Amid burnout, fear of being targeted and funding cuts, our grantee partners are clear that things are not sustainable. Funders, our response cannot be silence, self-protection, or simply falling back to, “philanthropy can’t fill the holes government left.”
I’m a Minnesotan, a gay man, third-generation Mexican American and have worked in philanthropy for nearly 20 years. When federal agents came to Minnesota this winter to threaten and harm our immigrant and refugee neighbors, our communities didn’t get stuck — we got to work. More on that in a moment.
Reading the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s new report, I was struck by what I already knew anecdotally that was affirmed in the data – our nonprofits are facing mounting challenges, and we risk losing great leaders while communities fall through the cracks. I couldn’t help but hear old philanthropic tropes in the back of my head as I read: I knew it could be easy for us as funders to play small or react to the data primarily with what we can’t do.
At the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation, we regularly conduct our East Metro Pulse survey which asks residents of our region to describe their experience of conditions, institutions, and communities. Our recent survey provides insights that mirror CEP’s newest data:
- As of 2024, 84% of residents believe that charitable organizations treat people of all races and ethnicities fairly. We could interpret this to mean that nonprofits are seen as one of the most fair dealing or equitable sectors; no wonder demand is high.
- There is also a lot of pressure on populations to make ends meet: according to the pulse survey, renters in particular worry about having enough money to put food on the table, pay rent and utilities, and get out of debt. Many of our nonprofit partners feel those pressures themselves even as they seek to alleviate them in the communities they serve.
I cannot accept that, especially while my communities are being actively targeted and harmed, there isn’t more philanthropy can do.
We’ve got to harness the power of possible.
While it may be true that foundation dollars alone cannot offset gaps and harms caused by federal shifts, we can create an environment of creative possibility to put our communities on a path toward greater stability. A few things stand out for me in CEP’s latest nonprofit research:
- Nonprofits have had to divert attention to public perception and legal concerns.
- Demand for help meeting basic needs is up and at the same time leaders know we need to maintain civic as well as cultural infrastructure.
- People of color and LGBTQ people are especially targeted at this moment and bearing a greater burden in leadership.
- Through it all, nonprofits are being creative and forming new partnerships while stretching budgets — but they know that short-term work-arounds aren’t sustainable.
As funders, we should be challenged and motivated by the data we see in this report, but we should not be immobilized. We have a responsibility to pull every lever our power affords us and ask, “in this context, what, then, is possible?”
For us at the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation, in 2024 we started asking ourselves questions about what might be possible if communities came under threat under a new administration. Since then, we’ve been trying a few things, with the mindset of “the power of possible” in direct response to some of the themes named in CEP’s latest report:
- Increasing Payout: In 2025, we leveraged our board’s variance power and increased our grantmaking by 20% and directed those dollars to people of color, immigrant, and LGBTQ-led anchor organizations as well as key nonprofit infrastructure groups — while unusual, it was possible to activate more resources from our investments.
- Activating and Informing Donors: Just last month, we gathered more than 50 of our donor-advised fundholders for a session to dispel the myths of fraud in the nonprofit sector and provided resources on how to give wisely in the current context — rather than hope individual donors were activated by the news, we knew it WAS possible to gather values aligned donors and equip them with needed information.
- A Both/And Strategy: Knowing that economic instability harms communities’ ability to engage in civic life, we’re resisting the idea of an “either/or” when it comes to funding basic needs and civic infrastructure. In partnership with our client foundations, the F. R. Bigelow Foundation and the Mardag Foundation, we’ve launched grant programs that will provide five-year general operating support in Arts & Culture, Democracy, and Food Access and Housing Stability programs — instead of pulling back and going quiet, we’re leaning in, knowing that reliable funding creates a greater sense of predictability and possibility for community groups.
- Creative Collaborations: Our investments team has launched the Future Ready Portfolio, a new below-market rate concessionary loan program focused on social determinants of health that is allowing individual donors, business and health care, and other foundations to co-invest collaboratively to infuse more capital into our ecosystem. Instead of saying “it hasn’t been done” we believed it was possible to create a new, values-aligned investment product that aggregated dollars from multiple sources.
Showing up with the mindset of “the power of possible” fuels us every day, so we don’t get stuck in the enormity of the problems our nonprofit partners are facing. The power of possible activates us to get clear about who is impacted, our role in the ecosystem, and how we can get creative. We hope you’ll join us in powering what’s possible — there is certainly plenty to do based on what CEP’s new research tells us. We hope you see your possibility in the data too.
Alfonso Tomás Wenker is senior vice president of community impact at the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation.
