This issue first appeared in Business Without Barriers, Juliann Nichols’s newsletter on LinkedIn, on October 9, 2026.

The funding risk most nonprofit boards do not see until it is already happening

A county commission meets on a Tuesday morning. On the agenda is a routine item, the kind that has passed without discussion for years. By the time the votes are counted, a couple dozen local organizations have lost their funding, and one of them stands to lose roughly forty percent of its budget.

Not because of a recession. Not because the money ran out. The dollars got moved to a different priority.

That happened in Florida not long ago. The funding came back after commissioners revisited the decision. But I have watched versions of this play out in enough places now that I have stopped thinking of it as a local story. A city council reprioritizes. A state legislature reallocates. A school board changes direction. A federal program sunsets. The specifics rotate. The exposure does not.

If a single vote takes out a meaningful share of your budget, you do not have a funding problem. You have a design problem.

The reversal is not the lesson

Here is the part that gets missed. When the money comes back, everyone exhales and returns to work. The structure that made it vanish stays exactly where it was.

Organizations that survive one of these scares almost never change their revenue model afterward. They change their advocacy. They show up to more meetings, build a stronger case, prepare a better presentation for next year. All useful. None of it addresses the actual issue, which is that the model requires the same people to say yes every single year.

And the second time is rarely as kind as the first.

The three questions your board needs to answer this quarter

I work with organizations that are two steps from a hard stop and do not know it, because everything looks fine right up until it does not. These questions surface it fast. If you lead the organization, send this section to your board before the next meeting.

1. What percentage of our revenue depends on a body we do not control?

Add up every dollar that arrives because a council, a commission, a board, or an agency approved it. Include the grants that feel permanent. Especially those. If the number is north of thirty percent, you are exposed. North of forty, you are dependent.

Write it down. Put it in front of your board at the next meeting. Most boards have never seen this number stated plainly, and the conversation changes the moment they do.

2. Who in this organization owns revenue development?

Look at your org chart. In most small and mid-sized nonprofits, the honest answer is the executive director, who is also the public face, the board manager, the funder liaison, the program lead, and the person covering when someone is out.

Development becomes the thing that happens after everything else. Which means it happens rarely, late, and under pressure.

That is not a performance issue. That is a structure that guarantees the outcome. Adding “diversify our funding” to that person’s annual goals accomplishes nothing except making their departure more likely.

3. Who is in the room before the decision gets made?

This one gets skipped constantly. If your funding runs through a public body or a major institutional funder, someone connected to your organization needs a real relationship there. Before the vote. Not during public comment, when the outcome is already decided and you are speaking for the record.

Check your board seats. Check who attends what. Organizations get surprised because nobody was positioned to see it coming.

Diversification is not a fundraising campaign

When I say diversify, most boards hear gala. Another appeal, another ask letter, another initiative nobody has time to run.

Not what I mean.

Diversification is structural. It means revenue arrives from enough different directions that no single decision maker can take out a meaningful share of it.

For most organizations the channels are more available than they realize. Major regional employers have community investment budgets and a genuine interest in the quality of life that helps them recruit and retain. Municipal relationships multiply your public base instead of concentrating it, so one county becomes one county plus four cities. Community foundations and family foundations fund operating capacity more often than people assume. Members and audiences who have only ever been asked for a ticket price have never been asked for anything else.

None of that is exotic. It is just work that nobody currently has time to do.

The window is now, not later

The organizations that get through the next disruption are the ones that built those channels while things were calm. Not the ones that started building during the emergency.

Run the numbers while nothing is on fire and nobody is defensive. A board that reviews its dependency ratio in a quiet quarter has options. A board that discovers it three weeks before a vote has a crisis and a very short list of choices.

Be honest about capacity too. Sometimes the fix is a hire. Often it is a defined stretch of focused work by someone whose only assignment is rebuilding the revenue base, after which the organization runs it going forward.

Either way, the work happens now or it happens under pressure. I have watched both. The first one costs less and takes less out of your people.

If you are already in it

Maybe you are reading this with the vote already on the calendar. Or the letter already in your inbox. You do not have a quiet quarter. Here is where to start.

Know your runway in weeks. Not months. Not “we will figure it out.” How many weeks can you make payroll and keep programs open if that money does not come? That number decides everything else, and your board needs it before they need anything else from you.

Get in the room this week. Call the commissioner, the program officer, the agency contact. Ask for fifteen minutes before the decision, not three minutes at public comment after it. People vote differently on organizations they have actually met.

Start one new channel this month. Not five. One. One employer conversation. One city meeting. One family foundation. One ask to the people who already buy your tickets. One door opened in a crisis is worth more than a perfect plan you start next year.

And ask for help. Nobody gets extra credit for carrying this alone. That is exactly how good leaders end up leaving.

One more thing worth saying

Leadership turnover in these organizations gets treated as a people problem. Wrong director, bad fit, poor board chemistry.

Sometimes. More often it is a job description no single human completes, sitting on top of a revenue model that requires annual permission from someone else. Replace the person and the seat stays hard. Fix the structure and the seat becomes one somebody good stays in.

That is the work. It is not glamorous and it does not fit on a poster. It is also the difference between an organization that survives its next surprise and one that spends a season finding out how many friends it has.

If you sit on a board and have never seen your dependency ratio stated plainly, that is a good first conversation. If you are an executive director and already in it, that conversation is more urgent. Either way, I am happy to have it with you. Book 20 minutes with me.

Juliann Nichols is the founder and CEO of JULO Strategy Global, a strategic execution and business consulting firm. JULO OPS provides fractional operations and revenue strategy support to businesses and mission-driven organizations nationally.