This article was originally published on LinkedIn on April 17, 2026, following the United Way national conference.
I just spent three days with four hundred nonprofit and United Way leaders at a national conference. And I came home with something I did not expect: not just new ideas, but a renewed sense of urgency about the work.
There are conversations happening at the national level that every nonprofit leader, funder, and community partner needs to be part of. So let me share what I heard, and what I actually believe.
The Organizations Built Solely on Compliance Are Becoming Irrelevant
I have been talking about this in our own community for a while now. I was glad to hear it echoed by leaders from across the country. Too many nonprofits are operating on inertia. Showing up. Doing what they have always done. Hoping the environment eventually turns in their favor.
It will not. The organizations that are thriving right now made a decision to evolve. Not to abandon their mission, but to ask harder questions about how they deliver on it. They built real strategy. They diversified how they generate resources. They stopped measuring success by activity and started measuring it by outcomes.
"Strategy is not a document you write once. It is a daily discipline of asking whether what you are doing today is actually moving you toward what you said matters."
There Is Too Much Duplication and Not Enough Honest Conversation About It
This one landed in the room like a stone in still water. The statement was simple: there are too many nonprofits doing the same work in communities across the country. And it is hurting the people those organizations are trying to serve.
Duplication is not just inefficient. It fragments trust, splits donor attention, exhausts the same pool of volunteers, and creates competition where there should be collaboration. The communities that are seeing real, measurable change are the ones where organizations have the courage to ask: what is our unique role here, and who should we be working alongside rather than around?
United Way, at its best, exists to answer that question. Not by picking winners and losers, but by being the honest convener, the organization that maps the landscape, connects the dots, and holds the community accountable for shared outcomes. That is a role worth owning. And it requires organizations willing to set ego aside in service of impact.
The Funding Model Has to Change. And That Is Actually Good News.
One of the most energizing conversations I had this week was around trust-based philanthropy. The idea is straightforward: stop treating the organizations you fund like suspects and start treating them like partners.
What does that look like in practice? Multi-year operational funding instead of one-year program grants. Fewer redundant reporting requirements. Letting organizations define what success looks like and trusting them to pursue it. One United Way that made this shift grew from 30 funded partners to 96, with nearly half of those being organizations that had never received funding before. The communities they were not reaching before are now being reached.
This is not about accountability going away. It is about accountability being built on relationship rather than compliance. The difference is enormous.
What the Thriving Organizations Are Doing Differently
Across the three days, a consistent picture emerged of what separates the organizations gaining ground from those losing it. The ones moving forward are doing several things in common:
I left this conference more energized about the work than when I arrived. Not because everything is easy or the sector's challenges are overblown. They are real. But because I saw what is possible when organizations stop waiting and start building.
The Northern Shenandoah Valley deserves organizations that are doing exactly that. The national conversation is pointing the way. The question is whether local leaders, funders, and boards are willing to follow it.
