Around 8 p.m. on January 27, Diane Yentel received a text message: President Donald Trump was about to announce a memo freezing payments of federal grants and loans across all public and private sectors.
Yentel, barely three weeks into her role as CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, a nonpartisan membership group, decided to raise the alarm. She took to LinkedIn and X to warn her tens of thousands of followers of the potential risks for U.S. nonprofits and the millions of people they serve.
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In her nearly four-month tenure as head of the National Council of Nonprofits, Diane Yentel has joined two lawsuits against the Trump administration and warned against silence and infighting.
Around 8 p.m. on January 27, Diane Yentel received a text message: President Donald Trump was about to announce a memo freezing payments of federal grants and loans across all public and private sectors.
Yentel, barely three weeks into her role as CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, a nonpartisan membership group, decided to raise the alarm. She took to LinkedIn and X to warn her tens of thousands of followers of the potential risks for U.S. nonprofits and the millions of people they serve.
The Top Line
Diane Yentel, the new CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, is a Washington insider, shrewd communicator, and experienced coalition builder.
Serving as lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit was a new role for the council. It had filed amicus briefs in the past, but had never sued a presidential administration.
As head of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Yentel was able to quickly coordinate a national effort among dozens of partners in response to the eviction crisis.
“From pausing research on cures for childhood cancer to closing homeless shelters, halting food assistance, reducing safety from domestic violence, and shutting down suicide hotlines, the impact of even a short pause in funding could be devastating and cost lives,” she wrote that night. “This order could decimate thousands of organizations and leave neighbors without the services they need.”
Barely two hours later, she was contacted by Democracy Forward, a progressive legal organization that has filed 40 challenges to the administration’s executive orders and policies since Inauguration Day. Did the National Council of Nonprofits want to join Democracy Forward as the lead plaintiff and sue the White House to halt the funding freeze? NCN leaders quickly agreed to join the suit.
Skye Perryman, Democracy Forward’s CEO, explained that Yentel’s organization — representing some 33,000 nonprofits through its state member associations — was an ideal litigant because it could show the potential damage cascading across the sector.
But serving as lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit was a new role for the 35-year-old Washington, D.C.-based association. The council had filed amicus briefs in the past, but it had never sued a presidential administration.
'This Year Is So Consequential'
So far, Yentel’s decision has borne fruit. On February 3, a federal judge ruled in favor of the council and the coalition of public-health organizations and small businesses party to the suit, temporarily stopping the funding freeze. And on February 25, the judge issued a preliminary injunction that prevents the administration from issuing a similarly sweeping order until the case is resolved. In March, NCN joined a second lawsuit against the administration’s attempted federal funding cuts to nonprofits working to combat climate change, improve infrastructure, and protect public health. In mid-April a federal judge ordered the administration to release billions of dollars in payouts.
“This has elevated NCN to a whole new visibility,” said Sabeen Perwaiz, CEO of the Florida Nonprofit Alliance and board chair of the National Council of Nonprofits.
It has also elevated Yentel, a Washington insider and former housing-policy advocate, into one of the more outspoken defenders of civil society — and a shrewd communicator who calls a spade a spade.
“I can’t think of another moment in my career or in my lifetime where the threats to the entire sector have been so existential, so systemic, and so immediate,” she said. “We’ll either end the year somewhere on a spectrum of harm, from somewhat harmed to really potentially decimated. Or we’ll end it strengthened by responding in this moment.”
Yentel underscores that the president, his special adviser Elon Musk, and others at the highest levels of power are pushing a narrative that vilifies nonprofits as “a giant graft machine” and their leaders as “thugs and sleazebags.” She also notes that in late November, lawmakers in the U.S. House approved a bill that would allow the Treasury to strip tax-exempt groups of their charitable status without due process.
“There’s no doubt these actions attacking civil society broadly are from an authoritarian playbook,” she said. “We need to respond with a similar level of sophistication and coordination.”
Among Yentel’s biggest concerns is silence. While many organizations and their leaders are opting to stay under the radar to avoid being targeted by the administration, Yentel is adamant that this is the wrong approach.
National organizations that don’t receive federal funding, in particular, have “an obligation” to speak out, she said.
Yentel may sound fiery in her online posts — numbering more than 50 on LinkedIn alone since she took the new job — yet in person she is calm and measured. Her stance has inspired other nonprofit leaders; it has also made her a target of trolling with antisemitic and sometimes violent language. The alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has piled on, calling her a “parasite.” The new attention on NCN, good and perhaps bad, has helped fundraising, she said, attracting support to expand staff beyond the current nine people.
In addition to decrying self-silencing, Yentel warns the sector against infighting and division.
“As nonprofits, we are all a target,” she said. “The protection we’ll have for our sector and our organizations will come through greater visibility and greater connectedness and solidarity.”
A Nonprofit and D.C. Insider
This is not the first time Diane Yentel has led campaigns to defend civil-society organizations under threat. “It’s a comfortable place for me to be,” she said.
At 22, after graduating from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, she joined the Peace Corps, serving as a community health educator in rural Zambia. Exposure to extreme poverty compounded by the AIDS crisis inspired the trajectory of her 30-year career, she said.
After returning to the United States in 1998, she earned a master’s of social work from the University of Texas at Austin and then went on to work at a string of nonprofits — Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, Oxfam America, and Enterprise Community Partners — and in government, at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Obama administration. Her name was floated as a pick to lead the department while Joe Biden was president. She was not tapped, but went on to advise the administration on issues like renters’ rights and housing affordability.
She doesn’t back down from a fight. She also doesn’t seek one.
Over the last nine years, Yentel led the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a 50-year-old progressive housing policy nonprofit in D.C. There, she earned a reputation as a savvy networker during the pandemic and a powerful advocate for housing programs that faced cuts under President Trump’s first administration.
During her tenure, she helped the nonprofit increase revenue from $2.3 million in 2016 to more than $23 million in 2023, allowing the staff to grow from 16 to 46.
The spread of Covid-19 forced the organization to switch gears to deal with the millions of people unable to work or pay rent.
“Diane really changed the trajectory of the housing and community development sector through the pandemic,” said Staci Berger, CEO of the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey and a National Low Income Housing Coalition board member. “She doesn’t back down from a fight. She also doesn’t seek one.”
Nick Wass, AP
Diane Yentel took the helm at the National Council of Nonprofits in January. The council represents some 33,000 nonprofits through its state member associations.
Yentel knows how things work in Washington. She was able to quickly coordinate a national effort among dozens of partners in response to the eviction crisis, said Jason Cone, chief public-policy officer at Robin Hood, the New York City anti-poverty organization.
She’s effective at communicating the impact that policy has on real lives, added Cone. “She understands that narrative is defining public policy today, and most of that narrative is not based in truth or fact.”
The National Low Income Housing Coalition was often in the news, and Yentel was quoted frequently. “It really shifted our relationship with congressional leaders and elevated the coalition’s role in housing policy,” she said of the press coverage. “It meant that members of Congress were reaching out to us and willing to work with us.”
The effort also resulted in more than $46 billion in federal emergency assistance to help people with low incomes pay rent and utilities.
Aggressive Leadership
At NCN, Yentel succeeded Tim Delaney, who retired in 2024 after 16 years in the role.
An attorney and former chief deputy attorney general in Arizona, Delaney was seen as a walking encyclopedia of nonprofit-policy knowledge who helped expand the council’s membership base by eight state associations and around 7,000 nonprofits.
The council transformed under his leadership “from a trade association focused on making insurance cheaper for nonprofits to a policy powerhouse and information hub for all nonprofits,” said Cynthia Gibson, a strategic-planning consultant who worked with NCN for many years.
Both Delaney and David Thompson, NCN’s vice president for government affairs who also retired last year, helped the council accelerate its federal policy engagement.
They were often successful. NCN’s advocacy for nonprofits to be eligible for loans through the pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program and the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act resulted in tens of billions of dollars flowing to charitable organizations.
I can’t think of another moment in my career or in my lifetime where the threats to the entire sector have been so existential, so systemic, and so immediate.
In 2017, the council helped spearhead efforts to hold off the repeal of the 1954 Johnson Amendment, which would allow charities to get involved in partisan politics. (That promises to be a continuing battle. In late March, Republican members of the House and Senate introduced new legislation that would allow churches to endorse political candidates.)
Many in the nonprofit sector viewed the council as a high performer because of its low budget, lean staff, and concrete results. But the group hasn’t gone without criticism — in part because, for most of its existence, it didn’t ruffle feathers.
“We’ve always been disappointed in the National Council not being willing to take positions that would offend any foundations,” said Jan Masaoka, who ran the California Association of Nonprofits for a decade. “A lot of the positions that they took were uncontroversial, but good. Everybody sort of wonders, ‘Well, what are they doing? What do they stand for?’”
Masaoka and other critics of donor-advised funds have dinged the council for accepting money from behemoth DAF sponsors like Fidelity Charitable while staying silent on legislative efforts to speed up DAF payout requirements. “One way to treat a really important issue is to not say anything about it,” she said. That gets you in less trouble, but it doesn’t exactly inspire the troops.”
Masaoka hopes that Yentel will fill a nonprofit leadership vacuum at the national policy level. “She’s off to a hugely promising start,” Masaoka said. “I and a lot of other people are cheering her on right now.”
Some conservative observers of philanthropy are lauding Yentel for the way she has hit the ground running at NCN. But they question whether her approach could backfire.
By taking a stand on behalf of continued federal-government support, Yentel and NCN are entering “a highly charged ideological situation,” said William Schambra, senior fellow emeritus at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. “For Trump supporters, this will confirm their impression that nonprofits are just like the other major institutions of American society, fighting fiercely to maintain the status quo against necessary reforms.”
There’s a chance that public support for nonprofits may erode if a major membership association is viewed as aligned with one side of a polarized political confrontation, Schambra said. “How Yentel and NCN will react to that is an open question.”
Yentel and the NCN are not backing off. On March 13, the council joined a second lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s freeze on funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
And more generally, NCN has positioned itself as the go-to source for those trying to understand the effects of the administration’s actions on nonprofits. Yentel and her staff have been updating a chart detailing various executive orders and associated litigation. They’re also providing guidance on what to do if a nonprofit’s federal grant is terminated and how the DEI executive orders could affect an organization.
Its webinars on the state of the nonprofit sector and the legal landscape have each attracted more than 10,000 viewers, according to Yentel.
Coalition Building
Nonprofits are often siloed by issues, each working to secure their own pots of funding and policy goals.
This creates what academics call a collective action problem, said Alan Abramson, a professor of government and politics at George Mason University who directs the Center on Nonprofits, Philanthropy, and Social Enterprise.
“When you have broad, broad constituencies, like the nonprofit sector,” he said, “there’s always the temptation of individual organizations to say, ‘I’m going to let somebody else do the advocacy. I’ll enjoy the benefits, but darn if I’m going to really pay for them because it’s not in my individual organizational interest.’”
It’s a challenge that Yentel has thought about throughout her career.
In 2018, she helped build the Opportunity Starts at Home coalition, which brought together groups in health, education, and child welfare, to support better housing policy for people with the lowest incomes.
The coalition was a very intentional means to align values and outcomes rather than the single issue of housing, she said.
Similarly, she thinks the nonprofit sector can harness this moment for realignment — for coalition building around government policy, sector infrastructure, and protecting American democracy. While the council’s legal strategy is attracting attention, Yentel says issues around tax reform, budget reconciliation, and charitable-giving incentives will be at the center of its future work.
Influencing Congress
In her nearly four-month tenure at the National Council of Nonprofits, Yentel and her colleagues have raised several million dollars. That could go a long way for the council, which reported $2.4 million in revenue and $3.8 million in expenses on its most recent tax filing.
In past years, about 75 percent of revenue came from foundation support and 13 percent from membership dues, though that ratio is shifting with the influx of philanthropic dollars. New supporters include Robin Hood and the Packard Foundation.
In March, Robin Hood made a $650,000 emergency grant to support Yentel’s small team. “We need more leaders like Diane, who operate from a place of courage and moral clarity,” said Robin Hood’s Cone.
C-SPAN
As former president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Yentel was a regular advocate on Capitol Hill. In recent months, the National Council of Nonprofit’s lawsuit against the Trump administration has elevated Yentel into a prominent defender of civil society.
New funds will help the council expand its staff.
“It’s not sustainable to be doing even the level of work that we’re doing now, much less what I feel we need to be doing,” Yentel said, noting NCN has brought on consultants and added two executive positions this month.
Sarah Saadian, who started as senior vice president of public policy and campaigns in April, has followed Yentel for much of her career at Enterprise Community Partners and the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
“I have never worked with somebody who is so good at bringing people from different points of view along to move in the same direction,” she said.
Several years ago, Saadian and Yentel met with former Congressman Denny Heck, a Washington state Democrat. He started off saying, ‘Listen, I’m meeting with you guys today, but we have nothing in common. I’m not going to agree with any of your positions,’” Saadian recalled.
But Yentel pointed out areas of mutual interest, and by the end of the meeting, Heck agreed to introduce legislation on a top priority: expanding the National Housing Trust Fund, a program to help build homes for people with the greatest economic need.
“Most advocates are good at making arguments for their cause,” Saadian said, “but the great advocates can help people see that they can achieve their goals too by working together.”
That likely won’t be possible with senior administration members publicly vilifying nonprofits, Yentel said. But she’s hopeful that the council can continue to build relationships with key congressional Republicans.
That will require legislators to understand the importance of nonprofits to the country, she said.
NCN’s members and the local nonprofit executives and their influential board members they can reach are well positioned to help make those connections.
“They’re the ones who can have the ear of members of Congress,” said Abramson of George Mason University. “That’s as much what will swing votes in Congress for the sector as anything.”
