The ground shifts. A grant doesn’t renew. A funder signals retreat. And almost before you’ve had a chance to think, the conversation turns to what has to go.
The impulse to protect makes sense. In moments of pressure, it’s wired into us. But there’s a cost to defaulting to scarcity — one that rarely shows up on the balance sheet.
When every funding disruption triggers the same response — cut, protect, survive — something quieter gets lost. The capacity to ask a different question. To look at what’s already inside the organization and wonder what else it might be capable of. To imagine a different kind of relationship between mission and money.
And then there’s the earned revenue conversation. Raise it in many conversations and the reaction is predictable — doubt, resistance, risk aversion. We’re not a business. That’s not who we are. The possibility closes before it gets started.
That’s the environment Tanja Horan has spent her career navigating.
She came to the nonprofit sector from the outside — from fintech, AI/ML, consumer products, and health and wellness — shaped by a mindset she absorbed early and has never set down: figure things out, and make things happen. When she turned that lens toward nonprofits, she found organizations sitting on more than they could see. Hard-won expertise. Relationships and reciprocal trust built over years. Programs that had genuinely changed lives. Teams with deep knowledge they’d never thought to leverage differently.
And a habit — reinforced by every funding model they’d lived inside — of looking outward for what they needed rather than inward at what they already had.
Every conversation in this series has circled the same underlying question: What does it mean to lead well when the conditions around you are shifting faster than your frameworks can keep up?
Christophe Kempkes (April) helped us think about what it looks like to hold coherence when systems are fragmenting. Mary Ann Allison (May) helped us name the deep currents and patterns beneath the turbulence — and why grounded hope isn’t the same as optimism. Louis Diez (June) thinks like someone who has watched real teams grapple with what it actually means to bring AI into mission-driven work; his conviction is that the relational work of leading people becomes more important.
And now Tanja brings the question I think has been building all year: When the funding model itself is under pressure — what do we already hold that we haven’t fully seen yet?
She doesn’t answer that question for you. She helps you ask it for yourself. And that distinction matters.
The name of this series — Reflect & Refract — points at something I believe deeply. Each of us has something to teach. Each of us has something to learn. These roundtables exist so that leaders across the sector can be in conversation with thinkers and practitioners who see our most pressing questions from angles we don’t always have access to in our own work. What you bring into the room matters. What comes back has changed shape. That’s the whole point.
— In gratitude, Gary
A 75-minute facilitated conversation, not a presentation. Gary and Tanja will offer a brief framing through their interaction, and then the room takes over. Gary facilitates. Questions guide. Participants think together.
Live only. Not recorded for distribution. Limited to approximately 20 participants so everyone has a chance to actually speak.
