The Foraker Group

“What yesterday we might have called obstacles, today are opportunities that make us unstoppable.” –Amanda Gorman, UNICEF Ambassador, from her new poem With This Bright Voice

In Alaska, we know all too well about earthquakes and harsh weather events. They can be unexpected, jarring, and full of significant consequences for people and places we care about. “Lifequakes” are similar to those natural events with their uncertainty and impact, but they are more personal. Lifequakes can result from a shift in our professional or home life and can disrupt us alone, our family, our community, or the world. No matter the magnitude, these earthquakes and lifequakes get our attention and can propel us into action.

2025 had plenty of quakes to rattle our days as they shifted the ground beneath our feet – literally, emotionally, and from a policy and funding perspective. All these rumblings had our sector leaders turning their heads like they were on a high-speed swivel – one impact after another came sharply and swiftly and just never stopped all year long. I can say with confidence that the vast majority of us would be pleased not to endure any more unexpected shifts this year or in the coming year. Still, this landscape is our reality today, and it is far from stable and, likely, far from over.

Even with all the quakes, we carry on – a testament to the resiliency of our missions, the people we work with, the boards and volunteers who keep showing up, and every donor that in quiet and remarkable ways invests in the causes they believe in again and again. And you. You did it! You kept going even when it was harder than you thought possible.

Maybe some of you just blew right by that note of encouragement. I get it. It’s easy to not take it in because you are still overcoming obstacles and doing the work.

Or maybe you are not giving yourself or your team a moment to recognize your accomplishment for making it to this point because it just feels normal now – like any other day.

If that is true, I urge you to resist the temptation to accept this as normal and instead harness all the resiliency that brought you to this point and use it to get to a place that feels less like facing into the wind or sitting on a fault line.

Instead, I offer a few ideas of what a “better place” could look like right now for our sector in our communities and in the country.

Imagine a place where we spend less time defending our work and its positive impact on people and places and more time partnering to increase that impact.

Imagine a place where government at every level remembers at every turn that when we deliver services with them, as their partner, we are all saving money, time, and effort, leveraging our resources for better results.

Imagine standing with our local governments to mobilize community action, planning and prioritizing our way forward together – rather than having policy makers simply viewing us as another entity at the end of a microphone delivering public testimony.

Imagine a place where donors are not asking us to justify our overhead and instead are celebrating the process that makes the work more efficient.

Imagine a place where everyone remembers that nonprofits are as diverse as every part of our country and that it requires every idea, every political perspective, and every person for us all to thrive.

Imagine a place where a seat for nonprofits has been placed at every decision-making table, bringing our voices into every solution.

Imagine a place where you have affordable health care and a living wage, and that is the new normal.

Imagine.

I imagine all these things and more because we have seen glimpses of them over time across Alaska. They are not a dream of a faraway place. Instead, they are possible if we hold them up as goals, as requests, and as mandates.

I know these things are possible when we reject the notion that our work is not valued or not worth it – when policy makers plan for us, but not with us, when we are only seen as takers and not givers to our economy – or when we are scapegoated or vilified. These are not our “new normal” and it is not ours to own. Instead, let’s all lean into what we know is true – that every day our missions and our sector are central to the lives of Alaskans, to our economy, and most certainly to the vitality of our democracy.

Imagine all of this as you set your intentions for the new year.

May those intentions be bold, courageous, powerful, and clear. May they lift you and your mission up and lead us all to a better place.

With all my gratitude for showing up and not giving up during such an intense year,

Laurie

PS. If you want additional perspectives on imagining our future, check out this recent podcast where I consider how nonprofits are central to Alaska’s strong and vibrant future when we work hand in hand with government and the private sector.