In late 2024, the cost of housing, cost of living, and cost of running a nonprofit in California were sky high. Organizations had barely recovered from the COVID pandemic and the Great Resignation. Burnout was sky high, too.

Nonprofit leaders told researchers that their #1 challenge was supporting their staff. Specifically, they pointed to the inability to adequately recruit, compensate, and retain employees. And to ensure healthy workload and a healthy workplace to stave-off burnout.

This was an issue of organizational effectiveness. This was an issue of funder effectiveness. This was an issue of economic justice. This was an issue of racial and gender justice. This was an existential threat.

This was the environment when Fund the People began building partnerships across the Golden State, and convened a slate of gatherings to spark investment in California's nonprofit workforce. In September 2024, we held regional dialogue events in Northern California, Los Angeles, and San Diego. A few months later, In December, we put on a statewide conference, the California Talent Justice Summit, in Berkeley.

In the lead-up to the Summit, just after the 2024 Presidential Election, a bill called H.R. 9495 was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, which threatened to empower the White House to strip away the legal existence of nonprofits by designating them terrorist supporting organizations - without offering accused groups any evidence or adequate process to defend themselves.

In the void of sector leadership speaking out against this bill and educating the sector about it, Fund the People began our Defend Nonprofits, Defend Democracy campaign. By mobilizing nonprofit leaders to educate their elected representatives, we helped to change the votes of 15 House Members from Yes to No, taking the bi-partisan sheen off the bill and stopping it from moving forward in the Senate.

When hundreds of leaders from nonprofits, philanthropy, and sector infrastructure groups gathered near the UC Berkeley campus for the Talent Justice Summit on December 9-11, 2024, the event took participants through a learning journey based on our Funding that Works framework. An array of plenary and concurrent sessions featured presenters from across the sector, who shared practical examples and lessons-learned from innovative efforts to invest in the nonprofit workforce in California and beyond.

The Summit conversation swirled around two major topics: First, how best to integrate talent-investing into foundation grantmaking and nonprofit fundraising. Second, how our sector could prepare for the new policy context that awaited the sector in the new year.

 In January 2025, on Inauguration Day, the Trump Administration took the next steps in what would become a sustained series of comprehensive attacks against America's nonprofits, foundations, and philanthropic giving. We call it the Trump Administration's War on Charity.

Fund the People maintained important follow-up conversations and events with our California partners and event participants, supporting those who signed our Talent Justice Pledge during the Summit, and continuing our Upgrading Nonprofit Workplaces study, which documents how organizations and their funders are improving nonprofit job quality and working conditions in California and across the nation. But there is no doubt that momentum was squandered as the nonprofit sector dealt with the earthquakes and many aftershocks of the War on Charity.

Today, in 2026, investing in the nonprofit workforce remains an issue of organizational effectiveness. It's an issue of funder effectiveness. An issue of economic justice. And an issue of racial and gender justice. It is even more of an existential threat.

We invite you to join the conversation.