Managing Organizational Risk in an Increasingly Volatile Political and Economic Landscape



Moderater: Sandhya Nakhasi, Co-CEO, Common Future

Panelist: Jennifer Njuguna, Co-CEO, Common Future

Panelist: Kelly Burton, CEO, BIA

Panelist: Erika Seth Davies, CEO, Rhia Ventures

Panelist: Vishal Reddy, Executive Director, Work Four

Panelist: Deepa Iyer, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives, Building Movement Project
It’s no secret that managing an organization dedicated to justice today is very different than it was even a year ago. In recent months, we’ve seen dramatic shifts in the federal government's role in addressing economic disparities, a destabilizing funding environment for economic and racial justice work, and increased risk in the operating landscape for nonprofits more generally. This has led to a climate of underinvestment by funders, and general confusion about what work is permitted legally.
On July 10, 2025, Common Future gathered leaders across five organizations that have been exploring questions about what it looks like to operate and effectively assess and manage risk in a continually shifting political, economic, and legal environment. Moderated by Common Future Co-CEO Sandhya Nakhasi, our panelists included Kelly Burton, CEO of BIA, Erika Seth Davies, CEO of Rhia Ventures, Vishal Reddy, Executive Director of Work Four, Deepa Iyer, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives of the Building Movement Project, and fellow Co-CEO Jennifer Njuguna. Here are our top takeaways from their time together and we encourage you to watch the full video below:
“Managing risk status isn't just about compliance or harm reduction, but it's also an opportunity for us to build the infrastructure that can weather storms and advance the work.” — Vishal Reddy
Thinking Beyond Nonprofits As We Know Them
Risk management most often looks like legal and policy reviews, scenario planning, and regular risk assessments to prioritize threats and responses, but it doesn’t stop there. In the face of a challenging funding landscape, risk management can be diversifying how organizations legally incorporate and secure funding.
Both Vishal and Erika shared their first-hand lessons on dual-hybrid structures such as 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4), which allow their organizations to engage in politics and specific legislative efforts. Erika noted that this added flexibility has become a risk management strategy of its own.
Vishal explained, “Even if you don't have a concrete idea of how you might leverage a particular organizational structure, corporate entity, it's better to start the process of obtaining that structure now, because the process of becoming a 501 c3, or 501c4, or 501 c6… can take sometimes a year or longer...it's better to start that process now so that by the time you have vision of how you might leverage that structure, you can just run with it.”
Multiple panelists also shared the importance of revenue diversification, such as BIA’s consultant structure and Work Four’s learnings from conservative movement memberships, turning grassroots supporters into paying members to advance the organization’s mission. Kelly noted, “We constantly hear from foundations and philanthropy, ‘You got to diversify,’ but because they don't know how to do it, they can’t help instruct us on how to do it. That's why these conversations are so important, and that's why we have to lean on one another to share learnings because it's getting really dangerous for organizations like ours.”
“We don't want just a handful of big donors, whether they're philanthropic or individual, determining the boundaries of our work ... We're actually learning from conservative organizations who have done this well for decades. So the NRA is the best example of this, where they get $130 million a year for membership dues, which is a third of their funding. They've been able to weather [the scrutiny on their finances and tax-exempt status] in part because of their dues paying membership based structure ... This is certainly on some level about financial independence, it's also about reinforcing our theory of change and building grassroots power.” — Vishal Reddy
Jennifer Njuguna looked to the lessons learned from past Civil Rights Movements as well, “SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, funded not just the work of advancing civil rights, but just dangerous work where they're putting their bodies on the line… through a lot of these membership-based individual, small dollar donor types of mechanisms. It was also through people like Georgia Gilmore, who was a woman that did fundraising through cooking and providing meals, and supported the Montgomery Improvement Association that was responsible for the Montgomery Bus Boycott.”
Burnout is Real, But We’ve Been Here Before
The threats we’ve seen are not small. Deepa shared a threat matrix developed by the Building Movement Project, which she summarized as, “Movements, leaders and groups are being attacked in a cyclical nature…this includes the withdrawals of funding for critical services, the congressional inquiries and investigations that are happening into certain types of nonprofits and funders. It includes reputational harm, safety and security in terms of violence and intimidation of organizations and the targeting of nonprofit status by administrative, judicial and legislative attacks. We also have seen that frontline communities are most vulnerable in this threat matrix.”
The monetary and emotional costs of our current social and political landscape have been many, and our panelists spoke of the toll this has taken. “Before the election, it was just about crossing your T's and dotting your I’s and doing everything decently and in order. After the election, it was really about staying out of the crosshairs….It's been a long process. It's something that we thought we would be able to tackle in a few weeks, and it took us several months and really activating our entire organization.” —Kelly Burton
“We're seeing growing political attacks on nonprofit advocacy and an increasing risk of interference, not just from the state, but also from funders who are going to be pulling back out of fear of that interference.” — Vishal Reddy
Jennifer shared how this retrenchment has also led to funders allocating funds using a false binary of favoring direct service work and deprioritization of intermediaries, rather than understanding that we work in concert with one another. “We do a lot of the work that's often invisible or hard to quantify. We build hope and we connect dots, we fill gaps, we bridge across silos.. But we're still having to operate in an environment of short termism and fundamental misunderstanding and devaluing of the work that intermediaries do. We recognize gaps, we amplify partners in communities that are overlooked and considered too risky by philanthropy, and that help hold together that longer term systems change work that's needed.”
Kelly shared how countless executive orders targeting economic and racial justice work have led to a real need to evaluate external communications and programmatic grant-making criteria to avoid targeting. “When we're applying for new grants, we're having to scrub any reference…diverse communities, marginalized communities, people of color, which has in and of itself, been a very traumatic experience.
But this retrenchment from the racial justice movements of 2020 was no surprise to those who studied the history of this work. “From 2020 and the racial reckoning … some of us were very clear that that was merely a window, and that the retrenchment would be coming, and it delivered,” Erika noted that throughout American history, every Civil Rights movement has been followed by backlash and threats to democracy, and that our current climate came as such a surprise at all is reflective of serious educational gaps. “To say to someone, ‘if we do not address racial injustice in our country, this is actually a significant threat to democracy’ required learning, it required this whole narrative shift.”
To enact that shift, we have to both take care of ourselves, and enact lessons from the past on how we move forward. Vishal emphasized the importance of meditation and reducing noise to maintain clarity of purpose while Kelly and Jennifer highlighted the value of organizing and finding consensus with others to build power. Erika, Jennifer and Deepa all shared how engaging more deeply with their children brings them hope for the future.
“You may not ever enjoy the fruit or the shade of the tree, but the planting of the seed is worth it.” —Erica Seth Davies
To do this work, we must fill our cups with what inspires us, whether that is local organizing, the arts, or hobbies that inspire us to look to the future.
Looking to the future, as Jennifer noted, is crucial, along with values-aligned decision making. “We have to see risk through the lens of being values driven and values aligned in ways where we do the right thing, not just the easy thing or the quick thing, or even the thing that a funder desires.”
In understanding that short term thinking in itself is both a reaction to attacks, and a risk in and of itself, our panelists uplifted a clear need for solidarity across the economic justice space, not only through not only a shared understanding of root causes and power shifting, but through the principles of movement building and organizing.
“When we talk about solidarity, we're really talking about an ecosystem approach that relationship building organizing can all actually support us over self preservation, or individual organizational preservation…Solidarity can actually be a strategy to withstand, mitigate and redistribute risk.” —Deepa Iyer, Building Movement Project
Solidarity as Strategy
Grassroot organizations, policy makers, and researchers often work independently on single issues rather than developing unified strategies to address the root causes of interconnected challenges. Throughout our panel, each leader shared similar insights about how this time of uncertainty requires sharing resources and approaches to support one another. Deepa Iyer of the Building Movement Project encapsulated these thoughts perfectly, adding actionable strategies on how to enact solidarity in practice.
“Solidarity can be a narrative strategy, a legal strategy, financial strategy as well, as well as a strategic way to build infrastructure. This also includes mobilizing and organizing with others who are facing similar threats, to coordinate messaging as well as mutual defense,“ which in practice could look like mutual aid efforts, class action litigation, and philanthropic backing. In essence, by developing infrastructure to facilitate conversations across our ecosystem of similarly suited organizations, we can manage risk at a collective level. Deepa also shared numerous resources including Building Movement Project’s recently released Social Change Ecosystem Map, Rapid Response in Real Time, and Solidarity Is frameworks.
Kelly echoed these thoughts with her perspectives on communications and marketing, and our sector’s deep need to invest in collective communication infrastructure for building campaigns altogether. She shared that the communication expertise needed to motivate the masses into collective action requires specific knowledge and strategy. “That's hard, that's tough stuff. It requires a real subject matter expertise that does not exist in most nonprofit organizations, even large or medium sized ones with significant budgets and sizable staff.”
Though we can’t fully know what threats the future will hold, we know that our ecosystem is strongest when we work together. Look to history and take comfort in the progressive movements that have arisen during periods of retrenchment before us. As Deepa explained, “Some of us have more capacity than others. How do we protect our work without becoming neutral about the issue? Who are your closest partners? What do they need? And also, who can we reach out and support, especially if we are not directly at risk for being targeted?”
We hope the strategies our panelists shared help you find hope in what can feel like dark times. Though risk management is most often done behind closed doors, by individual organizations, shared tools and insights can help strengthen our sector’s collective resolve, and carry our movement forward to build the world we want to see.
Thank you again to Deepa, Kelly, Vishal, and Erika for the time they spent with us.