Meeting the moment: Balancing Risk and Caution
To Our Community,
Here We Are, December 2024
We’ve been sitting with the anger and grief of knowing how painful the coming years will be for our communities – our friends, family, neighbors, clients, and for nonprofits across the country. At Tangelo Tree Consulting, we’re also resolved: our only choice is to meet this challenging moment with clarity, focus, and determination. Nonprofit organizations are already facing, or will soon face, what feel like impossible decisions.
We should resist the idea that we must choose between acting boldly and taking risks to defend our communities, or cutting back to weather the storm. Instead we should ask ourselves:
How might our communities be impacted by policy and funding changes?
What community assets and organizational strengths must we protect?
What risks are we willing to take?
What are we willing to let go of?
We find that answering these tough but necessary questions helps to provide strategic clarity as we move forward into the unknown. Every organization will find it impossible to avoid risk over the coming years, but to remain effective, every organization will need to be strategic about the risks they take.
Caution for Continuity
Understanding how our communities will be impacted by policy and funding changes will be vital, and will require some caution from every organization. In the face of a Trump administration that has historically shown active disdain for vulnerable communities, we have to plan for a long fight, and sometimes that calls for caution. Choosing caution does not mean shying away from the challenge, but rather ensuring that we are here to serve our communities for years to come.
“Tightening budgets and cutting certain programs to find solvency for the short term may be what is best for the communities that we serve.”
Bold Action
We must also be bold to counteract the rise of white supremacy and the systematic dismantling of resources and services that our sector has worked tirelessly over decades to build within our communities. We need to prioritize which established capacities we’ll protect in order to ensure the survival of the ecosystem in which we operate. Bold organizations are not reckless; visionary action requires careful planning, preparation, and coordination with peers. Bold organizations make strategic decisions to push forward for the betterment of those they serve in ways that leverage their strengths and the opportunities presented – even in moments of resource scarcity. In considering which bold action to take, we must ask ourselves: what risks are we willing to take?
Here We Go, 2025
Each organization will need to be clear on its strategic priorities, understand its appetite for risk, and center the needs of communities, so that leaders are able to respond strategically to a barrage of challenges and potential crises. Each organization will need to make unique strategic decisions in order to navigate the coming years. No matter what your organization decides, meeting this moment in the name of your organization and community is what matters the most. By planning now, you are creating a space to allow your organization to be nimble when the expected challenges begin to rise. Do not wait for the challenge to arise, prepare now.
