Mission and Money: How Nonprofit Leaders are Building Financial Sustainability

Larry Guillory was going through the credit card statements line by line. Every subscription. Every vendor payment. Every dollar going out the door. As chief administrative and financial officer at Big Thought, a Dallas-based nonprofit focused on youth development and creative learning, he was still fairly new to the organization. Pandemic-era relief funding was drying up. Revenue projections weren't holding. And a closer look at the organization's programs revealed some of the organization’s core services were operating with subsidy gaps.

"Although the budget said $15 million in income, we were not a $15 million business," Guillory recalls. "We were, in fact, much smaller than that, and we had to start behaving as such."

For Guillory and Big Thought CEO Erin Offord, what followed was a period of difficult choices, fast action, and a hard-won insight that would guide everything: mission and financial discipline are not opposites. 

Big Thought’s experience is far from unique. For many nonprofit leaders, the past few years have required navigating one disruption after another. First came the COVID-19 pandemic and the scramble to sustain programs and services amid shutdowns and uncertainty. Now, organizations across the country are confronting another difficult reality: shifting federal priorities, changing philanthropic landscapes, rising costs, and growing pressure to rethink how their organizations operate and sustain themselves long-term.

“As we started 2025, the whole nonprofit sector really woke up to a significant shift in federal funding priorities and approach,” says Gillian Gorra, senior manager with BDO’s Nonprofit and Grantmaker Advisory, a consulting practice that helps nonprofits strengthen financial management and long-term sustainability. “We’re seeing organizations that have historically relied heavily on government funding suddenly finding out that 50, 60, 80, 90 percent of their funding is no longer available to them.”

To help organizations address these challenges, BDO has developed new tools within the Strong Nonprofits Toolkit, a free library of more than 45 financial management resources designed to strengthen nonprofit financial resilience. New additions to the toolkit focus specifically on helping organizations navigate uncertainty through scenario planning, risk assessment, and long-term financial strategy.

The resources are part of a broader initiative called Nonprofit GPS, which offers webinars, peer learning opportunities, a public helpline, and practical tools to help organizations assess risk and plan for multiple possible futures. According to a February 2026 webinar hosted by BDO and the Afterschool Alliance, organizations are increasingly focused on areas such as forecasting cash flow, analyzing business model risks, evaluating cost-saving measures, and strengthening compliance practices amid unprecedented changes in the nonprofit sector.

“Really leaning into scenario planning and having a strong scenario planning muscle is important,” Gorra says. "The tools help organizations discuss and set guiding principles that they're going to take with them through their scenario planning journey. What are the things we must do? What are the things we might do? What are the things we won't do?"

At Big Thought, those kinds of questions were no longer just abstract planning exercises. 

From Crisis Response to Long-term Sustainability

When Guillory arrived at Big Thought in early 2025, Offord had been in the CEO role for just a few months. The organization had a strong reputation, deep community roots, and a 40-year history of serving young people in the Dallas-Fort Worth region. But it also had a financial picture that needed an honest reckoning.

“There was a real need to look at the strength of the organization through the financial lens,” Offord says.

Stabilizing the organization started with taking a much deeper look at its finances, operations, and long-term sustainability. That process led to difficult decisions: scaling down programs, restructuring operations, and reducing the organization's monthly expense run rate by 40 to 45 percent. It also included hard staffing decisions that Offord and Guillory both acknowledge left marks, including a summer when Big Thought had to pull back from some of its community partnerships.

"We probably left some of the community-based organizations we had partnered with and supported for a long time feeling a little unsupported by Big Thought during that season," Guillory says. "It was financially successful. But we probably left a little bit of impact on the table."

Throughout it all, the leadership team stayed anchored to a clear principle: the work of financial recovery was inseparable from the mission it was meant to protect.

“We did really ask ourselves…how do we make sure we’re also still serving our youth and our community first?” Offord says. “That actually helped guide us to make some of these really hard, complicated decisions.”

Guillory says that principle continues to shape how the organization operates today.

“The guiding principle there is the desire to deliver impact to the community, and then realizing that you have to have the income and the financial sustainability to fuel that impact,” he says. “There is this symbiosis between impact and income that we really keep top of mind.”

Communicating that message clearly and quickly was critical. Guillory had to deliver the sobering news to the board: despite what the budget said on paper, Big Thought needed to behave as a significantly smaller one. The organization implemented new financial controls, increased board communication, improved forecasting practices, and shifted toward what Guillory described as a more “hyper-conservative” financial approach grounded in realistic revenue projections rather than optimistic assumptions. They also implemented a stronger focus on helping staff understand how operational decisions affected the organization’s overall financial health.

The results were meaningful. Cash on hand moved from days to months. Income forecasting became more reliable. And the organization, now working from a two-to-three-year strategic plan, is thinking longer-term than it has before. Offord says the organization viewed the period not simply as a moment of contraction, but as an opportunity to fundamentally reassess how it could build a stronger future.

“That was the real reality of what 2025 exhibited,” she says. “We became a smaller organization to get larger and to grow and to make more impact. It was a pause, but it was also a meaningful space to revisit, re-strategize, and make ourselves impactful and stronger in the long run.”

Rethinking Financial Models in the Arts

Arts organizations are navigating many of the same pressures, though often in different ways. The Laundromat Project offers one example. The Brooklyn-based organization, which is participating in Wallace’s Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative, uses art to promote social change in communities of color across New York City. The organization’s director of finance and operations, Shana Wolfe, says one of the biggest challenges facing arts organizations today is the instability of short-term funding cycles. 

For many small- and mid-sized arts organizations, especially those rooted in communities of color, that instability creates what she described as a “constant rat race” of fundraising that makes long-term planning difficult. Wolfe says this challenge is compounded by the growing demands placed on community-based organizations at a time when many are already operating with limited staff capacity. 

"In so many other sectors, organizations have funding that's 10, 15, 20 years out, where they can actually work toward fulfilling their mission," Wolfe says. "In arts and culture, the funding cycles are so short that you're in a perpetual race to keep the lights on."

Through the Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative, The Laundromat Project has been receiving financial coaching support from BDO and also began using the Revenue Risk Analysis tool as part of broader efforts to strengthen long-term planning and better align conversations between fundraising and finance teams.

“We recognized this pattern that we had internally where it wasn't clear who was making decisions about what was going in the budget,” Wolfe says. “We’ve been using the revenue risk analysis tool as a way to deepen our conversations and our collaboration among our own teams.”

That conversation, she says, has become more structured and more honest. The fundraising team now has a clear picture of what money the organization realistically expects to bring in and how fundraising goals connect to the actual budget, and the finance and development functions are coming together more regularly to compare notes. But for Wolfe, the most important financial work the organization has undertaken isn't any single tool. It's the discipline of long-term planning itself. 

“We've developed a long-term strategic plan that lays out what we want to accomplish organizationally and a financial plan that supports that, and we created long-term scenarios for each of those,” she says. “It’s a lot harder to get to long-term sustainability if you don’t have the roadmap to gauge along the way whether you’re on track or not.”

That long-term planning includes The Laundromat Project’s investment strategy. Wolfe says the organization is working to grow an investment fund as part of a broader effort to develop revenue strategies that give it more control over the money it can generate each year. In a field where many organizations depend heavily on annual grants and short-term operating support, she sees that kind of strategy as one path toward greater financial stability and independence.

“I don’t see this type of investment strategy work happening in the arts and culture field as much as it could be,” she says. “I think this is due to capacity, scarcity, and lack of resources. But it is a really powerful tool towards more financial sustainability that I would love more people to be able to tap into as well.”

Leaning on Community

Nonprofit leaders say one bright spot in recent years has been the increased collaboration and peer support across the sector. Often during difficult periods, Gorra affirms, nonprofits can rediscover the strength of their communities.

“Watching the arts organizations in the Wallace arts initiative continue to lean on each other and come together and share information and just the friendship and camaraderie is amazing,” she says.

She also notes that organizations are increasingly exploring partnerships, shared services, and other collaborative approaches to improve efficiency and sustainability. Wolfe has seen similar dynamics emerge among arts organizations in New York.

“There’s been such a wave of people coming together because of the landscape and out of necessity to share resources,” she says.

The Laundromat Project participates in collaborative fundraising and peer learning groups with other arts organizations, which Wolfe says have helped organizations exchange ideas, discuss policy challenges, and support one another through an increasingly difficult funding environment.

At Big Thought, Offord says, conversations with other nonprofit leaders became critical as the organization faced difficult decisions about its future. She began hosting convenings and breakfasts with other nonprofit CEOs in the region to exchange ideas, discuss challenges, and explore opportunities for partnership and collaboration. 

“Though it may not have seemed that way at the time, some of that real energy and those early conversations yielded great ideas and viable strategies that helped us get to where we are now,” Offord says. 

Grounded in Mission, Guided by Data

While the nonprofit sector continues to face significant uncertainty, many leaders are also seeing resilience emerge through stronger infrastructure, clearer strategic alignment, and deeper collaboration. Gorra points out that periods of disruption often force organizations to strengthen financial and operational practices that may have previously been deprioritized.

“When times are tight, organizations are really coming back to basic infrastructure and making sure that their foundational muscles are strong,” she says.

At Big Thought, Offord and Guillory emphasized that financial recovery requires difficult choices, fast action, and trust across the organization.

“Strong leadership is critical,” Guillory says. “It starts with strong leaders who are unwavering in their commitment to allow the organization to see its way through and also have the courage to make really tough and bold decisions at times.”

Offord adds that strong leadership also depends on having the right team, strong relationships and mutual trust.

“It really is important that everyone trusts the expertise of their teammates and just trusts each other,” Offord agrees. “It isn’t always about the money. It’s about the relationships and the trust that we can build together.”

For organizations facing similar pressures to Big Thought, both Offord and Guillory emphasized the importance of acting quickly and grounding decisions in data, mission, and long-term sustainability.

“Have the courage to make the hard decisions,” Offord says. “Look at the data, use the data. Don't be afraid to talk to your consumers and use them for guidance in what decisions you have to make.”

Amid the uncertainty, Offord believes nonprofits do not have to choose between mission and sustainability.

“Match your mission with the financial discipline,” she says. “You could do both.”