Advertise on podcast: Mission Forward with Carrie Fox

Some crises come with a playbook. In 2008, the answer was financial intervention. In 2020, it was a collective mobilization that sent money flowing to organizations that hadn't even asked for it. But the environment in which nonprofits are fundraising today doesn't come with such a playbook. There's no agreement on the solution, and for many organizations, the causes they've spent their careers advancing have suddenly become harder to name out loud. Dan Katz gets it. As founder of CIMA Consulting, he partners with nonprofits in criminal justice, the environmental movement, reproductive rights, and youth services, and his counsel for how nonprofits can best navigate this moment is refreshingly steady: go back to the fundamentals. Get clear on mission, vision, and values. Invest in how the organization actually runs. Stop asking one development director to do five jobs. Build new revenue channels one small step at a time, before you need them. And when everything is pushing you to speed up, try slowing down instead. That last point matters most as new tools make it easier than ever to look and sound like everyone else. Dan's view is simple: donors are people, and people can tell. The organizations that draw supporters in and keep them are the ones willing to be exactly who they are. This is a conversation about staying calm in a crisis, and about the virtuous cycle that calm sets in motion. A grounded organization attracts staff, board members, volunteers, and donors who share its north star, and together, they can help carry it forward. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (01:54) - Introducing Dan Katz (06:38) - About CIMA Consulting (10:12) - The Tension of Confidence (15:07) - What is Working at the Crossroads? (20:56) - A High-Functioning Fund-Raising Department (29:23) - Finding Calm in a Crisis

Gary Green told Carrie he could hire ten more people tomorrow and still be redlining. Nearly a thousand calls came into the Student Press Law Center's hotline last year, from 46 states, up 42 percent in two years. So he slowed the organization down long enough to build a plan. Carrie comes back this week with what stayed with her: why the step back belongs in the middle of the chaos, what it takes to hold a crisis clock and a fifty-year clock at the same time, and why capacity comes from the community you keep. What sticks hardest is Gary's answer on hope — thousands of young people walking into journalism, seeing only the opportunity in front of them. Listen to the full conversation: Practicing Patient Urgency With Gary Green. Learn more at splc.org. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

Some organizations run at the speed of the crisis in front of them. Others play a long game measured in decades. The Student Press Law Center does both at once, and Gary Green has spent the last year making sure his small but mighty team knows exactly how. Gary is the executive director of the Student Press Law Center, which since 1974 has managed the hotline that a student journalist calls when someone with authority wants a story to go away — and censorship has been the leading reason for those calls ever since. Last year alone, students and their advisers reached out nearly a thousand times, from across 46 states, with calls up more than 42% in two years. Gary will tell you he could hire ten more people and still be redlining, given the increased demand in student press legal services. So he did something that sounds backward in a moment like this one. Last year, he slowed the organization down. Over the better part of a year, SPLC asked students, advisers, board members, and funders what they actually needed, and turned those answers into a three-year strategic plan called To Our Future, built to stay nimble in a landscape no one can predict five years out. The phrase that anchors this conversation isn't in the strategic plan, though. It's one Carrie brings to it: patient urgency. It's what it takes to answer today's hotline crisis while quietly working, state by state, toward student press freedom laws in all fifty — a New Voices movement that, as Gary says, may take another fifty years to finish. Underneath all of it is a promise Gary makes plainly: SPLC turns no one away. Every student journalist, every call. That matters more than ever now that students working through news-academic partnerships filed more than 44,000 local stories last year — in many communities, the only account of the county commission or the school board that exists anywhere. Plenty of those newsrooms have had SPLC's number for decades. This conversation is about everyone else: the newsrooms that have never heard of it, and have no idea there's been someone standing beside them all along. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (09:19) - The Strategic Planning Process (21:25) - Patient Urgency (28:04) - Hope (30:21) - Get Involved

Define the guardrails, then let people loose inside them. That is how Ike Anand leads ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and it shapes everything from how the organization takes on new technology to how it regards the other charities working alongside it. Carrie Fox returns to her conversation with Ike Anand on leading people through a moment that makes them anxious, and on the definition of the job she hasn't stopped thinking about since. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

Every so often, a leader steps into a moment that seems built for them. New CEOs appointed days before the COVID pandemic, or during economic volatility, or any number of other challenges — and it's like they were made to be there, in that moment, to steer the ship calmly through the uncertainty. Ike Anand is one of those leaders. He is the president and CEO of ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, a seat he stepped into a year ago, after joining the organization in 2020. That work reaches well past Memphis. Mission Partners' research with nonprofits and foundations last year found the sector split roughly down the middle on AI: half ready to lean in and trust that it's part of their future, half not willing to go there at all. Anand's answer starts with how rather than whether, and it rests on the principles he brought with him to the job. The first of them gives this episode its name. Get a little bit better every day. You aren't competing against anybody else, Anand says; you're competing against yourself, and the race is long. Which suits an organization whose reputation was built the same way — a game of inches, every day, for more than sixty years. Anand describes himself as carrying that brand for a period of time, with a responsibility to hand it on in good condition to whoever comes next. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (05:44) - Trust (11:31) - Governance (19:29) - Scaling and the Four Principles

Forty years into leading one of the country's pioneering community development financial institutions, Elyse Cherry has changed nearly everything about how BlueHub Capital does its work — and nearly nothing about why. In this week's reflection, Carrie Fox sits with what that distinction makes possible, and why the leaders who last tend to be fixed on a question rather than attached to a product. It's a short conversation about proximity, persistence, and a particular kind of courage — the quiet kind that looks less like defiance and more like refusing to stop. If you've ever felt forced to choose between staying true to your mission and adapting to the moment, Cherry has a reason to think you've been asked the wrong question. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (00:56) - Why Makes the How Possible (01:56) - Proximity is a Pre-Condition for Impact (03:10) - Courage Cannot be Silent

In Brockton, Massachusetts, a Cape Verdean grocery store sits next door to a community health center. They're side by side on purpose. When BlueHub Capital looked at the neighborhood, it saw residents wrestling with food and health and decided those weren't two problems but one, so it financed the store and the clinic together and put them within a few steps of each other. A small decision. It also explains how an organization stays alive for forty years. Elyse Cherry co-founded BlueHub in 1985 with $3,500 and a single idea: build healthy communities where people of limited income live and work. The idea has never changed. Almost everything else has. Over four decades the organization has run a loan fund, a venture fund, a utility-cost company, a foreclosure-relief program, and a one-percent loan to cover the cost of citizenship. Cherry separates the why from the how. The why is fixed. The how gets reinvented whenever the work demands it. Which raises the obvious question: how do you know when to change the how? Cherry's answer isn't vision or instinct. It's location. BlueHub keeps its offices inside the neighborhoods it serves, because the people who live there understand what they need before anyone downtown does. They may not know how to build a capital structure. They know which corner needs a grocery store. Sit close enough and the next move tends to announce itself. The longest test of the idea is Roxbury, where BlueHub has been headquartered for twenty-five years. A new 40-year impact study counts $147 million in financing, another $910 million leveraged on top of it, and more than 3,200 homes, along with childcare, schools, and job training. Numbers like that come from the same nerve that, during the 1992 banking collapse, led a then-tiny BlueHub to buy its own distressed loans back from the federal government at ten cents on the dollar and rewrite them so families stayed housed. When you're making something that has never existed, Cherry figured, you have nothing to protect, so you may as well be bold. All of which brings up courage, a word Cherry uses carefully. Courage can be quiet, she says, but it can't be silent. Stop moving, and the people who don't share your values win without a fight. It's a modest creed for a hard season, and a workable one. The leaders who last are the ones who stay close — to the community they serve, and to the financial realities that let them keep serving it. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (07:29) - Proximity (13:14) - CDFIs (21:42) - The Roxburry 40-Year Impact Study (28:12) - "Courage can be quiet. It can't be silent."

In 2020, the emergency announced itself. The need was visible, the urgency undeniable, and that clarity gave leaders permission to act — to move a million dollars across town before lunch and hand-walk the check to a barely-open UPS store. Five years later, Carrie Fox reflects on her conversation with Tanir Ami of the CARESTAR Foundation and lands on a tricky puzzle: the urgency hasn't gone away, but it has gone quiet. The systems are still shifting, but they're shifting in ways that are less visible, and that invisibility is what makes them so hard to act against. This is where a North Star stops being a poster on the wall and becomes an operational imperative. This week, takeaways from an important and ongoing conversation: clarity of purpose makes action possible, strategic planning is a lifeline rather than a luxury, and the most meaningful impact is the momentum you’ve created, and then leave behind. And for CARESTAR, that momentum has a name — eliminating racial disparities in emergency medical services. What they measure as achievement isn't just in the form of grants or the dollars deployed. It's that an organization sitting just outside the center created the space for a statewide conversation no one else could convene, and then committed to keeping that conversation alive long after its own work is done. If you haven’t listened to the main conversation with Tanir, it’s a good one. You can find it right here. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

You probably know the dream where you need to run and your legs won't obey. Carrie names that dream halfway through her conversation with Tanir Ami this week, and from there it's hard to let the idea go. What Tanir describes, and what the whole nonprofit and foundation sector seems to be describing right now, is the waking version of it. In 2020, leadership looked like a million-dollar check hand-walked to a closed UPS office. Decisiveness was the whole job. The uncertainty was acute but legible: a virus, a curve, a set of immediate needs. You moved, or people died. Today's uncertainty is different. Tanir calls it "quieter." The threats are diffuse, the timelines unclear, the systems shifting in ways that might not surface for months or years. The instinct to charge forward survives. The sense of which way to charge does not. Tanir, in the middle of all this, did the opposite of what the field expected. She narrowed. While other leaders were being told that strategic planning had become too hard to attempt, she and her team spent the year writing one. Not a sprawling, hedge-everything plan. The CARESTAR Foundation's new strategic plan turns on a single sentence: eliminate racial disparities in emergency medical services care across California. The 2026 Insights on Purpose research that anchors this season found that most leaders are making major changes to grantmaking or fundraising, and most are doing it without a strategic plan at all. The reasoning is easy to follow: when the ground keeps moving, why commit to a destination? Tanir's answer runs the other way. When the ground keeps moving, the destination is the only stable thing on the horizon. The path will change. The collaborators will undoubtedly change. The question of what you are trying to alter about the world only gets sharper under increasing pressure. When Tanir shared this new, tighter focus publicly, nobody backed away. They moved toward her. Committing publicly to one specific thing made her easier to find, and the plan turned into an invitation.  In this week’s Research Brief, Matt Price points the same direction: health-focused nonprofits report the lowest optimism of any subsector in the study, and they are the ones who most need a funder willing to cover work that is, as he puts it, "sometimes under attack." Carrie's dream, the one where you run and stay in place, marks one texture of leadership in 2026. This conversation points to another. Choose one thing, say it out loud, and build the plan around it. The legs start moving again. The dream hasn't ended. You've just stopped trying to outrun it. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (01:18) - Introducing Tanir Ami (04:42) - Why is Racial Justice so important to Pre-Hospital Care? (05:54) - Reflections on Leadership Today... versus 2020 (13:35) - Reimagining Creativity and Collaboration (16:22) - The Strategic Plan (23:05) - The Ten-Year Retrospective (27:55) - Research Briefs with Matt Price

Most organizations talk about resilience as if it's a single thing — a quality you either have or you don't, summoned in a crisis and admired after the fact. Phil Weinberg, president and CEO of STRIVE, draws a sharper line. There's the resilience of the person, and there's the resilience of the institution, and conflating them is how good organizations end up brittle. One is mindset. The other is muscle. Carrie sits with that distinction this week, and with two more ideas from her conversation with Phil that are worth carrying into the work: the quiet damage of the nonprofit starvation cycle, and what it actually looks like to lead with consistency when every signal in the environment is asking you to react. Links & Notes Listen to Resilience as a Muscle and a Mindset with Phil WeinbergSTRIVEMission Partners' 2026 Insights on Purpose™ Report (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

Every generation inherits a story about how people move up in the world. Go to college, the story goes. Get the degree. Climb. It's a story that has shaped policy and philanthropy for three generations running, and for tens of millions of Americans, the story does not describe reality. What remains is a gap. Not a talent gap, as this week's guest is careful to distinguish, but an opportunity gap. Two populations standing on opposite sides of a chasm, motivated people looking for a path, and employers who cannot find workers. This chasm is not bridged by ambition alone. It has to be built. Phil Weinberg has spent fourteen years at STRIVE building exactly that kind of bridge, and what makes his account worth hearing is the architecture underneath it. This week, Carrie Fox talks with Weinberg about what it takes to grow a nonprofit through three successive crises without losing the thread, why he draws a sharp line between individual resilience and the organizational kind, and how the conventional wisdom American philanthropy has held about nonprofit overhead may have had it backwards the whole time. It's a conversation about consistency as a form of leadership, about the unglamorous decisions that compound into durable institutions, and about what happens when an organization stops apologizing for the infrastructure that makes its mission possible. This week also marks the debut of a new recurring segment on Mission Forward: Research Briefs, a short conversation tucked into the end of each episode for the next three months, featuring Mission Partners' Researcher in Residence Matt Price. In each brief, Matt connects the themes of the week's conversation to what the latest data is telling us about the field. This first installment puts Phil Weinberg's reflections in context with new Gallup data on how American workers are feeling about the job market — and what the numbers reveal about resilience, leadership, and the gap between struggling and thriving. Stay tuned at the end of the episode. Links & Notes STRIVESTRIVE's Story (40-year history, founded in East Harlem, 1984)STRIVE Programs (Career Path, Future Leaders, Fresh Start)STRIVE Network (directly operated sites in Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, and New York, plus affiliate partners)Phil Weinberg on LinkedInMission Partners' 2026 Insights on Purpose™ ReportMatt Price, Researcher in Residence at Mission PartnersGallup: U.S. Worker Thriving Declines as Job Market Pessimism Grows (March 2026 release)BDO's Ninth Annual Nonprofit Standards Benchmarking Report (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (03:09) - Leading through Turbulence (06:32) - Building Resilience Across the Team (12:42) - The Non-Profit Business (21:34) - Demand versus Capacity (30:49) - Research Briefs

In this week's reflection, Carrie draws out three lessons from her conversation with Amanda Kwong, director of the Public Health Communications Collaborative. The throughline: when your goal is building trust, the words you choose — and the ones you're willing to let go of — matter more than most of us realize. It's a short but worth-your-time listen before you head into your week. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (00:40) - Changing Words Does Not Mean Changing Values (01:36) - Plain Language is NOT Dumbing Down (02:33) - Trust is Cumulative

There's a version of this conversation that could feel heavy — a public health communications director navigating a moment when national guidance has gone quiet, trust in federal institutions is eroding, and the very words her organization was built around have become politically radioactive. That version exists. But it's not the one Amanda Kwong, from the Public Health Communications Collaborative (PHCC), shows up to tell this week. In this conversation, Amanda shares the philosophy that powers PHCC, the initiative Amanda directs, which has grown to a community of 40,000 health communicators across the country. Together, Carrie and Amanda examine why the communicators doing the most important work right now aren't the ones broadcasting the loudest. In fact, they are the ones listening the most carefully. This episode provides a framework to evaluate whether the language you're using is still doing what you think it's doing. Words shift. Culture moves. A phrase that once built credibility can quietly become a barrier, and the communicators who don't notice are the ones who lose their audience without ever knowing why. As Amanda reminds us, the organizations that will come out of this moment with their credibility intact are the ones that kept asking the harder questions. They didn’t continue asking “what do we say?” but instead asked, “What does this actually mean to the person we're trying to reach?” (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (02:21) - Introducing PHCC (13:33) - Making the Complex Approachable (18:08) - Resources found at PublicHealthCollaborative.org (22:13) - Dancing Apolitically (31:19) - Finding the Good, Celebrating the Hope

Tonia Wellons became president and CEO of the Greater Washington Community Foundation thirty days before COVID-19 shut down the world — and her first major move was to build a ten-year strategic framework. Not because the future was predictable. Because it wasn't. A plan, she understood, is not a forecast. It is a fixed point, and fixed points are most valuable when everything else is in motion. Six years later, 100% of her staff report clarity on the organization's mission; six years earlier, that number was 39%. The lesson Carrie draws from Tonia's leadership runs deeper than planning: resilience is not a reserve you stockpile — it lives in the relationships you build, in the honest conversations between funders and partners that no grant agreement can manufacture. And holding steady, Tonia proves, is not the same as standing still. In this week's reflection, Carrie revisits three lessons from her conversation with Tonia that every leader navigating sustained uncertainty needs to hear. Learn more about the Greater Washington Community Foundation. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

In a recent staff survey at the Greater Washington Community Foundation, 100 percent of employees said they were clear on the organization's mission and vision. Six years ago, that number was 39 percent. That gap is what happens when an organization decides, at the height of a pandemic, to stop thinking in three-year cycles and commit to a ten-year framework instead. Tonia Wellons was thirty days into her role as president and CEO when COVID hit — canceling a 600-person gala, sending staff home, building a crisis response from scratch. And then, as the uncertainty stretched on, she and her board planned further out, not less. Because the plan isn't a prediction. It's a fixed point. And fixed points are most valuable when everything else is moving. What's moving right now is almost everything. In 2020, the crisis had a shape — federal resources flowing outward, community energy concentrating around visible needs. Now the disruption comes from a different direction. What Wellons calls "dispersed energy" has replaced collective momentum: people still care, but without a center of gravity, that care is very hard to organize — and very hard to sustain. Nonprofit leaders are resilient by training. But resilience and endurance are different capacities. Over ten consecutive years of crisis, the sector has been asked to sustain both, and the cumulative cost is real. Boards that aren't actively asking how to lighten that load are going to lose people — not in a single wave, but in quiet rolling exits. Some of those, Wellons is careful to note, are the right response. A thoughtful departure or sabbatical isn't failure. It's a sector populated by human beings. The same honesty shapes how she talks about the foundation-nonprofit relationship. The power dynamic is real, she says. But the way through it is relational, not structural — funders explaining why they stopped doing something, nonprofits naming the blind spots that foundations can't see from where they sit. The alignment the sector keeps reaching for will arrive person to person, or not at all. Last fiscal year, the Greater Washington Community Foundation granted approximately $70 million — a record — while donor giving and national philanthropic support both reached new highs. None of it happened because the environment got easier. It happened because the foundation had a fixed point, and a leader who understood that holding steady and standing still are not the same thing. Links & Notes Read the Insights on Purpose™ ReportThe Greater Washington Community Foundation (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (01:22) - Introducing Tonia Wellons and the Greater Washington Community Foundation (08:12) - Making Room for Planning (13:52) - On Resilience (28:04) - A Spotlight on the Good