These are uncertain times for America’s large and significant nonprofit sector. Since retaking office in 2025, President Donald Trump has canceled or frozen more than $425 billion in federal funds across the arts, education, health care, and other sectors.
This affects us all. There are nearly two million nonprofit organizations in the United States, positively impacting tens of millions of people directly and countless more indirectly. Employing more than twelve million workers and contributing $1.4 trillion to the U.S. economy, the nonprofit sector is also one of the most trusted institutions in American society—doing well and doing good.
Yet, recent funding freezes have caused ripple effects at the state and local levels, blowing holes in budgets for nonprofit organizations and government agencies. The future may not look much brighter: 84 percent of nonprofits expect further cuts to their funding.
Trump aside, even nonprofits that don’t rely on government funding are calling attention to a broader crisis and are feeling the loss of support. I see it firsthand. As a systems designer, I work with nonprofit leaders who feel like their mission is at risk. They fear not being able to keep the lights on or having to reduce staff. It’s a nightmare happening in real life.
Our ability to do our work is also threatened by a greater crisis—a lack of trust in government entities and their nonprofit partners. People feel disconnected from government and nonprofit leaders.
Fortunately, nonprofits are creative and nimble. Through the process of steering their ships through uncharted waters, they’ve become adaptive and resilient. Some nonprofit leaders are now increasingly looking to local governments to help them replace lost federal dollars. Others are investing in public policy advocacy efforts.
Akilah Watkins, president and CEO of Independent Sector, calls it “strengthening our advocacy muscle.” She notes that nonprofits are now America’s third-largest private employer, accounting for up to 7 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, yet barely 30 percent of nonprofits engage in advocacy at the federal or state level.
Watkins is right. For too long, nonprofits have failed to act when the government and private sector have attacked, sometimes falsely and maliciously.
Floridians in my home state are feeling the ripple effects of HB 1471, signed into law last year by Governor Ron DeSantis. The law grants state officials broad executive authority to designate specific nonprofits as “domestic terrorist organizations” and censor them, in violation of due process and constitutional safeguards.
Advocacy is the buffer against attack. Nonprofits can respond to current political circumstances with a clear sense of their values, criticizing ideas rather than people.
First, today’s nonprofits need to band together to achieve shared goals. In my experience, nonprofits often overlook local partners on the ground who may help with initiatives that range from mission-setting to mobilization and fundraising. And the best way to collaborate is to actually come together—ideally in person, in settings that are healthy for communicators to air possible differences of opinion.
One of my life missions in recent years is to facilitate multi-day workshops for nonprofit and government partners that support a collaborative approach. Based on a modality called the “Collaborative Operating System,” I fully support a “more cooks in the kitchen” approach, weeding out voices that do not work together constructively.
And nonprofits often have more opportunities to collaborate than they realize. A 2014 Bridgespan report found that more than half of U.S. nonprofit leaders receive no support for collaboration, and, perhaps not coincidentally, that more than half of nonprofit funders rarely, if ever, fund collaborative efforts. We have not seen much progress in 2026, as communication gaps persist and recent external threats lead nonprofits to pull apart rather than unify as a broader aspirational community.
As standalone entities, nonprofits leave money on the table and lose their community impact. The only solution is collaboration. Let us turn today’s threats into opportunities to come together.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.