Legacy Dollars, Living Systems: Funding Models That Breathe
Money sits. That's the problem. A grant lands in a nonprofit's account, and what happens? It gets parked in a savings account, spent on the same programs as last year, and maybe grows a little if a finance person is clever. But a dollar doesn't breathe. It's inert. Yet we keep talking about 'endowment strategies' and 'sustainable funding' as if the goal were to preserve a lump of something, not to feed a living system. This is a quiet crisis in strategic giving. Foundations and charities are waking up to the fact that the old models—the ones built on perpetual trusts and payout ratios—don't fit a world where needs shift fast and communities demand a seat at the table. So what does a funding model that actually breathes look like? It's not a metaphor. It's a set of practices that treat money as a flow, not a hoard.