What happens on the call

Thirty minutes on Zoom, nothing to prepare.

  • You tell Gina what you are building and what is getting in the way. Three short questions when you book help the call start where you are.
  • Together you name the real problem and one next move, whether or not we work together.
  • If it is a fit, a one-page scope note with the fee arrives within two business days.

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What it feels like right now

Most small nonprofit and education leaders I talk with this fall describe the same month. A funder who loved the work last year is “waiting to see how things play out.” A staff of twenty has become a staff of four, and the four are running every program. A larger organization with a development team won the grant you helped write. Someone used the word “survival” without irony, and then apologized for being negative.

And yet the same leaders are the ones with the ideas. A youth-led training model where students teach the adults. A national challenge that turns a tired food drive into a design problem with micro-grants attached. A recognition program for whole school districts, started out of one person’s pocket because nobody would fund it. Scrappy is a method, and it has been changing large systems for a very long time.

The edge is where the change comes from

Historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban spent a career studying why American schooling resists reform and what gets through anyway. Their phrase for the durable core of school is the “grammar of schooling”: age-graded classrooms, subjects in separate periods, one teacher with a roomful of students. Reforms that try to replace the grammar wholesale tend to fade; the changes that last are the ones that get adopted piece by piece, often from the margins, and that teachers and communities decide to keep (Tyack and Cuban, 1995). That is a book about schools, but anyone who has worked inside a hospital system, a county agency, or a university will recognize the grammar.

The same pattern shows up in the policy work on career-connected learning. A September 2026 playbook from the Clayton Christensen Institute argues that K-12, higher education, and workforce systems each do part of the job of preparing people for work, and that “regulatory silos keep them from forming more coherent models.” The authors’ answer is shared vision, shared data, and changed rules on credit and licensure, so that local partners can build together (Horn, Jackson, Dwinal-Palisch, and Curtis, 2026). Read that from the small organization’s side: the system is not going to redesign itself. Someone outside it has to show what the connected version looks like.

Why survival mode is so expensive

There is a reason the four-person team cannot find time for the edgy idea. Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard named it the “nonprofit starvation cycle”: funders expect unrealistically low overhead, nonprofits underreport what the work costs to keep the money coming, and the organization slowly loses the capacity it needs to run well, which confirms the funder’s expectation (Gregory and Howard, 2009). The cycle starves attention as much as it starves budgets. Every hour that goes to surviving the current grant is an hour not spent on the test that would earn the next one.

Two more things I keep hearing, and they belong in the open:

  • Partnerships with large organizations can cost you the idea. More than one leader has told me, in nearly the same words, that they brought a concept to a bigger partner and watched it get funded without them. Keep partnering, and write the terms down before the first joint meeting. Notice, too, that small organizations partnering with small organizations is where most of the real collaboration is happening right now.
  • Strategic plans read like wish lists. A business plan says what you will make and by when, and who else has to win for you to win. Most nonprofit strategic plans I read say what the organization hopes to do by itself. The second kind does not help you decide what to stop.

What I have seen work

I will keep this at the level of pattern, because the organizations are not mine to name. Over the past year I have helped a small education nonprofit rebuild its business model around the partners who added value to both sides, and I have listened to leaders of national youth-serving organizations describe what kept them standing when funding paused. The common moves were small:

  • They picked four or five partners they talk to every month and let the other forty-five go warm.
  • They treated recognition as a program, not a thank-you. One leader told me a public thank-you had done more for a grantee than a $500 check.
  • They turned a program they could not fund into a challenge others could run: a clear prompt, a short timeline, micro-grants for the best responses, and a stage for the finalists.
  • They asked funders for staff time alongside pass-through dollars, and said out loud what the pass-through model costs.

What a program design engagement looks like

  • A short diagnostic: what the idea is for, who inside the large system has to say yes, and what they need to see first.
  • A business case written the way the system reads it, with the partners named and the first-year numbers given as estimates.
  • A small test designed to be visible: who, how many, how long, what counts as working.
  • The thing itself, built alongside you: the pilot plan, the partner agreement, the funder-facing page.

Signs you may be stuck in survival mode

  • Every proposal is a version of last year’s, because there is no time to write a new one.
  • You have more partnership conversations open than you can remember without a spreadsheet.
  • The program you most believe in has been “written into proposals” for two years and never funded.
  • Your strategic plan has no line that says what you will stop doing.
  • You collect feedback from grantees, students, and partners, and nobody has time to read it together.

If two or more of those sound familiar, the problem is usually that nobody has drawn the line between what is urgent and what is strategic, and so the urgent wins every week.

Apply it

Before the next grant cycle

  • Write the problem you are solving in one sentence, in the words the large system uses. If you cannot, start there.
  • List every partnership. Mark the five you will deepen this year. Decide how the rest will be told.
  • Pick one idea you cannot fund and redesign it as a challenge, a train-the-trainer, or a shared pilot with one partner.
  • Put a number and a date on it. A funder can say yes to “forty students, one semester, three districts.” Nobody can say yes to a wish.
  • Decide what you will stop. Put it in writing. Tell the board.

Tip: print this page or take a screenshot of this checklist to use later.

Your notes

Everything you write in the Your turn boxes, and every step you check off, collects here so you can take it with you.

Nothing here yet. Answer a Your turn prompt or check off a step above, and it will show up here.

Your notes stay in this browser until you send them. Texting and your email app use your own apps, so you choose where the notes go.

Know someone who needs this? Send this field note to a teammate.

Try the Problem Clarity Worksheet.

One page to separate the problem you were handed from the one that is worth solving.

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Common questions

We are down to four people. Is strategy even realistic right now?

Strategy at four people is deciding what the four of you will not do. It takes an afternoon, and it is the fastest way to get hours back.

How do we protect an idea when we partner with a larger organization?

Put the idea, the roles, and the credit in writing before the first joint proposal, and agree on what happens if one party pursues it alone. A one-page memorandum does most of the work, and a partner who will not sign one has told you something useful.

Should we chase the new funding priorities or stay with our mission?

Look three to five years out, not one cycle. Reframing the same work for a new priority is fair; abandoning the work you are known for to chase a cycle usually costs more than it brings.

What if the large system never says yes?

Then build the visible version next to it. Systems adopt what they can see working. That is the history, and it is still how it goes.

Sources and further reading

Keep going with StrideForward

Bring the idea the system keeps saying no to.

In thirty minutes we will name who has to say yes, what they need to see, and the smallest test that would show it.

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