We Are Not the Help, Part II

This is the second of two essays about those of us who work across the social impact sector and the strange, often invisible place we occupy within it. Part I was an attempt to surface the human and collective cost of treating people the sector depends upon as provisional, and to ask what disappears with them when they feel they can no longer remain. This essay turns toward how we arrived at these arrangements and what it might take to build something different.

As the sector searches for its footing and tries to chart a path forward, it must also ask what kind of ecosystem it is building, who carries knowledge and learning between institutions, whose observations are treated as meaningful intelligence about the field, and what structures might allow that knowledge to deepen, accumulate, influence decisions, and endure.

Notably, the social impact sector history that I offer in this essay is what I have witnessed and participated in over the past twenty-five years. It’s by no means definitive and I can imagine push back, qualifications, and claims of over-simplification. All fair. All good. Still, it’s what I lived through and that’s got to mean something.

My first nonprofit job was in a one-room office inside an old warehouse building in Chelsea. I had a desk. The program director had a desk. The grant writer had a desk. The executive director worked from the couch on a laptop. That was more or less the entire operation.

Then, around four o’clock each afternoon, young journalists would arrive, drop their bags, take over whatever chairs and surfaces were available, grab snacks from the pantry, and begin working on their stories.

Our main fundraiser was an auction held at a nearby restaurant. The prize was a date with one of the young women in the board chair’s high-end dating service, which operated on the other side of our office wall. I mean that literally. A door connected the room where young journalists earnestly reported their stories to the room where millionaires casually thumbed through a lookbook filled with photographs of beautiful young women, most of whom, if I recall correctly, were from Eastern Europe. It was wild, and by today’s standards it would almost certainly be scandalous. But it was also what we could cobble together from whatever relationships, space, and opportunities within our reach.

The New York City nonprofit sector I entered in the early winter of 2002 was reeling from the aftershocks of the 9/11 attacks. Many of the outfits I encountered were small, founder-driven efforts, sometimes more like ambitious projects than fully formed institutions. Directors handled programs, fundraising, strategy, partnerships, and whatever emergency had arrived that morning. Staff performed several jobs at once. A grant ending, a key funder pulling back, a fundraiser that flopped, or a leader leaving could bring the whole thing to an abrupt end. In fact, that is exactly what happened at my first job. One day, my executive director called me and said that we had run out of money and that I should file for unemployment. That was how my first nonprofit job ended.

Organizations that survived this period began asking how they could become less vulnerable to the kinds of shocks 9/11 had exposed. Scale offered an enticing answer to that fragility. Reaching more people, expanding into new cities, and replicating models that appeared to be working promised not only greater impact but greater durability. I had a front-row seat to that period too. I helped local programs become regional and national organizations, and participated in building the systems that could carry a good idea from one context into others that might benefit. The promise of expansion attracted money, along with a growing belief, fueled by the rise of neoliberalism, that the most successful ideas were the ones capable of being replicated.

What I witnessed next was the growing influence of business language and management practice. Decades of tax cuts, financial deregulation, and policies that fast-tracked wealth concentration in fewer hands helped create enormous new fortunes in finance and tech. Some of that wealth flowed into newly created foundations and into the hands of a new generation of philanthropists. They brought with them expectations about evidence, performance, and demonstrated outcomes. Organizations were increasingly expected to define theories of change, establish performance indicators, and show that their models could reliably produce results across different places. Strategy became a more formal discipline. Measurement and evaluation became evidence of rigor, signs that an organization was legitimate, disciplined, and worthy of investment.

As grantmaking itself professionalized, foundations built larger staffs, developed strategies and theories of change of their own, set priorities, measured outcomes, and gained greater influence over which kinds of social change work would be funded, studied, replicated, and taken seriously. Higher education helped formalize what was happening by launching programs in nonprofit management. Similarly, philanthropic studies developed into a field of education and research, most visibly through institutions such as Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. The work of leading nonprofits, raising and distributing money, governing institutions, and shaping the philanthropic systems surrounding the work was suddenly part of the credentialing marketplace.

A competition also emerged among nonprofits for coveted corporate executives, financiers, lawyers, and management professionals. Recruiting someone with significant private-sector credentials could itself signal that an organization had arrived. These leaders brought status, money and relationships, but also assumptions about what serious institutions looked like and how they should be governed, measured, and led. Boards became more formal. Reserves, risk, succession, and long-term durability received greater attention, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis exposed how many organizations remained undercapitalized, with too little unrestricted revenue or reserves to sustain them through any disruption in funding.

I want to pause here because there is a paradox at the center of this story, and I do not think we are as honest about it as we need to be, in part because we do not want to offend the people who fund the work. But the truth is the truth. The very policy environment that concentrated wealth, lowered taxes, and elevated private capital also created many of the systemic crises the sector was then called on to solve, all while corporate demands for scale and efficiency aggressively reshaped how organizations understood their own missions. For those of us who have watched this unfold, it is frustrating to hear the sector itself attacked as the problem, to be told we are not smart enough or efficient enough with resources when we know how much of what we spend our days trying to address could be changed through more equitable public policy. And yet, the capital that flowed from this system built real organizational muscle. It funded capacities, systems, and durability that commitment, mission, and sheer will could never have produced on their own.

I saw the effects of that money and those expectations inside the organizations I inhabited. The executive director who had once held down nearly every organizational function was joined by a chief operating officer, a chief strategy officer, a chief financial officer, a development chief, a communications leader, a head of human resources, and, eventually, executives responsible for culture, equity, learning, and impact. What had once been a relatively flat group of committed generalists became a differentiated C-suite overseeing increasingly specialized departments.

Nor was specialization confined to what happened inside organizations. The field itself was expanding horizontally. Distinct areas of work grew up around litigation, policy, organizing, direct service, education, research, communications, leadership development, culture, and capacity building. Within those areas, different traditions and orientations emerged, some radical and others reformist, some movement-rooted and others institutionally oriented, some confrontational and others collaborative, some local and others national.

At its best, that proliferation gave the ecosystem greater depth, range, and resilience. It created more ways to enter the work for people who wanted to do good for a living, more forms of expertise, more opportunities for people to build lasting careers around work they believed mattered, and more possibilities for responding to conditions no single organization or strategy could address alone. Yet the capacities that made our organizations stronger also made them more complicated. The scale that had been so exciting to fundraise for and build produced satellite offices far from the core operation. Specialization gave people the chance to deepen their craft, but it also encouraged departments to become more internally focused. Hierarchy promised greater clarity and coordination, but it often made communication more formal and transactional, while decisions made in rooms one had not been invited into became harder to understand, much less embrace.

Taken together, all of this professionalization, specialization, scale, and institutional growth made the sector more capable, but also more complicated. The more sophisticated it became, the more effort it required to align the people, functions, institutions, and approaches it had created.

That is where many of us came in.

We became part of the infrastructure through which that complexity was managed. We clarified strategies, designed structures, developed leaders, facilitated difficult decisions, navigated transitions, repaired relationships, and helped reconnect work that growth and specialization had pulled apart.

But the sector’s investment remained centered on the organization. The organization itself came to be treated as the primary vessel of mission and the principal site through which impact would be enabled. Resources flowed inward, strengthening its systems, staff, leaders, memory, and capacity to renew itself.

The private sector and government built consulting, research, and advisory institutions into their infrastructure. Firms such as McKinsey and Deloitte, along with institutions such as the American Institutes for Research that serve governments, philanthropy, and large nonprofits, do not simply compete for discrete projects. They participate as partners, thought leaders, and influential players in the fields they serve. Their accumulated knowledge, research capacity, talent, and relationships give them a voice in defining emerging problems, setting agendas, and shaping how entire sectors respond.

The social impact sector did not build or recognize comparable infrastructure around the many practitioners working across its organizations. Even when organizations invested significant resources in consulting, the largest and most consequential contracts often went to established firms capable of functioning as institutions themselves. They could distribute risk across engagements, absorb slower periods, develop their people, retain knowledge, and invest in what they would need for the work ahead.

Many of us working independently or in small structures, especially women and people of color, came to this work through organizing, movement building, leadership, and lived practice rather than formal business programs. We learned by doing the work, living inside its tensions, watching movements rise and recede, seeing what organizations could become and how easily they could lose their way.

Having seen what institutions could make possible and how easily they could lose their way, many of us stayed close to the work because we believed they could become something more. We wanted to help institutions become more worthy of their missions and justice become more than an aspiration repeated in strategic plans. We were trying to help our movements win.

And yet, we were chronically underresourced as long-term participants in that larger project. We were hired one engagement at a time, expected to arrive fully developed, remain perpetually current, absorb the gaps between contracts, finance our own learning and renewal, and somehow preserve the knowledge we carried across institutions.

The sector strengthened the institutions presumed to hold the mission while leaving many of us who moved among them to sustain ourselves through a succession of transactions.

Organizations are unique, just not as unique as they often believe. Histories, cultures, missions, constituencies, geographies, and political conditions all matter enormously. But the underlying dynamics are often remarkably familiar.

Working across the sector allows us to notice when a problem being treated as unprecedented is actually a recurring pattern. Sometimes the solution one organization is pursuing has already been attempted elsewhere, and we know something about why it worked, why it failed, or what conditions were required to make it useful.

This is the connective, shape-shifting work of carrying learning across boundaries. Our client-partners possess extraordinary depth in their issue areas. What we bring is a set of skills and knowledge developed through repeated work across organizations. We preserve memory when staff turn over and hard-won knowledge risks walking out the door with them. We translate ideas developed in one issue area so they can be useful in another. We recognize patterns that help leaders locate an immediate challenge within the broader arrangements producing it. And we help teams, consumed by the constant demands inside their own institutions, see how what they are experiencing relates to what is unfolding elsewhere.

That is why I think it is time for some of us to stop calling ourselves consultants.

Nearly every other role in the sector has been renamed as the work has evolved. Directors became executive directors, then presidents and CEOs. Personnel became human resources, then people and culture. Fundraising became development, then advancement. Titles expanded to reflect greater complexity, authority, and ambition.

Yet those of us who work across organizations, playing multiple roles and drawing upon a wide range of skills, remain consultants, as though the most important thing about us is the temporary contractual arrangement through which we enter the room.

The word tells an organization where to place us on a tax form, procurement document, or budget line. It says almost nothing about our function in the field. It does not capture what we carry, connect, preserve, translate, challenge, or make possible. It does not distinguish between someone hired to complete a discrete technical task and someone helping an institution understand itself in relation to a much larger struggle. At best, the term is outdated. At worst, it reduces essential work to a purchasable utility.

When I changed my LinkedIn description to ecosystem infrastructure, I recognized that it was partly an act of branding. But it was also an attempt to be more truthful about how I understood my place in this work. Infrastructure is rarely heralded, but nothing moves for long without it. It carries what must travel. It connects what would otherwise remain separate. It preserves continuity. It keeps things running.

This moment requires people who can design strategy and build the tools needed to carry it out, create learning experiences, redesign structures and ways of working, coach leaders through questions of role and purpose, manage complex projects, gather and synthesize information, and turn what they learn into frameworks and practices that organizations can actually use. These are the people I have worked beside, thought with, and built with. And across my feeds, threads, and listservs, as well as in the conversations I am having, I see us trying to find our place in this moment and put what we know and can do to use.

We are trying to offer infrastructure. But because our sector has not learned to see our work that way, the infrastructure around it remains fragmented and underdeveloped, without the institutions, practices, and resources needed to consistently function as a source of knowledge or power in its own right.

My hypothesis is that distribution is the problem. We are scattered across independent practices, firms, collectives, consultant pools, procurement systems, job boards, and social platforms. And while these arrangements may help organizations locate and purchase our services and enable us to find our next engagement, they do not help our knowledge accumulate, our ideas develop, or our collective experience become legible as something more than the sum of individual offerings.

This distribution also places us in a relationship of co-opetition. We may share ideas, refer work, offer feedback, and genuinely want one another to succeed, but we are all trying to survive in a market that continually requires us to distinguish ourselves from one another.

LinkedIn and Substack prey on this dynamic. The democratization of publishing has made it possible for more of us to circulate ideas, build audiences, and speak in our own voices. It has also made thought leadership feel compulsory. We are each encouraged to show up as the strategist, the guide, the executive whisperer, the person with the framework or singular insight organizations cannot afford to miss.

But a feed is not a field.

Too often, we speak over one another. An idea appears, travels briefly, gathers agreement, then is buried beneath the avalanche that comes next, sometimes by the same afternoon. The pressure to remain visible, demonstrate relevance, book consultations, and keep a viable practice alive is understandable, especially in a precarious market. But it can leave us with a collection of individually compelling voices and little shared capacity to develop, interrogate, or sustain ideas over time.

Every so often, a piece of thinking breaks through the churn and shows the glimmers of field-level sensemaking. Books like adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy gave thousands of us a vocabulary for adaptation, relationship, and change. Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth forced philanthropy to reckon directly with how money, power, and extraction intersect. Maurice Mitchell’s 2022 essay, “Building Resilient Organizations,” gave a shared frame to tensions that had been accumulating across progressive institutions without a term to contain them. Each, in its own way, helped people recognize isolated experiences and locate them within a broader pattern.

Lately, a similar dynamic has taken hold around narrative strategy, strategic communications, and frameworks like “block and build.” Certain ideas catch. They travel. They populate conference panels, strategic plans, funding priorities, consulting practices, and the everyday language people use to explain what the moment requires. The problem is that circulation is not the same thing as coherence. I am not confident that we ever arrived at a shared understanding of what emergent strategy means in daily practice, or that institutions attempting to “decolonize wealth” can realistically resolve the structural contradictions of doing so without radical and fundamental changes in economic policy and our values around money. Narrative strategy is rapidly becoming an omnipresent frame, but we are still learning what it can reliably accomplish and under what conditions.

Each of these examples demonstrates that ideas can become ubiquitous across the sector. But without infrastructure to test them, interrogate their limits, and learn from them in practice, they often remain unevenly understood and insufficiently developed. One big problem that I repeatedly see is that too much of what we learn remains privatized inside engagements. It appears in a memo prepared for one leadership team, a debrief attended by five people, a presentation that disappears into a shared drive, or a post that travels for three days before the feed moves on. Our knowledge is commissioned privately and consumed locally, even when its implications are collective. As a result, field-wide patterns are reduced to isolated client problems. This presents yet another paradox. The sector relies on our ability to interpret what is happening inside particular organizations while rarely creating the conditions for us to bring those interpretations together and say what we believe is happening to the field as a whole. We are engaged as sources of labor, advice, and implementation, but less often recognized as producers of knowledge about the ecosystem itself.

I recognize that I have been occasionally platformed to think in public. Over the past several years, I have written about the generational tensions reshaping racial equity work, hierarchy and the limits of changing who holds power without changing the structures beneath them, what it might mean to begin building pro-Black organizations and practices, the demands placed on leaders of color, the recurring disconnection between leaders and staff, and the hidden risks institutions fail to see. In each instance, I was trying to bring a larger pattern into view so the field could examine it and put it to use. What I rarely experienced afterward was a larger conversation through which the ideas might be tested, challenged, revised, or developed beyond the page. I have often found myself thinking about the contrast with the infrastructure built on the political right, where think tanks, foundations, publications, and advocacy organizations have spent decades and billions developing and advancing ideas, including claims that are thinly evidenced and readily disproven. The ideas may be retrograde, indefensible in serious debate, or just plain silly, but they benefit from a well-oiled machinery that knows how to keep them in circulation long enough to shape public understanding.

A field has more than people like me producing content. It has places where ideas can be debated, tested, revised, and carried forward. It has structures through which recurring observations become shared knowledge, and shared knowledge can shape priorities, investments, and action. Without those structures, we remain a network of labor rather than a community of practice: visible but disconnected, creative but incoherent, essential in particular moments and disposable when those moments pass.

I am not interested in preserving nonprofit consulting exactly as it exists. We can be extractive, overly attached to our own methods, insufficiently accountable for what happens after we leave. We can hide behind expertise and recommend changes that exceed an organization’s capacity or ignore the conditions under which people are actually working.

If we want a new agreement in which clients value us more fully, we must also be willing to ask more of ourselves.

That means understanding ourselves as stewards of knowledge that can serve a larger field. It means discerning what belongs to a client, what belongs to the practitioner, and what can be shared in ways that help the field understand itself more clearly.

Organizations, in turn, must reconsider what they believe they are purchasing when they engage us. People invited into an institution’s most consequential questions should not be treated as interchangeable inputs whose value ends with the transaction.

Organizations could also become more curious about what the people moving among them are seeing. Not simply, What can you do for us? But, What are you noticing across the field? What patterns are emerging? What are other institutions struggling to name? What might we learn from experiments happening beyond our immediate line of sight?

A new agreement also asks funders and sector institutions to consider the people moving between organizations as worthy of investment in our own right. If cross-organizational practitioners strengthen dozens of institutions over the course of our careers, then our development, renewal, research, and continuity should matter to the field.

The sector should resource practitioners to study emerging patterns, convene one another, test ideas, produce analysis, and translate what we are learning into knowledge others can use. It should support inquiry that begins with what practitioners are seeing, not only work that begins after an institution has already defined the problem, written the scope, and issued the RFP.

I do not know whether the answer is a guild, an association, a union, a stronger network of collectives, a research and learning institution, or something we have not yet imagined.

Nor do I want to suggest that we are starting from nothing.

For the past three years, I have been part of Constellation, an evolving community where BIPOC consultants share RFPs and opportunities, exchange information, learn together, build relationships, and help one another navigate the work.

The New York Equitable Economies Coalition is organizing nonprofit institutions to diversify their vendors, contractors, and consultants and to use their collective purchasing power to direct more resources toward people of color.

And through Imagine Us, where I serve as a principal consultant, I am part of a growing community of independent consultants and coaches seeking to share resources, form teams, practice together, and create a professional home without reproducing the rigid organizational structures many of us deliberately left behind.

These efforts are building different pieces of what we need. They also illustrate the distance still left to travel.

The horizon cannot be a more inclusive marketplace in which more of us receive RFPs, find out about opportunities, and compete for work. Our value does not lie solely in our capacity to execute work someone else has already decided is necessary. It also lies in our capacity to notice what has not yet been named and to help the sector decide what work the moment requires.

That requires collective influence over how opportunities are conceived, funded, structured, awarded, evaluated, and ended.

We do not all need to use the same methods, share the same politics, or agree about where the field should go. But we need enough connective structure for our differences to generate learning, and enough collective power for our observations to carry weight beyond the individual engagements in which they were formed.

We are—I am—asking for a seat at the table that reflects the investment practitioners and firms have made over decades in building the capacity of organizations and shaping the field itself. The work now is to build a more honest and reciprocal field of practice where knowledge can accumulate, become available beyond the engagements that produced it, and sustain the people who carry it.