Rooted Together, Storm-Ready: A Resilience Map for Nonprofits

with Hap Clemons from Puget Sound Estuarium and Consultant with PhilanthroFusion

Local nonprofits are deeply rooted in their communities, but many are holding those roots together with duct tape: one key funder, one exhausted leader, or one fragile program holding everything up. “Rooted Together” is powerful only if organizations are also storm-ready.

This session introduces a simple, visual Resilience Readiness Map that helps leaders quickly see how grounded their organization is in three structural “roots”: Clarity (mission and focus), Capital (money and reserves), and Culture (trust and governance). Participants will self-score these three areas on a 1–5 scale, discuss where they feel “underwater” versus “storm-ready,” and identify one concrete 90-day move to strengthen their roots.

The key message: Resilience is not about being heroic, it is about shoring up a few core conditions together. When boards, staff, and partners share a common picture of where the organization is fragile, they can make better decisions, protect people, and grow impact without burning out.

For example, a small nonprofit that just lost a major grant might discover it is strong in Culture but weak in Capital and Clarity. Using this mini-map, they can align around a short list of focused actions: reset priorities, stop low-impact work, and design a realistic revenue mix, instead of chasing every new opportunity out of panic. Wasting valuable staff time chasing funding that is probably not aligned well enough to be funded robs the organization of needed mission focused work. Money isn’t always the solution.