July is Disability Pride Month. This year, I'm marking it differently.

I recently lost my service dog. He died of cancer. And in the middle of sitting with all of that, I kept thinking about how disabled leaders show up everyday and how the nonprofit sector can shift the disability justice conversation.

This week, the Supreme Court closed out its term the same week that the United States turns 250 years old. In one 24-hour stretch, birthright citizenship survived, transgender kids lost the right to play on their team, and Alabama got the green light to erase a majority-Black congressional district. That's not a coincidence. It's a pattern. Our country doesn’t need us to celebrate it - it needs us to take action.

Nonprofit leaders talk about scarcity vs. abundance all the time. But we've narrowed that conversation down to donors and fundraising. What if we applied an abundance mindset to the rest of the work? Read more about abundance of possibility — and why it might be the leadership shift your organization needs.

What happens when a white colleague tells you that you don't have "CEO energy"? What does that even mean — and who decided extroversion was the price of admission to leadership? What is it really asking BIPOC leaders to prove?

Every nonprofit leader I talk to right now is saying some version of the same thing: "We have to pivot to individual donors. We don't have a choice."

You're right. We don't.

But here's what the pivot advice leaves out: individual fundraising isn't neutral. How you build it determines what your organization becomes for the next decade. Build it, chasing major donors, and you'll have major donors with opinions about your programming. Build it, telling stories that make wealthy people comfortable, and you'll have a donor base that expects comfortable stories.

Build it right — grounded in Community-Centric Fundraising (CCF) — and you can have something most nonprofits have never had: a broad, resilient donor base that distributes power instead of concentrating it. One that outlasts any administration, any political cycle, any single funder's priorities.

CCF was built by BIPOC fundraisers who formalized what their communities had already been doing for generations — mutual aid, rotating savings circles, neighbor-to-neighbor campaigns. It's a framework that finally catches up to what many of us already knew.

Every year in the nonprofit sector is a critical moment. Every year, the same ask: rise to it.

We've been in "critical moment" mode for years. And the staff absorbing that urgency — the ones who showed up precisely because they couldn't walk away — are paying the price.

Tema Okun named "a sense of urgency" as a characteristic of white supremacy culture for a reason. It shortcuts deliberation. It silences dissent. It keeps power exactly where it already sits. And it justifies asking the most mission-invested people to give more — indefinitely — without ever questioning the conditions that require it.

We are sometimes in urgent moments. We are not always in urgent moments. The inability to tell the difference is itself a crisis.