Yes, We’re in a Crisis. No, You Shouldn’t Change Your Nonprofit’s Priorities.

The word “crisis” is sometimes overused, but I can’t think of a better way to describe what the nonprofit world is facing right now. Federal funding cuts are decimating institutions ranging from public media to health service to refugee resettlement. Every form of diversity work is under scrutiny, and far too many nonprofits are barely hanging on. This is a bad, bad time for our sector.

So what’s the most productive way for nonprofits to respond to this crisis? With the best of intentions, many may decide to shove aside their primary work and tackle the crisis head on by engaging in activities outside their areas of expertise.

I want to offer some counterintuitive advice. Instead of making drastic changes in response to the current crisis, nonprofit leaders should ask themselves these questions: What is the core mission of our organization? What does our constituency trust us to do? How do we do that as well as possible?

Keep Playing Your Music

I was reminded of this wisdom while re-reading the excellent monograph by management guru Jim Collins, “Good to Great and the Social Sectors.” Collins was writing in the wake of a different crisis, and he tells a compelling story about what one organization did to meet that moment. The crisis was the 9/11 attacks and the fearful days that followed. The organization was the Cleveland Orchestra.

The orchestra happened to have a concert scheduled for that Thursday, September 13, when they planned to play Mahler’s Fifth. But as the magnitude of the terror attacks came into full view, the orchestra wasn’t sure it should go ahead with those plans. So many events had been cancelled. Others were being repurposed into fundraisers for the victims or townhalls for discussion and reflection. What should the orchestra do?

After some internal reflection, the answer became clear. The Cleveland Orchestra needed to do what it did best — play the music it was rehearsing for the audience that had gathered to hear it. Mahler’s Fifth Symphony opens with a solo trumpet playing a funeral march and ends over an hour later with sounds symbolizing birth and renewal. The piece seemed almost cosmically suited to the moment.

The one adaptation music director Christoph von Dohnanyi made was to hold a moment of silence before the music began. Understanding the power of both sound and its absence, Dohnanyi held the silence longer than is typical — just long enough for the audience to understand that they were experiencing something extraordinary, but not so long that people lost focus.

“There is absolutely nothing we could have done to be of better service at that moment than to stick with what we do best, standing firm behind our core values of great music delivered with uncompromising artistic excellence,” the orchestra’s executive director, Thomas Morris, told Collins.

The Cleveland Orchestra was not a fire department or a medical organization. It was a musical institution. However much New York City needed first responders and doctors, the leaders of the orchestra knew that straying into that territory was beyond the scope of its core mission and might do more harm than good. So they stuck to their area of excellence and played music.

What is your core work? What is your Mahler Five? What is your manipulation of sound and its absence that expresses both your mission and meets the moment?

Don’t Rewrite the Score

In my view, too many nonprofit organizations and government institutions managed the crisis of 2020 poorly. Instead of sticking to their fundamental work and asking how excelling at that work could help address both a national racial reckoning and a worldwide pandemic lockdown, they strayed into areas beyond their expertise and often made decisions that proved counterproductive.

A prime example was public health. In the summer of 2020, after months of stern warnings against gathering in large crowds, more than 1,300 public health experts signed a letter supporting attendance at mass protests against racial injustice.

Many did not have a good answer for their hypocrisy. “I certainly condemned the anti-lockdown protests at the time, and I’m not condemning the (racial justice) protests now, and I struggle with that,” said Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “I have a hard time articulating why that’s OK. ”

Such sentiments helped fuel a cratering of public trust in the public health sector, including among frontline health care professionals. A WebMD/Medscape study in 2021 found that 77 percent of both doctors and nurses said they had lost trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, many citing the politicization of health care guidance and the contradictory messaging on masking and gathering.

As a nonprofit leader, I had my own experiences with institutions compromising their credibility during that crisis by focusing on work outside their mission. I remember one program officer at an elite New York foundation who had been given the task of funding creative approaches to getting vulnerable groups vaccinated. My organization had developed just such a program, called Faith in the Vaccine Ambassadors.

In his original correspondence, the program officer said the initiative was a perfect match for the foundation’s strategy. He invited a letter of inquiry and agreed to a Zoom meeting.

We subsequently had multiple meetings with the program officer, during which he spent nearly every minute railing against white supremacy culture, microaggressions, police brutality, institutionalized racism in philanthropy and the like. Whether I agreed with any of it or not was beside the point — it had nothing to do with his main job, which was funding vaccine programs for vulnerable populations. He never formally responded to the letter of inquiry we sent him for the program, which he had indicated he wanted to fund, and we never did get the grant. Hundreds more people might have been vaccinated if he had done his job.

Focusing on an organization’s core work isn’t just good strategy, it demonstrates integrity, which I think of as a spiritual quality.

I will close with one of my favorite stories about St. Francis of Assisi. One day, St. Francis was hoeing his garden when a person came by and said, “St. Francis, what would you do if I told you the world is going to end at 6 p.m. tonight.”

St. Francis answered: “I would continue hoeing my garden.”

The world needs your organization to continue to tend its garden and excel at its mission. That’s how you meet the moment. That’s how we get out of this crisis.