by: MJ Mathis
We’ve been working with values-driven organizations since 2019, and here’s what we’ve noticed: they were never set up for success.
We work with a number of nonprofits. They exist because there’s a need in society that isn’t being met anywhere else. These organizations are filling a gap left by systems designed for extraction rather than care. And they are doing essential work: feeding people, housing people, educating people, and advocating for people. But the larger system makes it extraordinarily difficult for them to do that work.
The funding model itself is broken. Grants often require that very little money go toward administrative costs, which means nonprofits can’t provide a safety net for their own employees. The people doing this work are operating on thin margins, precarious funding cycles, and the constant pressure to do more with less. They’re holding others while barely holding themselves.
Here’s the part that makes it even harder: the moral context of capitalism tells a story about who deserves support and who doesn’t. The people these organizations serve are framed as unworthy, as if needing help is a personal failure rather than a systems failure. That narrative doesn’t just shape public policy. It shapes who donates, how much they give, and what strings get attached.
The Research on Power and Empathy
There’s research that explains part of why this is so intractable. Studies on power and wealth consistently show that more wealth reduces compassion. More power reduces people’s capacity to take others’ perspectives, which lowers their capacity for empathy.
This creates a fundamental problem: nonprofits are often dependent on donations from wealthy, powerful people, the very people whose empathy and perspective-taking have been diminished by their wealth and power. Not only do these donors often give with strings attached, but they have no real incentive to fundamentally transform the systems creating the need for nonprofits in the first place. Why would they? Those systems are working for them.
What are We Building Toward?
For as long as we’ve been doing this work, the larger systems have made it difficult for values-driven organizations to survive. But lately, something has shifted.
Organizations we worked with years ago are coming back to us. They built shared values, clarified their purpose, and invested in their people. And still, things are buckling.
The social contract is being rewritten. Funding that was once reliable is now volatile. Donors are shifting priorities based on political identity. Philanthropy that sustained organizations for years is drying up or coming with new conditions. The social safety net has been further eroded. Full-time work no longer guarantees people can meet their needs. Housing, healthcare, food security are not assured, even when you’re employed.
And it’s not just impacting nonprofits. We’re seeing this with for-profit mission-driven organizations too. Small businesses who are trying to pay living wages and companies prioritizing sustainability over growth. Anyone trying to operate with values that run counter to extraction is navigating these tensions.
What we’re seeing with our clients, and experiencing ourselves, is that survival now requires different capacities: the capacity to pivot internally when external circumstances change, the ability to build your own narrative around what your value is in the world, and the ability to zoom out and remember that you are a small part of a larger whole working to build a more sustainable future.
This is why we’re thinking about coalition.
Coalition as Blueprint
Coalition has always been the blueprint when there are intersecting interests around an issue. Coalition can create the conditions for human-centered organizations to thrive despite the shifting external environment.
According to sociologist Bobbi Harro, transforming the system through coalition requires the foundation of dialogue across differences that disrupts assumptions, brings awareness to experiences of the larger systems that we may have been unaware of, and a commitment to our shared humanity despite our differences.
This is the true genesis of ANCHOR, our Human-Centered Practices program. We built these practices (the ability to listen to understand, practice empathy, hold our own power responsibly, and exercise inner agility) in response to supporting our clients in addressing the challenges they initially came to us with. We equip people with the skills to have the necessary conversations that support the collaboration, creativity, and innovation these challenges require.
The work of coalition starts with learning to see yourself clearly: your values, your place in the ecosystem, what you’re actually here to do. And then it extends outward: to your team, to partner organizations, to the networks that will hold us all when the systems we’ve relied on can’t.
In our next post, we’ll explore what coalition actually looks like in action when organizations are navigating the kind of pressure we’re all feeling right now.