Hi Reader,
Federal funds are shrinking. State dollars are tangled in block-grant fights. Donors want to see plans, not pleas. We can't count on government to create the structures that move the non-profit sector forward. This week's stories all turn on the same move: organizations that built structure before they needed it.
Inside this issue:
A Florida food bank that's doubling its capacity with a $30 million capital plan. A three-partner funding stack sending $75,000 each to eleven free clinics across three states. An Arkansas hospital system that delivers $50 of fresh produce every month through a locker and a PIN.
Plus three quick moves you can do before Friday, including an I-9 compliance update that could save you $2,861 per form. Three AI prompts your team will actually use. And a board exercise that exposes where your board is doing the ED's job.
About our nonprofit partner: A portion of every NGN Premium subscription supports Rooted, a Madison, Wisconsin nonprofit growing urban agriculture, food access, and land stewardship across Dane County. Rooted produces roughly 60,000 pounds of food annually across its three farm sites (Badger Rock, Troy Farm, and Madison School Farm), runs hands-on agriculture education at 12 Madison schools, and supports 70+ community gardens. Like many small nonprofits doing Farm-to-School work, Rooted is navigating a funding environment where federal and state grants keep shifting under their feet — which makes sustained donor support matter more, not less. Learn more at rootedwi.org.
A Florida Food Bank Is Doubling Its Capacity — And the Math Is What You Should Borrow
Harry Chapin Food Bank, he Fort Myers–based organization will distribute 80 million pounds of food annually by this fall — up from 45 million. That isn't incremental growth. It's a fundamental restructuring of what the food bank can do.
The engine is a $30 million capital campaign called Feeding the Future. The Hunger Action Center under construction in Fort Myers — a 110,175-square-foot distribution hub — is running ahead of schedule, with WGCU News reporting an October opening rather than November. Bank of America committed $250,000 in April. Florida Blue contributed $500,000 earlier this year. Half the $30 million goal is raised, funded through a mix of corporate foundations, individual major donors, and community giving.
Forget the dollar figure. What's replicable is the disciplined approach to capital planning in a sector that typically cobbles together expansion out of crisis-response grants.
Here's the model. Harry Chapin built a $30 million capital campaign with a clear facility target and a multi-year execution timeline, then layered multiple funding streams — corporate, foundation, individual — into one campaign narrative. The new facility isn't just a bigger warehouse. It includes a community food pantry where neighbors shop directly for fresh produce, ten truck bays for inbound and outbound logistics, and a real-time computerized inventory system.
Here's how to start. If your organization has been hustling to meet demand with no capital plan, project your real capacity ceiling — program hours, service volumes, facility limits, staff utilization. Identify the single infrastructure investment that would unlock the next level of service. Get three cost estimates for that specific investment. Build a named campaign around it — not a general fundraising appeal — with giving tiers that correspond to facility components (a truck bay, a cold storage room, a technology upgrade). Capital campaigns succeed when donors can see what their gift buys.
The uncomfortable truth? Most small nonprofits never run capital campaigns because asking for capital feels presumptuous when operating dollars are already tight. That logic backfires. New capacity lowers your cost per unit of service — which means every operating dollar you raise does more work. That's the ROI story capital campaigns should tell.
Sources:WGCU News — Harry Chapin Expansion Ahead of Schedule · Bank of America — BofA Awards $250,000 in Grants to Harry Chapin Food Bank · Gulfshore Business — Harry Chapin Food Bank Launches Plan for Hunger Action Center
A Three-Partner Funding Stack Is Keeping Mental Health Care Alive at Eleven Free Clinics
On April 14, Direct Relief, Teva Pharmaceuticals, and the National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics (NAFC) announced a second round of funding — $75,000 each to eleven free and charitable clinics across Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. The money supports behavioral health services in communities where Medicaid access is thin and private therapy is out of reach.
The 2025 numbers are why this model matters. Across the initial cohort, Community Routes grantee programs reached more than 57,000 people with mental health services and conducted nearly 6,000 depression and anxiety screenings. Eleven clinics. Three states. One coordinated funding stream.
Here's the partnership architecture. Teva (pharma) supplies the money. Direct Relief (a disaster-response nonprofit with deep logistics expertise) manages grant administration and reporting. NAFC (a national convening association) identifies high-performing grantees and supports peer learning. Each partner contributes a different form of value: capital, infrastructure, network. No single partner could run this program alone.
Why does this matter to your organization? Because it answers a question most small nonprofits get wrong: how do you tap corporate money without getting captured by corporate communications priorities?
The answer isn't "write better corporate proposals." The answer is "find an intermediary." Direct Relief and NAFC act as trusted brokers between a pharmaceutical company and small clinics. The intermediary handles grant administration, outcome reporting, and quality control — which allows the corporate funder to commit multi-year money with confidence, and allows small clinics to skip most of the proposal-writing burden.
Your move. If you run a small nonprofit, identify three intermediaries in your issue area that already have corporate partnerships. Ask whether they run a grantee network you could apply to join. Don't chase corporate dollars directly. Chase the intermediary that chases them for you.
Sources:GlobeNewswire — Community Routes: Continued Funding for Mental Health Services · Direct Relief · National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics
A Hospital System and a Hunger Alliance Are Prescribing $50 of Produce a Month — Through a Locker and a PIN
"Eat more vegetables" is useless advice if you can't afford them. A hospital system and a food nonprofit in Arkansas just solved the "can't afford them" problem with $50, a pantry, and a locker.
Baptist Health Community Outreach and the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance have launched the Arkansas Fruit & Vegetable Prescription Program, which delivers $50 of fresh produce each month to Arkansans with diet-related health conditions who meet income requirements.
The logistics are what make it work. Participants place their order. The Baptist Health Community Outreach Center fills it from its pantry. The produce goes into a designated locker. A text message arrives with a PIN. The participant picks it up — without scheduling, without judgment, without a missed appointment.
The program also includes a "veggie test" that evaluates whether participants are consuming the vegetable quantities their bodies need. Measurement is built into the delivery, not bolted on after.
Why this is worth copying: most nonprofit-hospital partnerships die on logistics. The hospital doesn't want to run a food program. The nonprofit doesn't want to navigate medical compliance. The patient doesn't want another appointment. This design solves all three. Baptist Health contributes clinical referrals and delivery infrastructure. The Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance contributes produce, the pantry model, and food expertise. The locker-and-PIN system removes scheduling friction for the patient.
Here's your Monday morning version. If you run a food-focused or health-focused nonprofit, identify the largest hospital system in your service area. Find the person running community benefit or population health — that's the legally-required budget line most nonprofits overlook. Nonprofit hospitals are required by IRS rules to conduct Community Health Needs Assessments and invest in the gaps they identify. Most are looking for credible operational partners.
Propose a six-month pilot for 100 patients with a named chronic condition (hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, and congestive heart failure all qualify). Propose the logistics up front: who fills orders, where pickup happens, how referrals flow, how outcomes get tracked. Measure the metrics hospitals care about — readmissions, HbA1c reductions, emergency department visits.
The nonprofits winning these partnerships aren't writing funding requests. They're walking in with logistics plans.
Sources:KATV News — Baptist Health, Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance Launch Free Monthly Produce Program · American Hospital Association — Baptist Health's Food Rx Program
Update Your I-9 Forms Before the Fines Start Hitting $2,861 Each
On March 16, 2026, ICE reclassified more than ten common I-9 error categories — missing signatures, wrong-edition forms, late completions — that used to be correctable "technical violations." They are now substantive violations subject to immediate fines between $288 and $2,861 per form, with no 10-day cure period. The law firm of Morgan Lewis flagged the change in an April 2026 client alert.
Block 60 minutes this week. Pull your I-9 files. Confirm every active employee has the January 20, 2025 version of Form I-9 — USCIS reverted Section 1 Box 4 language to "An alien authorized to work." Confirm Section 2 was completed within three business days of each hire's start date. Confirm you're retaining I-9 records for either three years from the date of hire or one year from termination, whichever is later. Fix what's fixable before ICE shows up.
A 15-person nonprofit with three paperwork errors is now exposed to $8,583 in fines with no opportunity to cure. Sixty minutes this week is the cheapest risk management you can buy.
Run a SaaS Subscription Audit and Cut $1,000–$3,000 From Your Annual Budget
Industry research from Gartner estimates that roughly 30% of SaaS spend is wasted on unused licenses and features. The fix doesn't require new software. It requires a spreadsheet and two hours.
Pull three months of credit card and bank statements. List every recurring software charge — CRM, email marketing, project management, cloud storage, scheduling, design apps, analytics. For each one, answer three questions:
Who uses it?
When did they last log in?
What does it do that another tool in our stack doesn't already do?
Cancel any tool with zero logins in 90 days. Consolidate any tool whose function overlaps with a subscription you're already paying for.
A 10-person nonprofit typically runs 15–25 SaaS subscriptions. Cutting three at $30–$80 per month each frees $1,080–$2,880 annually — money that funds actual program hours instead of seat licenses nobody opens.
Launch a Five-Donor Thank-You Sprint This Week
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project has tracked overall donor retention rates in the low 40s for more than a decade. The organizations beating that rate aren't doing anything fancy — they're thanking donors individually, not with templated acknowledgment emails.
This week, pull your mid-level donor list (gifts between $250 and $2,500 in the past 18 months). Sort by most recent gift. Pick the five donors who gave most recently and have not received a personal thank-you — phone call, handwritten note, or personalized email — in the past 90 days. Put 30 minutes on your calendar. Deliver five personal thank-yous. Mention the specific program their gift supported. Ask for nothing. No solicitation. Just thanks.
Run the sprint for four weeks. Twenty personal thank-yous cost about two hours of staff time. Three donors each increasing their next gift by 20% typically recovers that time — and the real upside is retention on the donors who don't increase.
Build a 90-Day Moves Management Plan for Your Top 10 Donors
Most development directors carry a mental picture of where each major donor sits in the cultivation cycle — but it lives in someone's head, which means nothing happens when that person is sick, at a conference, or giving notice. You run this prompt not because you're behind, but because knowing exactly what the next touchpoint is for each top donor frees you to focus on the actual conversations.
PROMPT: Act as a senior development director with 20 years of experience running major gifts programs for small to mid-size nonprofits (budgets under $5 million). I'm going to paste in a list of our top 10 donors with their giving history, most recent gift date, and any known interests or relationships. For each donor, produce: (1) their likely cultivation stage — identification, qualification, cultivation, solicitation, or stewardship, (2) the single most important next touchpoint to move them forward over the next 90 days with a suggested date, (3) the specific mission outcome or program detail most likely to resonate based on their giving history, and (4) any red flags I should watch for (lapsed engagement, competing giving priorities, life transitions). Format as a table I can walk through with my ED in 20 minutes. [Paste your top 10 donor list with gift amounts, dates, and any context on their interests.]
Run a Cash Flow Stress Test Against Your Three Most Likely Funding Disruptions
Most nonprofit leaders have a vague sense of which grants, donors, or contracts would hurt most if they disappeared. You need that vague sense converted into a dollar figure and a month on the calendar. The prompt below turns anxiety into a plan your CFO, treasurer, or finance committee can actually act on.
PROMPT: Act as a nonprofit CFO with 15 years of experience guiding small to mid-size nonprofits through revenue disruptions, grant losses, and economic downturns. I'm going to give you our current fiscal year budget by revenue source and our monthly expense run rate. Model three stress scenarios: (1) the loss of our largest single funder starting next month, (2) a 25% reduction in individual giving over six months, and (3) a 90-day delay on our largest government contract reimbursement. For each scenario, produce: (a) the month our cash balance goes negative, (b) the specific expense cuts that would preserve 90 days of operating runway, (c) the bridge financing options a small nonprofit should consider in order of preference, and (d) the one operational change I should implement now regardless of which scenario hits. Assume we have __ days of operating reserves. Format as a board-ready memo with a one-paragraph executive summary. [Paste your revenue sources with amounts and your monthly expense run rate here.]
Draft a Stay Interview Script for Your Three Most Critical Staff
Exit interviews tell you what went wrong after you've already lost the person. Stay interviews tell you what's going to go wrong while you still have time to fix it. Most nonprofit leaders never run them because they don't know what to ask. This prompt gives you a script your management team can use in 30 minutes.
PROMPT: Act as a nonprofit HR director with experience running retention programs for organizations under $5 million in budget and 15–75 staff. Generate a 30-minute stay interview script I can use with our three most critical staff members — the people whose departure would create the biggest service disruption. The script should include: (1) an opening that makes clear this is a retention conversation, not a performance review or exit interview, (2) six to eight questions that surface what's keeping them here, what's frustrating them, what would accelerate their career, and what would make them consider leaving, (3) one question that reveals whether they feel their work has clear impact, and (4) a closing that commits to two specific follow-up actions within 30 days. Add a one-page facilitator guide with coaching notes on how to respond to common answers — including the most dangerous answer, which is "everything's fine." [Describe your organization's mission and any recent turnover patterns in a sentence or two.]
The Strategy vs. Operations Boundary Map
Board Culture / Role Clarity — 20 minutes
What makes it worth trying: Micromanaging boards (usually) don't know they're micromanaging. Disengaged boards (usually) don't know they're disengaged. This exercise exposes both patterns in 20 minutes by forcing each board member to classify ten real decisions your organization has made. It surfaces the gap between what the board thinks its job is and what the board is actually doing — and gives you a shared language for fixing it.
What you need: Ten decisions from the past six months — a mix of strategic (approving a new program area), operational (hiring a program coordinator), and in-between (changing fundraising software vendors). Write each one on a notecard or in a shared slide. Set up three categories: Board decides. Board reviews ED's decision. ED decides alone.
How to run it:
Step 1 (3 minutes): The board chair explains the three categories and confirms there's no "right" answer — the exercise is designed to surface disagreement, not settle it.
Step 2 (5 minutes): Each board member privately classifies all ten decisions into the three categories. No discussion yet.
Step 3 (7 minutes): Reveal the distribution. Start with decisions where everyone agrees — usually two or three. Then work through the decisions where the board split. Ask: What was the thinking behind "Board decides" here? What was the thinking behind "ED decides alone"?
Step 4 (5 minutes): Make one decision together. Pick the decision with the widest split. Agree — for this one decision — where the boundary belongs. Document it.
In-person: Physical notecards sorted into three piles on a conference table. Dot voting in step 3.
Virtual: A shared Google Slide with ten decisions as draggable text boxes. Board members drop each decision into one of three columns. Reveal all classifications at once after step 2.
Watch out for: The ED defending their past decisions rather than observing the patterns. This exercise is about surfacing each board member's mental model, not judging past calls. If the ED debates classifications, the exercise collapses — brief them in advance. Also watch for the board member who classifies everything as "Board decides." That's usually either discomfort with the ED or discomfort with their own role. Probe privately, not in the meeting.
You'll know it worked when: At least two board members say some version of "I had no idea we were disagreeing about that." The real signal is whether your next few decisions surface the boundary conversation naturally — meaning the map has become a shared reference, not a one-time exercise.
That's this week's NGN Premium. One question to sit with: If your organization's funding got cut by 25% tomorrow, which of the structures in this issue would hold you up — and which would expose that you've been running on hustle instead of systems? Better to find out this week than next quarter.
See you next week.
— Ted
A portion of your subscription supports Rooted, building community-led food systems in Madison, Wisconsin.
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Founder and CEO Risk Alternatives, LLC 202.758.7572 (cell) 608.709.0793 (office) Website
Author of Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience
We help nonprofits thrive by providing practical tools and support to address uncertainty and improve risk management.
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