Funders Want Nonprofits to Merge. There’s a Better Option.

To the Editor:

Alex Daniels’s recent article — Some Funders Want Nonprofits to Merge (April 28) — arrives at a difficult moment. Federal cuts and funder retraction have left many nonprofits scrambling and forced to make painful decisions about their futures. By spotlighting mergers, Daniels identifies a real tension and a viable solution. But there’s a difference between consolidation driven by shared organizational goals and mergers resulting from grant maker preference.

At the Disability Inclusion Fund, where I serve as director, our grantees are all too familiar with today’s challenges: Just one penny of every 10 grant making dollars goes to disability rights and justice. 

As a former nonprofit leader and long-time organizer, I believe my role as a funder is to listen, not prescribe. In 2025, our grantees asked us to try something that stops well short of mergers but offers some of the same benefits: to explicitly fund collaboration between their organizations. By working together, these nonprofits saw opportunities to expand the disability justice movement in directions they couldn’t have pursued on their own.

Funding collaboration means supporting the relationships that build trust across organizations and creating the conditions for new thinking to emerge. For example, two of our grantees — El Grupo Vida in Colorado and Living Hope Wheelchair Association in Texas, both rooted in immigrant justice movements — began working together across state lines to support disabled immigrant families in ways neither had done before.

Mergers are sometimes the right answer for nonprofits, and grant makers must absolutely support organizations that move down that strategic path. But collaborations offer another option that can be bolstered by targeted foundation investments. 

The most important question funders should be asking right now is how we can make the whole field stronger based on our grantees’ self-identified needs and perspectives. Collaboration between nonprofits strengthens connections among organizations and movement leaders, resulting in more innovative approaches and a stronger base of knowledge.  

Nonprofits are already pointing the way. Our job is to follow their lead.

Nikki Brown Booker
Director
Disability Inclusion Fund