institutional moment we’re actually in.

The first is that the reform era underdelivered on its own terms. Decades of standards, assessments, accountability, and choice were sold as a path to higher achievement. The most recent national results tell a different story. Twelfth-graders just posted the worst reading scores since 1992 and the lowest math scores since the test began in 2005. Nearly half of all twelfth-graders scored below “basic” in both subjects. Lower-performing fourth- and eighth-graders recorded the worst reading scores in over 30 years, and the eighth-grade math achievement gap has reached the widest point in the test’s history.

The second is populism. A wave of populist energy has been building in American life for nearly two decades, rooted in a growing distrust of institutions that promised stability, mobility, and opportunity but too often fell short. Financial crises, the hollowing out of local economies, and credential inflation all deepened that skepticism. Education has not been immune and has increasingly become the target of this energy.

The COVID school closures were a radicalizing event. Parents who had long trusted schools to make reasonable judgments about their children watched those decisions unfold in real time, often inconsistently and with uneven results. The recovery has done little to restore confidence. On NAEP, the highest-performing students have made gains in math since 2022, while students below the 25th percentile continue to fall further behind. Federal pandemic relief funds provided meaningful support, but the best evidence suggests they offset only a fraction of learning loss: approximately one-third in math and one-quarter in reading.

What parents lost during this period was not confidence in a service. It was trust in the relationship. They watched a credentialed class make consequential decisions about their children, defend those decisions in the language of expertise, and then face no real reckoning when the outcomes came in. Schools were closed. Children were harmed—academically, developmentally, in their mental health. No one was held to account.

The third is demography. The institutional unit we call “the neighborhood public school” is being eroded by demography before any policy intervenes. The result is massive budgetary pressure on districts and a coming wave of school closures. Thirty-four states project K–12 enrollment declines between 2025 and 2031, with 11 losing 5 percent or more. The under-five population has dropped sharply since 2020, and the decline is concentrated in the places that have historically educated the most kids; large urban counties have seen an 8.1 percent drop in their 0-to-4 population, nearly double the national rate. The children entering the system over the next decade are already born, and there are fewer of them than the institution was built to serve. This is the floor under everything else. Whatever happens with reform, recovery, or innovation, the system will be educating fewer students, in fewer buildings, on tighter budgets, for the foreseeable future.

The fourth is the diversification of education options. Three years ago, no state had a universal school choice program. Today more than a dozen do, and a majority of US students live in a state where they qualify for some form of choice support. Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) alone have grown from fewer than 30,000 students in 2021 to roughly 488,000 today.

But the most revealing signal didn't come from state legislatures. It came from families. In 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit delivered monthly payments of up to $300 per child to households, with no strings attached. Families could spend it on nearly anything, and what survey research found is that they spent the money on education. Census Household Pulse data shows that in a typical week, more than 9 million families used their funds for schoolbooks and supplies, nearly 3 million for tuition, 2 million each for transportation and after-school programs, and 644,000 for tutoring. This wasn't an ESA campaign or a Heritage Foundation talking point. It was revealed preference from low-income families, many of whom were in blue states and deep-blue cities, many from communities of color, many from the very populations the equity debate claims to defend. Given unrestricted cash, they assembled a portfolio of educational supports, the exact model ESAs and microschools are now formalizing. Families were already thinking about education as a portfolio, not a place. The public system wasn’t organized to provide one.

These are not problems we can outpace by tweaking existing reforms. They describe the ground beneath us. The meaning of "public" in public education is changing. Trust has eroded. The question is no longer whether to respond, but what to build next.

What Schools Are For

Schools exist to form the next generation of citizens, neighbors, and workers. That formation has three parts: the values we broadly share, the foundational knowledge needed to participate in civic life and meaningful work, and the durable skills that enable a flourishing life. This is not a soft mission, and it is not a controversial one. It is the oldest and most demanding ambition American public education has ever held. James Madison put it plainly two centuries ago: “A people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” That is what schools have always been for.

The modern reform era taught education leaders to care about outcomes, transparency, urgency, and innovation. Those habits are worth keeping. But over time, it also narrowed the definition of success toward what was easiest to measure, made it harder to sustain a shared language of public purpose, and at times encouraged us to think about students, families, and schools as individual actors rather than members of a broader democratic community. The result is an institution that often manages people instead of forming them and explains outcomes instead of answering for them.

McGuire and Wilka point to the right destination, but the path runs through the relationships the reform era let fray. The challenge is that earning back trust is not a project of better messaging or stronger standards, it is a project of responding to the people the system exists to serve: to students who spent years collecting grades and credentials that promised readiness, only to arrive in college needing remedial coursework. To parents who have been told that the institution knows better than they do. To employers who have been told to believe in empty credentials. And to citizens who have been told that public education is best understood as a delivery system rather than a community institution. None of those failures is solved by defending the institution as it stands. All of them point to the same work: building one capable of carrying the formative mission through the conditions we now face.

AI Makes the Core More Important

This moment of institutional distrust coincides with the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of performing a growing array of tasks with superhuman intelligence. The temptation is to treat AI as another classroom technology, a tool to personalize instruction, plan lessons, support tutoring, or improve operations. All of that is real, and much of it will help. But it understates what AI actually is and what is at stake.

AI is not just a classroom tool. It is becoming an information environment, a labor market shock, and a civic challenge all at the same time, creating its own societal anxieties. It is becoming one of the primary ways people not only get answers to their questions but also form their beliefs, shaping how information is interpreted and presented. That shift could either strain an already fragile civic fabric or help rebuild a shared foundation of understanding. Which outcome prevails will depend on whether the next generation can use these tools with discernment.

There is also a temptation, in moments like this one, to argue that AI requires us to rethink education’s core purpose from scratch. The opposite is closer to the truth. AI makes the core more important, not less.

Writing is thinking. Prompting an AI system is, at its heart, the act of thinking clearly and saying exactly what you mean: framing a problem, supplying the right context, specifying what a good answer looks like, and providing clear feedback. The most powerful users of AI are not the most technical. They are the most articulate: the people who can frame a question well, give precise direction, and recognize a good answer from a plausible-sounding wrong one. That is why AI does not lower the value of literacy. It raises it. In the AI era, students who lack these skills will not fall behind slowly. They will fall further and faster, because the gap between those who can say exactly what they mean and those who cannot is amplified by a technology that uses language to harness intelligence.

Literacy alone is not enough. Students will also need the capacity to reason: to recognize when AI is confidently wrong, to test its outputs, and to ask better questions that surface assumptions. These are not just academic skills. They are the foundation of judgment, and judgment is what democracy requires. A democracy cannot function if citizens outsource it to systems they neither understand nor question. The irony of AI is that the technology many fear will make traditional academics irrelevant is precisely what makes literacy, numeracy, scientific reasoning, history, civics, and the humanities more essential.

AI could help students deepen their understanding of concepts, or it could weaken their cognitive abilities. Students will need to learn when to use these tools but also when not to use them, when to slow down, when to seek another human being, and when a decision requires judgment rather than optimization. At its best, AI should make learning harder, not easier, because it is through productive struggle that understanding deepens.

This has implications for teaching as well. AI should not become another mandate layered onto an already overburdened profession. Used well, it can create more space for the human work of teaching: conversation, feedback, mentoring, encouragement, and the building of trust. Used poorly, it risks narrowing learning even further to what can be automated, measured, and managed.

In that sense, AI does not introduce a new question. It sharpens an old one. It can either deepen the mistakes of the reform era or help us correct them. The real danger is that we repeat a familiar pattern: adopting powerful tools before we are clear about the purpose they are meant to serve.

So the AI question is ultimately the education question. What kind of people are we trying to form? What knowledge must they share? What skills will help them flourish? What habits will help them govern themselves and live with others? What public obligations attach to public dollars, regardless of whether learning happens in a district school, charter school, microschool, tutoring, online program, or hybrid model? Can students use these powerful tools without surrendering judgment, agency, or democratic responsibility?

Plural Forms, Public Purpose

If the formative mission of education is the right destination, the harder question is the institutional vehicle that carries it. McGuire and Wilka largely treat the public school as the default container for democratic preparation. But we already have a working example of a system that serves a public purpose through plural forms. We built one in higher education.

American higher education, even with its faults, is still among the most admired systems in the world precisely because it is plural. Public flagships and regional universities. Community colleges. Private nonprofits and religious institutions. HBCUs, tribal colleges, and minority-serving institutions. Online programs, stackable credentials, and career-connected pathways.

These institutions differ widely in mission and design, yet they are held together by something deeper than their differences: a common purpose. A community college and a research university pursue it in very different ways, but both are understood to serve the public good Madison described, forming capable people who can earn a living, sustain a community, and govern themselves.

That shared purpose is protected by a framework: Pell grants for low-income students, federal student aid, civil rights protections, accreditation, and transparency requirements. What makes the system public is not that the government runs each institution. It is that this purpose, and the public commitment to access, fairness, and honest information that protects it, is incorporated across every institution that participates.

A community college in rural Oklahoma, a Jesuit university in Chicago, a women’s college in Mississippi, and the University of Michigan all serve different students in different ways. We do not treat that diversity as a failure of public purpose. We treat it as the system working.

This example matters because it offers a different way to understand what is happening in K–12. The changing shape of education is not automatically a betrayal of public purpose, but neither is it automatically an expression of it. Pluralism can serve democracy, but only when it is disciplined by a strong public framework.

Higher education’s lesson is not that structure does not matter; in fact it proves that it does. It is that purpose travels through structure when the framework is clear. Civil rights protection, transparent outcomes, quality assurance, and a shared commitment to preparing students not just for work, but for participation in a democratic society. That framework is what makes pluralism work and what causes it to fail when it is absent. The for-profit college crisis, rising costs, and deepening stratification are not arguments against pluralism itself. They are evidence of what happens when public purpose is weakly enforced or inconsistently applied. Any serious effort to extend this model to K–12 must take those lessons seriously.

The broader pattern, however, is already visible. ESAs, tax-credit scholarships, and a growing mix of microschools, hybrid programs, tutoring, and specialized services are beginning to function in K–12 much as Pell grants do in higher education: as public investments that follow students into a wider range of learning environments. In practice, families use these funds for a mix of tuition, tutoring, online coursework, therapies for students with special needs, transportation, and instructional materials, assembling an educational experience that extends beyond any single institution.

The question is whether we will build the framework that allows this shift to serve a democratic purpose rather than erode it. That framework must be clear and non-negotiable: strong civil rights protections, real transparency about outcomes, meaningful access for the families who need it most, and quality oversight that distinguishes genuine educational opportunity. Without it, pluralism fragments and trust erodes. With it, pluralism can expand opportunity while strengthening democracy.

Conclusion

A century ago, Horace Mann argued that the common school could form a common people. McGuire and Wilka are right to remind us that the formative ambition behind that vision is more necessary than ever. But “common” no longer means “uniform,” and it has not for some time. A community college in rural Oklahoma and a public flagship in Michigan can both serve the public good. A district school and a microschool can both prepare a student to think clearly, evaluate evidence, and participate in democratic life. The form is not the purpose. The form serves the purpose, when we hold it accountable to the purpose.

That is the work ahead. We will need to hold the formative mission steady while the institutional vehicle for that mission changes shape. We will need to build a public framework strong enough to make pluralism serve democracy rather than fragment it. And we will need to earn back trust by responding to the people the system exists to serve. Earning back trust is not a strategy. It is the discipline of meeting people where they are and serving the public good through whatever institutional forms can carry it.

The United States is experiencing the most drastic attacks on science in its modern history, as the government imposes unprecedented budget cuts on federal research agencies, undermines transparency, and casts scientific expertise as partisan. For many in Brazil, this moment feels disturbingly familiar. In 2023, the country emerged from four years under President Jair Bolsonaro—a period that revealed what climate denialism and authoritarian populism look like when they take root in power.

Bolsonaro’s government systematically dismantled Brazil’s research infrastructure between 2019 and 2022. It slashed the budgets of the country’s two main federal science funding agencies—Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development—to a fraction of their former size. His administration also harassed universities and branded researchers as ideological enemies; dismantled the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), which monitors and fines breaches of Brazil’s environmental law; and celebrated an 80 percent reduction in IBAMA fines on rural properties. The result was an explosion in deforestation rates, wildcat mining, invasion of public lands, and great social conflict. This instability also contributed to many young scientists leaving the country. For example, the Serrapilheira Institute, a nonprofit that promotes science, found that about 10 percent of its young grantees left Brazil, moving to countries like United Arab Emirates, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the United States.

Brazil, therefore, has already lived through what many other countries are now passing through or fear, and this experience offers painful but important lessons about how science philanthropy might act in times of political hostility. By supporting the preservation of public goods essential to science and democracy, using communication strategies that counteract polarization, and adopting a more coordinated and transnational approach to funding, philanthropy can be a stabilizing force.

Balancing Science Philanthropy and the Continuity of Evidence

In the United States, science philanthropy commands billions of dollars. In Brazil, the picture is dramatically different. The country’s largest private science funders—foundations such as Serrapilheira Institute, Ciência Pioneira Initiative, Boticário Foundation, and the Alana Institute—represent a very small fraction of the public science budget. Even at full strength, they could never replace the federal government’s support.

Yet this limitation may, paradoxically, be healthy. The temptation to view philanthropy as a substitute for the state is a trap for democracy. Science is a public good, and only elected governments should provide and finance a national strategy. Philanthropy can co-fund government initiatives, but its greatest contribution lies elsewhere: in agility, tolerance for risk, and the capacity to test alternative funding models. Rather than rescuing the system, philanthropy can act as its creative laboratory—supporting curiosity-driven research and incentivizing early-career scientists to tackle bold and risky questions with flexible funding. This complementary role preserves both the legitimacy of public science and the integrity of private giving; if philanthropy ever sought to replace the state, it would lose its ability to challenge it.

However, some moments of democratic backsliding may demand temporary and targeted philanthropic interventions to preserve public goods that are essential to science and democracy. Bolsonaro’s government did not merely neglect science—it actively sought to erase it. A vivid example emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the federal government downplayed the importance of the pandemic, putting the population at risk. The replacement of his Health Minister—a physician who had voiced doubts about the efficacy and safety of the drug hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus—with an army general who had no medical experience stands as a symbolic silencing of scientific voices. Bolsonaro also called COVID-19 a “little flu” and a “fantasy.” Yet nearly 700,000 people in Brazil died from it between 2020 and 2022.

In this context, the Todos Pela Saúde initiative—founded in April 2020 and led by the Itaú Unibanco bank in partnership with universities, hospitals, and public authorities—demonstrated how philanthropy can mobilize resources rapidly while reinforcing public capacity. By funding diagnostic research, coordinating epidemiological data, and supporting vaccine-related studies, it delivered timely data on where and when COVID-19 was spreading fastest, developed affordable rapid-testing kits, and produced models pinpointing effective interventions—efforts that allowed state and municipal authorities to respond with far greater precision.

Another striking philanthropic response came when the Bolsonaro government attempted to bring strategic environmental data under political control after its public attacks on Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). Bolsonaro accused INPE of spreading lies after it released data showing rising Amazon deforestation and dismissed the organization’s director soon afterward. His administration then transferred the responsibility for publicly releasing data on fires and forest burnings to a different agency under the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Institute of Meteorology. The move weakened an institution that had monitored and disclosed fire data for decades, and raised concerns about transparency at a moment of rising environmental scrutiny. The fallout was also diplomatic: In 2019, Norway and Germany froze new contributions to the Amazon Fund.

Importantly, databases like these are not just technical repositories—they are pillars of democratic governance that allow civil society, journalists, and researchers to hold institutions accountable and to anchor public debate in evidence. Their weakening endangers not only the continuity of scientific work but also the very capacity of society to deliberate on facts. The Brazilian experience exposed how political volatility can undermine the infrastructures that sustain both environmental policy and democratic trust.

Since this disruption, innovative and resilient initiatives such as the MapBiomas, funded by both national and international philanthropies to provide land-use and land-cover data from satellite imagery, have become essential to ensuring that the country does not depend solely on INPE data. Brazilian philanthropy has also begun to reflect more deeply on how to help protect the continuity of public goods. Foundations have convened scientists, policy makers, and civic leaders to discuss models of shared data governance—exploring how to shield critical datasets from political interference through redundancy, open access, and institutional cooperation. An international Science Meets Philanthropy seminar, for example, took place in November 2025 at the University of São Paulo, and a cohort of institutions are now discussing a Brazilian science philanthropy alliance to help ensure that collective knowledge can endure political turbulence without philanthropy assuming direct control.

The challenge, then, is to sustain evidence without usurping authority—to keep the lights of knowledge on while leaving the power grid in public hands. When governments falter, philanthropy’s role is to bridge discontinuities, not to redefine who governs science. This delicate balance between continuity and legitimacy ultimately safeguards both democracy and discovery.

Science Communication as a Counterforce to Polarization

One of the clearest lessons from Brazil’s recent experience is that defending science is not only a technical matter—it is political, cultural, and civic. Public understanding of science determines how a society responds to climate denialism, anti-vaccination movements, and disinformation. In a polarized world, science can become a rare vector of unity, helping societies rebuild trust and shared reality.

In addition to cuts to science research, the current US federal administration has made cuts to science journalism. An article in Undark emphasizes the important role that philanthropy plays in supporting media organizations in the country: “According to 2024 analyses by the membership organization Media Impact Funders, between 2018 and 2022, the top 25 funders collectively gave $1.1 billion towards journalism, and nearly three-quarters of all 47 organizations surveyed reported an increase in journalism grantmaking.”

Brazilian philanthropy has started to recognize the importance of science communication, but investments in the field are still modest. Over the past years, the Serrapilheira Institute has supported more than 130 initiatives in science journalism and media, including podcasts and YouTube channels. It has also supported the creation of independent platforms that connect researchers with journalists, such as Agência Bori and Amazônia Vox, making it easier to disseminate scientific information.

Projects such as Bori, which disseminates Brazilian scientific research under embargo to journalists registered on its platform, and the Ciência Fundamental column in Folha de S.Paulo, a publication that explores fundamental scientific questions for a non-specialist audience through the view of young scientists, have brought new perspectives on how science stories reach the public. These initiatives not only amplify scientific evidence but also help journalists navigate complex fields—from epidemiology to climate modeling.

Supporting science communication is not ancillary to research—it is a strategic investment in democracy. The goal is not simply to make science popular. It is to bring people closer to the scientific process, embed scientific reasoning into the cultural fabric of society, and—while recognizing other knowledge systems present in society—ensure that people see science not as an elite language, but as a truth-seeking practice. This vision reaffirms that scientific thinking belongs to everyone, not just to laboratories or ministries.

Building a Networked Defense for Global Science

Bolsonaro’s Brazil also exposed a structural vulnerability in global research: its limited capacity to respond in moments of political crisis. Thousands of scientists saw their projects collapse, their funding disappear, and their laboratories dismantled. Only a handful of international partnerships could offer temporary refuge.

This fragility highlights the need for a more coordinated and transnational approach to science philanthropy. Imagine if, during the Bolsonaro years, a global network of private foundations had offered emergency fellowships or temporary positions abroad for threatened Brazilian scientists. Today, such a system could operate in both directions: Latin America, Europe, and others might also host US researchers whose work becomes politically untenable.

These networks could act as a safety net for global science, preserving research continuity and the international flow of knowledge. They could be modeled on existing frameworks—rapid-response funds, shared mobility programs, and open-access data partnerships—to ensure that scientific communities remain resilient even when national politics falter.

As instability spreads across democracies, this idea grows increasingly strategic. Political cycles fluctuate, but science depends on long time horizons. International philanthropic collaboration could thus serve as a stabilizing force—a means to preserve inquiry, foster exchange, and resist isolationism. A networked defense of science is no longer a luxury; it is a prerequisite for the survival of evidence-based societies.

When people think of climate change, they tend to picture smokestacks, tailpipes, or high-rise buildings. They rarely think of the bridges we cross, the tunnels we pass through, or the roads that hold our cities together. Yet cement, steel, and asphalt are among the most carbon-intensive materials in the global economy. The World Green Building Council reports that buildings and construction together account for roughly 39 percent of global energy-related carbon emissions, with approximately 11 percent attributable to embodied carbon (the emissions locked into materials during extraction, manufacturing, and transport). Once a bridge is poured or a tunnel is lined, those emissions are fixed.

As a structural engineer, I encounter this gap in practice. When I specify materials for bridges and structural systems, I know that the carbon consequences of those choices are fixed the moment concrete is poured or steel is erected. For most of my career, embodied carbon was not a standard part of design conversations. That is beginning to change, not because of any single technology, but because of coalitions: Groups of actors who do not typically work together, finding ways to align around a shared problem.

Infrastructure decisions shape which communities bear the greatest burden of carbon-intensive construction and which gain the resilience benefits of forward-looking design. But reducing embodied carbon in infrastructure is not a narrow technical problem. It is a systems challenge at the intersection of procurement, materials science, community development, and public finance. When a state agency requires lower-carbon materials in public works, it simultaneously shifts supply chains, changes how engineers specify products, and creates opportunities for manufacturers who have invested in cleaner production. When a city mandates pre-demolition salvage audits, it connects environmental goals with local employment in deconstruction and reuse. When engineering firms benchmark their embodied carbon performance against peers, they create professional norms that ripple across thousands of projects.

Seen this way, infrastructure decarbonization is a social innovation agenda, with an outcome that no single actor can produce alone. Engineers cannot change procurement rules. Policy makers cannot redesign structural systems. Nonprofits cannot scale material reuse without data from engineering firms. But each holds a piece of the solution.

The four cases that follow illustrate how coalitions are forming to connect these pieces, from established results to work that is still nascent or struggling.

1. Procurement Power and ‘Buy Clean’ Policies

In October 2017, California Governor Jerry Brown signed the first “Buy Clean” law in the United States, requiring suppliers of four categories of materials used in state-funded projects to submit facility-specific Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) disclosing the global warming potential (GWP) of their products, as well as empowering the California Department of General Services (DGS) to set maximum acceptable GWP limits at the industry average and review those limits every three years (while, by statute, only adjusting them downward, ensuring that standards tighten over time).

The coalition behind this policy brought together actors with distinct but aligned interests. State agencies, including the California Air Resources Board and Caltrans, established reporting requirements and enforcement. The BlueGreen Alliance, a national partnership of labor unions and environmental organizations, built the political case for the legislation and subsequently launched a campaign to bring Buy Clean to other states. The American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) engaged in the policy design process and supported the development of industry-wide EPDs. (Domestic steel producers operating electric arc furnaces, which have lower carbon intensity than the blast furnace production common among international competitors, had a competitive interest in transparency requirements, making industry participation a matter of market advantage rather than mere compliance.)

California spends approximately $10 billion annually on infrastructure, so requiring carbon disclosure as a condition of bidding on public work uses the state’s purchasing power to create a competitive market for lower-carbon materials without mandating specific production technologies. This approach has limitations, of course; Buy Clean laws cover a narrow set of materials, and the original California law notably excluded concrete, the single most carbon-intensive material in most infrastructure projects. The requirement for facility-specific EPDs also imposes costs on smaller manufacturers who may lack the resources to produce them, raising concerns about market consolidation. And the downward ratchet mechanism, while powerful in principle, depends on the quality and consistency of the underlying data, which varies across material categories.

Since then, nine states have enacted Buy Clean laws or equivalent standards: California, Oregon (2022), Colorado (2021), Washington (2024), New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. Colorado’s law extends beyond buildings to horizontal infrastructure, covering roads and bridges. New York established GWP standards specifically for concrete mixes in state building and transportation projects, becoming the first state to do so for concrete. In November 2024, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) awarded $1.2 billion to 39 state departments of transportation under the Low Carbon Transportation Materials (LCTM) program, funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, to support the use of lower-carbon concrete, steel, asphalt, and glass on federally aided highway projects.

In early 2025, the Trump administration rescinded Executive Order 14057, which had established the federal Buy Clean program. But state agencies and the U.S. Climate Alliance have continued to house and lead the partnership independently, showing that the coalition infrastructure built over seven years has durability beyond a single administration. For structural engineers, the shift is tangible: An EPD is no longer an afterthought appended to a submittal, but is part of the initial procurement decision.

2. Circular Construction in New York City

While procurement policy can reshape markets, New York City illustrates how a public agency can move beyond setting standards and begins actively building a coalition around circular construction. In March 2024, New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) released Circular Design and Construction Guidelines applying across its roughly $9 billion capital portfolio. But the guidelines were one component of a larger strategy, a Green Economy Action Plan that projects 400,000 green-collar jobs in New York City by 2040, with an explicit commitment to creating pathways for residents from environmentally disadvantaged communities. The social innovation dimension is structural, not decorative: Circular construction is not only an emissions reduction strategy but part of an economic development and equity agenda.

New York’s approach centers on building a coalition around implementation. In 2024, Buro Happold hosted cross-industry convenings with contractors, salvage specialists, material innovators, and design teams across project boundaries, connecting what comes out of one deconstruction project with what goes into the next. Cornell University’s Circular Construction Lab, working with the CR0WD Network, contributed state-level policy analysis, while Brooklyn-based architecture studio CO Adaptive conducted salvage operations at the Hunter College Brookdale Campus, the first major project to follow the city’s circular guidelines.

The real test of this coalition is now underway. The construction of SPARC Kips Bay, a nearly two-million-square-foot science and research campus at Hunter College’s Brookdale Campus in Manhattan, is expected to create more than 15,000 total jobs and generate $42 billion in economic impact over 30 years; NYCEDC estimates that circular construction methods on the publicly funded portions of the site will reduce embodied carbon by 26,400 metric tons, equivalent to taking roughly 5,800 cars off the road.

The challenges of circular construction at this scale are substantial, requiring coordinating the timing of materials coming out of one building with the specifications of another, across different contractors, different schedules, and different structural requirements. Storage, certification, and insurance for reclaimed materials remain unresolved at the system level, and while the matchmaking convenings organized by Buro Happold revealed demand, they also exposed the gap between aspiration and logistics: Participation was limited, and the reuse stories that emerged remain, as Buro Happold acknowledged, in draft form. Much investment will be required to make reuse work at commercial scale, as reliable rather than heroic. At least seven additional construction projects in New York City have begun rethinking demolition for deconstruction since the guidelines were published.

3. Professional Accountability

Structural engineering is fundamentally conservative, and for good reason: Structural failure is catastrophic, so the profession defaults to proven materials and established methods. An unintended consequence has been that carbon reduction entered mainstream structural practice very slowly. The SE 2050 Commitment Program is changing that from within the profession, and it is doing so through peer accountability. (I contribute nationally to the SE 2050 initiative and co-lead the Bridge Group within Infrastructure 2050, so I write here both as an observer and as a participant).

In 2016, at the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF) at the University of Washington, an interim working group developed a data-driven commitment for structural engineering firms to pursue zero embodied carbon in buildings. In 2018, Frances Yang of Arup and Wil Srubar of the University of Colorado Boulder proposed the SE 2050 Challenge to the Sustainability Committee of the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI), a division of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). In December 2019, the SEI Board of Governors voted unanimously to support the program, and by April 2020, it became an official initiative of SEI.

Participating firms sign a formal commitment and then develop an Embodied Carbon Action Plan (ECAP) organized around education, reporting, reduction strategies, and advocacy. They also input project-level embodied carbon data into a shared database, building a national dataset that enables benchmarking across regions, building types, and structural systems.

The program’s 2024 Annual Report already documents measurable shifts. Firms tracking embodied carbon at early design stages, when material choices have the greatest influence, have doubled from 20 percent to 40 percent, and firms including project case studies in their ECAPs rose from 17 percent to 27 percent. Firms reporting limited resources to conduct whole-building lifecycle assessments fell from 11 percent to 5 percent, suggesting that the analytical tools are becoming more accessible.

The peer accountability makes this a coalition rather than simply a voluntary program. Firms benchmark their performance against one another and public signatory badges create reputational incentives. When a firm’s competitors are publishing ECAPs and reporting data, the internal pressure to participate becomes professional rather than ideological. Younger engineers, who have grown up with climate literacy, can use this transparency to advocate for change within their organizations.

That said, SE 2050 is voluntary, and the firms signing on tend to already be inclined toward sustainability. The harder challenge is reaching firms that see embodied carbon as a compliance burden, who constitute the majority of structural engineering practice. Moreover, the program’s focus on buildings leaves a significant gap, since most of the concrete and steel in the built environment goes into infrastructure. That infrastructure gap has led to Infrastructure 2050, an effort to extend embodied carbon reduction to bridges, tunnels, ports, roadways, and utility systems. (I co-lead the Bridge Group within this initiative.)

The work is difficult. Bridge engineers are accustomed to optimizing for strength, cost, and constructability, and adding a fourth variable into a profession that moves slowly, for good reason, requires patience, data, and above all trust among peers. However, downstream effects of this professional momentum are becoming visible in codes and standards. The American Concrete Institute published its first low-carbon concrete code, ACI 323, in 2024, creating a pathway for jurisdictions and agencies to adopt lower-carbon concrete specifications.

4. Disaster Recovery and the Opportunity to Rebuild Differently

This final case is not a story of a mature coalition producing measurable outcomes, but of a crisis that reveals why such coalitions are so urgently needed. Hurricane Helene made landfall on September 26, 2024, leaving a trail of destruction across the southeastern United States. The most severe damage occurred in western North Carolina, where flash floods and landslides caused catastrophic harm to roads, bridges, and water systems. FEMA allocated $33 million for emergency replacement of public bridges across eleven counties, and more than 10,500 families received federal funds to rebuild and repair private-access roads and bridges. Total federal recovery spending in western North Carolina exceeded $2.7 billion, including over $2 billion for debris removal, more than 15 million cubic yards.

As a structural engineer, what strikes me about these figures is not just the scale of destruction but the rebuilding pattern they imply. Historically, disaster recovery replicates the same designs: Damaged bridges are replaced with equivalent structures using the same materials and methods. Each replacement locks in decades of embodied carbon. Each design that replicates past fragility ensures the community faces the same failure in the next major storm. The cycle is expensive, carbon-intensive, and inequitable: The communities most exposed to repeated climate disasters are often those with the fewest resources.

Cross-sector coordination in Helene’s aftermath has been primarily humanitarian, focused on restoring access rather than reducing embodied carbon. Restoring damaged private roads and bridges in communities that public budgets cannot easily reach is important work, and its coordination model—connecting federal resources, faith-based organizations, and local communities around specific infrastructure needs—demonstrates exactly the kind of cross-sector alignment that could, in future disasters, be designed to incorporate lower-carbon materials and modular construction.

The policy mechanisms for such integration already exist, but in the aftermath of a disaster, speed dominates every other consideration. Communities need bridges rebuilt in weeks, not months. Specifying lower-carbon concrete or evaluating modular alternatives takes time that emergency managers do not feel they have. The coalition that could connect low-carbon materials programs with disaster recovery does not yet exist in any operational form. Building it would require pre-positioning lower-carbon specifications in state emergency procurement protocols, so that when the next storm hits, the default option is already the better one.

Major hurricanes and floods produce billions of dollars in infrastructure reconstruction. If even a fraction of that spending were directed toward lower-carbon, more resilient designs, the cumulative impact on both emissions and community outcomes would be significant. The precedents from procurement, reuse, and professional accountability coalitions described above suggest what such a disaster recovery coalition could look like.

What These Coalitions Teach Us

Three patterns distinguish the coalitions that are making progress.

1. Incentives that make participation rational rather than heroic. California’s Buy Clean law leveraged $10 billion in annual infrastructure spending to create competitive pressure among suppliers. NYCEDC embedded circularity targets into its $9 billion capital portfolio, making circular construction a condition of doing business with the city. SE 2050’s signatory badges and peer benchmarking create professional incentives. Firms participate because their competitors do, not solely because it is the right thing to do. The lesson for social innovators: If your coalition requires altruism to function, it will not scale.

2. Embed equity from the outset rather than adding it as an afterthought. NYCEDC’s guidelines are part of a Green Economy Action Plan with explicit workforce commitments. SPARC’s $1.6 billion contract operates under a Project Labor Agreement, and a Community Task Force shapes public realm design. Bridging Together’s focus on private roads and bridges serves the most isolated families, those for whom a washed-out road means complete disconnection from employment, healthcare, and schools. Equity is not a secondary benefit of these coalitions. It is part of what holds them together.

3. Peer and market pressure normalize climate responsibility faster than regulation alone. The competitive dynamics among structural engineering firms in SE 2050, the growing number of states whose Buy Clean laws send coordinated demand signals, and the cross-project convenings in New York City all create shared expectations that make lower-carbon practice the emerging norm. But this dynamic has a shadow side: Firms and jurisdictions that are not part of these networks feel no pressure at all. The gap between leaders and laggards is widening, and the coalitions have not yet found a reliable way to close it.

Looking Forward

Nine states have Buy Clean laws on the books, and the U.S. Climate Alliance continues to coordinate the multistate partnership even as federal policy shifts. NYCEDC’s guidelines are being tested on an active $1.6 billion project, with deconstruction underway and at least seven additional developments rethinking demolition for deconstruction across New York City. The SE 2050 signatory base continues to grow, and the April 2026 SE 2050 Summit at Structures Congress in Boston will convene engineers from across North America to share case studies and deepen collaborative networks. The FHWA’s LCTM awards to 39 state DOTs provide a funding mechanism that, if connected to disaster recovery planning, could transform how we rebuild after climate events.

What remains missing is a broader shift in mindset: Seeing infrastructure decarbonization not as a niche technical upgrade, but as a social innovation imperative, one that requires the same kind of cross-sector coalition-building that SSIR’s readers apply to health, education, and poverty.

The cost of inaction is already visible. Hurricane Helene caused $9.8 billion in transportation infrastructure damage in a single state. Each rebuilding cycle adds emissions from cement and steel while the communities least equipped to absorb repeated shocks bear the greatest burden. If we continue to rebuild the same way, we entrench a cycle of fragility: high costs, high emissions, low resilience. Infrastructure should serve as a shield against climate disruption, not a recurring liability.

For leaders in the social sector, infrastructure offers a practical and powerful lever for innovation. Nonprofits can advocate for equity-centered procurement and accountability, as the BlueGreen Alliance has done in advancing Buy Clean policies across nine states. Philanthropy can de-risk pilots and enable coalitions to form, as funders have done through Cornell’s CR0WD Network and through the feasibility work undergirding NYCEDC’s circular guidelines. Governments can embed embodied carbon standards into public works, as California, New York, Colorado, and their peers are demonstrating, and use their convening power to align actors across project boundaries. Businesses can partner across sectors to scale proven approaches, as Skanska is doing under a Project Labor Agreement at SPARC and as structural engineering firms across North America are doing through their SE 2050 commitments.

Infrastructure has always been about connection: joining places, enabling movement, linking communities to opportunity. But it has also been, for too long, a system that locks in harm without asking whether the next bridge or tunnel could be built differently. The coalitions described here are beginning to ask that question. Their work is imperfect, incomplete, and often slower than the climate demands. But they exist, and they are growing. The question for the rest of us is whether we will join them before the concrete sets.

Since the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID—alongside big reductions in overseas development aid by the UK, Germany, France and other nations—it is been clear that the development landscape is being fundamentally reshaped. The numbers are sobering: Development assistance for health alone fell 21 percent between 2024 and 2025 (driven by a 67 percent drop in US financing), which researchers at The Lancet estimate could contribute to up to 14 million additional preventable deaths by 2030.

This is not a temporary funding trough. This is a structural rupture in how the world has funded global development.

And yet, even before, the traditional model was never adequate to the challenge. Overseas development aid (ODA) and philanthropy together provide only one dollar for every twenty needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, and no realistic expansion of donor generosity could ever close that gap.

International NGOs have, for too long, been focused on approaches that depend entirely on aid budgets, while underemphasizing market-based solutions, whose concepts of “return on investment” sit uncomfortably in a sector shaped by charitable instincts.

Moreover, the dominant funding instrument in international development—the project grant, for an average of 18 months—is poorly suited to solving complex, entrenched social problems. To meaningfully shift education outcomes, break cycles of poverty, or build a resilient health system, you need to be active in a community for a decade or more.

The Right Diagnosis, The Wrong Prescription

In the face of new developments, the inadequacy of the old model for global development has been the subject of much debate. For example, in a recent Renaissance Philanthropy column, “Philanthropy 2.0: What the Evolution of For-Profit Investment Tells Us About the Future of Giving,” a group of authors drew on the evolution of venture capital, to argue that philanthropic capital should be structured around a limited partner/general partner model, in which donors act as LPs, but defer to expert fund managers on grantmaking and portfolio construction. This division of labour, so productive in commercial investing, is genuinely rare in philanthropy, and the analogy is persuasive precisely because it addresses a real dysfunction.

As Mark Kramer and Marc Pfitzer recently argued, philanthropists have long assumed that financial success reflects a wisdom transferable to social change. But where is the evidence that is true?

Expertise does not often transfer across different domains: Einstein was no good at painting, and Picasso couldn’t do math. Carnegie would never have turned for business advice to his contemporary Mahatma Gandhi, a legendary leader of social change — so why do we assume Carnegie understood how to create a better society, or that today’s billionaires do?

An LP/GP model corrects for this problem, putting domain experts rather than donors in the driver’s seat. But even this approach misses a fuller opportunity, by treating philanthropy as the primary pool of capital to be restructured. That is, unfortunately, like redesigning a bucket when what is needed is a pipeline. The most pressing social and environmental challenges of our time require capital at a scale that philanthropy simply cannot reach. We need structures capable of mobilizing a far wider range of capital simultaneously: ODA, DFI financing, impact investment, corporate capital, philanthropic funding (both grants and investment capital), and technical assistance, each playing a distinct role in a coherent architecture.

Moreover, expert fund managers with deep domain knowledge are necessary but not sufficient. Effective development finance also requires long-term, trusted relationships with communities, the ability to work with—rather than around—government systems, and expertise in navigating the political economy of change. These capabilities take decades to build. They live inside organizations like Save the Children, not inside newly formed fund vehicles. As Ann Mei Chang and Laura Lanzerotti explain, organizations seeking to drive innovation must build a second engine alongside their core operations, leveraging the scale and trust of the existing platform rather than discarding it.

A New Engine, Not a New Organization

Save the Children Global Ventures (SCGV) was designed to solve this problem, and respond to this moment, by combining our brand, trust, technical depth, and community relationships with a stand-alone team capable of designing and managing blended finance vehicles.

For example, our Generation Empowerment Fund, focused on sub-Saharan Africa, illustrates the model in practice: The Fund deploys capital through a layered structure, in which first-loss and concessionary investors act as anchors and DFI guarantees provide protection for highly risk averse but much larger, institutional investors. Because SCGV is also a foundation, it can attract technical assistance grants alongside the investment capital, further enhancing impact without diluting financial returns. Critically, capital can be allocated to the most appropriate implementing entity, from local entrepreneurs and financial institutions to domestic and international NGOs, which—because of Save the Children’s government relationships—can be integrated into and support national education systems, building sustainability that no short-cycle grant can achieve.

We are now developing a second vehicle: the Asia Health Fund, focused on Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Pacific, markets where Save the Children has operated for over 75 years and programs more than USD $100 million in annual health work. The Asia Health Fund will target telehealth, nutrition, frontline health worker training, and underserved health needs of women and children. Its architecture employs a two-class waterfall structure: a concessional Class A tranche, funded by Save the Children, partner health NGOs, and global health philanthropists, who agree to defer returns above a 7 percent hurdle until Class B investors reach a 15 percent target. This return enhancement mechanism is designed to give commercial LPs the confidence to commit patient capital to emerging market health investing over a 10-year horizon. The social returns should also be significant: Evidence suggests every $1 invested in digital health has the potential to generate $5 in health system savings; every $1 spent on addressing undernutrition returns an estimated $23 in economic value.

The Asia health investment market is already demonstrating that financial returns and social impact are mutually reinforcing, not in tension. Eighty-nine percent of Asia-focused impact investors report financial returns in line with or exceeding expectations, a clear signal that scalable health solutions in the region can generate attractive risk-adjusted returns. New technologies are accelerating this further. Advances in artificial intelligence are making high-quality clinical intelligence abundant and cheap, increasingly outperforming humans in specific diagnostic tasks and dramatically lowering the cost of care in low-resource settings. This is precisely why SCGV invested in ThinkMD three years ago, equipping frontline health workers and family caregivers with AI tools that improve the quality, consistency, and reach of care where trained clinicians are scarce or absent.

Both funds embody the LP/GP principle but extend it to encompass a broader range of capital and anchor it in the operational depth that only an INGO platform can provide.

SCGV’s commercial funds are complemented by a third vehicle designed to do things that market capital cannot: take the earliest, highest-risk bets. The Children’s Impact Multiplier Fund, launched in October 2023, is an evergreen venture philanthropy fund, backed by tax-deductible donations rather than investment capital. This makes it SCGV’s most flexible and catalytic tool, able to invest earlier in a company’s lifecycle, absorb risks that would be unacceptable to a DFI or many impact investors, and test an investment thesis before deploying it at scale through a commercial fund.

In practice, this pipeline function is already proving its value. The Multiplier Fund made an early investment in Jackfruit Finance, a Nairobi-based EdTech lender that uses AI-powered credit scoring to provide affordable financing to low-cost private schools in Kenya. That investment built the evidence base and our confidence to allow the Generation Empowerment Fund to make a larger follow-on investment. Similarly, the Multiplier Fund invested in Goshen, a microfinance institution, on the specific condition that it on-lend to low-cost early childhood education providers in Rwanda, an early proof point for the blended finance model at the heart of the Generation Empowerment Fund’s design. Philanthropic capital, deployed with investment discipline, seeded the thesis that commercial capital is now scaling.

This pipeline structure—from venture philanthropy to blended finance to commercial fund—is one of the most important features of SCGV’s architecture. It is also what distinguishes SCGV from a conventional fund manager: the ability to use the full spectrum of capital, from fully concessional to fully commercial, as an integrated toolkit.

Not everyone is convinced that the middle ground between philanthropy and commercial investing is as fertile as we suggest. Kevin Starr argued recently that “there is no such thing as impact investing” and the $1.57 trillion claiming the label is mostly commercial capital with good intentions and that real change in poor communities requires genuinely concessionary finance. He is right that there is often a trade-off between return and impact.

But a binary framework obscures what a well-designed capital stack can achieve. SCGV’s funds are deliberately structured so that concessionary capital—from the Multiplier Fund, from Class A investors in the Asia Health Fund, from concessionary investors and DFI guarantees in the GenEm Fund—does the work that commercial capital cannot: absorbing first-loss risk, funding technical assistance and reaching the communities that market logic alone would bypass. The commercial tranches are not pretending to do development work. They are riding on the foundation that concessionary capital has laid—and in doing so, they bring a volume of resources to bear that philanthropy alone never could. As Kusi Hornberger argued in response to Starr, the question is not whether this middle space exists, but whether it actually delivers outcomes. That is precisely the standard to which SCGV holds itself.

Unlocking the Endowment

There is a final dimension most discussions of innovative finance overlook: The vast majority of philanthropic foundations are deploying only a fraction of their available capital for impact. Globally, foundations and donor-advised funds collectively hold enormous assets—DAFs in the US alone exceeded $250 billion by the end of 2023—yet most of this capital sits in conventional investment portfolios generating no social return whatsoever. The “5 percent rule” dictating that a minimum share of assets be distributed annually while the rest is invested conventionally represents a massive, ongoing missed opportunity.

The Paul Ramsay Foundation in Australia has recently modelled a more ambitious path. In early 2026, PRF updated its Investment Policy Statement to formally embed a Total Impact Approach across its entire endowment—not merely a ring-fenced allocation—increasing its Endowment Impact Fund target to 20 percent of its portfolio, now standing at $150 million in commitments. This is the direction of travel for sophisticated foundations serious about maximizing their social return.

For global development, the implications are significant. Foundations prepared to act as catalytic, limited partners by deploying endowment capital into vehicles like the Generation Empowerment Fund or the Asia Health Fund, alongside DFI and commercial capital, can generate both financial returns and outsized impact, without spending down their corpus.

That is the total impact approach: not choosing between investment return and social return but insisting on both.

Philanthropy Is Still Critical (and Perhaps More Important Than Ever)

None of this means traditional philanthropy is obsolete. There are contexts—acute humanitarian crises, high-conflict fragile states, child protection emergencies—where fast, flexible grant funding is the only appropriate response. When children are at immediate risk in a disaster zone, the right answer is not a blended finance vehicle. The work Save the Children does in these contexts is vital, and demand for it will only grow as conflicts multiply and climate change accelerates.

But for the more sophisticated funder of international development, the question should always be: Is there a way to make this capital go further? To be more catalytic? To attract development finance or private sector capital alongside my contribution? That question, asked honestly and answered with the right structures, is what will close the funding gaps that philanthropy alone never can.

The world we face in 2026 demands a wholesale reimagining of how development capital is structured, deployed, and sustained. The tools exist. The trusted platforms exist. What is needed now is the ambition to use them.

Reaching scale has long been a central organizing ambition of international development, but is too rarely achieved and even more often, is not lasting. Recent foreign assistance cuts have made this painfully visible: When programs are built on donor funding, donor systems, and donor management, they do not survive the donor’s exit.

We are by no means the first to suggest that donor funding is limited when it comes to reaching people in need with social services and that there are more sustainable paths to pursue. We have followed the evolution of this discourse in SSIR, reflecting deeply on multiple hard-hitting articles just this past year.

Five years ago, well before the recent aid cuts, the team at the Eleanor Crook Foundation asked a simple but uncomfortable question: If we already know how to prevent and treat malnutrition, why do millions of children continue to suffer? Why do so few people receive these life-saving interventions? And what would it take for a donor like us to help change that?

In trying to answer this question, we identified three pathways for programs to reach scale and concluded that not all of them lead to the same place.

• Sometimes a window of opportunity creates rapid adoption: An outbreak forces a nationwide replication of a locally designed case-tracking tool. Or a political champion, for example, a prime minister, publicly orders that every local hospital must be able to identify and treat severely malnourished children and mandates expansion.
• Sometimes external or normative pressure drives uptake: donor conditionality, peer influence, or simply the momentum of “everyone is doing it.”
• And sometimes, donors and partners choose accompaniment as the pathway to scale. Accompaniment is a term used by the late Dr. Paul Farmer to describe a fundamentally different approach to partnership for service delivery grounded in solidarity with the community in need. In global philanthropy, we define accompaniment as walking alongside governments with humility and empathy, while working in sustainable, deliberate partnership to embed programs into national systems, budgets, and routines.

The first two pathways can initiate or expand programs, but they rarely sustain them. When the triggering crisis passes or the external pressure fades, programs tend to contract or collapse entirely. Accompaniment is different. It is not necessarily a method of reaching scale faster, but it is a method of reaching scale that lasts.

As a US-based philanthropy focused on ending child deaths from malnutrition, we have deliberately changed course and employed an accompaniment approach in our programmatic grantmaking. Previously, like many philanthropies with issue-based missions, we organized our grantmaking around key technical questions, like whether bundling interventions can improve nutrition outcomes or how to reduce the cost of wasting treatment. Despite contributing to a growing and robust evidence base about what works in treating malnutrition, we realized we were not meaningfully moving the needle on delivering care to the people who need it most.

We needed to move from being a global grant maker to a long-term country partner—not to run programs, but to accompany governments as they do the hard work of turning interventions into routine services. Thanks to a grant from Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) in 2023, we were able to take that step. Our continuing work with the Government of Nepal to scale two high-impact malnutrition interventions illustrates what an accompaniment approach looks like in practice and has surfaced lessons we believe are relevant well beyond Nepal.

Scaling Malnutrition Solutions

Despite significant national progress in reducing some forms of malnutrition, wasting, the deadliest form of malnutrition, remains a persistent challenge. In Nepal, about 8 percent of children under 5 suffer from wasting, a rate that exceeds global targets. In some provinces, that number is even higher, with one province having as many as 16 percent of children suffering from wasting. Additionally, a third of women of reproductive age are anemic, posing serious risks to their health and nutrition if they become pregnant.

ECF started working with the government of Nepal in 2023 to support the government’s approach to scale the coverage of two highly cost-effective, evidence-backed malnutrition interventions. Wasting treatment with ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTF) is lifesaving for children who are severely malnourished, and, separately, comprehensive prenatal multivitamins (known as MMS) improve maternal nutrition and prevent babies from being born too small and too soon.

We decided to work with the government of Nepal on this targeted scaling effort for a few reasons. There is a relatively strong health system in place in Nepal, with a network of well-trained community health workers who serve as the backbone. As a result, most women receive antenatal care, which is critical for accessing prenatal vitamins. The country is also uniquely positioned to own improvements in access to wasting treatment since it previously financed procurement of RUTF from its national budget. This strong infrastructure, combined with an openness to further address malnutrition issues, made Nepal a good fit for this work.

Accompaniment has been central to how ECF has approached the scale-up of both wasting treatment and maternal nutrition programs. Nepal’s Ministry of Health and Population has defined research projects, policy reform needs, and developed a financing road map. In each case, ECF has followed the government’s lead to invest in strengthening health systems and their leadership. We have been joined by international and local partners who have committed to an accompaniment approach to impact.

Based on our experience, we offer five principles for what accompaniment requires in practice:

1. Plan for scale from day one. This means committing from the beginning to a government-set vision rather than a short-term project approach and making sure that vision is shared among supporting partners. In Nepal, we were clear early on that ECF funding for research should inform operational challenges related to scaling solutions and shape how MMS could be introduced through government systems. We collaborated closely with government officials to create a plan for national expansion and supported that goal in practical and political ways. Our technical partner, Helen Keller International, is now working closely with the government to develop a road map for scaling MMS, outlining the sequence of policy, financing, procurement, and delivery steps needed to progress from initial introduction to nationwide coverage.

2. Design for institutionalization and government-run systems. Scaling requires thinking about the whole system from the beginning—not just the intervention, but how every facet of government, from supply chains, financing, and partner coordination will need to function together. The government must lead on supervision, reporting, and decision-making. Partners play a supporting role: coaching, troubleshooting, providing tools, absorbing short-term surge demand, but never running a parallel system that the government can’t sustain on its own. In Nepal, we clearly delineated what our philanthropy would fund and what the government would fund. For example, health worker training on wasting treatment is paid for by the government, while ECF funded the development of the training manual. And in the short term, ECF is supporting scale-up of MMS in one province, while the government works toward a plan for national scale-up across all provinces.

3. Understand incentives for government bureaucrats to lead reforms and achieve scale. In the public sector, the term incentive can carry a negative connotation, but global development actors must understand what drives decision-making because that is what moves the work forward. We knew that a prerequisite to scaling up malnutrition solutions was updating Nepal’s Essential Medicines List (EML) to include important nutrition commodities. Our government partners wanted to update the entire list rather than adding the nutrition commodities to the existing EML. So, we supported a full EML revision, going beyond our organizational mandate on malnutrition, because updating the entire list of more than 4,000 medicines to strengthen the overall health system was the real incentive that encouraged decision-makers to act.

4. Build an accountability and ownership narrative. Accompaniment does not end when a policy is adopted or a government ministry endorses a scale-up road map. Sustained scale requires two things working in tandem: Citizens and communities actively expecting and demanding services, and national leaders with the conviction that delivering those services is worth sustained political investment. We work with government partners not only to design delivery systems, but to equip them with a clear story about why maternal and child nutrition matters: as a human capital imperative, an equity issue, and a measure of state effectiveness. As part of our advocacy effort, we are working to develop politically resonant narratives that can raise malnutrition higher on the political agenda and bring it more prominently into public discourse, helping strengthen public accountability and deepen government ownership. Accompaniment without accountability risks creating programs the government inherits but never truly owns.

5. Be patient and redefine success metrics. Scaling takes time, and finding wins along the way is essential to sustaining commitment. Institutionalization markers like updated guidelines, protocol adoption, and newly functional procurement cycles are real signals of progress, even when coverage remains stagnant. It indicates that the system is advancing toward government ownership, and it codifies progress in that direction. The path won’t be linear. Working with any government requires navigating election cycles, unforeseen global and domestic crises, and at times slow-moving, bureaucratic processes. When Nepal faced political turmoil and government collapse in September 2025, we remained patient and engaged, working with an interim government and, after peaceful elections, a newly formed government. Philanthropy willing to celebrate milestones along the way and commit to the long arc of institutional change with long-term, flexible funding will see the payoff.

Pathway to Progress

This approach won’t work in every setting. Accompaniment requires a strong government counterpart, making it less feasible in humanitarian settings. It also needs to be tailored to each context, something that happens most naturally when national governments, with their unique realities, are truly in the driver’s seat. MMS is now being introduced in Lumbini province, one of the poorest regions in Nepal, with the potential to reach more than 100,000 pregnant women and their babies with improved nutrition this year. A road map for national MMS scale-up by 2030 is being considered by the government—and would set the course for transformative impact across generations.

The progress in just three years, and amidst a change in government, is remarkable. That being said, we are still in the early stages of this journey in Nepal, and we are learning as we go. The work ahead—navigating procurement cycles, transitioning to end-to-end domestic financing, and sustaining political will through government and leadership turnover—is less visible and immediate than launching an ECF-funded child malnutrition program. But it is what genuine accompaniment demands.

We’re on track to help Nepal sharply reduce malnutrition and give more children the chance to survive and thrive. And we’re doing it through the only path to scale that lasts.

In the United States, we ask state and local governments to do a great deal with limited resources. Every budget cycle requires trade-offs among competing priorities, often under intense time pressure and political scrutiny. In that environment, public dollars frequently flow toward programs that are familiar, longstanding, or administratively convenient rather than those most likely to produce lasting positive outcomes. The result is missed opportunity, despite the best intentions of public leaders.

This problem is especially frustrating because the evidence base for public policy has grown substantially over the past two decades. In that time, rigorous evaluations have identified interventions that improve outcomes in education, workforce development, and economic mobility. Some have demonstrated success across multiple settings, while others have shown strong promise and a clear theory of change supported by credible research. Policy makers know far more today than they once did about what works.

The challenge is how to use that evidence to drive budgets.

We come to this problem from different vantage points: philanthropy, state government, and the evidence-building field. Over the past two years, we have worked together on an approach designed to help states move proven programs from promising ideas to funded priorities. The State Partnership for Proven Programs model uses an advance philanthropic funding commitment to unlock matched public investment, overcome inertia, and reorient spending toward evidence-based solutions. It’s designed not simply to fund effective programs at scale, but to change how governments approach funding decisions by aligning incentives, authority, and accountability around evidence.

The Problem With Traditional Social Spending

Most public social spending is governed by formulas, legacy programs, and incremental adjustments to prior-year budgets. These structures offer predictability and administrative ease, but they also favor inertia over effectiveness. Once a program is funded, it tends to stay funded, regardless of whether it delivers strong results. New programs, even those supported by solid evidence, must compete for scarce discretionary dollars and often face steep barriers to entry.

Bureaucracy tends to reinforce this dynamic. State agencies are rightly cautious about taking on new initiatives that require complex coordination, changes to procurement, or new implementation capacity. Meanwhile, advocates for existing programs often have established constituencies and relationships that help preserve the status quo.

The costs of this structure are real. Dollars that could be directed toward interventions with a proven track record of success like improving graduation rates, increasing earnings, or reducing youth involvement with the justice system instead remain tied up in programs that may do little to change outcomes. Opportunities to scale effective solutions are lost, not because they lack credible evidence, but because funding systems are not designed to reward proof of impact. This may sound like a wonky budgeting problem, but the consequences are deeply human: fewer students completing college, fewer young people receiving effective support, and fewer families benefiting from programs that could improve their lives.

Investing in Evidence

The central innovation of this model is the use of an advance philanthropic funding commitment to change the calculus of public investment.

Under the model, a philanthropic partner (in this case, Arnold Ventures) commits funding upfront, contingent on the state matching those dollars and directing the combined investment toward a menu of programs supported by rigorous evidence. This advance commitment functions as a catalyst. It reduces fiscal risk for the state, creates a clear incentive to engage with more evidence-based interventions, and opens space for conversations that might otherwise stall.

This approach differs fundamentally from social impact bonds or pay-for-success contracts. Those models ask investors to bear the risk while government waits to see if outcomes materialize. The State Partnership model inverts the logic: Philanthropy commits upfront to reduce government’s perceived risk of investing in programs where the evidence already exists, but where funding systems have failed to follow. The first question is no longer simply “Does this work?” For selected programs, rigorous evaluations have already answered that. The harder question is “How do we get proven programs funded at scale?”

Several elements are essential to making this work. First, public leadership must be fully bought in. Public partners, which can be state agencies, local government, or school districts, retain control over program selection and implementation, ensuring that investments align with local priorities and political realities. Second, the partners must share a commitment to using evidence as a practical guide to decision-making; investments are limited to programs that meet the agreed-upon evidence and implementation criteria. Third, the partnership includes technical support to help policy makers assess research, compare options, and design implementation plans that maintain program fidelity.

At the heart of the model is the program menu, and how it’s built matters as much as what’s on it. The menu is intentionally selective: It prioritizes interventions backed by rigorous impact evidence and the capacity for faithful implementation at scale. The point isn’t to crown a handful of favorite programs. It’s to give public leaders a short list of high-confidence options—best bets—where the expected return on scarce public dollars is meaningfully higher. For instance, many tutoring approaches are marketed to schools, but only a subset with rigorous, high-dosage designs have evidence strong enough to justify public investment at scale. A program’s absence from the menu doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. It may simply mean the evidence is still emerging.

Ensuring equity in this model also means creating paths for newer interventions and leaders to gain investment. To that end, Arnold Ventures offered to fund additional randomized controlled trials alongside investments in proven programs, helping build the evidence base for promising approaches that aren’t yet ready for the menu.

Maryland: The First Partnership in Action

When Governor Wes Moore took office in Maryland, he set a clear standard for his administration: be “data driven and heart led.” From the start, the administration looked for new ways to infuse evidence into government spending. State leaders wanted to expand programs that could improve educational attainment and youth outcomes, with a particular focus on young men, but needed a mechanism to do so within existing budget constraints. The advance funding commitment provided exactly that.

The partnership brought together a $20 million advance commitment from Arnold Ventures and a matching $20 million investment from the state. With support from the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, Maryland officials reviewed a menu of programs with strong or highly promising evidence of effectiveness and selected those that best fit the state’s goals and capacity. Local stakeholders played a central role in assessing readiness and implementation considerations. For example, district leaders from Baltimore City and Prince George’s County assessed specific school readiness for program implementation, and county leaders explored options to shift funding to support mentoring of high-risk youth.

The resulting investments included expansion of the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) model at four community colleges, as well as implementation of Saga tutoring and ASSISTments, two programs shown to improve K-12 math achievement, in multiple school districts. In addition, the partnership will soon drive significant funding for Big Brothers Big Sisters community-based mentoring in nine Maryland counties.

These programs were selected not because they were trendy or new, but because they had demonstrated meaningful impact in multiple rigorous evaluations and offered a reasonable expectation of success at scale. The ASAP model increased college graduation rates by 15 percentage points in prior evaluations, and the Big Brothers Big Sisters community-based mentoring program reduced youth violence-related delinquent behavior by 24 percent and recurring substance use by 42 percent. In a field where many interventions produce modest or uncertain results, these programs represented unusually strong bets for public investment.

For Maryland leaders, the partnership created a practical mechanism to turn the Moore administration’s evidence-focused priorities into funded programs. By pairing philanthropic dollars with a state match, the advance commitment gave the state a structured way to identify evidence-backed options, allocate matching funds, and move quickly from policy interest to implementation.

What We’ve Learned—and What We’re Still Figuring Out

What surprised us most was how quickly the advance commitment changed the nature of the conversation. Typically, when a philanthropic partner approaches a state government about evidence-based programs, the response is polite but cautious. In this case, the commitment of real dollars up front, contingent on a state match, opened doors to more concrete conversations with state leaders about evidence, implementation, and trade-offs. Most importantly, in Maryland, it helped drive $40 million toward evidence-based programs in less than two years. That kind of speed is unusual in government.

The model also created room for a different kind of conversation: not only which proven programs to expand, but what it would take to implement them well and learn from the expansion. By elevating the focus on impact in funding decisions, the partnership encouraged state agencies, local providers, and philanthropic partners to discuss readiness, adaptation, measurement, and long-term sustainability from the beginning rather than after dollars had already been committed.

At the same time, important questions remain. The partnership created momentum, but momentum isn’t the same as institutional change. The real test is whether states embed evidence preferences into future budget cycles once the advance commitment expires. Will the community colleges that adopted ASAP sustain those practices if external funding ends? Will the school districts that piloted Saga tutoring have the infrastructure to continue it? We are working closely with state and local partners, including the Maryland State Department of Education, to identify opportunities to sustain program implementation beyond the partnership, but the work is hard. Embedding new norms into agencies and procurement systems is slower, less visible, and harder to sustain across administrations than any single partnership.

Future Directions

The State Partnership for Proven Programs is not a panacea. It is one approach to a persistent problem: how to help governments use limited resources more effectively by aligning spending with evidence of effectiveness. Its core insight is that evidence alone is not enough. It must be paired with incentives, shared commitment, and respect for state decision-making.

For philanthropies, the model suggests a role that goes beyond funding individual programs. By using advance commitments strategically, philanthropy can help governments take informed risks and unlock public investment in solutions that have a strong chance of improving outcomes.

For policy makers and practitioners, the model offers a new way to move evidence from the margins to the center of budget decisions. And for the broader social sector, it underscores the value of collaboration across government, philanthropy, and communities to scale solutions. Maryland is the first state to launch a partnership based on this model, but it is not the last. Similar collaborations have launched in Colorado, Oklahoma, and North Carolina.

Investing in what works starts with working together. When partners align around evidence, share responsibility, and commit resources upfront, public dollars can go further and do more good. The State Partnership for Proven Programs model won’t solve every problem in social spending. But it does offer a practical lesson: Evidence doesn’t move budgets on its own. It needs an on-ramp, one that keeps public leaders in the driver’s seat while changing the incentives around what gets funded. We have more proof than ever of what can change people’s lives. The task now is finding the will—and the partners—to fund it.

Across the United States, a new generation of civic leaders is reimagining how bookstores can serve their communities. In rural Mississippi, a former policy advisor returned home to open Friendly City Books, which now runs an annual book festival drawing thousands of readers. In New Orleans’s long-underserved Seventh Ward, a neighborhood native and former finance executive founded Baldwin & Co., a Black-owned bookstore pairing author events with children’s financial literacy workshops. Along the Rio Grande in Brownsville, Texas, a young engineer built Búho (“owl” in Spanish). Created in the spirit of the Junto, Benjamin Franklin’s club for mutual improvement, Bùho hosts lectures and bilingual family events that help connect people across a border city.

Community-driven bookstores like these nurture readers, foster in-person connection, and offer something increasingly rare: a physical space for gathering across generations, perspectives, and walks of life. But despite their value, most need to compete as for-profit businesses in a market increasingly stacked against them. On the one hand, they face the size and scale of e-commerce giants, which can fulfill books cheaper and faster than any local business. On the other, they must contend with the rising cost of living and retail overhead. Despite a well-documented recovery in the past decade, the overall number of US bookstores has fallen by nearly 60 percent since the early 1990s, while recent American Booksellers Association financial surveys show indie bookstores operating on net margins of around 1 percent. Independent booksellers often accept high risk and financial strain to provide a public good, particularly in the less-affluent markets and rural places that need them most.

Recognizing this dilemma, many European countries—including Germany, France, and Italy—have passed laws that protect indie bookstores from the threat of e-commerce and create incentives for communities to invest in their stores. In Asia, the Chinese government subsidizes bookstores directly, including in rural places, while the Japanese government recently launched a task force to revive its bookstores.

In the United States, arts and culture work has long relied more on philanthropy and civil society than government support. The organizations that support bookstores usually do so within the constraints of the for-profit model. The American Booksellers Association and regional trade associations, for example, provide industry education, advocacy, and networking. Author James Patterson and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation provide direct cash support to bookstore owners and employees, often as one-time grants, including during emergencies like fires and floods. And platforms like Bookshop.org have expanded access to e-commerce and digital sales for independent bookstores. But largely missing is a pathway for bookstores to reimagine their structure in alignment with their public mission.

Emerson Collective is a company that supports literacy, education, economic mobility, and the environment through a blend of investment and philanthropy. During the pandemic, as lockdowns and store closures threatened civic life, it began researching the value independent bookstores bring to their communities, the challenges they face, and ways that philanthropy could help them flourish. As the company surveyed the bookstore landscape, it found promising experimentation already underway. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Magic City Books had adopted a nonprofit structure pairing retail bookselling with literary programming, including more than 100 annual author events and an adult book fair drawing thousands of local readers. And as SSIR documented in 2016, Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park sought to become a “bookstore of the 21st century” by restructuring as a hybrid entity, retaining its retail operations within a for-profit arm while migrating programs and school partnerships to an affiliated nonprofit. The question for Emerson Collective’s philanthropy team, who led this work, was not how to reproduce any one store’s model, but how to distill what was working so that other bookstore leaders could build on it, especially in smaller markets and rural communities.

Hybrid and Nonprofit Models

In 2022, the philanthropy team began inviting community-driven bookstores to consider moving to a hybrid or nonprofit model with Emerson Collective’s support. In a hybrid model, a bookstore operates alongside a sister nonprofit through a shared services agreement. This approach is often most viable for existing store owners, allowing them to retain their invested capital while offering a straightforward legal pathway relative to full nonprofit conversion. While the business retains retail sales, the nonprofit arm takes over programming and community work. This creates operational efficiency and makes it economically viable to do something most bookstores cannot: provide books to children and families who may not be able to afford them. To maximize the nonprofit arm’s efficiencies and minimize costs, the sister nonprofit may choose to purchase books from the bookstore at market or below-market rates, creating a viable, locally rooted mechanism for expanding book access.

The nonprofit model, by contrast, is often a better fit for new bookstores with an explicitly charitable and community-centered mission. In this structure, bookselling and programming operate within a single entity to advance that mission. While this creates a simpler model, leaders must clearly demonstrate that the organization is organized and operated for a charitable purpose (such as advancing education, supporting literature, or combating community deterioration) to qualify for tax-exempt status.

Today, Emerson Collective supports nearly 50 bookstores nationwide, spanning cultural centers like Detroit and Miami; former industrial hubs like Steubenville, Ohio; and rural places such as Wardensville, West Virginia, and Tahlequah, Oklahoma. These partnerships include three to four years of seed funding and a playbook to educate leaders on the model. The company also brings partners together for an annual convening and supports them in traveling to visit each other’s bookstores, which has created a practice of sharing knowledge and collaboration.

The adoption of these models, alongside fundraising coaching, is reshaping the underlying economics of bookstores in ways that support long-term resilience and sustainability. With Emerson Collective’s initial support, partners are raising funds independently to support their nonprofits or nonprofit arms. Fundraising strategies vary by community. Some leaders cultivate relationships with regional foundations and major donors, while others build support through local businesses, membership programs, events, and grassroots campaigns. In a field where margins are razor-thin, even modest support fills a critical gap. This is especially true for smaller bookstores operating hybrid models. Because the hybrid model does not need to add significant overhead and partners already run robust community and educational programs, this revenue often functions as flexible operating support, covering the cost of ongoing charitable work that would otherwise strain the retail side. Fundraising revenue equal to just 5–7 percent of sales can stabilize a bookstore’s operations, providing breathing room to invest in staff and maintain strong charitable programs, and many in Emerson Collective’s early cohorts have already exceeded this goal.

Three Areas of Social Impact

The social impact of sustainable independent bookstores is most visible across three areas: economic vitality, literacy, and social fabric.

In terms of economic vitality, a recent study by Civic Economics and the American Booksellers Association found that independent bookstores recirculate approximately 29 percent of their revenue locally through wages and purchasing—more than double the rate of chain retailers. They also generate additional economic activity by drawing visitors to commercial districts. Customers who come for books or events often stay to visit nearby shops, restaurants, and cafes, contributing to the broader vitality of Main Streets.

Emerson Collective’s bookstore partners are seeing their impact as economic anchors in real time. For example, Lisa Uhrik at Plenty Bookshop, a fully nonprofit bookstore in Cookeville, Tennessee, collected data from customers and 11 neighboring businesses in the 10 months following Plenty’s launch. She found consistent increases in sales across nearby businesses, with reported gains ranging from the mid-teens to nearly 40 percent, while 92 percent of Plenty’s customers reported visiting another local business during their trip downtown.

Regarding literacy, decades of research show that access to books at home is a strong predictor of academic success, even controlling for income and parental education, with the largest effects among children who start with the fewest books. By design, hybrid and nonprofit bookstores are engines of book ownership—not only for regular customers, but also for families with limited access.

Emerson Collective’s partners donate thousands of age-appropriate books to children in underserved communities while also engaging families in the practice of reading together. In Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood, for example, Whose Books pairs bilingual storytimes with book giveaways. This works to destigmatize reading aloud for caregivers developing English fluency and to embed it as a daily practice in the Spanish-speaking households they serve. Surveys and parent testimonials from the company’s portfolio meanwhile suggest increased enthusiasm for reading and more consistent reading practices within the home.

Finally, bookstores play an important role in building the social fabric of their communities. Emerson Collective’s work draws on Ray Oldenburg’s concept of the “third place” outside of home and work that fosters local connection, as well as research by Raj Chetty showing that upward mobility is strongly associated with “economic connectedness,” or the friendships and social ties that form across socioeconomic lines, especially between low- and high-income children. The company’s hybrid and nonprofit bookstore partners are uniquely positioned to function as the community setting where these cross-class connections can form. By design, they serve both regular customers, who purchase new books and attend events, and families with more limited access, who bookstores often draw in through free programming, school partnerships, and book giveaways.

Act 4 Books, a bookstore founded by a fourth-generation dairy farmer in rural Western New York, first introduced many children and families to the bookstore through partnerships with local Title I schools. Now these families are returning for author events, workshops, game nights, and other community gatherings alongside longtime local readers and residents. Models and programs like these are making the bookstore a common place where new relationships form across walks of life, laying the groundwork for community cohesion and opportunity.

Looking to the future, there is an opportunity to coordinate public and private partners to make reading more visible and vibrant across civic life. Emerson Collective is also expanding support for libraries that are finding new ways to collaborate with bookstores on public programs, literacy efforts, and reading initiatives. Policy makers are starting to engage as well: The recently introduced Open Books, Open Doors Act would support bookstores and other local institutions working to combat book deserts and expand access to books for young readers. With the right investment, the United States can set a new standard for how to build thriving and connected communities around books and reading, with great bookstores at the center.

With AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic expected to generate enormous personal fortunes in the years ahead, speculation is already mounting about how this new class of ultra-wealthy individuals will direct this windfall, and what that might mean for society. It is reasonable to assume that at least a portion of these fortunes will flow into philanthropy, potentially adding hundreds of billions of dollars in new charitable giving over time.

Predictably, much of the public discourse has focused on which problems these new philanthropists should choose to address and the practical questions that follow: What funding strategies will be most effective? What kinds of organizations should be built or scaled? What infrastructure, talent, and organizational forms will be required to translate these resources into meaningful impact?

These are important questions but perhaps not the most important for our time. The more weighty question is what responsibilities accompany extraordinary wealth in a world beset with declining trust in institutions, deep polarization, and widespread feelings of political and economic disenfranchisement.

Many of the recent generations of wealth creators, including Gates, Zuckerberg, and Bloomberg, accumulated their fortunes during a period of extraordinary technological transformation, much like the current one. Their philanthropic endeavors reflected a distinctly technocratic ethos: identify a tractable but underinvested problem, assemble the best experts, fund solutions, measure outcomes, and scale what works. This model has produced extraordinary advances in global health, scientific research, education, and public policy.

Yet it has also revealed the limits of expertise, resources, and good intentions as levers for social change. Some of the most ambitious interventions of the past two decades struggled not because they lacked funding or rigor but because they underestimated the importance of legitimacy, trust, and community ownership. Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million effort to reform public schools in Newark remains a case study in the limits of top-down philanthropy.

The challenge facing this new era of philanthropy is compounded by the fact that the institutions that have traditionally mediated between citizens and power are themselves struggling. Civil society organizations, from nonprofits to universities to the media, are confronting their own crises of legitimacy, representation, and public confidence. Critics from across the political spectrum increasingly view these institutions as unresponsive to the concerns of ordinary citizens, even if they may disagree about the causes. Some see them as captured by economic and political elites, while others see them as beholden to ideological agendas that have displaced their core missions. With moral authority in scarce supply, the ability to navigate competing interests, values, and constituencies will be critical for any individual or organization attempting to address social problems.

Resources, expertise, and ambition will be insufficient on their own to repair the fractures in our social order. The defining challenge for this new generation of billionaire philanthropists is therefore not simply determining what to fund but how to exercise influence in a society where trust is fragile and legitimacy cannot be bought. They will need to envision a broader role for themselves, one that casts them not merely as investors and orchestrators of social outcomes but as stewards of the civic conditions that build trust, participation, and shared purpose.

Ironically, despite Andrew Carnegie’s many flaws as an industrialist, his philanthropy was animated by a belief that wealth carried obligations beyond charitable giving alone. Libraries were not simply a service to be delivered, they were civic organizations designed to expand opportunity, agency, and enable broader participation in public life. Likewise, many of the universities, museums, and public institutions established during that era were conceived as enduring infrastructure for a democratic society. That broader conception of philanthropy, as a form of civic leadership rather than provision of goods and services that markets or government are unable to deliver, feels increasingly relevant today.

For that task, the next generation of philanthropists may need guides. Ironically, some of the most valuable lessons may be found within the very institutions many new philanthropists are inclined to dismiss: professionally managed legacy foundations. While the organizational forms and program strategies of foundations such as Ford, MacArthur, Hewlett, and Packard may appear anachronistic to a generation steeped in entrepreneurial culture, it would be a mistake to overlook the experience these organizations have accumulated operating at the difficult boundary between markets, states, and civil society.

To be clear, legacy foundations are hardly immune from the broader crisis of confidence affecting civil society. They have found themselves criticized from several directions—variously accused of being paternalistic, elitist, unaccountable, or ideologically driven. Yet, they remain among the few civic intermediaries whose work routinely spans sectors and time horizons. Over decades, these foundations have helped seed and sustain entire ecosystems of organizations, research fields, civic institutions, and public-interest infrastructure that continue to shape society today. They have supported efforts to expand civil rights, advanced gender equality, strengthened environmental protections, improved public health, and broadened opportunities for historically marginalized communities. Their record is far from flawless, but it demonstrates a capacity not only for institution-building but for helping to catalyze meaningful social change within complex systems.

Their leaders have spent decades navigating the very hurdles that the next generation of philanthropists is likely to encounter: competing constituencies, conflicting values, and persistent questions of legitimacy and authority in a pluralistic society. Few other institutions have accumulated comparable experience operating amid such persistent contestation.

The intellectual and political translation work that foundation leaders perform every day, between trustees, staff, grantees, policy makers, community leaders, and the broader public, may prove increasingly valuable in the years ahead. They have spent decades confronting the limits of philanthropic power and understand that lasting social change rarely emerges from expertise or resources alone. More often, it depends on coalition-building and public buy-in.

Consider the aforementioned example of Newark Public Schools. What if, instead of arriving with a largely predetermined reform agenda, the effort had begun with a period of community listening? What if a meaningful portion of the funding had been devoted to cultivating local leadership, supporting parent organizing, and creating governance structures through which residents could shape priorities and hold institutions accountable? It is impossible to know if the educational outcomes would have been different, but the intervention might have delivered more lasting civic infrastructure.

Such an approach requires a fundamentally different mindset than one that has typically driven technological innovation. It asks philanthropists to see philanthropy not simply as a mechanism for social problem solving but as a means of broadening the agency of communities and strengthening their capacity to shape their own futures.

In the 1960s, the Ford Foundation funded the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the first community development corporation in the United States. That initiative helped seed what became the modern community development movement by demonstrating how philanthropy could strengthen neighborhood-based organizations. Over time, the model spread to thousands of communities across the country, contributing to affordable housing development, neighborhood revitalization, and local economic growth while leaving behind a legacy of civic capacity and local leadership that lasted far beyond the original philanthropic investments.

The next generation of philanthropists will undoubtedly fund scientific breakthroughs, accelerate technological innovation, and tackle some of humanity’s most pressing challenges. Yet they will also inherit a society grappling with declining trust, weakened institutions, and deep social divides. Even the most elegant interventions can falter when the institutions leading them lack legitimacy or when the communities they seek to serve feel excluded from the process. Scientific discovery, economic opportunity, public health, educational attainment, and even the most responsible development of artificial intelligence ultimately depend on levels of trust and social cooperation that cannot be taken for granted.

This is not simply a moral argument for civic leadership, but a practical one. The most consequential question facing this new era of philanthropy may not be what problems wealth can solve, but how wealth can be exercised in ways that strengthen the democratic foundations upon which all lasting progress ultimately depends.

For most of the past three decades, we have gotten education wrong for students. I say that as a former teacher, district leader, and voice for education reform. Even as a few data points, like graduation rates, have edged in a positive direction, there is low faith in our public schools and few of us feel that we are doing an excellent job preparing students for the future. I think we can sum up where we went wrong very simply: We put too much faith in adults and the systems they assert will solve our nation’s education challenges and too little faith in students, what they tell us they want, and what they believe will prepare them for the future.

So let me start by sharing a bit about some of the high school-age young people whom I have crossed paths with recently in my work with the Center for Rising Generations at the Aspen Institute.

Lucia is a young woman of Chinese descent who lives in New York in a multi-generational community. She recognized that within her community the older generations needed help with technology—setting up cell phones, fixing minor computer problems—and that young people had a hunger to learn more about their heritage and culture. To help address both problems, Lucia started an organization to bridge the generations and provide opportunities for each to learn from the other.

Taylor is a high school student in rural Maine. Even before the most recent sports betting scandals hit the news, Taylor noticed that his teenage friends were spending a lot of time on gambling websites. Knowing that constant gambling was a poor match for the developing teen brain, Taylor started an organization to help build community amongst young men to help them avoid the dangers of gambling.

Just this year, Detroit high school students at the Henry Ford High School recognized that even as young people are more networked than ever through technology, they feel a significant sense of disconnection. To help address this in their community, they developed Disconnect to Reconnect, a program to help students connect with their peers, in-person, without technology. These high school students have planned in-person convenings for their peers at a local park and an overnight lock-in at their school with games and activities, and they have plans to expand these opportunities to deepen connections.

Here is what is striking about each of these examples: They are student-led, focused on challenges that adults may not have identified, and support solutions that are unique to students’ interests. A deeper dive into each project would also show that they are inter-disciplinary, collaborative, and focused on outcomes. These are excellent examples of what happens when we trust students, and they are not unusual.

In fact, we find that among every group of young people, when you provide them the opportunity to craft a solution to problems, they surprise and amaze us. At the Center for Rising Generations, we have had similar experiences with incarcerated youth, with young people with special needs, with recent immigrants, and with every other demographic group.

Young people have done more than enough to earn our trust. I can’t necessarily say the same for policy makers. I believe the education story of the past 25 years is that we have demonstrated a distinct lack of creativity in trying to improve schools, and that we put faith in economic and management systems that have never produced results for all students.

Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka do an impressive and thoughtful job of reminding us of the history of education in our country. It is enlightening to recall how the purpose of schooling and the approach we take to schools has evolved over time. The idea that kept echoing in my head as I thought about their article is that one big thing had changed significantly, and one big thing had not changed at all.

What Has Changed—and What Has Not

The big thing that has changed is we do not know what to teach our children anymore. During the era of job training and apprenticeships, we knew what to teach our children. During the era of Sputnik, we knew what to teach our children. During the era of education reform, we still believed we knew what fundamental skills were going to be important for young people, and we strove to build structures to ensure they got those skills.

Today only about a quarter of people at a national level have faith in public schools. We can, of course, blame that figure on systematic efforts to undermine confidence in public sector institutions, our country’s inability to articulate a clear role for education during the COVID-19 crisis, or a long history of stagnant outcomes of many of our schools. I think that, as educators, we should also look within for the cause of this dissatisfaction.

I don’t think we know what our schools should teach anymore. And it is hard to inspire confidence in our schools when we are, at best, wishy-washy about what schools should teach. In 1995, Steve Jobs said that everyone should learn to code. That may have been sage advice at the time and in fact may still be an idea with merit given the structured, linear thinking that coding can inspire. In the age of AI, however, it no longer feels like the transformational approach that it was a few decades ago. Today’s policy makers continue to strive to figure out what the thing that everyone should learn is. Maybe we should have dedicated AI time. Maybe we should do more to measure durable (or soft, or relational) skills. Or maybe there is going to be something brand new in a few short years that some of us will think needs to fit into the curriculum. So the big thing that has changed is we no longer have a clear idea of what to teach.

The big thing that hasn’t changed is that we still adhere to a very traditional structure for schools—teachers, classes, tests, schedules, tracks, and a clear delineation between what happens during school, after school, and outside of school.

From the most traditional public schools to most of the most innovative charter and independent schools, what I see when I visit schools is a very traditional approach. Perhaps the most detrimental aspect of this structure is that it places all the decision-making power in the hands of the adults—those same adults who are struggling to figure out what schools should be teaching.

As I talk to policy makers and thought leaders, I mostly find myself in conversations that wouldn’t have been new had they happened 20 years ago. They believe charter schools—few of which deliver truly innovative educational approaches and even fewer of which are held accountable for outcomes—will deliver results. Or they believe that market forces, through vouchers or similar arrangements, will produce the results that were promised to us from failed SES programming and previous voucher experiments. Millions of dollars have gone into reimagining high schools. I do not doubt the good intentions behind those efforts, and I share their frustration that we have not produced sufficient results.

Co-Creating With Young People

One of the young people with whom I work a lot—a young person who grew up in a multi-generational household—frequently reminds me that the very best solutions come when you marry the imagination of young people with the wisdom of those with more experience. It seems to me that the future of schooling is exactly the kind of problem we should solve this way.

Co-creating solutions with young people does not happen by itself. It also is not driven by market forces or measured by traditional accountability metrics. To do this work, we are going to have to be brave and we, the policy makers who have made decisions about education since the days of the one-room schoolhouse, are going to have to share power and decision-making with the students who are closest to the schools.

When I was the Chancellor of DC Public Schools, I began to do a little work in co-creating with our students. The work that we did with our students is some of the work that I am most proud of, and one of the regrets I have about my tenure as district leader was that I didn’t start earlier and do more.

There are innumerable examples of how we engaged young people, from the creation of our student cabinet to the student satisfaction survey that drove many of our decisions, but I want to focus on two specific decisions that I made because students told me it was the right thing to do. First, during the first-ever DCPS student budget hearing, at which I gathered students from every high school to provide input on our district budget, one of the clearest messages I got is that we needed to equalize opportunity for advanced coursework across our high schools. In our many years of budget hearings with adults, we never heard the message that more of our students needed more rigorous courses, but that was what our students told us. So we did it. We vastly expanded AP coursework in our high schools and participation rates as well as passing rates went up.

I also heard from students that they wanted more opportunities to learn outside of school, to see the world, and to experience cultural exchange. So we made that happen too. We created opportunities for middle and high school students to travel to Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America during their spring breaks. We paid for travel, including luggage and passports when students needed help, and we created a rewarding, enriching experience for all of our students.

Now imagine what would happen if we engaged students in a conversation about what their schools should look like, how they should be prepared for the future, and how their time should be structured. I honestly don’t know what they would come up with (though I’ll share some guesses in a minute), but I am confident it would not be vouchers, savings accounts, and school data reports.

There is an added advantage implicit in this approach. We, the policy makers, the ones who bring wisdom to the co-creation table, will also be modeling the value of engaging across lines of difference. Perhaps if we show the value of engaging a wide range of students including high-achievers, neurodivergent students, disengaged young people, and students with a variety of ideological perspectives, we can instill the value of designing with those who don’t agree with us in the young people with whom we work.

The responsibility that we hold is to show that co-creation is an approach that produces results that serve our shared goals better. Consider the things you can do right away. Create a student cabinet or a youth advisory committee and listen to them. Conduct a survey of students and share the results and your reaction publicly. Hire young people and give them significant responsibility (and support!). Bring a young person with you to share your speaking engagements and invite a young person to co-author with you. Hold a youth panel at your event (and prepare the young people to be effective participants). Include a young person on your hiring committee and your board. In short, consider all the various levers of power that you hold and demonstrate how much more effective you can be when you share that power.

More broadly, I believe that as leaders, can we do four things to tap into the imagination of young people and to begin the process of co-creation with students.

1. First and most importantly, we should ask students what they want and trust in their answers. Ask students how they want to spend their school days. Ask students what they think they will need to be prepared for the future. Ask students what part of their day is a good use of time and what parts are not. Ask students when they enjoy learning and when they believe they are growing the most. Of course, not every student idea will be a winner, but then not every adult idea is a winner either—yet we still let adults make decisions.
2. Second, just as important, do not greet every student response with an explanation about why the state mandate, teacher contract, school facility, transportation policy, or schedule makes their idea impossible. If we want to unleash our imaginations, we need to remove the constraints that have kept us teaching the same way for 100 years. Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” The same is now true for our education structures—buildings, laws, policies. We first shaped them to support our vision for education and now we are letting the constraints those structures create shape our education.
3. Third, don’t assume that it can’t be done. Why couldn’t every high school student spend much of their junior and senior year engaging in apprenticeships? Why couldn’t we do student exchange programs so young people could experience new cultures? Why couldn’t we set up internships that allow students to study the topics that interest them most at a deep level? Why couldn’t students set up schedules that allow them to pursue their art, music, or sports passion while attending their local high school? Somewhere in the country there are private schools that do all these things and more. Our public schools could do them too.
4. Finally, as we co-create with students my expectation is that we will learn that there are many more partners who want to work with us: colleges and universities, non-profits, private sector employers, community organizations. We will need their trust as well as their support. They all have knowledge and resources that we do not have, and many of them are eager to work with the public schools.

I do not think we know what the purpose of education is going to be in five, 10, or 25 years. We have not shown ourselves to be great predictors of the future nor have we shown ourselves to be excellent policy makers in the present. Efforts to shoehorn political agendas of any stripe and economic models ill-suited to producing results for young people are not promising approaches. I have strong faith that the solution to creating schools that are flexible and responsive enough to react to changing needs is to deepen our trust in our ability to create imaginative solutions with young people. Not only will it be effective, it will also be joyful work.

Every so often, a program in workforce development does more than expand opportunity, creating stability and dignity through economic access in ways that materially change people’s lives: Work becomes predictable rather than intermittent, paychecks arrive consistently, and people can plan around rent, transportation, and care, instead of bracing for the next disruption.

These outcomes change how people experience their own lives. Stability means that energy spent navigating daily disruption is freed for forward-looking decisions; risk recedes enough for people to begin exercising agency. Whether work restores dignity worn down by economic instability or systemic exclusion or creates dignity for the first time, stability marks a shift that is fragile, hard-won, and deeply consequential.

When success is unmistakable, pressure to expand follows quickly. Programs reach this level of impact because of disciplined leadership, and because organizations and partners have aligned support, expectations, and opportunities around the realities of people’s lives. Yet at precisely this moment, the dominant question in funding conversations and boardrooms is rarely how to protect what is working, but how fast the work can grow, how easily it can be replicated, and how many more people it might reach.

These questions are well-intentioned, reflecting a desire to extend benefit and steward resources responsibly. But they also reflect how success is defined and rewarded: Measures of reach and expansion tend to carry more weight than indicators of stability, depth, or continuity. As a result, over time, scale can shift from a strategic option to an implicit expectation, even when leaders closest to the work believe that deepening or stabilizing would better support the people they exist to serve.

Much of the existing conversation about scale focuses on readiness, replication models, and execution discipline. Less examined is the way expansion has become the default expectation and how that expectation can shape leadership judgment. The risk is not simply that fewer people are reached in the short term. It is that pressure to grow too quickly compromises the very outcomes and relationships that made the work effective in the first place.

The Hidden Cost of Scaling Under Pressure

These decisions are difficult. Leaders are responsible not only for programs, but for teams working alongside people navigating real lives and real constraints. And expansion is not a technical exercise, but raises equally difficult questions about staffing, systems, partnerships, local conditions, and whether what worked in one place can genuinely hold elsewhere. The risks vary by programmatic model: some interventions can standardize delivery more easily, while others depend on trust development, local labor-market conditions, and critical partnerships that are shaped by place and relationships.

Sometimes, however, leaders hesitate to voice these concerns openly. Naming limits or uncertainty can be misread as a lack of ambition or a threat to continued funding, especially for programs whose revenue depends on the capacity and priorities of partner organizations and systems. In practice, judgment calls are made under pressure rather than through honest dialogue. Over time, when growth outpaces investment in people, systems, and partnerships, organizations begin to stretch faster than they can support. This strain is often amplified by geography, as private capital, philanthropic support, and employer networks are unevenly distributed across regions. When these constraints remain unspoken, work that once operated with care and coherence can begin to fray.

In these moments, burnout often reflects a misalignment between expectations and capacity, particularly when success is defined primarily through expansion rather than through alignment between ambition and what the work can responsibly hold.

Why Scale Becomes a Proxy for Legitimacy

This dynamic is not accidental, and it is not unique to any one organization. Under conditions of uncertainty, scale has often become a proxy for legitimacy. Growth signals seriousness. Replication reassures stakeholders that success can travel. Reach offers something measurable and defensible when outcomes are complex and human lives are involved.

In business, this logic often makes sense. Scale is how value proves itself over time. But social impact work can and should operate under a different logic. It centers people whose lives have been shaped by uneven access to opportunity, long-term underinvestment, and labor markets that reward credentials and networks they were never positioned to acquire. These conditions play out differently across regions, shaped in part by uneven access to philanthropic and corporate capital. As a result, what works in particular contexts rarely transfers without careful adaptation to people and place. Trust and proximity are not easily replicated, and growth tests whether that fit can be preserved.

Organizational research helps explain why these pressures are so persistent. In uncertain environments, institutions gravitate toward models that are easily recognized and validated by funders and boards, a pattern often referred to as institutional isomorphism. The result is that scale becomes less a reflection of what the work requires and more a response to what the system knows how to reward.

Behavioral economics reinforces the same tendency. Leaders are often more focused on avoiding visible failure than on pursuing uncertain gains. In these environments, growth is easier to justify than restraint, even when slowing down to strengthen teams, systems, or partnerships would better serve the people at the center of the work. Scale begins to fail when it shifts from a considered strategy to an unexamined requirement.

Reframing Scale as a Leadership Decision: Expand, Deepen, or Sustain?

Scale has come to be too narrowly defined. If impact matters because lives matter, our frameworks must recognize significance beyond speed and volume. This is not an argument against scale; it is an argument for discernment.

In practice, leadership decisions about scale tend to fall into three paths: expand, deepen, or sustain.

Expansion is appropriate when the goal is to reach more people, and the conditions are genuinely in place. Growth works when funding, staffing, systems, partnerships, and leadership capacity expand together. When these elements are misaligned, expansion can look impressive while quietly weakening delivery and trust.

Deepening is necessary when outcomes depend on proximity, consistency, and sustained engagement. Some interventions create value not by serving more people, but by working more effectively with those already engaged. For talent populations farthest from opportunity, depth is often what makes progress possible.

Sustaining becomes the priority when continuity itself is the outcome, and the cost of disruption is high. Some organizations exist to prevent harm rather than produce visible gains. Their success is often quiet because the worst outcomes never occur. In a period when public investment is uneven and often declining, sustaining this kind of continuity also becomes a long-term revenue challenge, not just an operational one. In these cases, leadership means protecting focus, stabilizing teams, and resisting pressure to grow simply to signal momentum.

These paths make clear that scale is not a single move in one direction. It is a decision about how impact grows. Expanding increases reach. Deepening increases what the work can reliably deliver. Sustaining protects continuity where interruption would carry real cost. Organizations may be scaling even when they are not serving more people on paper, through investments in staff capability, systems, and long-term sustainability.

The mistake is not choosing depth or continuity. It is treating reach as the only form of scale that counts, regardless of what the work actually requires.

When leaders distinguish between these paths, the conversation changes: not whether to grow, but what kind of growth the work actually requires. Decisions become grounded in readiness, risk, and responsibility to the people served and to the teams whose judgment and care make the work possible.

Honoring Who the Work Is For

I am writing this informed by experience leading within local and national nonprofit organizations, including periods of rapid growth and recalibration, and now working alongside them as a funder, with visibility into the different ways organizations navigate scale. Across those roles, I have seen organizations serve their communities well while lacking the space to speak honestly about what the work truly requires.

At the heart of decisions about scale is a simple question: who is this work for? Not every organization is meant to be everywhere. Some are built to serve a specific community, in a specific place, at a specific moment.

Their strength comes not from reach alone, but from clarity about responsibility, accountability, and where each is held. Choosing to serve one community deeply and consistently is not a failure of ambition. It is an act of discipline.

Ultimately, leadership should not be measured by how far something can go. It is measured by whom it is meant to serve, and whether those entrusted with decisions are willing to honor that responsibility over time, carefully, consistently, and with respect for the people and places that give the work its meaning.

What ultimately matters is not how widely the work travels, but whether its impact and integrity can hold.

In 2025, a group of Philadelphia high school students asked a question few adults consider: Where are young people actually welcome to be? To talk and connect with each other? Looking beyond home and school, they felt the city’s “third places” like parks and libraries were scarce, poorly maintained, or uninviting. Their research revealed underfunding at the Parks and Recreation Department, and they decided to focus their efforts on influencing the City Council.

Some students approached the idea of advocacy shaped by prior experiences of being dismissed, or with skepticism or fear. This time was different. With a structured process and the guidance of their civics teacher, they moved from discussing their concerns to researching the issue and practicing civic skills, from analyzing budgets to communicating effectively. By the time they met with the chair and vice chair of the City Council’s Parks and Recreation Committee, they felt confident and respected as community members offering solutions.

At a City Council meeting, they delivered persuasive remarks that helped secure passage of a 2025 resolution formally integrating youth voice into departmental decision-making. City leaders followed through, earning the students’ trust. The students were not learning civics just for a grade; they were practicing democracy in real time.

The Problem

While exemplary, the experience of these young people in Philadelphia is not the norm nationwide. The core problem of the accelerating decay of American democracy is driven not only by actors and conditions in the halls of power but by the context in communities. The democracy crisis sits atop a crisis of hope, a crisis of belonging (marked by isolation and fractured community ties), and a pervasive crisis of trust in institutions. As shared in America’s Promise Alliance’s 2024 State of Young People Report, young people in the United States are increasingly disillusioned with democratic institutions: Only 12 percent trust government leaders, with trust even lower among Black and Hispanic youth. Only 16 percent believe democracy is working for them. Yet the data also reveal an entry point for a future for democratic participation: 65 percent of young people trust their peers, pointing to the potential of classroom-based civic learning and local problem solving to rebuild civic confidence.

As noted in Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka’s article “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools,” given the challenges of the present, one wonders whether we have sufficient civic infrastructure to resist the lure of raw individualism: “After all, following decades of emphasizing schools’ individual economic returns, even talking about education as having a common purpose is akin to recalling a forgotten language. What, then, is the purpose of public schools to our changing and diverse democracy?”

Schools remain collective spaces—in fact the largest remaining collective space in America. The kindergarten mat is most young people’s first public square beyond family, where children practice values first learned at home and norms set by their teachers and each other. School routines often set the rhythm of kids’ lives, and offer on-ramps via classes and clubs for their interests and potential to unfold, alongside their friends. Youth learn they are not only passive recipients of school culture but, in the best scenarios, they shape it as their artwork or club flyers dot the walls, their voices fill auditoriums with speeches and art, and their athletics inspire the entire community to gather.

Instead of seeing these features of schools as a distraction from test scores, we have an opportunity to build from young people’s identity as members of their school community to their civic identity as residents of their town, city, and state. Schools can be designed for collective progress through project-based learning, group projects, and youth voice shaping decisions. This is an alternative to prioritizing individual success alone, focused only on how students stand out and above their peers. A healthy balance of teamwork and individual contribution prepares the rising generation for participation in community organizations, councils, and deliberative bodies to make decisions.

This pivotal moment demands that we intentionally support schools to rise to their true calling: to prepare the guardians of our inalienable rights and founders of America’s next century. It is our civic duty to equip students not merely to inherit this nation but to actively lead its democratic renaissance, armed with the critical thinking and moral courage to engage in civil dialogue across lines of difference and to discern truth in a world awash with disinformation.

Bright Spots for Democracy

The organization I lead, Generation Citizen (GC), partners with schools nationwide, like the Palumbo school in Philadelphia whose students successfully advocated for a City Council resolution. We share our community-based civics curriculum and then train and coach educators who integrate GC into their class. To date, since our founding in 2010, we have delivered experiential civics education to nearly 250,000 students across geographically and politically diverse communities.

A key pedagogical component of this education is project-based learning (PBL). This approach allows middle and high school students to engage in real-world projects that address local issues they identify, developing civic knowledge of how the government works and applying it to solve problems. Instead of just memorizing facts and dates, students conduct research, interview community members with different perspectives, meet with elected officials, and advocate for positive change.

This shift from spectator to active participant is especially crucial for civic education. It creates the conditions for students to communicate and collaborate with each other and adults, work across lines of difference, experience a sense of belonging and agency in their towns.

For example, in rural Meeker, Oklahoma, a high school student led a Generation Citizen project focused on her hometown's lack of community involvement. After discovering that residents often support businesses outside of Meeker and don’t participate in local events, she assembled a team to create a promotional video highlighting the town’s businesses, churches, and other assets.

San Francisco high school students stepped up as community problem solvers by tackling the housing crisis facing “Transitional Age Youth,” young adults aged 18 to 24 who are often moving out of the foster care or probation systems and who face steep barriers to independence and are at higher risk of homelessness. Through a community-based civics project, they engaged SF Supervisor Matt Dorsey, sharing data and personal stories to advocate for the funding and policy changes needed to secure stable housing for their peers.

Democratic practice remains most accessible and tangible at the community level, where young people can see the impact of their efforts and begin to feel a sense of civic agency and belonging, no matter the circumstances at the federal level.

Investing in Our Greatest Civic Asset

While recognizing the incredible power of a semester or year of hands-on civic learning in the critical adolescent period, there are important civic learning stepping stones both before and after those years that are essential to spur a renaissance in civic engagement. In articulating the different but complementary roles of families, community institutions, schools, and government we can honor their interdependence and invest in the strengths of each.

1. Civic Values Begin in Early Childhood, at Home: Children’s socialization begins in infancy, as they observe how family members engage with them, each other, and the world around them. Research on early brain development indicates strong influences by babies’ regular interactions with caregivers, including that their brains start to form expectations for how they will be treated and how they should respond. This first stepping stone establishes core values like fairness, responsibility, and empathy, as trusted caregivers nurture a child's sense of belonging. Faith and cultural organizations play a role in communicating shared norms and hosting service and connection between families that are foundational for a child’s understanding of themselves as part of a community.
2. Foundational Civic Knowledge Through Elementary School: According to a 2021 Fordham Institute report, “Most of the states with the strongest civics and US History standards take an ambitious approach to both subjects in the elementary years.” In many states, but not all, students in early grades begin to learn about the Constitution, three branches of government, and social movements that provide essential scaffolding for their identity formation as community members and more complex history and civics in later years. The elementary years also offer families an opportunity to volunteer together and have age-appropriate conversations about current events.
3. Experiential Civic Learning in Middle and High School: This crucial stepping stone, exemplified by the work at Generation Citizen and other organizations outlined in a recent report by the Council on Civic Strength, builds on civic knowledge and adds civic skills like communication, teamwork, and critical thinking through project-based learning. Comprehensive, experiential civics education, delivered through trusting relationships with teachers and community leaders, can counter civic despair and polarization and prepare young people to collectively build a healthy, resilient democracy. Opportunities for youth voice and service with peers encourage further exploration of pathways to civic engagement and leadership.
4. Service Opportunities for Young Adults: Institutionalizing a year of service through programs like AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, or state-level initiatives such as the Maryland Service Year Option and the One Utah Service Fellowship is a powerful public strategy to address real community needs. By applying civic skills to real-world systems, young people discover a clear sense of purpose while building durable career skills. Developmentally, this provides a "rite of passage," allowing young adults to transition into adulthood with a supportive cohort. Particularly in a moment with concerns about the impact of AI on early career opportunities, this shared experience can offer concrete entry-level experience.
5. Continuous Civic Contribution for Adults: In adulthood, civic participation should reach its fullest expression, yet for many it quietly fades. Recent Social Connection in America data shows that social nonparticipation is now the norm, for instance: “Over the past year, the majority of US adults report never participating in clubs and organizations (67 percent), religious services (51 percent), getting together with neighbors to do something positive in their neighborhood (63 percent), or formal volunteering (58 percent).” This erosion of associational life weakens the informal leadership and shared responsibility that democracy depends on. Adults need accessible, flexible on-ramps into neighborhood groups, volunteer efforts, and civic associations that foster belonging while building leadership capacity. As the culmination of civic development, sustained adult participation strengthens well-being, counters isolation, and ensures democratic leadership is practiced daily, and then passed on to the next generation. Large employers and elected officials can encourage volunteerism and civic participation in their communities.

Based on the fractured and tense circumstances we find ourselves in, this civic journey, from early childhood through adulthood, cannot be sustained by individual or familial effort alone. It depends on a shared civic infrastructure that is intentional, well-resourced, and coordinated across sectors. Today, civic learning and engagement systems remain fragmented, underfunded, and increasingly politicized and weak.

On civic learning policy, state leaders have many strong examples to learn from as bipartisan pathways already exist for strengthening civic learning at the state level. Legislatures can look to Massachusetts and Illinois, where civics requirements signal that civic readiness is a core public responsibility. Regulators can draw lessons from New Hampshire’s performance-based assessments and Tennessee’s project-based civics model, which embed civic learning in real-world application rather than rote compliance. Standards setters can follow Oregon’s lead by aligning inquiry-driven learning, social and emotional development, and informed civic action with a clear commitment to equity and justice. These approaches point to a coherent agenda: make civic learning relevant, rigorous, measurable, and sustained over time. The question is no longer whether this can be done, but whether states will choose to invest in the democratic capacity of the next generation.

Local and state collective impact efforts offer a practical path forward. Models that have strengthened public health and education show what is possible when schools, nonprofits, businesses, and public agencies align around shared goals and measures. Applying this approach to civic development would encourage civic readiness to be cultivated consistently over time, and reinforce civil society’s potential to reduce polarization and encourage pluralism. With deliberate coordination, communities can invest together in the leadership, relationships, and problem-solving capacity a resilient democracy requires.

As John Dewey observed, “[Democracy] has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” If we want a participatory and inclusive democracy, examples like the students in Philadelphia need to be the norm and not just a bright spot. To raise generations of community problem solvers with a greater sense of civic purpose than today’s adults, we must invest in them now. We need civic learning pathways that foster hope and agency while helping every student feel a sense of belonging and responsibility. By building their knowledge and skills as they grow, we can ensure the next generation is ready to participate in the project of self-governance. And they just may go on to start projects and movements that inspire their elders to join them.

In their article “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools,” Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka rightly decried “education’s slow but steady drift from its democratic function,” and presciently called for “a bolder, broader purpose for public schools in our changing multiracial democracy.” As the former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the US Department of Education, I agree, and I view the current unraveling even of aspirational American democracy as a distressing outgrowth of our failure to teach the many millions of students in both public and private schools the tools necessary to sustain it. But we have the capacity to recover. We have guideposts for how to do it, and I join McGuire and Wilka in urging our nation’s educators, parents, and policy makers to pick them up and follow.

In fact, the work I do in the democracy center I now lead, the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, focuses on just those aims. Responding to this dangerous time of national regression and civics crisis, the Edley Center promotes democracy education, civic participation, and equal treatment under law. We publish reports and host convenings to equip democracy defenders with the knowledge and tools needed to support American democracy. In so doing, we aim to shore up the healthy information environment, civic engagement training, and public trust on which a healthy democracy depends.

The conversation McGuire and Wilka started in their article calls on educators, education policy makers, and leaders to imagine a practice of educating as if our democracy depends on it. An extension of that work is preparing young people to grapple with facts when the facts are contested and giving students the tools they need to see and understand today’s social and economic challenges. We must understand and cultivate the enabling conditions associated with the democratic purposes of education. And we must appreciate the equalizing role the states and the federal government should be playing in helping public schools pursue their civic mission.

Practicing Democracy in Our Schools

The schools we provide to the students we cherish must be places that welcome them, nurture them, and teach them both facts and how to understand and act on facts. As education leaders, parents, and adults in this country, we must understand and act on the principle that effective education is equal in its opportunity. Its success rests not only on grade-level performance achieved but on nurturing the capacity to discern, test, and debate as independent and successful thinkers.

Within and across schools, this work includes treating every lesson in every class as a lesson in democratic participation. Concretely, that means: Science teachers who teach scientific inquiry must be conscious, while teaching the periodic table of elements, that they are also teaching students how to challenge, test, and dispute; to be open to proof and to findings that are counterintuitive; and to act on evidence-based conclusions—all of which are essential skills for democratic participation.

Likewise, language arts teachers who teach students their letters and literacy in languages other than English can direct their students to debate current events in a language that is not their home language, forcing students to engage in issues they care about with the mastery of language that is foreign to them. Similarly, teachers of younger children are teaching democratic engagement skills when they teach their students to keep their hands to themselves, to wait their turn in line, and to push other students on the swings while awaiting their own turn for a ride. In learning those lessons, young children are learning how to participate in community and that communities thrive when we respect, include, and support each other.

Doing that work right must mean that we do not leave its satisfaction to the vagaries of individual teachers’ creativity and instead treat it as curricular necessity and a component of educational leadership. It requires that we attend to the key enabling conditions. Our leadership and teacher training programs as well as state curriculum policies need to incorporate democratic purpose as an explicit goal. And our schools need to provide the necessary resources for learning—decent school facilities, trained teachers in every classroom who lead with high expectations for every one of their students, and instructional materials students can access at school and at home, as well as rigorous courses available in sequence for every student’s access to them—on an equal basis across all our schools. Otherwise, we train students in under-resourced schools away from civic engagement. As Professor Michelle Fine explained in an expert report for a school equality suit that I among others litigated 20 years ago: “The likelihood of democratic engagement by these youths and young adults is fundamentally threatened by their experiences in these schools.” I have been grateful, in my work at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy, to speak with educators around the country about education practices for democratic engagement, affirming what governing law actually is, and practicing with them what it takes to educate with democratic purpose.

Misguided Federal Education Policy

I am both dismayed by and mindful of the distance between what the governing law actually requires and what the rhetoric, policy aims, and enforcement practices are today at the federal level. Today’s federal rhetoric claims to return education to the states. Yet the federal government is now more directive than ever regarding what can be taught, thought, and understood in schools. They threaten to withhold funds from schools for engaging in racially inclusive actions that no court has actually outlawed while simultaneously reinterpreting federal sex discrimination requirements in ways that would cause compliant school communities actually to violate binding federal court precedent. These efforts serve to confuse and misdirect educators, parents, and families nationwide, claiming that practices that are perfectly lawful, effective, and good policy somehow violate the law.

These among other federal misdirections cry out for an educated populace who can discern fact from fiction and who are equipped to use the tools of democracy to uphold our constitution and laws.

To be clear, our national failure to educate with democracy in mind is not what caused us to live now in the fastest democratic decline of any democracy on earth to date. This historical moment has many progenitors. Nonetheless, now and in any time, a well-educated public who know and have practice using democratic tools will be better equipped to ensure that the government is responsive to the people and functions as our nation’s laws command.

We also have recent as well as longstanding evidence of the consequences when we fail to heed the democratic purpose of education. In the early weeks and months following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel, we witnessed an astonishing proliferation of reported hate incidents in schools, including an instructor reportedly separating students by national origin and denigrating them for the countries they come from, community members assaulting students because they are perceived to be from a specific region of the world, and students barring other students from accessing parts of campuses because of their identities.

At their core, hate incidents in schools impart lessons in devaluation and exclusion that are antithetical to a healthy democracy. The ugly reports that captured national attention and outrage following October 7, 2023 underscore a crying need for democracy training in school: training in how to disagree without denigrating persons because of who they are, training in how to learn from opposing viewpoints and effectively argue against them, and training in how to question received wisdom while learning canons.

Civil Rights and Education for Democracy

I was the chief civil rights enforcer in the nation’s schools during both the second term of the Obama administration and the Biden administration. Before and after the Hamas attack against Israel, I witnessed, and confirmed through case investigation, to my horror, the degree to which P-12 schools as well as colleges and universities across the country failed to fulfill their statutory obligation to ensure that hostile environments, limiting or denying students’ equal access to education, did not and do not proliferate. These failures violate Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Our legal response at the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) included work to educate the public, including educators in schools. We devoted more resources than any other time in history to eradicate discrimination of this type, opening and resolving more cases for investigation on this topic than in any prior administration, securing resolution agreements during the Biden administration from five times as many schools and school districts than OCR secured during the prior administration, issuing more policy resources addressing this topic than in any prior administration, and providing technical assistance training to school communities throughout the country to explain applicable civil rights laws and our complaint and investigation process.

A more distant, and similarly pernicious, example confirms why civil rights protection and enforcement are important links for education and democracy. For five years, from 1959 to 1964, one of the school districts that had been the subject of the Brown v. Board of Education litigation closed every single public school in the district rather than fulfill courts’ mandates to integrate its public schools to satisfy the Constitution. This district, Prince Edward County in Farmville, Virginia, chose not to operate any public schools at all and instead opened putatively private academies for white students, leaving some nearly 2,000 Black children without schooling. On the first day of school in September 1959, “14 buses helped ferry 1,475 white students to the private academy, while 1,700 black children stood and watched.” Families pursued litigation to correct the unconstitutional condition of education in their community, the United States Department of Justice intervened to support these families’ pursuit of education justice, and still the Black children of Farmville, Virginia lost education while time passed without schooling. Finally, the newly inaugurated Kennedy administration instigated and supported the creation of the Prince Edward County Free School Association, supported through private funds nationwide, to offer integrated schooling to the students of Farmville.

Farmville is simultaneously a lesson about the arc of justice turning toward righteousness through collective will and a remarkably ugly lesson in what is lost while communities wait for the justice arc to bend. At bottom, though, the Prince Edward experience teaches that education away from democracy can be overcome, with improved school conditions for the students and a national community willing to pitch in—with school children’s allowance pennies, with teachers’ and administrators’ talent and skill, with attorneys’ and politicians’ leadership, and with families’ willingness to take risks for their children’s future—to deliver meaningful educational opportunity.

Particularly in this time, when we dangerously lean toward inequality and subjugation in schools, with federal leadership turning away from democracy and toward autocracy, we need to rally a national consensus around our core aspirations for education. Instead of presidential executive orders directing what skewed version of history can be taught in schools or weaponizing our civil rights laws or devaluing science, this nation’s education community must work together to generate and sustain free inquiry, community engagement, and sound and thorough knowledge foundations. Just as the nation rallied to open and support schools for Prince Edward, Virginia’s students to learn and thrive together and to recover from years of educational loss and the stigma of separation by race; just as the freedom schools movement built an education foundation for students who had been deprived of opportunity; the nation now needs to build a movement for thorough, robust, free public education for all of our students, one that supports and challenges learners, whoever they are, and encourages their full participation in their communities.

Final Thoughts

This country has long recognized, including in the constitution of every state in the union, the value of education to sustaining democracy. The United States Supreme Court in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education decision adverted to “the importance of education to our democratic society” when it ruled that racially segregated education by law is unconstitutional. And of course our history long reinforces that education teaches lessons in worth, community engagement, and who counts in our democracy. For the health of our democracy, the school lessons we commit ourselves to now must include the practice of democratic engagement together with the knowledge and skills foundations we expect our nation’s learners to come to know. Failing to keep sight of this core purpose of education will translate into formally educated graduates who lack the skill and practice of democratic engagement, leaving them unable to uphold the guardrails that sustain democracy.

Preparing young people to participate and govern means moving beyond entrusting civic learning to a single course in high school or an elective on campus. Yes, young people should still learn how a bill becomes a law, but they will also need schools and communities that inculcate their agency and voice, curricula that promote inquiry into problems relevant to their lives, and educators who are trained to nurture civic skills and dispositions.

Picking up on McGuire and Wilka’s charge, I urge a simple but crucial shift in our theory and practice of schooling, to drive the democracy sustaining purpose of education. Our schools of education must—as the University of California at Berkeley School of Education, for example, does—be explicit with students and faculty that they educate as if democracy depends on it. And our classrooms, at every level of education, must operate with that same principle, aiming to teach subject-specific lessons while also teaching young people how to think, how to engage, and how to participate in communities, because these also are core purposes of education.

In early 2025, a university in Beirut quietly hit the cumulative break-even point on a philanthropically funded initiative. No one at the funding foundation was running its day-to-day operations. No one at the university had asked for more money. But in the midst of everything else that was happening—currency collapse, the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion, broad political crisis, and ongoing regional conflict—the university’s leadership had decided, on its own, to replicate the initiative’s model across additional departments.

This is not exactly a sustainability success story, but a different category of outcome, one the philanthropic field does not yet have a standard to recognize, let alone measure. It is the question of whether a grant has built something permanent, something structural, and something that outlasts the grant itself.

The initiative is the Abdulla Al Ghurair Hub for Digital Teaching and Learning at the American University of Beirut (AUB), built with capital from the Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation (AGF). It is not a program or a platform, but an institutional nerve center for online innovation in higher education: the integrating architecture that brings together faculty, technology, governance, revenue, and delivery into a single structure the university owns and operates.

By the time it broke even, our foundation’s role was almost finished. Not because we walked away, but because the design makes our presence unnecessary. And that outcome was not luck. It was architecture. And the difference between the two is the most important conversation philanthropy is not having.

The Measurement Gap That Distorts the Field

Philanthropy has become sophisticated about many things. Our theories of change, results frameworks, adaptive management, and learning agendas have improved practice. They have not, however, resolved a structural blind spot: the field’s dominant metrics are almost entirely bounded by the grant period. We count enrollments, beneficiaries reached, programs launched, outputs delivered. We report these numbers with precision and sincerity, and we answer the question “Did the money do something?”

These metrics do not answer the question that actually determines strategic philanthropic value: “Did the money change something permanently?”

These are categorically different questions. Conflating them allows philanthropic capital that sustains activity only while present to be evaluated by the same standard as capital that fundamentally rewires how an institution operates. A grant that funds 10,000 training sessions and a grant that transforms how a workforce system designs training can look identical in a final report. They are not identical.

This distinction matters because it should shape how funders design grants, how grantees orient their work, and how the field allocates its most scarce resource: institutional attention. When we cannot distinguish between capital that supports and capital that transforms, we default to the easier one. We fund programs. We build things next to institutions rather than inside them. We discuss sustainability in year three of a five-year grant and treat it as a planning exercise rather than a structural requirement. Then we express surprise when activity decays after departure.

This is not a failure of intention. It is a failure of architecture. And it marks the difference between supportive capital and architectural capital.

Supportive Capital vs. Architectural Capital

Supportive capital funds activity within existing systems. It strengthens what institutions already do, adds capacity, enables delivery. It is time-bound by nature, and its effects are contingent on continuation, either through renewed funding or through the institution’s own decision to absorb costs. And supportive capital is legitimate, necessary, and often effective. Most philanthropic capital operates this way.

However, architectural capital does something different: it changes the underlying operating logic of an institution. It reshapes how decisions are made, how governance functions, how revenue is generated, and how performance is measured, so that sustaining the new model becomes the institution’s rational self-interest rather than a burden it bears out of obligation or inertia. When architectural capital is deployed well, departure is not a risk to be managed, but a milestone that validates the design.

The critical difference is where the locus of control sits at every stage of the work. In a supportive model, the funder enables. In an architectural model, the funder reconfigures, and then the institution owns.

That most philanthropic capital is supportive and appropriate for many objectives. But when funders state ambitions of “systems change,” “sustainability,” or “lasting impact,” they are making an architectural claim. The question is whether their grant design matches that claim. In practice, it rarely does.

What Architectural Design Looks Like in Practice

The Al Ghurair Hub at AUB was among our first educational investments in which we imposed architectural discipline from the outset. The operating environment demanded it, as did our Chairman H.E. Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair, who insisted that philanthropic capital should be held to the same performance standards as business capital. That conviction shaped every design choice that followed.

Moreover, Lebanon’s compounding crises meant that any model dependent on stable external funding, political continuity, or infrastructure reliability would likely fail. Extended support was not a viable long-term strategy. Cautious pilots would produce learning but not durability. We needed to build something that could withstand conditions we could not predict, and the only way to do that was to ensure the institution itself owned the capability entirely.

With this in mind, three design choices defined our approach.

1. Institutional delivery with rigorous accountability from the outset. The Foundation did not embed staff, establish parallel management structures, or assume responsibility for implementation. The American University of Beirut designed, staffed, operated, and owned the Hub through its own institutional systems.

Institutional ownership, however, was paired with structured accountability. Funding was designed from the beginning around performance milestones, with disbursements linked to demonstrable progress and outcomes. The structure preserved autonomy while ensuring that results, not activity, determined continuation of support. While the university owned the work, the Foundation ensured that the work met a level of rigor consistent with the ambition of the initiative.

This arrangement requires discipline on both sides. Funders must resist the impulse to insert themselves into execution while maintaining clear expectations and visibility around outcomes. Institutions, in turn, must perform at a level that justifies the autonomy they retain.

When that balance holds, philanthropic capital can strengthen institutions rather than substitute for them.

2. Governance inside the institution, not alongside it. Oversight of the partnership was agreed on and maintained through a joint Steering Committee composed of senior representatives from the Foundation, AUB, and external stakeholders. The committee served as the highest strategic governance body for the initiative, approving plans and budgets, reviewing progress, and safeguarding the long-term direction of the Hub.

We did not establish an independent donor oversight board or parallel accountability structure. Performance standards, with key performance indicators linked to payment milestones, were embedded in university processes and designed to outlast the grant.

3. Financial sustainability as a design constraint, not a closing aspiration. Revenue generation and cost modeling were integrated from inception. The Hub was structured so that 60 percent of revenue flowed to its designated Hub account, creating a clear path to operational self-sufficiency. This was not a sustainability plan written in year four. It was a structural feature of the model from inception.

Designing for financial sustainability in a context like Lebanon means the ability to adapt financial discipline to reality without abandoning it. When the Lebanese pound collapsed, when conflict disrupted enrollment, and when infrastructure failed, the Foundation did not hold the university to budget lines set four years earlier in a different local reality. We extended timelines to allow the university to achieve its KPIs under conditions none of us had anticipated. We adapted milestones to reflect what was actually happening on the ground, with a laser focus on the final goal: Hub sustainability beyond the grant.

When strategic philanthropy looks beyond bureaucratic donor reporting cycles, it is something different from monitoring compliance from a distance; it means understanding the operating environment deeply enough to distinguish between underperformance and an institution fighting through conditions that would have collapsed lesser models. Rigidity in the face of volatility is not discipline, but abandonment by another name.

The Evidence: What the Numbers Actually Show

Within a few years of operation, the Hub reached operational maturity and financial self-sufficiency within its operating model. In 2023, annual revenues covered annual operating expenses for the first time, marking what AUB’s own financial review describes as the achievement of “operational maturity.” By early 2025, the Hub crossed the cumulative break-even point.

These outcomes matter less for their scale than for the conditions under which they were achieved. The Abdulla Al Ghurair Hub for Digital Teaching and Learning at the American University of Beirut absorbed shocks without operational collapse. The model held because it was structurally sound.

Perhaps the most telling evidence is behavioral rather than financial. Following an internal evaluation of its online education strategy, AUB’s leadership chose to evolve its approach by replicating the Hub’s architecture across the university. The decision was not prompted by the Foundation but driven by university’s own assessment that the Hub’s design offered solutions to challenges while creating opportunities for strategic growth and broader impact. When an institution independently transitions from its existing system with the model philanthropic capital helped establish, the outcome is transformation.

The Post-Funding Test

Many initiatives persist after a grant is completed, whether through extraordinary individual effort, residual goodwill, institutional inertia, or another opportune grant. The stronger test is whether the institution’s incentives, governance structures, and operational logic have shifted such that maintaining the new model is still the rational choice.

The test is simple: Could the institution revert to its prior way of operating without actively dismantling systems now embedded in its practice that produces better results?

At AUB, reverting would require removing integrated KPIs, unwinding revenue structures, and abandoning processes the university has already chosen to extend to other departments. That would not be a program winding itself down. It marks an institution that has changed how it works.

A Standard the Field Has Not Yet Required of Itself

The measurement systems that would enforce this distinction do not yet exist at field level. No major philanthropic network systematically tracks post-funding institutional behavior. The sector’s most prestigious reporting mechanisms remain overwhelmingly bounded by the grant period.

A systematic effort to document post-grant institutional behavior across philanthropic portfolios would allow the field to test this distinction empirically. It would also provide the evidence needed to understand when architectural capital succeeds, when it fails, and under what institutional conditions durable change actually takes hold.

This is a solvable problem. It requires funders to commit to post-grant assessment as standard practice and to hold themselves accountable for what remains, not only for what they produce.

The Abdulla Al Ghurair Hub at the American University of Beirut is only one case. But while it doesn’t prove that architectural capital always works, it shows that when the design is disciplined, the institution is capable, and the funder acts like an investor who is willing to hold the line on outcomes while adapting to the world as it actually is, philanthropic capital can leave behind something an institution would not willingly give up.

And that is the bar the field needs to set. Every year it delays, another generation of grants will end, and the question will go unasked: What, if anything, did we actually change?