Collective Impact Insights

Nonprofit leaders spend vast energy chasing annual targets, short-term grants, and philanthropic trends to keep doors open. Relying on institutional power structures, like large foundations or government grants, leaves organizations vulnerable to shifting political agendas and funder priorities. To build organizational resilience, institutions must adopt a deliberate legacy giving strategy.

Workforce inequity isn't simply a result of individual bias: a bad manager, a hostile interviewer, or an exclusionary hiring manager. It is sustained by organizational structures designed to uphold these injustices. A 2025 Prism report highlights the extreme economic disparities facing transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming job seekers, who continue to face disproportionate unemployment, underemployment, and discrimination.

If the rules are fair, why does the culture feel rigged? The answer lies in the ecology of power. While we obsess over visible power (budgets, titles, and bylaws), we often ignore the invisible power—the hidden filters and gatekeeping habits that act like static on a radio, drowning out the very resonance we need to succeed.

The displacement of marginalized communities doesn’t always happen through dramatic, overnight shifts. It happens through the quiet, synchronized movement of two different types of power: visible policies we can see and hidden power that we often miss.

If your team is struggling with silence in meetings, guarded language, or chronic exhaustion, you are dealing with the biological baseline of trauma. Trauma, whether individual, collective, or historical, reconfigures how people perceive themselves and the world. In the intimate and private realms, from the family home to the prison cell, trauma dictates a person’s ability to feel safe in a room with others.

State surveillance in red states represents more than policy; it is the operationalization of power to erase trans identities. In Rooted Together, we call for a Mycelium of Resistance. Nonprofits must move beyond advocacy to build Parallel Governance—decentralized systems of safety, digital sovereignty, and mutual aid. By creating infrastructure the state cannot track, we peacefully undermine authoritarian control and move from survival to sovereignty.

To become a savvy steward, you must move beyond these three expressions of ‘power over’ and begin cultivating ‘power with’ – the shared strength that emerges when power is distributed rather than hoarded.

Starting a movement requires more than a lone dancer on a hillside; it requires the courage of a first follower and the strength of a shared foundation. To move beyond a fleeting moment toward a self-sustaining ecosystem, we must shift from 'power over' to 'power with.' Discover how to transform individual action into collective agency by creating relational safety, distributing leadership, and building a 'person-proof' root system that ensures your mission thrives long after

In the social impact sector, change-makers often focus on 'clarity' as a single metric for success. We chase clear spreadsheets, clear KPIs, and clear organizational charts (top-down management). We must move past the lens of clarity and activate the essential frequency of resonance (bottom-up amplification).

It's a perplexing question that often plagues observers of institutions, big or small: Why do some organizations seem to languish in incompetence rather than embracing necessary change? Why do they cling so fiercely to outdated models, even when it's clear these no longer serve their purpose or the very people they claim to protect? This isn't just about inefficiency; it's about a profound resistance to evolution, often with real consequences for those who depend on these o

In times of crisis and systemic oppression, our resources — our time, money, and energy — must be deployed with maximum impact. Institutional philanthropy won't keep the lights on, nor will it meaningfully dismantle a powerful, oppressive system. Relying solely on traditional philanthropic models fails to address the root causes of systemic vulnerability. They cannot, by their nature, confront an actively hostile state apparatus determined to control every aspect of life.

Who are the power players in your community? Are they charismatic, creative leaders who get things done for the community? Is it sustainable, shared power that brings people together or is it authoritarian power sustained through coercion and fear?

he Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade threatens the lives of everyone who can become pregnant, removes personal autonomy over the bodies of people with uteruses, and forces pregnancies onto people who do not want to be pregnant.

Mega giving is a consistent and continuing American giving tradition, ultimately making mega-foundations more powerful now than they were 100 years ago, due to their greater number and the societal context in which they operate. The public is more reliant on the nonprofit sector to meet critical needs as government budgets continue to whittle away at social service programs over the past several decades.

Our country is in the midst of a democratic crisis. It is the responsibility of White folks to clean up this mess and dismantle our country's white supremacist infrastructures. What does that mean for nonprofits?

Our call to educate is intertwined with making actionable change; as we discuss how we, as consultants, can incorporate these activists' insights into our own consulting firms, the nonprofits, and movements we serve. I'm sharing the discussion questions and action items I've drafted for The Revolution Will Not Be Funded in hopes that other nonprofit professionals will take this opportunity to critically think about the long-term consequences of the "nonprofit industrial compl

When we examine where donations have gone, we begin to ask if the communities being hit the hardest are the ones receiving the resources.

The nonprofit sector often operates as a "white space"—an environment where an implicit racial order demands that leaders of Color "pass inspection" for provisional acceptance. Following Cyndi Suarez’s critique of how these spaces sanitize racial justice into "diversity," Talem Consulting is launching two parallel governance initiatives.

If you are a reimbursing employer you must pay 100% of unemployment costs before you are eligible for 50% forgiveness.

My own faith has informed my nonprofit work where I have built communication strategies for communities of color and diverse faiths