Three stories this week about organizations and funders that wouldn't stay inside the lines. A 113-year-old Milwaukee nonprofit asking private donors for capital for the first time — because depending on government dollars alone stopped being safe. A small Illinois public library running bilingual mental health counseling and a weekly grocery distribution program — alongside the books. And a $1 million pooled fund from Ford and MacArthur paying nonprofits to consolidate, because staying separate was costing the field too much.
The thread: each story is about an institution stretching past its original definition because the mission demanded it. Inside this issue, you'll see how Wisconsin Community Services rebuilt its identity twice in 113 years to keep serving the people who needed it. How Highwood Public Library used the trust it already had to deliver services nobody asked the library to provide — and why that worked. And why two of philanthropy's largest funders just put money on the table to help nonprofits do the consolidation work the sector keeps ducking.
Plus a vendor 1099 audit your finance committee should run before fiscal-year-end, a password manager rollout that closes the security gap multi-factor authentication doesn't reach, and a treasurer's quarterly internal-controls certification your auditor will love. Three AI prompts your team will actually use — vendor risk assessment, training needs analysis, and a strategic-questions audit your board can run at its next retreat. And a 15-minute board exercise that surfaces what would actually happen if your executive director left tomorrow.
A portion of every NGN Premium subscription supports Rooted, a Madison, Wisconsin nonprofit building community-led food systems across Dane County. Learn more at rootedwi.org.
A Milwaukee Nonprofit Just Launched Its First Capital Campaign in 113 Years — And the Lesson Isn't About the Money
Wisconsin Community Services opened in 1912 as the Society of the Friendless. It became Wisconsin Correctional Services in 1966. About 20 years ago it broadened again, taking on mental health, housing, and substance-use programs that now serve more than 17,000 people a year. In late April 2026, just a few weeks ago, WCS launched its first-ever capital campaign — $5 million to revamp the second floor of its Wisconsin Avenue campus and rebuild its community-based mental health programs.
Read that timeline again. A 113-year-old organization that has changed its name, its mission, and its primary work twice — and never asked donors for capital. Until now.
The campaign's mechanics matter, but the lesson lives in the framing. WCS is primarily supported through government funding. That funding source has become more unpredictable, more politicized, and more conditional than at any point in recent memory. The board's response wasn't to cut programs or merge or wait. It was to add a fundraising muscle the organization had never built before — at age 113.
That's the replicable insight. The reason most government-funded nonprofits don't run capital campaigns isn't capacity. It's identity. They've spent decades telling themselves "we're not a private-fundraising organization." That story is now expensive. The organizations that figure out how to add private capital alongside government contracts — without losing the mission focus that made them grant-eligible — will outlast the ones that don't.
Here's how to start. If your organization is primarily government-funded and has never run a capital campaign, the work begins with your board, not your development director.
Ask your board chair to put one question on the next agenda: what is the single infrastructure investment that would expand the people we can serve, and what would it cost? Pin a real number — building, equipment, technology, a permanent staff position. Not aspirational. Specific.
Then start mapping who in your community has both the capacity and the affinity. Most government-funded nonprofits have donor data sitting in their CRM that nobody has segmented for major-gift potential. Pull a list. Identify the 25 people who would likely take a meeting.
Brief your ED on what a major-gift conversation actually sounds like — it isn't a pitch, it's a question about whether the donor sees themselves in the mission.
The harder work is internal. A capital campaign requires the board to commit to a goal in front of the community, the ED to learn an unfamiliar discipline, and the staff to absorb the energy a campaign demands. WCS spent more than a century without those muscles. They built them anyway.
The uncomfortable truth. If your nonprofit's revenue is more than 70% government dollars and you've never run a private capital campaign, you're not as safe as your audit shows. You're concentrated. And concentration risk in nonprofit revenue behaves the same way it does in investment portfolios — it looks fine until it doesn't.
Sources:Milwaukee NNS — Longtime Milwaukee Nonprofit Launches Capital Campaign · Milwaukee Courier — Capital Campaign to Transform Mental Health Space · OnMilwaukee — WCS Launches Campaign
A Small Illinois Library Is Running Mental Health Counseling and a Grocery Pickup Program — From the Same Building
A library is supposed to lend books. Highwood Public Library — in a small North Shore community outside Chicago — has been quietly redefining what a library does for nearly four years. Since 2022 the library has operated a Health Equity department offering bilingual (English and Spanish) counseling and case management to community members without insurance or English fluency. In March 2026, it added a weekly grocery distribution program funded through private donors.
The library isn't a clinic. It isn't a food bank. It's a library that recognized two things most nonprofits never name out loud: it had earned trust the local community already used, and the physical space it controlled could meet needs that neighboring institutions couldn't.
The grocery program runs alongside an existing arrangement with St. James Food Pantry. St. James is open Thursday afternoons at a nearby church; whatever food is left by Friday goes to the library and gets distributed throughout the week. The mental health work is bilingual by design — Highwood has a substantial Spanish-speaking population that local clinical providers don't reliably serve.
This is a story about asset reuse. Most nonprofits act as if their assets are limited to what their budget pays for. Highwood treated the building, the trust, the welcoming front door, and the stigma-free reputation as resources. Then it plugged services into them.
Why this matters to your organization. Whether you run a library, a faith community, a rec center, a school program, a housing nonprofit, or anything with a physical footprint and community trust, you almost certainly have unused capacity to host services your community needs but you don't currently provide.
The constraint is usually identity, not space. "That's not what we do" is the most expensive sentence in the nonprofit sector.
Here's your Monday morning version. Pick one need your community has that the closest credible provider can't meet at scale — language, hours, transportation, stigma, scheduling, trust. Identify the organization that could provide that service if it had a different setting.
Have one conversation: would your existing space and existing relationships make their service work better? Many wraparound partnerships start with a single shared room, a regular hour on the calendar, and a referral pathway both organizations can describe in plain English.
The structural insight is what Highwood's director understood early. The library didn't replace the pantry. It didn't replace the clinic. It became the connector between them and the people who hadn't been showing up for either.
That's a role most nonprofits with a physical footprint could play if they were willing to stretch the definition of what their organization is for.
The hard part isn't logistics. It's letting the institution change. A library that runs counseling sessions is a different organization than a library that lends books — and not every board, every staff member, every donor will agree the change is right. The conversation has to happen explicitly. Highwood had it. The communities that benefit are the ones whose institutions are willing to stretch.
Sources:The Record (North Shore) — Beyond Books: How Highwood Library Fights Hunger, Supports Mental-Health Needs · Highwood Library & Community Center
Ford and MacArthur Are Paying Nonprofits to Combine — And the Signal Matters Even If You're Not Eligible
On March 12, 2026, the Sorenson Impact Institute launched a $1 million pooled grant fund anchored by the Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to help nonprofits in the impact investing and inclusive capitalism field merge, integrate operations, or share services. Grants run $100,000 to $400,000. Letters of intent are due June 11, 2026. Full proposals are due August 22.
Read that eligibility carefully — this fund is targeted at field-building organizations in impact investing and inclusive capitalism. That isn't your housing nonprofit, your food pantry, your arts council, or most of NGN Premium's audience. So why does it matter to you?
Because of what the fund signals. Two of the largest, most-watched philanthropies in the United States just put real money on the table to make consolidation cheaper for the nonprofits that pursue it.
Allowable uses include feasibility studies, due diligence, legal costs, integration planning, staff transition support, and even strategic communications to help organizations frame consolidation publicly. The funders aren't subsidizing growth. They're subsidizing combination.
This follows a longer pattern. Mission + Strategy's longitudinal research on nonprofit mergers has been documenting the structural barriers — legal costs, integration capacity, leadership transitions — that keep nonprofits separate even when combination would clearly serve the mission better. Funders have been hearing the message. The Sorenson Fund is the first major coordinated philanthropic response.
When Ford and MacArthur say something with money, the rest of philanthropy listens. Expect community foundations and regional funders to begin underwriting integration costs in their own grant cycles within twelve to twenty-four months. This has the makings of a directional shift rather than a one-time event (I hope that's not simply wishful thinking on my part).
Here's why this should change your conversation this quarter. If you've ever been part of a hallway conversation about whether your organization should combine programs with a peer — even informally, even tentatively — the funding environment is moving toward you. The argument "we can't afford to merge" is now answerable. The argument "the funders won't support a transition period" is no longer reliably true.
Your move. Pick the one peer organization in your service area whose mission overlaps yours by more than 30%. Have one private conversation between EDs about whether either of you has been thinking about consolidation, shared back office, joint programming, or asset transfer. Don't bring the boards in yet. Don't draft anything. Just find out whether the conversation is alive on both sides.
If it is, the next twelve months are going to surface funding opportunities your organizations would never have had access to alone. If it isn't, you've still learned something important about how to plan the next three years.
The harder version of this question is the one most boards avoid: if your organization stopped existing tomorrow, would the people you serve be worse off? If the honest answer is "they'd find roughly the same services from our peer organization down the street," you have a strategic problem that no fundraising plan will fix.
Combination is one answer. Pretending the question hasn't been asked is also an answer. It's just an expensive one.
I believe that part of the stewardship obligation of every nonprofit board of directors is to raise and critically evaluate this question every year.
Sources:Sorenson Impact Institute — Collaboration Fund RFP · Mission + Strategy — Nonprofit Merger Study Longitudinal Revisit
Audit Your Vendor W-9s and 1099 Records Before June
Most nonprofits learn they're missing W-9s for vendors they paid last year only when their bookkeeper begins assembling 1099 information for the next filing cycle. By then it's late, the vendor relationship may have ended, and chasing down a missing form is a multi-week annoyance — sometimes a wall. The IRS schedule for failing to file or correct an information return runs $60 per form for early corrections, $130 if corrected by August 1, and $340 if corrected after August 1 — with intentional-disregard penalties starting at $680 per form and no maximum.
Block 90 minutes this week. Pull every vendor your organization paid more than $600 in the past 12 months — service providers, contractors, attorneys, freelance designers, repair workers, the whole list. Confirm you have a current W-9 on file for each one. For any vendor without a W-9, send the form today with a clear deadline (two weeks). For vendors no longer working with you, request the W-9 with a brief note explaining the requirement; most respond. Update your accounts-payable workflow to require a W-9 before issuing the first payment to any new vendor.
A nonprofit with three missing 1099 forms is exposed to anywhere from $180 (corrected this month) to $1,020 (corrected after August 1) in direct penalty risk — and the administrative cost and audit-flag risk run well beyond that. Ninety minutes now beats a January scramble.
Deploy a Password Manager Across Your Organization
Multi-factor authentication catches the credential-theft attacks that come from outside. It does nothing about the credential-management problem most nonprofits actually have inside their walls — passwords stored in shared spreadsheets, sticky notes, browser tabs, and the same five reused phrases your staff has been typing for years. Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that compromised credentials were the initial access vector in roughly one in five breaches, and that the median user with infostealer malware had more than half their passwords reused across services.
A password manager solves the underlying problem. Bitwarden's Free plan covers individuals and 2-user organizations; their Teams plan starts at $4 per user per month. 1Password offers up to 50% off for registered nonprofits through their nonprofit program. Both roll out across a small team in an afternoon. Install on every staff laptop and phone. Set a policy that any password used for organizational work lives in the manager, not in a spreadsheet. Generate unique strong passwords for each account as you go. Set the recovery and emergency-access policies before staff start using the system, not after.
Time: one afternoon for setup, fifteen minutes per staff member to onboard. Cost: roughly $2 to $5 per user per month for a small team. The math is simple — one credential breach that costs even $5,000 in legal review, donor notification, or lost time pays for the manager many times over.
Get Your Treasurer to Sign a Quarterly Internal-Controls Certification
Most small nonprofits have internal-controls policies on paper that nobody confirms are being followed in practice. The treasurer signs the financial statements at year-end, but during the year there's no formal moment when someone with fiduciary responsibility attests that the controls actually ran. Auditors notice. Funders increasingly ask. And when something goes wrong — a misposted journal entry, an unauthorized payment, a missed bank reconciliation — the absence of a regular attestation is part of how the issue was missed.
Build a one-page certification your treasurer signs every quarter. The form should list five to seven specific controls that should have run during the quarter: bank reconciliations completed within 30 days of month-end, two-signature requirement honored on every check above your threshold, expense reports approved by someone other than the spender, vendor changes reviewed by a second person, and the credit-card statement reviewed line-by-line by a non-cardholder.
The treasurer reviews evidence that each control ran (logs, signed reconciliations, approval emails), checks the box, signs, and files the form with the board records.
Time: 30 minutes to draft the form. 20 minutes per quarter for the treasurer to certify. Estimated value: the ACFE's 2024 Report to the Nations puts the median nonprofit fraud loss at $76,000 per case. A regular control attestation is one of the cheapest mechanisms for catching irregularities before they compound, and auditors view it as a strong governance signal.
Run a Vendor Risk Assessment on Your Top Ten Operational Vendors
Most nonprofits know which donors might leave. Far fewer know which vendors could break their operations. Your IT provider, your payroll processor, your insurance broker, your CRM platform, your fiscal sponsor, your accounting firm — each one is a single point of failure for a critical function, and the consequences of any of them failing or being breached can be larger than most board members appreciate. You don't run this prompt because you expect a vendor to fail. You run it because knowing where your real exposure lives lets you spend the next ninety days actually addressing it instead of flinching when something goes wrong.
PROMPT: Act as a senior nonprofit operations consultant with 20 years of experience advising small to mid-size nonprofits (budgets under $5 million) on vendor risk and third-party dependency. I'm going to paste in our top ten operational vendors with the following information for each: (1) vendor name and the function they perform, (2) annual spend, (3) whether they hold sensitive data (donor records, client information, employee data), (4) the contracted notice period in our agreement (or "month-to-month" if none), and (5) my honest assessment of how easily we could replace them if they failed tomorrow. For each vendor, produce: (a) a likelihood-of-disruption rating (low/medium/high) with a one-line reason, (b) the operational impact on our organization if the vendor stopped delivering tomorrow, in dollars or staff-hours where possible, (c) the single most important mitigation action we should take in the next 90 days — backup plan, contract renegotiation, data export, vendor diversification, or insurance coverage — and (d) one question we should be asking the vendor at our next account review. Hold a high bar for "high" risk. Format as a board-ready memo I can present to my finance committee. [Paste your top ten vendors with the data above.]
Build a Training Needs Assessment for Your Staff Before Your Next Budget Cycle
Too many nonprofit training budgets get spent on whatever the ED happened to hear about that month — a workshop a board member recommended, a conference somebody on staff signed up for, a webinar that landed in the inbox.
Almost none of it is targeted to the actual capability gaps the organization has. The result is a training line item that costs money and produces no measurable change in how the work gets done.
A structured needs assessment, run before the budget cycle, redirects that money to where the organizational gain is largest.
PROMPT: Act as a senior nonprofit talent-development consultant with 15 years of experience advising small to mid-size nonprofits on staff capability building. I'm going to describe my organization: [paste mission, staff size and roles, annual training budget, and the three biggest operational frustrations or capacity gaps you've experienced in the past year]. Produce a one-page training needs assessment that includes: (1) the three highest-priority capability gaps based on what I've described, ranked by likely organizational impact, (2) for each gap, a recommended training format (cohort, individual coursework, on-the-job coaching, peer learning, conference attendance), with a rough cost range and one specific source where this kind of training is reliably available for nonprofit staff, (3) a measurement question I should be able to answer six months after the training to confirm it produced change, and (4) the single capability gap that would be cheaper to hire for than to train for, with a one-line rationale. Hold a high bar for "high impact" — programs my staff would enjoy but that don't change how the work runs do not qualify. Format as a memo my board's HR committee can review in fifteen minutes. [Paste your inputs here.]
Audit the Strategic Questions Your Board Should Be Asking — But Isn't
Most nonprofit boards spend their time reviewing reports about the past quarter and approving the budget for the next one. Strategic questions — the ones that would actually shape the organization's direction over the next three to five years — get raised at retreats once a year, if at all. The prompt below produces a short list of strategic questions specific to your organization's circumstances, ranked by importance, that you can put on the agenda over the next three board meetings or at your next retreat. The point isn't to answer them. It's to make sure the board is asking them.
PROMPT: Act as a senior nonprofit governance consultant with 20 years of experience advising the boards of small to mid-size nonprofits (budgets under $5 million) on strategic focus. I'm going to describe my organization: [paste mission, budget size, staff size, primary revenue mix, geographic scope, and the most significant strategic decision the board has discussed in the past 12 months]. Generate a list of seven strategic questions this board should be asking but probably isn't, ordered by likely importance. For each question, produce: (1) the question itself, written in plain English a non-expert board member can understand, (2) a one-sentence explanation of why this question matters now specifically (not in the abstract), (3) the type of information the board would need to answer it — financial data, beneficiary feedback, peer-organization research, or external trend data — and (4) the suggested venue for the conversation: regular meeting, executive committee, retreat, or one-on-one with the board chair. Avoid generic strategic-planning questions ("what is our five-year vision?") in favor of specific ones the organization's actual circumstances make urgent. Format as a memo the board chair can review in ten minutes. [Paste your inputs here.]
CEO Emergency Succession Cards — What Actually Happens in the First Seven Days If Your ED Disappears Tomorrow
Board Continuity / Risk Management — 15 minutes
What makes it worth trying: Most boards have never written down what they would actually do in the first seven days after an unexpected ED departure — illness, sudden resignation, family emergency, anything. When the crisis happens, the board chair improvises a plan in real time while staff watches.
This exercise produces a one-page action card that lives in the board's records and gets refreshed every year. It takes 15 minutes the first time.
Done badly, an emergency succession costs the organization six months of fundraising momentum, two key staff departures, and most of the donor confidence the ED spent years building. Done with a card already in place, it costs less than a board meeting.
What you need: Three blank index cards or a simple one-page template per board member. Three columns: "First 24 Hours," "First 7 Days," "First 30 Days." A list of the seven things that have to happen if the ED leaves suddenly — communicate to staff, communicate to the board, communicate to major funders, name an interim, secure financial systems and credentials, lock down legal and contractual obligations, and begin the search-or-bridge decision.
How to run it:
Step 1 (2 minutes): The board chair frames the exercise. Not "what do we want to happen" but "what would actually happen if I called you tomorrow morning and said our ED is no longer with the organization." There's no right answer. The point is to write down what the board would do, find the gaps, and close them before the gap matters.
Step 2 (5 minutes): Each board member privately writes, on their card, who would do what across the three columns. Who calls the staff. Who calls the major funders. Who has access to the bank and the CRM. Who chairs the next board meeting. Who's the interim point person if the ED isn't available to facilitate the transition.
Step 3 (5 minutes): Compare cards. Note where everyone wrote the same name (those are your real continuity assumptions). Note where the cards are blank or contradictory. Those gaps are your real exposure. Don't try to resolve them in the meeting — note them and assign one board member to draft a complete succession card for the board's next meeting.
Step 4 (3 minutes): Make one decision: who has emergency authority to act on behalf of the board if the ED is unavailable for more than 48 hours and the full board can't be convened? Most organizations don't have this written down. The chair, the executive committee, the secretary, or a designated officer — pick one and put it in the minutes.
In-person: Index cards collected and sorted on a conference table. The chair posts the consolidated draft on a flip chart for the room to see.
Virtual: A shared Google Doc with three columns. Each board member fills in their column simultaneously with their initials. The pattern is visible immediately when the chair shares the screen.
Watch out for: The board member who treats the exercise as theoretical because "this would never happen to us." The exercise is risk planning, not catastrophizing. Also watch for the assumption that "the executive committee will figure it out." Most executive committees haven't met outside of regular board meetings in years and don't have a working communication channel for crisis use. Test it by trying to convene the executive committee within 24 hours on a written-down basis — see how that actually works.
You'll know it worked when two things are true. First, within 30 days the board has approved a one-page Emergency Succession Card and stored it with the board's official records. Second, at least three board members can name — without looking it up — who has emergency authority to act between regular board meetings.
The deeper signal is whether the board reviews this card annually as part of the board calendar. Most boards do this exercise once and never look at the output again, which means the gaps reappear. The boards that get real value re-run the exercise every 12 months and update the card based on who's still serving.
That's this week's NGN Premium. One question to sit with: What is your nonprofit not doing because "that's not what we do" — and is the mission better off because you don't, or only your habits? The nonprofits described in the WMG section had the bravery to question their assumptions. Better to have that conversation now than to watch a peer organization stretch past you.
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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