Individual Fundraising Won't Sustain Your Nonprofit. Read This Before You Launch Your Next Campaign.
Photo by Alvan Nee
Community-Centric Fundraising Is Why Some Organizations Will Thrive and Others Won't.
Nonprofits across the sector are in triage mode right now.
Federal funding has been cut. State and local governments are bracing for their own cuts. The budget holes are real — and for many organizations, they've been years in the making. And the advice coming from every direction sounds the same: pivot to growing your individual donors. Build your base. Diversify your revenue. As if the solution is simply a new fundraising channel, and the only thing standing between you and sustainability is a better cultivation strategy and a year-end appeal.
Here's what that guidance misses: individual fundraising isn't just a channel. How you build it determines what your organization becomes. And if you build it with intention — grounding it in community trust rather than donor cultivation — individual fundraising can be the most resilient, values-aligned revenue base you've ever had. It can distribute power instead of concentrating it. It can build genuine ownership instead of obligation. It can outlast any administration, any political cycle, any single funder's priorities.
But that only happens if you build it right. The question isn't whether to build individual fundraising. You should, and you need to start now. The question is whether you build it in a way that deepens your relationship with community — or whether you build it in a way that just trades one set of funders for another.
Government Funding Was Never Neutral
Government funding has always reflected the values of whoever held political power at the time — and that changed with every election cycle.
States that didn't support reproductive rights restricted funding for abortion services or channeled it toward crisis pregnancy centers instead. The Hyde Amendment — in effect since 1977 — has banned federal funds for abortion for nearly five decades, with only narrow exceptions for rape, incest, and life endangerment, according to KFF. That's not a policy technicality. That's a political values statement written into law and renewed by Congress every year. Meanwhile, states like Pennsylvania funded pro-life crisis pregnancy centers under one administration and defunded them under the next. The funding followed the politics, not the community.
The same pattern holds beyond reproductive rights. Federal funding for equity-focused programs has been shut down, redirected, or made contingent on political compliance depending on who holds power. Beginning in early 2025, executive orders targeted DEI-related grants across agencies. A study published in The Lancet Regional Health Americas found that approximately 2,291 NIH grants were terminated — with nearly half of investigators whose grants were cut for equity-related reasons identifying as BIPOC, and women, LGBTQ researchers, and scientists of color losing funding at disproportionate rates.
Government contracts also came with compliance structures that determined who could be served and how, reporting requirements that shaped what counted as success, and timelines that rewarded scale over depth and documentation over trust.
Some organizations navigated those constraints without losing their footing. Others found themselves gradually shaped by what the contract allowed rather than what the community actually needed. That's not a failing — it's what happens when survival requires compliance.
So yes, losing that funding is a crisis. And it's also, potentially, the permission structure your organization has been waiting for to build something different. Individual fundraising, built through a Community-Centric Fundraising (CCF) model, isn't just a revenue replacement strategy. It's a chance to build an ownership model — where the people your organization serves have real stake in its future.
That opportunity is real. But it doesn't happen automatically. It requires intention from the first dollar.
Why CCF Is a Natural Model for BIPOC-Led Organizations
Community-Centric Fundraising didn't emerge from a think tank or a foundation boardroom. It came from a group of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) fundraisers in Seattle who, starting in 2018, began meeting to name the dissonance they felt between the fundraising practices they were expected to follow and the communities they were actually trying to serve. The movement formally launched in 2019 — grounded in years of unrecognized work by nonprofit leaders of color who had long been asking the same questions.
But CCF didn't appear from nowhere. It was a formalization of something communities of color had been doing for generations. Mutual aid networks, rotating savings circles, community tithes, grassroots house parties, neighbor-to-neighbor campaigns — these have always been how BIPOC communities moved resources when institutions weren't moving them. The CCF framework named and structured what was already happening in communities that couldn't wait for a foundation grant cycle or a government contract renewal. It didn't invent community-centric fundraising. It gave language and a professional framework to what BIPOC communities built out of necessity and collective care.
That origin matters. For BIPOC-led organizations especially, the CCF model aligns naturally with how community already functions. You don't have to invent new trust — it already exists. You don't have to convince your community that their voice matters in organizational decisions — that expectation is already there. What CCF does is give that reality a framework, a language, and a set of practices that make it legible and sustainable in a nonprofit fundraising context.
And the evidence supports it. A national study from the Johnson Center found that organizations adopting CCF practices maintained financial sustainability even as they shifted away from donor-centric models — and nearly 45% reported that fundraisers' morale increased in the process. Organizations with more BIPOC fundraisers on staff were significantly more likely to adopt CCF practices, underscoring what many practitioners have long known: this model works best when the people closest to community are leading it.
Donor-centric fundraising was built for and by a sector that was predominantly white, that centered wealthy donors as the primary agents of change, and that told communities of color they were problems to be solved rather than leaders to be resourced. CCF is a direct counter to that history. For BIPOC leaders, it's not a departure from how you already think about your work. It's finally a framework that catches up to you.
If Your Organization Is Predominantly White, You Can Still Use this Framework
CCF was built by and for BIPOC communities — and that lineage is not incidental. It's the whole point. But the framework is not exclusionary. The question it asks — who holds power in your fundraising, and who should? — is a question every organization needs to sit with, regardless of who leads it.
For predominantly white-led organizations, CCF asks something specific and uncomfortable: examine whose instincts you're following when you make fundraising decisions. When you picture a "donor," who do you see? When you write an appeal, whose comfort are you protecting? When you identify your highest-capacity prospects, what assumptions are baked into that assessment?
White-led organizations often have deep relationships with high-net-worth donors that BIPOC-led organizations have been systematically excluded from. CCF doesn't ask you to abandon those relationships — it asks you to interrogate the power dynamics within them. It asks you to stop letting donor preferences quietly shape your programming, your storytelling, and your organizational priorities. It asks you to build accountability structures that include community voice at the table where fundraising decisions get made — not just community stories in the appeal.
There's also a solidarity dimension that CCF makes explicit: nonprofits are not competitors for the same pool of dollars. They're partners in a shared ecosystem. White-led organizations that have historically had easier access to philanthropic networks have a responsibility to use that access in ways that don't crowd out BIPOC-led organizations. Referring donors. Sharing funder relationships. Collaborating on campaigns rather than running parallel ones. That's CCF in practice — and it requires white leaders to be willing to redistribute advantage, not just redistribute funds.
The framework works for your organization not because it erases where it came from, but because the values it's built on — community accountability, distributed power, honest storytelling, collective sustainability — are values that should govern any organization doing equity work.
Community-Centric Fundraising isn't a set of tactics. It's a framework that asks you to fundamentally reorient who your fundraising is for and who holds power in it. When you apply that to individual fundraising, it changes how you think about almost everything.
Here's how to build it.
Start with your community before you start with your donor list.
The first instinct when pivoting to individual fundraising is to look inward — to pull your existing contact list, identify your highest-capacity relationships, and start there. That's donor-centric logic, and it could steer you wrong from the beginning.
CCF asks you to start by asking your community what they want this organization to be. Not in a survey that goes unread. In actual conversation — in the formats and languages and spaces where your community already exists. What do they need? What would make them trust you enough to give? What stories do they want told? What would make them want to fundraise alongside you, not just receive services from you?
That conversation will surface a donor base you didn't know you had — because it was never activated, never invited in, never treated as a resource.
Build a broad base, not a major donor pipeline.
Donor-centric individual fundraising optimizes for major gifts. It identifies your top prospects, cultivates them individually, and builds a pyramid where a small number of large donors carry the organization's financial weight. That model creates the same power problem as government funding: a handful of people with resources have disproportionate influence over your future.
CCF asks you to invert that pyramid. Build wide, not tall. A thousand donors giving fifty dollars a year is more sustainable — and more democratic — than ten donors giving five thousand. Not because major gifts are wrong, but because they shouldn't be your foundation. Your foundation should be people who give because they believe in the work, not because they've been cultivated into a relationship of obligation.
This takes longer to build. It generates less revenue in the short term. And it is dramatically more resilient over time — because no single donor can defund you.
Make giving a community act, not a transactional one.
One of the most powerful tools in CCF-aligned individual fundraising is peer-to-peer fundraising. When community members fundraise on your behalf, they're not just extending your reach. They're becoming co-owners of the mission. They're telling their networks: this organization is mine, and I want you to invest in it too.
That's a fundamentally different relationship than "we sent you a year-end appeal and you gave."
Build giving circles. Create community campaigns with shared goals. Host events where the community raises money together rather than performing for individual donors. Let people who have received your services be the ones asking others to give — because their ask carries a credibility no development director can replicate.
Tell real stories — including the one about why you need individual donors now.
Here's a story most organizations are too afraid to tell: we relied on government funding, that funding is gone, and we need your help to survive and rebuild.
That story is honest. It's vulnerable. And for communities that have watched government fail them repeatedly, it lands differently than a polished appeal about impact and transformation.
CCF asks organizations to tell the truth — about root causes, about systemic failures, about what's actually happening. Your funding crisis is a systemic story. Tell it that way. Name the political forces at play. Connect your revenue gap to the broader attack on communities like the ones you serve. Give your donors and community members a political frame, not just a charitable one.
People don't give to organizations they feel sorry for. They give to organizations they believe are fighting for something real. So, what's the true story of your funding crisis — and are you telling it, or sanitizing it to protect donor comfort?
Individual fundraising done without CCF will replicate every problem you're trying to escape.
If you build your individual giving program by identifying your highest-capacity donors and centering their preferences, you will have major donors with opinions about your programming.
If you build it by telling stories that make wealthy people feel good about giving, you will have a donor base that expects feel-good stories. If you build it by hiring a development director and handing them a portfolio, you will have a transactional fundraising program that requires constant cultivation and produces donor dependency.
None of that is community-centric. All of it is survivable in the short term and corrosive in the long term.
The moment your organization decides to pivot to individual fundraising is the moment you get to choose what kind of power structure you build. You will not get that choice again easily — because fundraising cultures calcify. The relationships you build in year one become the expectations in year five.
Build it right from the beginning. The urgency of the moment is real. It is not an excuse to take shortcuts on the values. Consider: who is currently in the room when your organization makes fundraising decisions? Who isn't — and why?
Where to Start When You're Starting From Zero
If your organization has minimal individual donor infrastructure right now, here's a practical sequence grounded in CCF principles:
Assess honestly. Before you build anything, understand what you actually have. How many individual donors do you have, at what giving levels, with what giving history? What relationships does your leadership hold that haven't been activated for fundraising? What community relationships exist that have never been treated as a fundraising asset — because you never thought of community members as donors?
Have the internal conversation about values. Before you write a single appeal, your board and leadership need to agree on what kind of individual fundraising program you're building. What is your philosophy around major donors? What is your commitment to building a broad base? What stories are you willing to tell — and unwilling to tell — to raise money? Get this on paper. It will save you from drift later.
Go to community before you go to donors. Host listening sessions. Talk to the people you serve. Ask them what this organization means to them and what they'd want to say to someone considering giving to it. That content will be the most powerful fundraising material you produce — and the process will surface donors you didn't know you had.
Launch a founding donor campaign. Frame your pivot to individual fundraising as a community moment, not a financial emergency. Invite people to become founding individual supporters of a new chapter for your organization. Give that a meaning beyond the transaction — they're not just replacing a grant, they're building something new with you.
Build the infrastructure to sustain it. CRM, acknowledgment processes, a communications calendar, a recurring giving program. None of this is glamorous. All of it is necessary. And all of it should be built with the question: does this system treat donors as partners, or as targets?
This Is Where Healing Equity United (HEU) Comes In
The pivot to individual fundraising isn't just a fundraising problem. It's a culture problem — and that's exactly where HEU works.
Building a CCF-aligned individual giving program requires your organization to examine who holds power in your fundraising decisions, what implicit biases are shaping who you think of as a "donor," and whether your internal culture is ready to treat community members as co-owners rather than beneficiaries. That's DEIB work. That's the culture transformation HEU supports.
If your organization is ready to do that deeper work — not just build a donor list, but build an equitable fundraising culture — HEU's consulting, training, and coaching can help you get there. Contact us to start the conversation. And if you want to stay connected to ongoing tools, thinking, and community as you navigate this moment, you can subscribe for updates at healingequityunited.com.
You don't have to figure this out alone. And you shouldn't have to.
🔥 Firebrand Challenge
Before you send your next appeal, make your next major donor ask, or hire your next development director, answer these three questions — in writing, with your leadership team:
Who are we building this individual fundraising program for — and how would they answer that question?
What would it look like if community members were fundraising partners in this program, not just recipients of it?
What are we willing to say no to in order to keep this program aligned with our values?
The funding crisis is real. The urgency is real. And none of that changes the fact that the individual fundraising program you build right now will shape your organization's power structure for the next decade.
Build it like it matters. Because it does.
If your organization is ready to do the culture and equity work that CCF-aligned fundraising requires, contact us.