A week after the 2016 election, I sat down to sign a stack of grant award letters from the General Service Foundation, which I led at the time. In that urgent moment, the contract’s focus on compliance seemed misaligned.
We were operating in a different world now and needed to adapt. I changed the tone and substance of the contract, shortening it to the essentials only. That included eliminating written reports and replacing them with 40-minute calls. In the months that followed, we moved swiftly, like many other funders, to reduce barriers to funding, increase payouts, and center grantee needs.
Today, we are at another inflection point of crisis — and potential opportunity — with many in our sector asking, what now?
For those of us working to build a thriving and flourishing future for all, the task ahead feels daunting. The incoming Trump administration agenda has been explicitly forecast in the conservative manifesto Project 2025. While we can’t know for sure how all this will unfold, we need to be prepared for an onslaught of attacks, including mass deportations, rollbacks of reproductive rights, targeting of LGBTQIA+ communities, and a reversal of efforts to address climate change.
Moving resources quickly and flexibly will be important but won’t be enough. We will also need to stand up against authoritarianism and fight unprecedented assaults on nonprofits and foundations that stand for justice.
And yet, I believe the philanthropic world is more prepared for what’s coming than may be apparent. That’s because, during the last decade of crises, the sector has collectively evolved, forging a new era of philanthropy.
In this time of polycrisis, foundations that serve as a tool and tax shelter for the rich are of little use. Across the sector, many of us have been reimagining the purpose and practice of philanthropy, moving the field into a very different place than it was in November 2016. This new era has grown out of interrelated efforts, including the trust-based philanthropy movement, the expansion of participatory grant making, a growing focus on mission-aligned investing, a reckoning with inequality, and an expanding commitment to reparations and repair. All this has led to a widespread grappling with how funders hold and reallocate power and wealth.
Consequential Choices
Our task now is to keep going. As grant makers, we need to be as clear as possible about our values, the world we’re trying to build, and the transformational role that resources can play in accelerating progress. The dread, the fear, the grief of these times are all real. What’s also real is that as funders we have a set of consequential choices to make. Here are a few questions to guide the work ahead:
Are we mission organizations or financial organizations? Many grant makers spend only the legally required minimum of 5 percent of their assets, inspiring the critique that they are financial organizations first, and mission organizations second. As foundations and donors decide how much to spend in the coming years, we face a choice. If we are mission-first institutions, we must employ mission-driven spending policies that reflect our values.
Grantees are preparing for new levels of scrutiny and attacks, and yet the necessary resources are not flowing. As Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, shared last week with the New York Times, “The response (to the election) from donors has been shock, anger and depression, sprinkled with a few checks. … It has not been a flood.”
As mission-first organizations with large financial portfolios, we can stand with communities by considering how our funds are invested. During the first Trump administration, when the president directed the separation of children from families at the border, grantees urged funders to divest from companies that facilitate family separations, including private prisons and their many contractors. Philanthropy will again have this choice: Do we ensure that our capital is advancing our mission, or will we allow it to be used to attack vulnerable communities?
In urgent times, how can we provide the fullest support? Funders committed to perpetuity do less in the present so that they can exist in the future. Many boards follow the advice of Yale economist James Tobin, who famously described trustees of endowed organizations as “the guardians of the future, against the claims of the present.”
In these consequential times, this approach misses a key truth: What we do in the present determines what happens in the future. How might we make our best contribution today, unlocking resources that are meant for the public good, in a time when hard-won gains and rights may be rolled back?
Timing matters. In 2016 and 2017, too many grant makers were slow to move resources, going into long strategic planning processes or opting to wait and see. While there’s a lot we don’t know about how things will unfold in the coming years, we do know that vulnerable communities will suffer more. Grant makers don’t need an 18-month strategic planning process to distribute dollars in uncertain times. If your organization is clear about its values, start there.
How will we take risks and act courageously together? Our success will be measured during the next few years by how courageous we were in standing with grantees and even fellow funders when they took on real risks. The incoming administration has clearly signaled its plans to target the charitable tax status of nonprofits and their funders, giving foundations an opportunity to prove that their commitment is not to a tax break but to a more just future. Now is the time to join networks and coalitions, so that we can be brave together. Now is the time to get comfortable with discomfort.
How will we avoid crisis fatigue and take care of ourselves and each other? Many of us are experiencing crisis fatigue, which in philanthropy looks like numbness and denial. Unaddressed, it contributes to a lack of action. An antidote to fatigue is community. How are you leaning into connection, engaging your partners in philanthropy-serving organizations and affinity groups, and checking on your people to remember that you and they are not alone?
The need for care is even greater among grantees. Ensuring that they are sustained and supported should be a sectorwide priority. Nonprofits are facing escalating threats and need additional investment in their security, such as resources provided by initiatives like the Solidaire Network’s movement protection fund, where I serve on the board.
Each of us will be changed by the years ahead. That includes the philanthropic sector, which may be unrecognizable four years from now. These changes won’t just happen to us. Our choices will determine whether we responded with courage, clarity, and care. Four years from now, will we look back and see the seeds of the new era — planted a decade ago — blossomed into an abundantly resourced and more just future? Let’s make it so.
