December 23, 2025
Dear Readers,
The degree of suffering visited upon everyday people in the United States this year, by our own government, has been difficult to comprehend.
The deliberately inflicted pain ranges from attacks on the LGBTQ+ community to the racist targeting of immigrants and migrants to the heartless layoffs of thousands of federal workers to the arbitrary distress thrust on ordinary people simply trying to afford healthcare for their families.
It’s our job at NPQ to cover the nonprofit sector specifically, but it can feel myopic to focus on our own sector’s experience amid so much pain.
But nonprofits are not just another industry on an economic checklist. It is often our sector that stands up for the rights, dignity, and even survival of all those targeted groups and more, attempting to right the wrongs inflicted on the marginalized, the unwanted, the powerless. What hurts us, as organizations, hurts them, as people. And we must tend to our sector just as we must tend to those our sector serves.
The inauguration of President Donald Trump in January marked the beginning of a siege on institutions that protect vulnerable people, more or less starting with the nonprofit sector. Now, at the end of 2025, our sector finds itself fully under attack by the Trump administration and its allies in Congress. It is a grim state of affairs.
Yet, we remain standing, and fighting back. This year saw nonprofit leaders rise to the occasion of our times, despite or because of the dire risks inherent in this moral resistance.
Groups like the National Council of Nonprofits, Democracy Forward, and a multitude of other allies have put their proverbial money where their mouth is, suing the Trump administration over its various assaults, from mass-defunding to executive orders and memoranda aimed at initiating politically motivated investigations of nonprofits whose missions run afoul of the Trump administration’s ideological agenda.
Meanwhile, other organizations like We the Action and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (of which NPQ is a grantee) are providing legal resources to help ordinary cash-strapped nonprofits preemptively bolster their internal defenses against potential attacks.
Countless other groups have resisted by refusing to abandon their missions, and the people they serve, maintaining their resolve to fight for diversity, inclusion and equity—deep principles that have become the boogeyman of “DEI” to the Right.
It is one of those mysterious truths of life that the most unfortunate circumstances are also often the most profoundly important. It’s often what we do when things are bad, not good, that defines who and what we are.
In this special end-of-year Leadership newsletter, we’re looking back on just some of NPQ’s coverage over the last year (a more complete selection can be found on my Staff Picks list) of the bravery, morality, and leadership that our sector has shown and will surely continue to show in the year to come. All is not lost—and the fight is worth it.
With gratitude,
Isaiah Thompson
Editor
Leadership
[email protected]
