As a nonprofit, the most expensive way to do more work is to hire more people. The most reliable way is to find a different multiplier. The three stories in this issue are about organizations that did the latter. A Phoenix literacy nonprofit multiplies trained reading specialists by tenth-graders. A Kenosha food bank multiplies its delivery and grant-writing capacity by partnering with a community action agency that already has those staff. A national immigration nonprofit multiplies its caseworkers by an AI tool plugged into government data nobody else can touch.
None of these organizations got bigger.
Each found a multiplier the next nonprofit over has not yet asked about — which exposes the question every nonprofit leader is sitting on: what is the multiplier I am not using?
A quick note before we dig in: a portion of every NGN Premium subscription goes to Rooted, a Madison-based food-systems nonprofit. Thank you for making that possible.
A Phoenix Nonprofit Just Proved Its Peer Reading Model Works — With Numbers Most Education Programs Can't Match
Read Better Be Better, a Phoenix-based literacy nonprofit, published its 2025 Implementation and Impact Evaluation in late April. The headline finding is the kind of data education funders rarely see.
Kindergarteners and first-graders in the program scored an average of 22.4 percentile points higher than their peers on early reading skills assessments. Second and third-graders scored 8.95 percentile points higher on oral reading fluency tests. Third-graders scored 4.9 percentile points higher on Arizona's statewide ELA achievement tests.
Read those numbers again. A ten-week peer reading program produced double-digit percentile gains for the youngest readers — at scale, in nearly a dozen school districts, with only 36% of Arizona third-graders currently reading at or above grade level.
The model is straightforward. Younger students (kindergarten through third grade) are paired with older students (middle and high school) as reading partners. The older students are trained as "Leaders." The pair meets twice a week for ten weeks in an after-school setting.
The Leader uses a structured comprehension and fluency curriculum — but the engine is the peer relationship. The younger student practices reading aloud with someone who is closer to them in age than a teacher. The older student gains a leadership experience that, the program's research shows, also lifts their own outcomes.
Why this matters right now. Federal literacy funding is volatile, state budgets are squeezed, and most school districts are looking for high-impact programs they can run without hiring credentialed tutors.
The peer model gets around the staffing constraint. Middle and high school students are already in the building and already need supervised after-school programming. Pairing them with younger readers turns the demographic problem into the solution.
Here is what makes this replicable. The program is not a curriculum sale. It is a structural model with three components: trained older students as reading leaders, a defined ten-week pairing cycle, and a comprehension-and-fluency framework the leaders walk through with their partners.
The infrastructure costs are modest. Read Better Be Better's program is delivered in shared school space with volunteer or stipended student leaders. The startup cost for an interested nonprofit looks more like $5,000–$15,000 to license or adapt the model and train initial cohorts — far less than the $50,000–$150,000 most evidence-based literacy programs require.
First steps if your organization works with kids. Read the 2025 evaluation report and look at how outcomes were measured. Most education nonprofits skip evaluation because the design feels intimidating; this report is a usable template.
Then take three steps. Call Read Better Be Better's program team and ask if they license the model outside Arizona. Identify one school district partner in your service area that already has after-school programming and would host a pilot. Pilot small — one school, one ten-week cycle, with a pre-and-post reading skills assessment built in from day one. If the data holds, the next funding conversation gets dramatically easier.
If you do not work with kids, the model still has a transferable insight: the people who can deliver your program might not be the people you are currently paying to deliver it. Look at who is already present in your service environment — clients, volunteers, peer participants — and ask whether a structured pairing model would let you reach more people without adding staff.
Sources: Read Better Be Better — 2025 Implementation and Impact Evaluation. Read On Arizona — Arizona third-grade reading benchmark. 12 News Phoenix — program coverage.
A Kenosha Food Bank and a Community Action Agency Just Took the Third Path — Neither Merger Nor Solo Operation
In Issue #27, I covered a $1 million Ford and MacArthur fund that pays nonprofits to consolidate. The forecast in that piece was that community foundations and regional funders would begin underwriting integration costs over the next year or two. Then I learned that on April 1, 2026 — without a foundation paying for it — two Wisconsin nonprofits announced exactly the kind of arrangement that fund subsidizes.
The Kenosha County Food Bank (KCFB) and the Racine Kenosha Community Action Agency (RKCAA) signed a strategic partnership effective April 1 that lets them stay independent while sharing operations.
RKCAA now handles food deliveries and grant writing for the food bank. In exchange, RKCAA continues to store food in KCFB's walk-in refrigerator at no cost — capacity it would otherwise have to pay for. Both organizations retain their boards, their 990s, their separate funding streams, and their distinct community identities. What they share is the work.
Why this is worth a careful read. The framing every nonprofit ED has heard is binary: either you merge with your closest peer or you stay solo. Both options carry a tax.
Merger costs cultural integration, board reconfiguration, donor confusion, and 12–24 months of leadership distraction. Solo operation costs duplicated overhead and infrastructure you cannot afford to build on your own — fleet maintenance, grant-writing capacity, refrigerated storage, IT. What KCFB and RKCAA chose is the third path: stay legally separate, share specific operations.
That third path is rarely the first thing two EDs discuss. It requires both parties to acknowledge that their org charts are not the optimal shape for the work — and to give up the comfort of fully owning every function. It also requires actual coordination, not just a memorandum of understanding that lives in a filing cabinet. RKCAA's role here is operational, not advisory.
Here is what makes this replicable. The structure works because the partnership exchanges specific assets that each organization has in surplus and needs from the other.
KCFB has refrigeration capacity it does not fully use and lacks delivery and grant-writing staff. RKCAA has delivery routes and grant writers and lacks refrigerated storage. The exchange is direct and measurable, not a vague "let's work together" arrangement.
Three structural elements make a partnership like this durable:
- Both organizations remain legally and financially separate. No 990 consolidation. No shared liabilities beyond what is explicitly documented in the partnership agreement. Each board retains full governance authority.
- The shared services are specific and named. Not "we'll help each other out" — but "RKCAA delivers, KCFB stores, and grants are written through RKCAA's grant team with mutually agreed allocations."
- The exchange has clear value on both sides. This is not a charitable favor from a larger nonprofit to a smaller one. It is an arrangement where each party gets capacity it would otherwise pay for.
First steps if you serve overlapping populations with a peer organization. Identify the operational function in your nonprofit that is most expensive per unit of output — usually transportation, IT, grant writing, or back-office finance.
Identify a peer nonprofit in your service area whose mission overlaps yours by more than 20% and whose operational structure has surplus in your scarcity area. Have one private ED-to-ED conversation about what each organization has more of than it needs. Draft a one-page partnership outline before bringing your boards in.
The Sorenson Fund's published feasibility frameworks are a starting point if you want a template.
If a foundation in your region wants to underwrite this work, the Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative in San Diego — which opens applications July 1 — and the older Los Angeles NSI (running since 2012) both have published partnership case studies that map this kind of arrangement.
Sources: Kenosha County Food Bank — April 2026 partnership announcement. Kenosha.com — coverage of the partnership launch.
Mobile Pathways Negotiated Direct Access to USCIS Data — And the Result Was a 167% Earnings Boost for the Asylum Seekers They Serve
Mobile Pathways — a small nonprofit using mobile technology and AI to help immigrants through the court process — announced in May an enhanced version of its Pathfinder tool that cuts the time it takes to process an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) for asylum seekers. In the first two months after the enhancement launched, participating asylum seekers' average household earnings increased by 167%.
Pathfinder is the AI tool that does the work. The breakthrough that made it possible is what Mobile Pathways negotiated in April 2025: direct API access to both the immigration courts and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services databases. They are, per their own statement, the first nonprofit to receive that access.
With that data piped into Pathfinder, the system can track case status in real time, alert attorneys and clients to missed deadlines before they become irreversible, and accelerate the EAD eligibility check that is otherwise a multi-week back-and-forth with USCIS.
Why this matters now. Federal funding for legal services to immigrants is contested. State budgets are tight. Most immigration nonprofits are running on caseloads of 100–300 active clients per attorney, with deadlines slipping through cracks at predictable rates.
The asylum seeker who misses an EAD filing window does not just lose paperwork — they lose six to twelve months of legal employment, with all the household financial pressure that creates. A tool that catches those windows is not a marginal improvement. It is the difference between a household earning legally or not earning at all.
The 167% household earnings figure is the headline, but the more important data is what Pathfinder is doing structurally. It is not replacing immigration attorneys. It is replacing the manual deadline tracking and case status checking that attorneys would otherwise burn hours doing.
That recovered attorney time goes back into client representation, which means the same staff serves more asylum seekers per quarter without sacrificing legal quality.
Here is what makes this transferable — even if you do not serve immigrants. Most NGN Premium readers will not build the next Pathfinder. The replicable insight is upstream: a small nonprofit with deep service expertise can negotiate direct government data partnerships that no for-profit or larger nonprofit has bothered to pursue.
Mobile Pathways got direct USCIS access because they could demonstrate they would use it to improve outcomes for a population the agency itself cares about serving. The agency had no reason to say no.
Three preconditions made the data partnership possible:
- Mobile Pathways had a track record of using data responsibly. Their published immigration court data analysis demonstrated they could handle sensitive information without misuse.
- They proposed a tool, not a research project. The pitch to USCIS was "we will reduce the burden of EAD processing on your staff" — a concrete operational benefit, not a vague "we'd like to study your data."
- They built coalition before the ask. Letters of support from immigration courts, partner nonprofits, and pro bono law firms made the partnership politically feasible inside USCIS.
First steps if you serve a population that interacts with a specific government agency. Identify the agency. Identify the dataset they hold that, if you could query it, would improve outcomes for your clients.
Audit your organization's data handling track record honestly — could you defend it under scrutiny? If yes, draft a one-page partnership proposal framed as "here is how we reduce burden on your staff while improving outcomes for the population you are mandated to serve."
If your track record is shakier, the first move is a six-month data hygiene project before the partnership ask. Both moves take less money than most nonprofits assume.
Two final questions to consider if you or your organization currently are squeamish about using AI: do you think the asylees who work with this nonprofit feel bad about AI being put to use this way? If not (and I suspect not), what would your clients say in the same situation?
Sources: Mobile Pathways — Pathfinder May 2026 enhancement. Pathfinder by Mobile Pathways — tool documentation. PR Newswire — funding announcement and USCIS partnership context.
Renegotiate Your D&O Insurance Renewal Before You Sign It Again
Most nonprofits renew their Directors and Officers liability insurance the same way they renew their building insurance — they receive a quote, glance at the premium change, and sign. Insurance brokers count on this. The renewal cycle is one of the few moments where a 15 to 30-minute phone call has measurable financial return.
Action: Pull your current D&O policy and the renewal quote. Compare the premium change to your loss history (if any) and to the market — most regional brokers will benchmark you for free on request.
Push back on three specific items: the policy limit (most small nonprofits are over-insured at $3M–$5M when $1M–$2M is appropriate), the deductible (a higher deductible cuts premium materially), and any "consent to settle" clauses that constrain your ability to fight a frivolous claim. Ask your broker to quote two alternative carriers in addition to your incumbent. If your broker will not, switch brokers.
ROI: D&O premiums for small to mid-size nonprofits typically run $1,500 to $8,000 a year. A 10–15% negotiated reduction is realistic if you have not pushed back in three or more renewal cycles. That is $150 to $1,200 in cash per year, recurring.
The Nonprofit Risk Management Center's 2024 D&O benchmarking report showed material premium variation across carriers for substantially identical risk profiles.
Time: 30 minutes to read the policy, 30 minutes for the broker conversation, 30 minutes to evaluate alternative quotes. Under 2 hours total.
Re-Acknowledge Your Employee Handbook Before Summer Hires Start
Most nonprofits ask new hires to sign acknowledgment of the employee handbook on day one and then never ask again. Three to five years later, when an employment dispute arrives, the org discovers half its staff signed an acknowledgment of a handbook that has been revised three times since.
Action: Pull the current version of your employee handbook (the actual one, not the one labeled "Final v3.docx" from 2022). Pull the signed acknowledgment forms in your HR files. Identify every staff member whose acknowledgment is more than 24 months old or who signed a prior version.
Send each one an email with the current handbook attached and a one-paragraph acknowledgment for them to sign and return within two weeks. File the new acknowledgments. Calendar an annual re-acknowledgment going forward, ideally tied to performance review season.
ROI: The median wrongful termination settlement is in the high five figures, before legal fees. A current, signed handbook acknowledgment is one of the strongest pieces of evidence an employer can produce. The cost of a single avoided dispute pays for the next decade of re-acknowledgment hours.
Even setting aside dispute risk, a current acknowledgment cycle protects you from inconsistent enforcement of policies you may have forgotten about — including remote work, PTO, and AI use policies.
Time: 15 minutes per staff member. For a 10-person team, under 3 hours total.
Refresh Your Tribute Gift Acknowledgment Workflow Before Memorial Day
Tribute gifts — given in honor of someone or in memory of someone who has died — represent roughly 10% of household donations for most community-serving nonprofits and have donor retention rates 25–40 percentage points higher than regular gifts. Most nonprofits acknowledge these gifts with the same letter they use for everything else. They are leaving recurring revenue on the table.
Action: Open your CRM and filter for the past 12 months of tribute gifts. Check whether each one received three things: (1) an acknowledgment letter to the donor that names the honoree, (2) a notification letter to the honoree or the family (with the donor's permission and without the dollar amount), and (3) a follow-up at a meaningful anniversary or holiday.
If your current process misses any of these, fix the templates this week. Build the workflow in your CRM so it triggers automatically going forward. Memorial Day weekend traditionally drives a small spike in tribute gifts — get the workflow live before then.
ROI: A nonprofit doing $200,000 a year in tribute gifts at a 60% donor retention rate (typical when the workflow is sloppy) loses about $80,000 a year to attrition. Moving retention to 75% with a strong acknowledgment workflow recovers $30,000 a year — for a tooling cost under $100.
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project 2024 report puts overall donor retention at 41.9% — tribute gifts beat that meaningfully when handled well.
Time: 90 minutes to audit and rewrite the templates. 30 minutes to configure CRM automation. Under 2 hours total.
Map Your Earned Revenue Opportunities Before Your Next Budget Cycle
Most small nonprofits leave money on the table by not asking a structured question once a year: where in our operations could we be selling something we are already producing? You do not run this exercise because it is supposed to be a strategy retreat. It is not. It is a one-hour structured prompt that turns into a list of three to five ideas your finance committee can rank in the next board meeting.
Act as a nonprofit revenue strategist who has helped 100+ small to mid-size US nonprofits identify earned revenue opportunities they were not already pursuing. I'm going to give you a description of my organization: [paste your mission statement, programs, geographic focus, URL, and approximate budget size]. Based on that, produce a force-ranked list of 5 earned revenue opportunities specific to my organization. For each opportunity, provide: (1) what we'd be selling and to whom; (2) what existing organizational capability it builds on (don't propose ideas requiring a new department); (3) realistic year-one revenue range with assumptions stated; (4) the three risks of pursuing it (mission drift, donor confusion, capacity strain, etc.); (5) the smallest possible pilot to test the idea in 90 days. Rank by combined attractiveness of revenue potential and ease of pilot. End with one question I should ask my board before pursuing the top-ranked option.
Draft a Board Recruitment Search Profile Before Your Nominating Committee Meets
Most nonprofit boards recruit by personal network and end up with members who look like the people already on the board. A structured search profile breaks the pattern by forcing the nominating committee to articulate, before any names come up, what gap the next member is filling. It is a 20-minute prompt that prevents 18 months of regret.
Act as a senior board development consultant specializing in small to mid-size US nonprofit boards. I'll describe my current board: [paste board size, terms, current member backgrounds and skills, your nonprofit's mission and 3 strategic priorities for the next 24 months]. Produce a board recruitment search profile that identifies: (1) the 3 specific skill or experience gaps the next member should fill, ranked by strategic priority; (2) for each gap, the candidate profile — including professional background, sector, and demographic considerations relevant to the population we serve; (3) where this candidate is likely to be found (specific networks, professional associations, sectors, not "LinkedIn"); (4) the three questions to ask in a first conversation that will reveal fit faster than a standard "why do you want to serve" question; (5) one red flag pattern to watch for. End with the single most important board member competency our current board is missing and why.
Write a Volunteer Recruitment Pitch Worth Forwarding
Volunteer recruitment pitches fail because they read like a cause appeal — emotional, vague, low on specifics about what the volunteer will actually do. The pitches that get forwarded are the ones that name the work and the time commitment clearly. This prompt produces a forwardable 200-word pitch.
Act as a volunteer engagement strategist with 20+ years working with US nonprofits. I'm going to give you: [name the specific volunteer role, time commitment, what the volunteer will actually do week-to-week, what skills they need, what they'll get out of it, and the mission context]. Produce a 200-word volunteer recruitment pitch with the following structure: (1) opening hook — name the specific problem this volunteer role helps solve, with a concrete example; (2) what the volunteer will actually do — three to five sentences naming the work, the time commitment, and the supervision; (3) what they'll get — skill development, network, lived experience, with one specific named outcome; (4) the call to action — what to do next, with one named contact and a deadline. Avoid generic "make a difference" language. Make it forwardable: write so a current volunteer reading this could share it with a friend and the friend would immediately understand what they'd be signing up for.
The Mission Drift Check — A 20-Minute Diagnostic for Mid-Year Course Correction
What makes it worth trying: Most boards know mission drift when they see it in someone else's organization. They struggle to see it in their own. This exercise surfaces the gap between what your mission statement says you do and what your last 12 months of activity show you actually doing — without anyone having to make accusations. It works because the comparison happens to the data, not to the people.
How to run it (20 minutes):
Setup (before the meeting, by board chair): Pull two documents. (a) Your current mission statement, as it appears in your articles of incorporation and on your website. (b) Your last 12 months of board minutes — specifically, the list of programs and initiatives the board approved, expanded, or significantly funded. Print both at the top of a single page, with the mission statement at the top and the program/initiative list below.
Round 1 — independent ranking (5 minutes): Distribute the page. Ask each board member to silently mark each program/initiative with one of three letters: A (clearly within mission), B (adjacent to mission, defensible), C (drifted — would be hard to defend to a new funder reading your mission statement cold). No discussion. Mark and pass.
Round 2 — pattern view (10 minutes): Tally the marks. Show the count of A, B, and C marks per program. The patterns that matter are not unanimity — they are the C marks. Discuss any program with two or more C marks: why did the board approve it? Was it a genuine mission expansion (worth updating the mission statement to reflect) or a drift away from mission (worth a hard look)?
Round 3 — board decision (5 minutes): For each program with two or more C marks, the board makes one of three decisions: (a) update the mission statement to formally include this work, (b) sunset or reshape the program, or (c) refer to executive committee for a 90-day decision. No "we'll think about it." A choice gets made on every C-marked program.
In-person: Physical printouts and pens. Verbal tally on a flip chart.
Virtual: Shared Google Doc with the mission statement and program list visible. Each board member adds A/B/C in a column next to their name. Tally column updates live.
Watch out for: The ED defending every program. You are not conducting a performance review of the ED. This is a check on collective board decision-making — programs were board-approved, so any drift is also a board accountability issue. Frame the exercise that way at the start.
The other failure mode is treating one or two C marks as definitive. Single marks reflect individual interpretation, not consensus. Move only on programs with three or more C marks.
You'll know it worked when: The board either updates its mission statement (acknowledging the work has expanded), makes a reasoned conclusion that the mission statement and programs are 100% aligned, or makes a defined decision about a drifted program — within 30 days of the exercise. If the exercise produces "interesting discussion" but no decision, it failed.
We have seen there is a question hiding inside every nonprofit budget meeting: are we adding capacity in the most expensive way available? The default answer is to hire. The three organizations in this issue answered differently. None of them got bigger. All of them did more. So again, what is the multiplier your organization is not yet using?
— Ted
P.S. Thanks again for supporting Rooted with your subscription.
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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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