Several participants pointed to the "who do we know?" exercise as their next move: systematically mapping board and leadership relationships into the philanthropic community, and treating those connections as strategic infrastructure rather than incidental access. 4. Diversify into earned revenue and aligned partnerships Leaders from public-sector-adjacent organizations named for-profit partnerships, workforce and AI revenue initiatives, and mission-aligned corporate investors as priorities — explicitly linking earned revenue to mission sustainability. 5. Reframe the narrative and the practice itself Funder-side participants pointed to two narrative shifts: moving funding for movement-building from a frame of "lobbying risk" to one of "democracy and youth leadership," and developing deeper understanding of how grantees use storytelling for fundraising. Several leaders also raised participatory and community-led giving as a structural innovation worth institutionalizing. NOTABL E At least one participant explicitly volunteered to engage with Your Crescendo and Erika Williams to build out an individual giving strategy — a signal that the room translated insight into commitment in real time.
THREE TAKEAWAYS FOR THE FIELD
1. The diagnosis is shared. The infrastructure is not. Across organizations of different sizes and missions, the assessment of risk and the named priorities converge tightly. What varies is the degree of infrastructure — staff, systems, documented strategy, donor data — required to act on those priorities. This is where peer learning and shared capacity- building have the highest leverage. 2. Individual giving is the unlock — and the gap. It is the area where leaders score themselves lowest, name as their highest-readiness 90-day priority, and most often identify as the structural answer to concentrated funder risk. Closing the gap between intent and infrastructure is the practical work of the next two quarters. 3. Narrative is part of the strategy, not a wrapper around it. From DEI-constrained programming to repositioning movement-building, participants repeatedly returned to language and framing as strategic levers — not communications afterthoughts. The organizations that re-anchor their case for support to individuals, in a voice that travels in this climate, will be positioned to lead.
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