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You can raise more money, grow your team, expand your programs, and still feel like there's never enough. That's not a capacity issue. It's a design issue. And in today's episode, I'm going to show you how to leverage abundance to fix the problem. Welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind podcast, where we name what's really happening inside growing nonprofits and what it actually takes to design a high impact nonprofit the right way. I'm Brooke Richie Babbage, longtime nonprofit strategist and coach. Each week I unpack the systems, strategies and specific mindset shifts that help growing nonprofits get smart and intentional about growing their impact without burning out along the way. This show is about moving beyond grit to design. It's about building organizations that have the systems, structures and leadership capacity to truly hold the weight of their mission. Welcome. So here's the idea. I want to explore abundance and not the woo kind. Although I do like the woo kind. I am big into that. But that's not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about the strategic kind. I want to ask a question. What if abundance isn't just a mindset, but an actual legitimate growth strategy? This is a perspective shift that once I named it and felt it in my own leadership, it changed the way I thought about everything. About growth, about collaboration, even about competition and our sector. So I want to pull that apart a bit because for a lot of the folks that I work with and talk to, abundance feels like a vibe, right? A posture, a mindset, which it can be all of those things, but it can be relegated to this field of something you try to feel when you're navigating a world of scarcity. I want to actually invite you to consider a different way of thinking about abundance in your own leadership. I want you to think about what abundance could mean if it were something more structural and more operational. What if treating abundance like an organizational design strategy, right? Something you intentionally build into how you lead. What if that's the unlock for more growth, for stronger partnerships, and for a deeper sense of resilience in your organization? So we hear this all the time, shift to an abundance mindset and you cannot see it. But I am adding air quotes. Not again. Because I don't believe in an abundance mindset. I meditate every morning and I try to welcome abundance into my life. I do think it is a very powerful mindset. I also talk about mindset shifts all the time. The mindset that we work to strengthen, the positive mindset that we work to strengthen or hopefully we work to strengthen as a leader is so critical to how we move through the world, right? The way we see our work and ourselves shapes the way we do the work. So I understand talking about abundance as a mindset, but what I see with so many nonprofit leaders that I coach is that they only treat abundance like something they're supposed to feel and not actually a thing they can design or leverage. And the reality is, or the. The problem with that is they stay in reactive cycles, right? They are more likely to hoard or protect information from their team or their board. They feel guilty more often. They don't share their challenges. They might not refer a funder to a peer. They might not share that amazing template that they spent hours building with their board, not because they're selfish, but because underneath, they're terrified that there isn't enough, not enough money, not enough room at the table for everyone. And our current funding environment feeds that fear. It feeds that scarcity. But here's the thing I learned when I was navigating growing my own organization multiple decades ago, also during a financial time of crisis and scarcity. Scarcity is a design problem, and it's embedded into how we structure our organizations, our strategies and our relationships. Think about how you budget. Do you boldly say to the world and to your board and to funders, this is how much our vision and our impact cost, right? This is the work we want to do, and it costs $2.3 million. That is what we have to invest to have the impact that we want to change the world and the way that we want to change it. Or, and this is way more common, do you think about how much you think you can raise and then reverse engineer from there? That is scarcity being operationalized as a budget ceiling, right? So if we want to move out of that cycle, and not just emotionally, but practically, then we have to build abundance into the way that our organizations function. And I am going to share three concrete ways to do that. First, let's start with generosity. Generosity is not just a virtue, it's leverage. And I don't mean performative generosity, like posting on LinkedIn that you're cheering everyone on. I mean operational generosity. Operational generosity looks like sending a colleague your fundraising calendar because they're trying to build their own. It looks like referring a funder to another organization that might be a better fit, or co creating a training or a workshop with a peer leader rather than competing to get the contract first. It looks like dropping a link to your SOPs into a group slack thread because Someone that you know, another leader, asked a question you've already answered in your own organization. These things matter. They seem little. But when you share, you stop being just an individual organization fighting for oxygen, and you start becoming part of a network that amplifies and supports itself. I cannot tell you the power of being part of that network, of not being out on that limb alone. I have seen this again and again. When leaders are willing to give generously to one another, they also tend to receive faster and grow much more easily. The referrals come back around. The templates you share become the basis for someone else's growth, and then they collaborate with you. It's not woo, fuzzy karma, it's infrastructure. It's leveraging infrastructure and seeing your organization and your leadership and your challenges and your resources as one star in a vast sea of stars, as one part of a vast, powerful network where all resources can lift every organization. And this is especially true in a sector where so many leaders are feeling isolated and burned out and are navigating decision fatigue. This kind of concrete, generous sharing builds resilience, it builds trust, and it builds a shared momentum that no one organization can create alone. Okay, number two, and this one I'm really excited about because I have seen, actually, I've seen the examples of all three of these examples or strategies that I'm sharing in my own leadership and in the leadership of the orgs that I coach. But this one just has a sort of dear place in my heart. So number two is a strong network of peers. Here's the stake I'm going to put in the ground. I trust I sharing. Peer networks are one of the most powerful growth levers you can pull. They are one of the most powerful growth assets in our entire sector. And I do not say that lightly. I coach dozens of leaders every year. I see what happens when leaders are stuck in their own heads, doubting every decision, scared to reach out because they don't want to look like they don't know what they're doing. We've all been there. But here's the thing. When you are in the right room with peers who are also building, also navigating growth, who are also trying to shift into a new version of themselves. As leaders, build a new version of their team, rethink their board, you stop feeling like the only one who hasn't figured it out. You start seeing models for what's possible. And that matters, because most of the pain points that I see with the leaders that I coach are not just business problems. They have deeper Identity, roots, things like, I should know how to do this by now. That's a sneaky one. Or, what if I mess this up and the whole thing collapses? That's one that a lot of people walk around with. We may not say it out loud, but it's there. It's feeding the fear. What if I can't raise the money again? What if this person I hire is the wrong person? When you share those with peers in your network, when you start building and investing in a peer network that is rooted in trust and sharing, two things happen. One, you realize you are not alone in your challenges and your fears. You start leading with more confidence because you have places to gut check your instincts, to have someone reflect back. Yeah, you're not the only one navigating that. I got you. And the second thing is you share. You get access to ideas and insights and resources and tools that make you better. You have peers who are on the same journey helping you as strategic thought partners. Iron sharpens iron. My own participation in a peer mastermind. We called ourselves the Sustainable Sisterhood. And for those of you who are longtime listeners, you have probably heard me talk about this group. Seven women executive directors met every first Wednesday of the month for seven years. We met for breakfast. And it wasn't just a happy hour, you know, after work or wallowing or meeting for breakfast to high five and snuggle. Although we did like to snuggle. That's fine, too. We met because iron sharpens iron, right? These women, all of us, brought ideas and strategies and challenges to the table. They brought ways of thinking and leading that I hadn't thought about. They talked me off of ledges when I didn't know how to navigate specific leadership challenges. They helped me prep for scary funder meetings. They taught me things like how to do a roll call at a fundraising event and how to fire my first person. They traveled alongside me as I grew my organization from me and an intern at $350,000 to a team of 17 and a seven figure budget. So I want you to remember, iron sharpens iron. Okay, the third, Transparency. And you may notice the theme. I'm taking these concepts that can seem jargony and fuzzy, and I'm walking through how they are actually concrete organizational design strategies that you can operationalize. So the third one is transparency. And this one can feel risky at first for folks, but I invite the leaders that I work with when this is something they're navigating, to step into radical strategic transparency. Not oversharing and not vulnerability, for the Sake of vulnerability, not performative vulnerability. I mean intentional transparency that reduces friction and builds trust. That's what operationalizing transparency looks like. These are things like. And they can seem small, but they are really important. Sharing real financials with your board and your team, not just sanitized summaries. Things like sitting down with your leadership team and naming risks early, bringing them into your thinking about scenario planning, instead of waiting until things become emergencies because you don't want people to think that the ship is going down. This is also about letting funders see the actual cost of your work instead of thinking about how to package it so it feels fundable. Being honest with peers about what's not working, not just what is. This is the truth that a lot of folks will not say out loud. When information is controlled tightly, it creates artificial scarcity. It feeds the scarcity cycle, right? People will fill in the gaps with assumptions. Decisions will slow down. Trust starts to erode quietly. But the converse is also true. When you increase transparency, really important things shift. Your board can engage at a more strategic and less micromanaging way. Your team can make better decisions without you because they have more information. You can work with funders as actual partners to help you navigate challenges and build a stronger organization because they know you're not posturing and you know they're really partners, right? Funders and donors and peers can support you because they understand the real picture. Transparency doesn't just feel good. In fact, sometimes it can feel scary. But what radical strategic transparency does is it increases the speed and the quality of decision making across your whole organization. And it deepens trust. And that's where the leverage lives. So here's the question I want to leave with you today. What would change in your strategy, in your leadership, in your relationships, if you believed there was more than enough for everyone in your space? Not just enough funding, but enough support, enough brilliance, enough room for everyone to thrive. What if you acted on that belief? What decisions would feel less urgent? What truths would feel less scary? What collaborations would become possible? What would you stop holding so tightly or white knuckling all by yourself? Now, I'm not saying that this is easy. Operationalizing things like generosity and transparency and trusting peers to actually be honest with one another and not just meet up for a drink and talk about how hard things are, who really open up and be vulnerable. That can be hard. Especially when so many, so many of us were trained explicitly or not, to survive on what we can make do with, right? To survive on scraps, to do the best we can. To fight for relevance. What that can mean is that we start to see peers as competitors instead of co conspirators. We start to see funders as the other instead of partners. What I'm offering, I think is better. It's not abundance as a vibe or a vision board, but as an intentional design choice. And if you build that into the bones of your organization through generosity, through sharing, through high trust networks that sharpen you and make you better and make you feel stronger and actually make you stronger through radical strategic transparency, you can start to see how growth doesn't have to mean more pressure. It can actually mean more ease and more clarity and more momentum. So that's what I have for you today. I hope this was helpful. I will see you back here next week for more Mastermind. Thanks for listening. If this episode resonated, leave a review I read them and they do matter. And make sure you're subscribed so that you never miss a deep dive into building your resilient nonprofit. And finally, if you're ready to move from grit to good design, head to Brook richiebababbage.com strong to take the 90 second quiz and find out where to start.