September 2, 2025
Greetings, readers!
I write you as I prepare for some parental leave. It is a strange time to have the great privilege and grave responsibility of returning my attention once more to my newborn child. But there’s no true shelter from the storm, is there? Certainly not for the organizations and causes you, readers, belong to and to which you dedicate your labor, your careers, and your hearts.
This “back to school” season brings massive challenges to the nonprofit sector and civil society. Both are under continual deliberate and systematic attack.
But as we move deeper into the storm, we do so with the shared knowledge of those who’ve come before us—and with those on the frontlines, applying that shared knowledge in support of the equity-centered change that strengthens nonprofits and, in turn, civil society at large.
Consider feminist leaders, for example, who often navigate multiple intersecting crisis as they push for structural changes that uplift the many rather than the few. How can funders better support this work? Or the potential of organizational partnerships if they’re treated as the strategic, equity-rooted tools for advancing mission and community impact that they are.
Of course, many of our problems require societal, structural solutions that come from policy changes. Yet, even here, nonprofits are showing up and showing out with solutions that aim to strengthen civil society. Because if the United States is to ever build a truly multiracial democracy, Black institutions must play a more central role.
It’s this kind of coverage that we at NPQ hope to provide so that you can better navigate the moment our sector faces. So, in the spirit of shared knowledge and “back to school” learnings, I’d like to leave you with a stanza from Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let America Be America Again”:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Yours truly,
Isaiah Thompson
Leadership Editor
