Category: Articles
Strategy Is Not the Problem: Why Issue-Based and Systems Approaches Break Under Pressure without Defensible Decisions
The Familiar Choice – and Why It Feels Real Organizations across the nonprofit sector—particularly those focused on protecting or strengthening democratic institutions—are operating under conditions where their decisions are no...
Faith as a Civic Counterweight in the Southeast: A Philanthropic Case for Investing in Faith‑Based Civic Formation
On a Sunday morning in Mississippi, a pastor rises to speak. The sermon may begin with scripture, but it rarely ends there. It stretches into the realm of public life...
When Strategy Signals Instability
What “A Sector in Crisis: How U.S. Nonprofits and Foundations Are Responding to Threats” reveals about the philanthropic field—and why strategic coherence matters Introduction: A Signal in the CEP Report...
Organizing Under Political Stress: Structural Clarity Before Engagement Is a Governance Imperative
Governing Claim When urgency-driven national engagement meets place-based ecosystems managing the lived consequences of democratic decisions, risk is redistributed asymmetrically. If that redistribution is not understood and calibrated in advance,...
History, Resistance and Democracy: Reflections on Visiting the Phoenix Indian School
Members of the Growers Guild recently came together in Phoenix, Arizona. While there, they visited the Phoenix Indian School, which was established in 1891 as a boarding school for American Indian children...
Facilitating a Big Tent: Critical Connections for Pro-Democracy Organizing
As we enter the second year of the current administration in the United States, calls for coming together to collaborate across siloes within the pro-democracy sector are louder than ever....
ICE Violence and the Struggle to Make Meaning:
What Narrative Power Is Doing in Minnesota, and Beyond By Eleonore Wesserle The murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by ICE in Minnesota were not an anomaly or...
U.S. Catholics are facing an authoritarian threat. The church has been here before.
The Catholic Church in the United States today is facing a crucial test. How will the church lead under what the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat calls an “imperial...
Block, Bridge, and Build: A Framework to Forge a More Democratic Future
We are living through a period of upheaval. In this world of uncertainty, one thing is clear: The need for coordinated, collective action is urgent. Recently, the people at Convergence Magazine developed a...
When Loyalties Shift: Americans’ Growing Noncooperation with Federal Abuses of Power
Evidence shows that an increasing number of Americans from all walks of life and from various economic sectors and political identities disapprove of — and are refusing to accept —...