What being trusted by a donor means

I am excited to share that NFF is among the 384 organizations to receive support from MacKenzie Scott in a round of new grants announced today. These unrestricted resources will obviously allow us to serve more clients more effectively. It is also a singular honor to be counted, along with the 116 groups Scott announced in July, among a remarkable group of community-centered leaders who have received Scott’s funding, including NFF clients and partners, and my personal heroes, such as Cheryl Dorsey of Echoing Green, Bill Bynum of Hope Enterprises, and Ash-Lee Henderson and Allyn Maxfield-Steele of the Highlander Research and Education Center.

At NFF, we know that community-centered leaders, especially BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) leaders from the communities they serve, are best placed to drive progress in the United States. These leaders anchored the response to the COVID crisis in many places, led the uprisings for racial justice this summer, and helped win progressive election victories in Arizona and Georgia. This is not surprising. These leaders understand their communities’ aspirations, know the challenges their communities face, have the greatest stake and accountability in solving them, have the clearest insights about how to do it, and represent communities who will be the American majority in a generation.

Unfortunately, our social sector funding system generally fails these leaders. Working with clients across the country, we are outraged at how many must get by with too little and exert too much effort on fundraising. We are committed to playing our part to change ourselves and the funding system we influence so that we can best help groups like these harness additional resources through access to more financial knowledge and appropriate financing. We are thrilled that Scott’s donations signal her understanding that providing community-centered organizations with unrestricted funding is the greatest opportunity we have to get better results from social spending. We hope other donors follow her example.

For decades, NFF has advocated for donors to provide unrestricted funding, to cover full costs, and to build honest relationships with grantees based on mutual trust. But, this is the first time in my 9+ years at NFF that we have received unrestricted funding at anything close to this level. A few reflections on what this means personally:

1. News of this gift initially left me more disoriented than elated. We are so conditioned to operate in a scarcity mentality and to orient around donor interest that I’ve had to shed those filters to really understand the opportunity we’ve been provided.  
2. I have been able to see myself and act as part of a larger movement of comrades pushing forward together, instead of having everything conditioned by the nagging question “How will this work out for us?” Last week, I spent a few hours helping a nonprofit leader I admire raise funding for an urgent racial equity initiative, including direct outreach to two of my most important foundation contacts. Until now, I didn’t appreciate how much of our time was spent playing what Vu Le termed the Nonprofit Hunger Games.
3. It is liberating to tell funders what we believe will make the biggest difference, not what we think the funder will pay for, and to be able to walk away from work that’s not what we need to be doing. To anyone not in the nonprofit world this would seem to be an obvious way to operate; to most people in the nonprofit world, it is sadly unrecognizable. And, at least for now, funders are responding positively to our approach.
4. We just built our 2021 budget by answering the question “what will it take to seize the moment for our mission?” rather than “how can we ensure we break even?” We didn’t have time to allocate this new funding, but knowing it’s there allows us to focus on what our clients and the communities we serve need from us and to plan boldly to put ourselves in a position to provide it.
5. We can move at the speed of opportunity. We are launching multiple initiatives with amazing partners. All of this will require additional funding to scale. But now, we can commit to supporting our partners from the beginning, without having to wait for those funders to come along first.
6. This has led us to work harder and with greater urgency, not to become complacent. When I told her about this support, NFF’s CFO allowed us 10 seconds of appreciation and then made clear to me that this does not mean she is going to let me lower my fundraising target for 2021. Because now that we have been trusted with this support, we are driven to be worthy of the trust we have been shown by raising our mission ambitions.

This has been a horrible year on so many levels for so many people. But I carry hope into 2021 knowing that there are 500 organizations across the country who have experienced similarly transformative funding. These gifts alone will not be enough, especially for BIPOC-led organizations facing decades of disinvestment and continued inequity. But, so many have done so much with so little for so long, I can only imagine what will be possible now that these organizations have begun to access the resources and trust necessary to liberate their potential. 

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