When Politicians Call Nonprofits “Thugs” and “Sleazebags,” What Will You Do?

Welcome back and Happy New Year! This is Season 7, Episode 6 of your Fund The People
Podcast!
When politicians, elected officials, and government goons try to brand nonprofits as “thugs,”
“sleazebags,” and “terror-supporting orgs,” will you freeze? Take flight? Or stand up and fight
back?
In this episode, you’ll get:
1. Tips on how the Trump Administration will treat the nonprofit sector, and an alternative
way to prepare and respond
2. You’ll learn what FTP did for nonprofit workers in 2024, how we’ll build on that work in
2025, and how you can plug-in; and finally
3. You’ll get a sneak peak of what’s up next on FTP Podcast S7
There’s a lot going on in our country right now:
● a transition of power in the federal government; a president and congressional majority
coming into power who have a track record of leading with self-interest, selfishness, and
self-centeredness both in their politics and their policies – including attacks on the
charitable sector itself;
● we’ve had in addition to that several successful and attempted terrorist attacks, like the
one in New Orleans in recent weeks;
● we had the death and funeral of President Jimmy Carter;

● and of course we’ve had the insane, scary, devastating, unimaginable wildfires in
Southern California. I know you’ll join me and all of us at Fund the People in wishing an
end to the suffering of so many people, families, and community institutions in the LA
area. And these include people who've participated in our summit a month ago. One of
our consultants to Fund the People, Rebecca Schumer, and just so many, many other
colleagues and friends and fellow Americans. The country is with you, and we know that
nonprofit workers and volunteers, and philanthropic funders are all scrambling to
respond with urgently needed money, labor, goods, shelter, food, and more – just like the
firefighters and other first responders. And I hope you'll follow me and Fund the People
on LinkedIn and elsewhere, where we are sharing some of the resources through which
you can donate to the impacted people and communities there in L.A.
It’s really a mind-boggling moment. And yet, as the workforce that leads voluntary action for the
public good, we have to keep our heads on straight, and keep our hearts regulated. It is not
easy. We are the hope industry. We make civic life possible. When government and business
fail, we fill in the missing pieces. America needs nonprofits and our workforce to be strong and
enduring now and this year and in the coming years.
And unfortunately the presidential election results will make this even more difficult than it
already is. Because in a few weeks, we will witness the inauguration of the most
anti-philanthropy president that I know of in history, and a president who will actively attack
nonprofits, foundations, and the nonprofit sector itself.
Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance, their appointees and advisors in the executive branch, and their allies in
Congress have already left a trail of documented behavior, court decisions, publicly-stated
opinions (including their own social media posts), and legislative efforts that, taken together,
indicate what may be their approach to philanthropy and nonprofits. So, we compiled links to
this information in our Strong Nonprofits, Strong Democracy Toolkit, which we will link to in the
show notes, and which is kind of the successor to our H.R. 9495 nonprofit Killer Bill Toolkit.
The three traits indicated by our roundup of news stories and documents about the incoming
administration, the three traits that we identified based on what we've read are as followsare as
follows:
1. Behaviors among the rich, well-connected leadership of the forthcoming Trump
Administration show abuse of their own wealth and philanthropy, and the wealth and
philanthropy of others, in what I would call amoral or immoral (and often illegal) fashion
to varnish their own images without actually giving much of their own money or helping
the people they have claimed to help (including those lauded as heroes by Republicans,
such as 9/11 first responders and veterans);
2. The second key trait we saw is a disdain for the spirit and word of the law related to
philanthropy and nonprofits, and the role of philanthropy and nonprofits as a valuable
part of American society. An example would be the passing of the tax law in the first
Trump term that, according to the IU Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, disincentivized

charitable giving and created a massive decrease of billions of dollars from flowing into
the nonprofit sector. So Trump's tax law actually decreased charity and philanthropic
giving in our society by a significant measure.
3. And the third trait we noticed is a willingness to employ demagoguary, intimidation
tactics, lying and the manipulation of facts, and using the formal levers of government to
politically attack mainstream and/or progressive nonprofits and philanthropy when it
serves the interests of the MAGA leadership.
Unfortunately , these three traits, these findings indicate that the second Trump Administration
may be among the most uncharitable, misanthropic, and anti-nonprofit governments in living
history. Add to this President-Elect Trump’s self-proclaimed persona as a self-interested
business leader who prefers not to pay the taxes he owes the government, who prefers not to
pay the overtime wages he owes his own employees, and who doesn’t seem to actually make
the donations he says he does.
In fact, you can go back to the 2020 election, and on this podcast, Season 1 Episode 5 of this
show, I did a solo episode about The Presidency and Philanthropy. The episode discusses how
different Trump is from all the other presidents going back to the mid-20th century, when it
comes to how they handled the relationship between government and the nonprofit sector, both
in their official capacities as president, and in their personal lives, during and beyond the
presidency. I listened to that episode again recently in preparation for this one, and I was
reminded that Trump and his friends in Congress, during his first two years in office, had been
attacking the Johnson Amendment, which keeps nonprofits safe from being used in electoral
politics. They were trying to break down the wall between the nonprofit sector and government
and campaigns, and that would have really potentially unleashed, you know, right wing churches
or other vehicles to do more in politics. It also could have just completely undermined the sector
itself and created a lot more corruption and lack of clarity about the boundaries and interests of
the sector. These attacks, of one kind or another, have been going on for a while.
In this context, we not only face an assault on progressive nonprofits that oppose the Trump
agenda directly, but we also face a misanthropic leadership team in institutions (like the
presidency itself, the White House, and the executive branch of the federal government) that
have great influence in setting the tone, modelling behavior, and implicitly and explicitly shaping
values for federal, state and local government, for the private sector, and for our society. We in
the nonprofit and philanthropic community must model for our children and our peers and our
society, what it means to be generous, what it means to be ethical, to be ethical leaders, to be
ethical humans. What it means to focus on the public good, what the public good actually
means. What it means to focus on the common good. What it means to maintain the bonds of
community even when our opinions and our interests diverge.
And we must continuously and publicly brag about the value and values of nonprofits and
nonprofit workers. Because there is no doubt about it that Trump and his team will attack us and
try to silence us and tarnish our reputations. They will attack us and try to silence us as a way to

attack America’s First Amendment, our freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom
of advocacy. They’ll attack us by using rhetoric, bullying, legislation, hearings, and intimidation.
If you don’t believe me, consider this: The Trump team has ALREADY been attacking nonprofits
for months now leading up to this new administration. Here are just THREE of the many
lowlights from Trump and his friends in the House and Senate over the last, you know, 6 to 12
months.
1. In April 2024, Trump made the following statement on his Truth Social website: “How do
so-called ‘non-profits’ get away with spending all of their time and money on ‘getting
Donald Trump.’ That’s not the deal. We are watching these thugs and sleazebags
closely!”That is what our incoming president wrote on his social media site in April 2024.
https://lnkd.in/eZGntdmi
2. In May 2024, during student protests over the Israeli killings in Gaza, Sen. JD Vance
introduced legislation that attacked free speech and university endowments. His bill
would have required colleges to remove protest “encampments” from campus within 7
days. Institutions that failed to comply would have lost federal financial assistance for
their students, including Pell grants and federal loans, for five years. To replace these,
institutions would have been mandated by the government to provide students with
equivalent grants at the institution’s expense. If a college failed to do so, it would have
faced a tax equal to 50% of its endowment. That was Senator J.D. Vance, incoming vice
President elect J.D. Vance, and a bill he put forward in May of 2024. And that's what it
says about it on his website. https://lnkd.in/env6wH2g
3. The third lowlight I'll share is in September 2024, Republicans introduced what we called
the Nonprofit-Killer Bill (HR 9495), which would have enabled Trump’s Treasury
Secretary to strip any nonprofits of their right to exist by smearing them as a
‘terror-supporting’, without offering evidence of wrongdoing or adequate due process to
challenge this punishment. Since it had little chance of being signed by President Biden,
some have said this was a messaging bill, a kind of virtue signaling against virtue if you
will.
And unfortunately there are many more examples of how Trump and his wealthy friends have
illegally abused their own philanthropic foundations, while attacking the philanthropy of others
like McKenzie Scott.
So why? Why do they do this? Why do they attack us?
Well I imagine it is to gin up a new fake enemy against whom they can play victim. Perhaps it’s
to minimize organized, public displays of dissent, such as protests, marches, rallies, and other
protected First Amendment speech and assembly that might question their popularity, mandate,
or authority; that might shatter their illusion they seek to build of inevitability, authority, and
unquestionability. By silencing civil society, which is a kind of a fancy word for the nonprofit
sector and the informal organizations around us, they secure their own power and ability to pass
legislation related to the issues that many nonprofits are concerned about - climate change,

housing, health insurance, education about the history of the country, education period, racial
equity, taxation. So by silencing us, they increase their ability to shape social policy.
On a deeper level, perhaps they attack us because the trust, moral standing of nonprofit, good
works we do, the self-sacrifice of our staff and activists create a glaring contrast to the selfish,
mean-spirited, and greedy policies and behaviors of these faux-populist politicians. To keep
going the way they are, they must try to make bad anything that shines a light or contrast with
their own badness; they must corrupt anything that shines a light on their corruption; they must
destroy anything that shines a light on their destructive behaviour.
Lastly, perhaps they attack universities and foundations because they are overcompensating for
their own lack of endowment? I don’t know, that one is just a theory.
Now, most of the advice all of us nonprofits will be hearing and already are hearing is to prepare
for these attacks by getting our legal and financial ducks in a row, by making sure that there are
not cracks that can be used to destroy us in our spreadsheets or in, you know, any language on
our website, to sort of harden the outer shells of our organizations.
But this battle, these attacks, is not so much legal or financial. It’s political, it’s optics, it's
narrative. They have hard power and the soft power. The hard power - using the levers of
government - granted, that is difficult to stop them from doing right now. It's possible, though.
But the soft power - the crafting of the story, the gaslighting, the mislabelling, misinformation,
and misdirection - these we do have power to counter with our own narratives. And we have to
start doing both. We have to work on both fronts.
I want to quote at some length from an opinion piece I found useful and helpful in my own
thinking, it appeared in the The Chronicle of Philanthropy in their new section called The
Commons (https://lnkd.in/eDiefHjP) on January 8th of this year. It’s called “How Trump Could
Target Nonprofits — and How to Protect Yours.” It was written by Mike Berkowitz who helps to
lead the Democracy Funders Network. So here is what Berkowitz writes:
Civil society should not be immune from criticism and oversight, and the media and government
should help ensure charitable organizations operate ethically and within the law. My concern
arises - Berkowitz says - when those in power abuse their authority and threaten to silence and
shutter organizations on the basis of their ideals, not the legality of their actions.
While we can predict some of the targets of the incoming administration, it is worth noting that
— by its own admission — the Trump administration will not stick to the norms that have
governed past presidencies. Trump’s comments about being a “dictator for a day” and exacting
retribution against political enemies should not be ignored. Instead, they suggest that the
administration could use the Department of Justice, IRS, and other entities overseeing
nonprofits to launch aggressive, politically motivated, and potentially illegal attacks against
charitable organizations.
To confront the threat - Berkowitz continues- philanthropists and nonprofits should:

● Spotlight the repressive tactics of the administration to build public support.
● Build or join coalitions of pro-democracy groups and advocates. Unified action can
reduce risk for individual groups and strengthen the case for democratic values.
● Expand and deepen community relationships to develop constituencies for their causes
that can speak out when groups and issues come under threat.
● Review programs, policies, and procedures to ensure compliance with the law and
provide as few openings as possible for partisan investigations.
● Invest in federal lobbying, crisis communications, and legal support to monitor potential
threats and build relationships with key lawmakers.
End quote. That's from Mike Berkowitz of the Democracy Funders Network, writing in the
Chronicle of Philanthropy.
So, folks, we can’t cower in fear, we can’t just go on the defense, we can’t “obey in advance”.
We can’t get trapped like the media has, where they feel this need to be balanced because of
the position Trump occupies as president and leader of one of our two major political parties.
We have to be clear, independent, and unbossed. We need to go on offense, and boldly call-out
their nonsense!
Moreover, we need to declare and repeat over and over again the value of nonprofit workers,
volunteers, and activists. The value we provide to our democracy, our economy, our
communities, and society. We need to be confident in our own value proposition as a rightful
part of this country. So prepare, yes, to defend your own organization. But also be prepared to
stand up and speak out and fight back on behalf of the nonprofit sector and the First
Amendment rights that we represent and make real for the American people.
Fund the People, and myself personally, will continue to speak out publicly about the importance
of nonprofit workers and leaders in our economy, our democracy, and our society. And we will
continue to call out these attacks and the narrative they seek to create. We will not let them be
met by silence, and you shouldn't either. On that note, after a quick break, in the next segment
of this episode, I’ll share what Fund the People has been up to and what we've got cooking for
this year. So stick around with us for that here on your Fund the People Podcast!
(music)
Welcome back everybody! In this next section of the episode, I want to share Nine
Achievements of Fund the People in 2024, and give you a sense of how we will continue this
work in 2025. Over the last year, I've been tweaking this one pager about what Fund the People
does, and I've come up with nine C words or phrases that summarize what we do. So I'm going
to use my nine C's to give you this update. First, I'm going to share my nine C's. I know it's a lot
of C's, I wish it was seven so I could say “I've got seven C's”, which would be a nice little pun,
but I've got nine:
● CONCEPTS

● COURSES
● CONVENING
● COMMUNITY
● COLLABORATION
● CREATING KNOWLEDGE
● CONDITIONS FOR ADOPTION
● CHAMPIONING
● COMMUNICATIONS
Here's a little bit about each of these.
1. CONCEPTS: We wove together a decade's worth of ideas and tools that we've
developed in Fund the People into our Funding that Works Framework. It is a
transformational, and also pragmatic, framework. It defines the theory and practice of
talent-investing and provides eight principles and eight practices, including what we call
“talent justice”, which is how talent-investing can and must advance intersectional racial
equity. And it provides the framework, provides specifics about how talent investing can
be implemented and integrated into fundraising, nonprofits, grantmaking, foundations
and intermediary institutions that serve the field. In 2025, we will continue to grow and
improve the framework, introducing new ideas and tools
2. COURSES: In 2024 we launched our first online course on the Fundamentals of
Talent-Investing for foundation profesionals, to equip funders with our framework and
tools and lots of supplemental materials to help them think about, learn, gain context,
and begin to take action on investing in the nonprofit workforce, in their grantees, or in
the communities where they fund in a place based sense or in the social movements
they support. And I think this online course is a fantastic product. This year, we will be
adding new courses to our Funding that Works Academy, supporting nonprofits and
intermediaries, and we’ll be offering cohorts and workshops based on the courses to
help you learn and practice talent-investing. So very exciting that we have all these
online courses and programs built on them that are going to be available to you. You can
check it all out now at FundingThatWorks.org or go to our main website
fundthepeople.org and click on Funding that Works Academy. It's at the top of the page.
3. CONVENING: In our first-ever place-based effort, we gathered hundreds of leaders from
California nonprofits, foundations, and intermediaries in three in-person Regional
half-day events in September followed by a 3-day statewide summit, we called it our
California Talent Justice Summit. And that took place in December of 2024. These
events, the three half day events in San Diego, L.A. and Northern California, followed by
the statewide gathering, drew about 300 people total, and they featured our signature
silo busting dialog. They featured learning from current real world examples of talent
investing, and they featured action planning to help participants drill down to what they
want to achieve and need to achieve in their grantmaking, or fundraising, or nonprofit
management and what they want to do first toward those goals. So it was really exciting

and exhilarating. We had fantastic speakers, funders presenting their work, nonprofits
presenting their work, researchers presenting their work. And I want to take a moment to
briefly thank our sponsors of the summit:
■ James Irvine Foundation
■ Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
■ Walter and Elise Haas Fund
■ Ralph M. Parsons Foundation
■ Sierra Health Foundation
■ Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr Fund
■ The Weingart Foundation
■ And the Avery Dennison Foundation

Thanks to all of them for being not only financial supporters, but moral supporters of this work.
The California convenings were a fantastic chance to also build relationships with an array of
groups at the state and local levels. Our partners for outreach and programing included:
■ The California Association of Nonprofits, often referred as CalNonprofits
and we have their CEO coming up as a guest on the podcast next week.
■ Our other major statewide partner was Philanthropy California, which
brings together the three biggest regional associations of grant makers in
the state, who were also partners on our regional events and the summit:
Northern California Grantmakers, Southern California Grantmakers, and
Catalyst of San Diego and Imperial Counties.

Other partners included:

■ The Trust Based Philanthropy Project
■ Nonprofit Finance Fund
■ All Due Respect
■ Tri-Valley Nonprofit Alliance
■ Community Partners, our fiscal sponsor in L.A.;
■ The United Way of Greater Los Angeles
■ The Community Centric Fundraising chapter in San Diego
■ The Fieldstone Leadership Network in San Diego
■ Reworked the Bay in the Bay Area.

And there are a ton more, so thanks to those I've named and those I'm not going to name here
at this moment, to all of our partners on that programing.
In 2025, we're going to continue organizing in California, supporting the people who participated
in our summit and our regional events to take action within their respective spheres of influence.
We'll continue to support them in a variety of ways, both in-person and online.
4. COMMUNITY: We began organizing a peer-to-peer and silo-busting network through
which nonprofits, funders, and intermediaries will be able to learn, practice, and
advocate for investing in nonprofit workers. During our 10th anniversary year in 2024 we

held a virtual listening tour to learn what many of you want from Fund the People. We
heard that you want to be involved as organizations, but also as individuals. And we
heard you want FTP to do more advocacy on behalf of the workforce, both to
philanthropic foundations, but also in terms of government policy and practice. We heard
you and we are hoping to respond on both fronts.This listening process shaped our work
in 2024, and it shaped our plans for the future.
In 2025, we will formally launch our membership community, our Fund the People
Community. We put the fund in Fund the People, and you can put the people in Fund the
People. So we want to build this community to help you learn, practice, and advocate for
talent investing. And so we're working diligently toward that and we want to make it
accessible, practically useful and enjoyable. We look forward to engaging with you in the
year ahead on this effort and creating something special and unique and valuable for
you and for the sector.
Just to add on to that, we believe that all voices are needed, all stakeholders are needed
at this table. If we are to improve working conditions and job quality in nonprofits. And so
that's why we care about building a silo busting community and an organized
constituency where together we can advance our sector and also advocate for our
workforce together. We need to be an organized constituency for the nonprofit
workforce, and that's what we're striving toward.

5. COLLABORATION: we partnered with aligned funders and ‘infrastructure groups’ as you
heard me listing off many of them when I talked about our California work a minute ago,
and that was at the local, state and national level. And on our advocacy activities around
H.R. 9495 as well, which I'm going to talk about in a moment.
So, in 2025, we will continue to deepen and grow partnerships in California, in other
regions, and at the national level. So if you want Fund the People to have a presence in
your city or town or community or issue area, you know, just reach out because we are
available for speaking, presenting, sharing virtually, sometimes in person, and we want
to engage you and bring value to your community. So that's collaboration.
6. CREATING KNOWLEDGE: Last year we launched what we’re calling the ‘Upgrading
Nonprofit Workplaces’ initiative. It’s a research documenting how organizations (and
their funders) are effectively improving job quality and working conditions. This new
research, led by my colleague Betsy Leondar-Wright, who's part of the Fund the People
team. She came in through Staffing the Mission when it merged into Fund the People in
2023. So Betsy kicked-off this new research work by identifying an initial set of case
studies, and engaging in a couple dozen in-depth interviews. And will be doing more of
that research and hopefully sharing out some of our initial findings coming up in 2025.
We’ll publish some of the first findings from the Uprating Nonprofit Workplaces
Research, which will likely focus on some of our California colleagues and an amplifyed

research from other places in the field, which we always try to do on this podcast and
elsewhere. And share with you what we're learning along the way.
So I think that's a really exciting initiative. The thinking beneath it is that we're too often
talking about what's wrong and what should be different, but it's hard to bridge that gap
between what's wrong and what should be. And so with this research, we're trying to
look at who's been successful at improving nonprofit workplaces and what did they do,
and what works, and what doesn't work so well, and what does it take? And we're hoping
to get perspectives not only from funders and executives directors of nonprofits, but also
from, line staff, working class folks, program staff, junior level people, an array of
stakeholders within organizations, if possible, to really understand what some of these
changes have meant so that we can understand what works.
7. CONDITIONS FOR ADOPTION: By this I mean adopting talent investing principles and
practices. In the past, we've done consulting to help funders develop their talent
investing strategies. This year, this last year, we piloted the Talent Justice Pledge, a
five-point public commitment to investing in an equitable, effective, enduring nonprofit
workforce. Nearly 50 individuals and organizations signed the pledge, during our
California Talent Justice Summit, and the pledge will become available more widely next
year. We’ll be rolling-out this pledge nationally, inviting you to take the talent justice
pledge and take action based on the pledge. And we’ll provide a supportive peer
community to help pledge signers navigate the challenges they face in adopting and
adapting talent-investment principles and practices in their work. So it's really exciting.
And I want to thank those who signed the pledge during the summit, and we're excited to
share it with more of you who are listening now and those listening well into the future
hopefully will be able to find the pledge easily on our website fundthepeople.org and sign
it yourselves.
8. CHAMPIONING: In 2024 we mobilized nonprofit leaders in a successful effort to defend
the social sector against H.R. 9495, which we reframed as the “Nonprofit-Killer Bill”. This
bill would have empowered the Treasury Department and the IRS, as I mentioned earlier
in the show, to declare any nonprofit they wanted to a terrorist supporting organization
and to strip it of its legal, tax exempt status without having to offer evidence as to why
they're being accused of being a terror support organization, and without adequate due
process to challenge these accusations.
This was a very dangerous bill that had a lot of support initially. It had all but one
Republican in the House of Representatives voted yes for this, and many Democrats
voted for it as well. Initially, 52 Democrats voted yes on the bill earlier in the fall. And
then when a lot of us mobilized against it in the nonprofit sector and more broadly, we
were out there as Fund The People, really working to mobilize you and others around
the field to call your representatives and call your senators later on. And through that
public pressure and awareness building, we helped flip the vote: so of those 52
Democrats that voted for yes initially, when it came back up again only 15 of them voted

yes a few weeks later. So we were able to shift 37 or so votes from yes to no in a fairly
short time period. That demonstrated the power of our sector when we speak out. And
there were certainly groups on the Hill lobbying, there were groups that produced
statements of opposition and that was very, very important. It was important for the
Council on Foundations, Independent Sector, the National Council of Nonprofits and the
United Philanthropy Forum to come out with a joint statement opposing the bill. It was
important for the ACLU to come out with a statement with hundreds of other rights
groups opposed to this, and there were others. And I thank them for those important
statements and the lobbying and advocacy that was behind those.
We need to be having those direct conversations with staffers on the Hill and with
elected officials. We need our representatives of the sector up on Capitol Hill, but we
also need to be mobilizing the field all across the country, people who are never going to
get to Washington, people who are not connected to these beltway efforts, but who have
something to say and who have an important voice, an important role in our sector. This
proposed legislation was passed by the House. It succeeded in the House. Fortunately, it
never went very far in the Senate. It was never brought up for a vote in the Senate. And I
thank Senator Chuck Schumer and his leadership and the team around him for not
bringing it up for a vote. When the 118th Congress ended in December 2024 the bill died
with the end of that term of Congress, and I'm thankful that it is dead and buried. To help
inform the field throughout the fall, we compiled materials about the bill, how the votes
were going, statements of opposition, analysis of the bill, and most importantly, what
actions people could take. We put all of this into a free online toolkit, and it became a
valuable resource to a lot of folks.
So in 2025, we anticipate, as I mentioned in the first half of the show, that political
attacks and policy attacks on the nonprofit sector and on philanthropy will be continuous.
We also anticipate that the struggle for improved state and municipal contracting to
nonprofits will continue, if not intensify this year, as there will likely be budget cuts in
federal services and programs, creating more need in communities and less resources
coming from the national level.
So, we've revamped our HR 9495 toolkit, which now offers a roundup of some of these
“context clues” about how the Trump administration will behave toward nonprofits. I'd
encourage you to take a look at that, and we'll include a link in the show notes. We hope
to convene some of the local advocates for our workforce from across the country for
relationship-building, sharing war stories, tactics and solutions, and building more of a
unified front for our sector. We will keep you informed about these developments here on
the podcast, on linked-in, and through our email list.
I invite you to follow me and Fund The People on LinkedIn and we'll be providing
updates there, just as we did last year, about any anti-nonprofit or anti-philanthropy
legislation or other developments. We will be ready to mobilize our community in

defense and support of a strong nonprofit workforce, a strong nonprofit sector, and a
robust philanthropic and government funding landscape.
We will remind America that the First Amendment is key to making nonprofits possible –
and that nonprofits are key to making the First Amendment a reality. We can defend and
build a stronger nonprofit sector, and, when we do, we will be defending and building a
stronger democracy.
9. COMMUNICATIONS: One of the communications things we did last year was we
published 23 podcast episodes, spanning our seasons 5, 6 and 7, featuring an amazing
set of leaders, ideas, data and tools to help everyone invest in the nonprofit workforce.
And you can check those all out if you haven't listened to them. Our first five episodes of
2024 were some of my solo Rants and Reflections episodes which contained some, I
think, important and useful ideas. So I encourage you to check those out. We'll put a link
to the show in the show notes, but since you're listening to it, you should be able to get
to it.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fund-the-people-a-podcast-with-rusty-stahl/id153
1813289
Ok, so in 2025, we will ramp-up our communications capacity, which I'm really excited
about. We will continue our podcasting, and will leverage the content we create here on
the show so that it reaches more people more easily in more places, including people
who don't listen to podcasts. We hope to improve our website for easier navigation to
help you find the resources you need more easily. And we will seek more earned media
coverage, which my colleague Betsy Leonda Wright, has been encouraging me to think
about and to do. And so we’ll be building more communications tools like that to amplify
our mission, our message and our influence.
So I’m very excited about all the potential for Fund the People in the year ahead, despite how,
you know, once again, unstable and scary some of the things going on are. And I look forward
to engaging you in this work where it makes sense for you and where Fund the People can
bring value to you and your work.
Now, at the beginning, I promised I'd share a bit of what you can expect from Fund the People
podcast this year, so thanks for sticking with us here. I'm just going to wrap up by sharing a little
bit about what's coming up on the show.
As Season seven rolls on in the coming weeks, we’ll continue to publish weekly on Wednesday
mornings while we are in season and then we generally take a longish break in between
seasons. We will have episodes featuring some of the amazing presenters and participants from
our California Talent Justice Summit, as well as others working nationally and in other
communities.
We'll continue to highlight diverse voices from nonprofits, foundations, research and
intermediaries that support the field. So in the coming weeks, our guests include three of our

presenters from the summit. As I indicated earlier, Geoff Green is CEO of the California
Association of Nonprofits or CalNonprofits, and he'll be sharing why their association focuses on
public policy at the state level, rather than skills trainings or capacities for their members, which
many of the state nonprofit associations do. He will share some about their public policy
agenda, and the complexity of relationships between nonprofits and government at the state
level. The episode was recorded in late 2024, before the wildfires, so it does not touch on how
nonprofits are being impacted or responding to this tragedy – hopefully we will have something
on that for you another time.
Another upcoming guest is Arum Lee Lansel, from All-In 4 Impact. She’s a consultant who works
with nonprofits to strengthen their internal HR systems and supports for staff. She shares her
Thrive Framework, which helps organizations to stabilize, support, and sustain their employees.
Arum is a really cool person, she has worked in philanthropy, in nonprofits, in venture capital,
and she brings all of those perspectives to this question of how can nonprofits better support
their staff.
The last guest I’ll mention (but certainly not the least) is Nneka Payne, Executive Director of
Choose 180, a youth serving organization in the Seattle area. During the pandemic, Choose
180 set a floor for annual wages for all employees of $70,000 and has sustained and increased
this floor for years now. Nneka shares why they did it, how they did it, how they worked with
their funders, including government funders, to make this work and the difference it is making for
their team members and the young people who they serve. This is a people of color led and
focused organization. It is an incredible story and Nneka brings it. She brings energy, she brings
humor, she brings commitment and it's just an incredible example of what organizations can do.
So in the coming weeks and throughout 2025, stay tuned for these incredible guests and more
from Fund the People and your Fund The People Podcast! Be sure to subscribe, give us 5 stars
in Apple Podcasts, and share the podcast with your work friends. I’ll talk to you soon!
OUTRO
Thanks for listening to Fund the People podcast, visit fundthepeople.org and click on podcast to
find a transcript for this and other episodes and all the links discussed in the episode. If you
enjoyed this episode, we really appreciate a five star rating and a quick review if possible, on
Apple Podcasts. It helps more people to find the show. Thank you for driving change in our
communities. Remember to keep your tank full, take care of yourself and take care of one
another.