Repositioning

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Last week's issue was about borrowed infrastructure — finding the institution next door whose surplus capacity matches what you need. This week's is the harder move: reshaping your own organization when the ground underneath it shifts.

When a funding source disappears, most nonprofits cut, squeeze, or wait. Each is a bet — that the work can survive on a thinner staff, that morale will hold, that the funding will return on the timeline you need. Those bets often lose.

The three nonprofits in this issue made a different bet. One lost a major federal program and reemerged in a different role inside its successor. One reaches 13,000 households a year by changing how the work gets delivered, not by adding sites. One coalition of funders built a new backbone organization rather than splitting the money into more grants.

Each repositioned. None retrenched.

When North Carolina Shuttered the Healthy Opportunities Pilot, the Nonprofits That Ran It Repositioned Instead of Closing

Last year, the state of North Carolina shut down the Healthy Opportunities Pilot. HOP was the first program in the country to use Medicaid dollars to pay for non-medical services — food, housing, transportation — for high-need patients. It had been running in 33 counties since 2022, paying community-based organizations to deliver evidence-based interventions for some of the most expensive patients in the Medicaid system.

When the funding ended, the obvious path for the regional nonprofits that had stood up the work was contraction, layoffs, eventually closure. That is not what happened to Impact Health or Access East.

Impact Health oversaw HOP across an 18-county stretch of western North Carolina. Access East oversaw nine northeastern counties. On May 1, 2026, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services named both as two of five network leads for the state's new Rural Health Transformation Program — the ROOTS Hub, short for Rural Organizations Orchestrating Transformation for Sustainability.

The new program is funded by a $213 million federal award. The state hopes to receive $1 billion over five years to strengthen rural care delivery.

The here headline is what Impact Health and Access East had to become to win the role.

Under the federal award's terms, ROOTS Hub money cannot be used the way HOP money was used. It cannot pay for food boxes, transportation rides, or housing repairs. It can be used to build care coordination systems, conduct community needs assessments, and develop the rural workforce. The program is infrastructure-only, by federal design.

That is a fundamental shift in what these organizations are paid to do. Direct-service nonprofits in 2025 were paid to deliver the service. Infrastructure-layer nonprofits in 2026 are paid to make sure the service-delivery system across a 27-county region actually works.

Here is what makes this replicable. Impact Health and Access East did not pivot by accident. They were selected because they already had three characteristics the new program required.

First, deep relational networks across community-based providers in their regions. Second, operational knowledge of the food, housing, and transportation gaps rural populations face. Third, the discipline to run a multi-organization program at scale.

Those three things were built during the HOP years. The federal shape changed; the underlying assets did not.

That is the broader lesson for nonprofits facing federal funding pressure right now. The asset funders will pay for next is rarely the same asset they paid for last. But the underlying organizational capacity — relationships, knowledge, operational discipline — is transferable across funding shapes if the leadership team can name it accurately and pitch it credibly to the next funder.

First steps if you are running a program with funding that may not survive the next 18 months. Stop framing your organization as the program. Inventory what your organization actually has that the program required to function.

Which relationships are still warm. Which operational practices are well-documented. Which networks of providers still trust you. What data you have collected that no one else has.

Those are the assets. The program is the current expression of them.

Then look at what other funders are paying for in your region — federal, state, foundation. Most will not pay for what you used to do. Some will pay for one of your underlying assets to play a different role in a different program. The work is finding which one, and writing the pitch that connects your assets to their priorities.

If you do not have an honest conversation with your board about this in the next 60 days, your board will be having the wrong conversation when the funding does end. Get ahead of it.

Sources: North Carolina Health News — "After a pioneering program was spiked, NC organizations build a new path forward" (May 13, 2026); NC Medicaid — Healthy Opportunities Pilots Update; CMS — Rural Health Transformation Program awards.

A Minnesota Nonprofit Delivers One Service Through Four Channels — And Reaches 13,000 People With a Staff of Roughly 30

Prepare + Prosper, a Saint Paul nonprofit founded in 1971, files tax returns. That is the core service. In the 2025 tax season, P+P volunteers, partners, and staff filed nearly 26,000 returns and brought back more than $24 million in refunds to low- and moderate-income Minnesota households.

What is replicable is not the size. It is the delivery design.

Most nonprofit services are delivered one way. The client comes to the office during open hours. The staff person sees the client. The exchange happens in one mode, at one location, on the staff person's schedule. That model is honest, predictable, and limits reach to the population that can show up.

Prepare + Prosper delivers the same expertise through four distinct channels.

Channel one — in-person clinics. IRS-certified volunteers prepare returns face to face during tax season.

Channel two — DIY with remote support. Clients prepare their own returns online with a P+P volunteer available remotely for live questions. This expands reach to people who would never have made an office appointment.

Channel three — regional pop-up clinics. Staff travel to communities in rural Minnesota that have no local tax assistance, run a multi-day clinic, and leave.

Channel four — home visits. For clients who cannot leave home because of disability, eldercare obligations, or other constraints, a volunteer comes to them.

Same tax-preparation expertise. Four delivery modes. The result is an organization reaching roughly 13,000 households a year — including immigrants, undocumented workers, BIPOC families, low-income households, and rural Minnesotans — while operating with the staff and budget profile of a mid-size nonprofit.

On May 20, 2026, the Northwest Area Foundation announced a two-year, $250,000 general operating grant to Prepare + Prosper as part of $7.8 million NWAF awarded across 35 first-quarter grants. The grant is itself a signal: a major regional funder is putting unrestricted multi-year capital behind an organization whose distinctive feature is service-delivery design, not any single program innovation.

Here is what makes this replicable. The model works because the core service is well-defined enough to be delivered through different channels without losing quality.

Tax preparation has clear professional standards (IRS certification), repeatable inputs and outputs, and a deliverable that does not require ongoing relationship to complete. Once you have a trained volunteer base, you can deploy them in person, remotely, in pop-up form, or in home visits.

Three structural elements make a multi-channel service-delivery model work.

First, the core service has to be standardizable. What your trained volunteer does has to be repeatable enough that quality does not collapse when the delivery channel changes.

Second, you need a volunteer or staff base large enough to support multiple delivery modes without each one being chronically understaffed. Prepare + Prosper runs with 300+ IRS-certified volunteers in season.

Third, the back-end systems have to be unified. Appointment scheduling, quality control, follow-up, and case documentation all need to work the same across channels, or coordination overhead eats the gains from the additional reach.

First steps if your nonprofit delivers a tightly defined service. Pick one of your core services. Name the steps that have to happen for a successful delivery — be specific. Then ask: which of those steps actually require the client to be physically present at the office during office hours?

For most services, the honest answer is one or two steps, not all of them.

Design a pilot for one alternative channel. The two easiest to start with are usually remote delivery (your trained volunteer or staff person available by phone or video on a schedule that fits the client) and pop-up delivery (taking the service to a community partner's space for a day or a week). Either one can roughly double your reach without doubling your staff.

If your service is too relationship-intensive to standardize — direct mental health care, complex housing case management — the transferable insight is still about delivery design. Map which of your service touchpoints could be modular even if the relationship cannot. Intake, scheduling, follow-up reminders, document collection, post-service surveys: those are almost always repeatable across channels, and freeing your staff from those touchpoints lets the relationship work get more of their attention.

Sources: Northwest Area Foundation — "Q1 Grants: Prepare + Prosper Unlocks Financial Well-Being for All" (May 20, 2026); Prepare + Prosper — Free Tax Preparation; Star Tribune — "Nonprofit Prepare + Prosper helps Minnesota families claim $24.6 million at tax time".

Employers Just Pooled $5.4 Million to Fund a New Regional Workforce Backbone When No Single Employer Could Run It Alone

On May 5, 2026, four conveners launched the Greater Philadelphia Growth Partnership: the Chester County Economic Development Council, the Chester County Workforce Development Board, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, and the Chamber of Commerce of Greater Philadelphia.

The launch came with $5.4 million in pooled seed funding from four backers: Wawa, Independence Blue Cross, Essential Utilities, and The Pew Charitable Trusts.

The Partnership is a new regional backbone organization. Its job is to coordinate business expansion and attraction, regional marketing, talent-to-employer matching, and cluster-building across the high-opportunity industries of southeastern Pennsylvania.

None of that work fits inside any single employer's mandate. None of it fits inside any individual workforce nonprofit's budget. It is the kind of cross-organizational economic-development infrastructure that exists in some regions because someone decided to build it — and does not exist in many others because no one did.

Here is why the funding shape matters. The traditional way employers support workforce development is through individual grants to individual nonprofits running individual programs.

The result is fragmentation: dozens of nonprofits in a region each running a workforce program, each with slightly different intake criteria, each maintaining separate employer relationships, and almost no coordination across them. The fragmentation absorbs philanthropic dollars without solving the systems-level problem the dollars were trying to address.

The GPGP funders made a different bet. They put $5.4 million into a backbone organization whose job is the coordination layer — not into another program.

The structural argument: one well-funded backbone coordinating 40 existing programs creates more value than $5.4 million split across the 40 programs would.

Here is what makes this replicable. The funders did not invent the backbone model. The "collective impact" framework has been documented in nonprofit literature for more than a decade, with the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati as the best-known early example.

What is notable about the Greater Philadelphia model is the funding composition: four corporate-and-foundation funders, including two private employers (Wawa, Essential Utilities), one insurer (Independence Blue Cross), and one major foundation (Pew). The backbone is funded by the entities that benefit most from a working regional talent pipeline.

Three structural elements made this work.

First, the backbone organization is a separate legal entity with its own mission, governance, and staff — not a hosted project of any single funder. That insulation is what lets it work across competitive employers without being captured by any one of them.

Second, the funding is multi-year and concentrated enough to support a real organization rather than a part-time coordinator. Backbone organizations underfunded at $200,000 a year do not survive the second year.

Third, the founding partners include both the economic-development infrastructure (CCEDC, DVRPC, Chamber) and direct workforce-system actors (Workforce Development Board). The combination ensures the backbone has institutional standing on day one rather than spending its first two years building credibility.

First steps if you are part of a regional nonprofit ecosystem with cross-organizational coordination problems. Ask who in your region benefits most from a working version of the system you are trying to fix.

In workforce development, the answer is regional employers and the workforce board. In food security, it's large grocery chains, hospital systems with food-as-medicine programs, and the regional United Way. In mental health, it's hospital systems, large employers, and Medicaid managed-care organizations.

Then map who could plausibly pool seed capital for a backbone organization. The conversation is not "fund my nonprofit's expansion." It is "fund the missing coordination layer that makes all our work add up to something."

That pitch is hard for any single nonprofit to make. It is much easier for a coalition of regional nonprofits supported by a credible convener — a community foundation, a chamber of commerce, an economic development authority — to bring to the table.

If you are on a board with regional influence, the move is to start the convening conversation. GPGP did not come together on its own. CCEDC and the Workforce Development Board began the convening conversation, brought in DVRPC and the Chamber for institutional weight, and only then approached the four funding partners with a specific ask.

Sources: Chester County Economic Development Council — Launch of GPGP (May 5, 2026); Vista.today — CCEDC, Workforce Development Launch New Regional Job Growth Partnership; Greater Philadelphia Growth Partnership; Philadelphia Inquirer — Wawa, Independence Blue Cross, and other Philly-area businesses are investing in a new partnership.

Add an Explicit "No" Decision to Your Next Board Meeting Agenda

Most board agendas are a list of items the board will consider, discuss, or approve. Almost none include an item the board will explicitly decide not to do.

That is the structural reason most nonprofit boards accumulate program drift, mission creep, and quiet commitments nobody remembers approving: the agenda only documents what got added, never what got rejected. Decisions the board never makes get made by default — in the program directors' inboxes, six months later.

Action: For your next board meeting, add a single agenda item: "Items We Are Declining This Quarter."

Identify two or three specific opportunities, requests, or proposed expansions that have been informally floating — a partnership invitation, a new program someone has been pitching, a grant your team has been considering whether to apply for. For each, the board makes one of three decisions: pursue it (and assign it to staff), defer it to a specific date (and put it on the calendar), or decline it (and document why).

The point is not to say no to everything. The point is to make the decision explicit so that staff and board have the same answer when the question comes up again. An informally deferred opportunity is the same as an informally accepted one — it keeps occupying decision-making bandwidth until someone formally retires it.

ROI: Eliminates the silent commitment drift that consumes 5–10 hours of staff and board time per quarter on items that should have been declined six months ago. For an ED, the more important return is the cover the explicit "no" provides. A board-approved decline is a defensible answer to the next person who asks you to do the thing.

Time: 5 minutes to add to the agenda. 15 minutes of board discussion. The savings begin the next week.

Send a One-Paragraph Monthly Update to Your Top 10 Volunteers

Most nonprofits manage volunteers the same way they manage donors after the first gift: with silence. The volunteer signs up, gets the orientation email, shows up for the first shift, and then hears from the organization only when there is a scheduling conflict, a holiday gala, or an annual report.

The most engaged volunteers — the ones who would tell three friends about your work, recruit other volunteers, become major donors, eventually join the board — are getting the same low-touch treatment as the volunteer who signed up on a whim and never came back. The cost of that gap is invisible until you try to recruit the next 50 volunteers and discover the well has gone dry.

Action: Identify your top 10 volunteers — the ones who have given the most hours over the last 12 months, the ones who showed up consistently when you needed them, or the ones whose roles are most central to your delivery.

Write a one-paragraph monthly update from the ED to those 10 people. Tell them one concrete thing the organization accomplished this month that their work contributed to. Name one challenge the organization is working through. Thank them by name for one specific thing they did.

Send it on the first Friday of each month. Keep it to one paragraph. Do not use it to ask for anything — no extra shifts, no donations, no event RSVPs. The asks come later, and they land much better when the relationship has been getting genuine attention.

ROI: Volunteer-recruitment research has consistently shown that personal asks from current volunteers outperform organizational marketing by a wide margin. Each of your top 10 volunteers is in regular conversation with 30–50 people who could be your next volunteer cohort.

Treating them as the most important external relationships your organization has gives you a recruitment pipeline that costs nothing to maintain. M+R and similar benchmark studies have documented that recognized, regularly thanked volunteers convert to monthly donors at materially higher rates than unrecognized ones — the financial return alone often justifies the practice.

Time: 30 minutes per month to write. Two minutes to send.

Audit the Accessibility Settings on Your Donation Page

Roughly one in four U.S. adults lives with a disability. The actual share of your donor base affected by a poorly built donation page is higher than that — older donors with diminished vision, donors with motor-control limitations, donors using screen readers, donors on slow rural internet.

Most nonprofit donation pages have been built with none of those donors in mind. The result is a meaningful slice of intended gifts that simply do not complete, with no error log to tell you why.

Action: Pull up your donation page on three devices.

A desktop with a screen reader turned on (built into both Windows and macOS — Narrator and VoiceOver). A smartphone with the text size cranked up to maximum. A tablet with mobile data throttled to 3G if possible. Walk the donation flow end-to-end on each. Note where it breaks.

The four most common failures: form fields without proper labels (screen readers cannot identify them); buttons with insufficient color contrast; required fields that do not announce errors when missing; and donate-amount selectors that work only with precise mouse clicks.

If you find more than two failure modes, contact your donation platform vendor and ask specifically about WCAG 2.2 AA conformance. Most modern platforms can flip the right settings for you; the issue is usually that nobody asked. If your platform cannot deliver baseline accessibility, the accessibility gap is itself a reason to evaluate alternatives.

ROI: A donation page that excludes a quarter of your potential donors is leaving money on the table that you do not see in any report. Even a 5% conversion lift from accessibility improvements on a $100,000 online giving program is $5,000 a year, with no acquisition cost.

The reputational return is also real — disability-rights advocates increasingly publish lists of nonprofit donation pages that fail basic accessibility tests, and being on the wrong list is a story you do not want.

Time: 30 minutes to test. 15 minutes to email your platform vendor with the findings. Vendor response time varies; budget two weeks.

Build a Service-Delivery Redesign Analysis for One of Your Core Programs

Most nonprofit services were designed by the people who happened to be in the office when the program was created. They reflect what was operationally easiest at the time, what staffing was available, and what the founder thought would work.

None of those design constraints are necessarily true anymore. The service is being delivered in the shape it was built — not in the shape that would best serve the people it is for.

You don't run this prompt because the service is broken. You run it because the comfort of knowing your delivery design is intentional — rather than a fossil of the conditions that shaped it — is what frees your team to focus on the work itself.

Map Who Believes What About Your Organization Right Now — Your Funder Stakeholder Map

Every nonprofit ED has a mental model of how the major funders see the organization. That mental model is almost always rosier than reality, more current than reality, and less differentiated than reality.

The day a foundation officer stops returning your emails — or the day the program officer who championed your last grant moves to another foundation — is rarely the first time something shifted. It is usually the first time you noticed.

The reason to run this prompt is not paranoia. It is the same reason a competent sales organization keeps a current account map: relationships move, perceptions drift, and the cost of being wrong about where a major funder stands is much higher than the time it takes to write it down honestly.

Run a Pre-Mortem on Your Most Important Initiative of the Next 12 Months

The pre-mortem is one of the most useful tools in operational planning, and one of the least used in nonprofit settings.

The basic idea: imagine the initiative has already failed and work backwards to explain why. The technique surfaces risk concentrations that no amount of risk-scoring during planning will catch — because risk-scoring asks you to evaluate items individually, and pre-mortems force you to evaluate the system as a whole. The technique was developed by psychologist Gary Klein and documented in the Harvard Business Review as significantly more effective than standard risk assessment at surfacing avoidable failures.

You run this prompt because the failure modes that show up under direct questioning are easier to design around than the ones that show up six months in.

The "If We Started Today" Exercise — A 25-Minute Board Exercise to Reveal What You Would Build Differently

What makes it worth trying: Every nonprofit's structure, programs, and operations are partly intentional and partly inherited — the inheritance built from the founder's original choices, every program that ever got added, every funding-driven adaptation, every governance compromise.

Some of it is still working. Some of it is being carried forward purely because no one has questioned it. This exercise gives the board permission to ask which is which, without the political weight of attacking any specific person's program — because the question is hypothetical, which gives board members the cover to be honest. The conversation that emerges is not hypothetical at all.

How to run it (25 minutes):

1. Setup (before the meeting, by the board chair): Distribute a one-page handout listing the organization's major programs (3–8 typically), top three operational systems (the core systems your staff actually uses day to day), and current board structure (committees, meeting cadence, key recurring agenda items). Tell board members to spend 10 minutes on it before the meeting.
2. Round 1 — silent assessment (5 minutes in the meeting): Each board member privately marks each item with one of three letters. K (Keep — if we started today, we would build this again exactly as it is). C (Change — if we started today, we would build something serving the same goal in a different shape). E (Eliminate — if we started today, we would not build this at all). No discussion. The point is independent assessment.
3. Round 2 — pattern view (10 minutes): The board chair tallies the K, C, and E marks for each item on a flip chart or screen. The patterns that matter are the items where the marks are clustered (most board members agree it should change or be eliminated) and the items where the marks are split (the board does not share a mental model of what the item is or whether it is working). Both patterns are useful signals.
4. Round 3 — board decision (10 minutes): For each item with three or more C or E marks, the board makes one of three decisions: (a) refer to executive committee for a 90-day review with a specific recommendation back to the full board, (b) assign one board member to have a single conversation with the ED about whether the item is still serving the strategy, or (c) acknowledge it but defer formal review to the strategic planning cycle. No "we'll think about it." A choice gets made on every item with three or more C or E marks.

In-person: Physical printout and pens. Verbal tally on a flip chart. Cover the printout while board members mark, so the social pressure of seeing other people's marks does not bias the assessment.

Virtual: Shared Google Form with each item as a question, with K / C / E as the options. Results visible only to the board chair until Round 2. Screen-share for the tally.

Watch out for: The board member who treats this as an attack on a specific program or a specific staff member. The chair should frame at the start: "We are not evaluating anyone's performance. We are asking whether the shape of our work matches what we would build if we did not have a 15-year history of decisions to honor." Reframe attacks on people as questions about structure.

The other failure mode is the board that produces a strong signal in Round 2 and then quietly does nothing about it. The Round 3 commitment to a specific path for each clustered item is mandatory. Without it, the exercise becomes a complaint session that ends with a hand-wave.

You'll know it worked when: Within 90 days of the exercise, at least one item that received three or more C or E marks has had a formal board-level review producing a concrete recommendation — to keep, to reshape, or to sunset.

The deeper signal is whether the board returns to this exercise annually. Most boards do it once and shelve the results. The boards that build durable adaptive capacity make it a recurring discipline. The point of the exercise is not to question everything every year. The point is to give your board a regular structured permission to surface what would otherwise be unspoken.

There is a question hiding inside every nonprofit operating plan: how much of this work am I continuing because it is still the most effective expression of our mission, and how much am I continuing because we have always done it this way?

The three organizations in this issue answered honestly. None of them stopped doing the work. All of them changed the shape.

What part of your organization's work would look completely different if you were redesigning it today instead of carrying it forward?

See you next week.

— Ted

P.S. Thanks again for supporting Rooted with your subscription.

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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