Why I Keep Building When the System Keeps Breaking

We're living in a time when everything feels uncertain. Political priorities shift overnight. Funding streams that seemed secure vanish. Policies that protected vulnerable communities get rolled back. The acronym for this is VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. But for those of us working in the third sector, this isn't new. We've been navigating VUCA conditions since before anyone gave it a name.

What is new is the scale. The speed. The stakes.

And in this moment, the question isn't whether the third sector can survive the chaos. It's whether we have the infrastructure to keep building through it. Because hope without systems is just exhaustion in disguise. And fierce determination without sustainable structures is a recipe for collapse.

So let me tell you why I keep building when the system keeps breaking—and why I believe the third sector deserves better than what we've been given.

I got hired once to run a program that didn't exist yet.

Not "didn't exist yet" like it was in the planning phase. I mean the funding was secured, the press release went out, and I was sitting in an office with no curriculum, no staff, no outcomes framework, and a start date three weeks away. My job was to design it, hire for it, report on it, and somehow pretend it had been running smoothly all along.

That's not unusual in the nonprofit sector. That's Tuesday.

I've spent 25 years in this work, and I've seen versions of that same problem everywhere: at the state policy level, at the federal contract level, in grassroots coalitions, in mid-sized organizations trying to scale. The specifics change, but the pattern is always the same. Someone promises something before the infrastructure exists to deliver it. Then the people doing the work are expected to make it happen anyway—with no systems, no clarity, and no margin for error.

And here's the thing: we usually do make it happen. Not because we're lucky. Not because we're martyrs. But because we're fierce, creative, and unwilling to let the communities we serve pay the price for structural dysfunction.

But that fierceness shouldn't be a substitute for infrastructure. And our creativity shouldn't have to compensate for other sectors failing to do their jobs.

The Third Sector Exists Because the Other Two Weren't Enough

Here's what I learned in law school that they don't teach in nonprofit management programs: language creates power. The way we talk about problems determines who gets to solve them. The way we write policy determines who gets protected and who gets left out. The way we structure contracts determines whether partnership is possible or whether one side just gets to dictate terms.

I didn't become a practicing attorney because I didn't want to spend my career defending the systems that are already in place. I wanted to use that training to build new ones. To translate between sectors. To be the person who could sit at a table with government officials, corporate partners, and community leaders and make sure the community's voice didn't get lost in the bureaucracy.

Because that's what the third sector has always been: the space where people refused to accept that government and commerce were the only options for building the world they wanted to live in.

When the public sector couldn't—or wouldn't—provide the services people needed, communities built mutual aid networks, advocacy coalitions, and grassroots organizations. When the private sector prioritized profit over people, the third sector stepped in with models that put mission first. We didn't do this because we were humble. We did it because we were determined.

And we're still doing it. Every day. With a fraction of the resources, a tangle of compliance requirements, and a funding model designed to keep us dependent rather than powerful.

That's not an accident. That's a feature.

The Real Problem Isn't the Crisis—It's the System That Creates It

I once managed a $6 million federal cooperative agreement. My job was to ensure coordination across multiple agencies, maintain compliance with constantly shifting federal requirements, and secure continued funding in an environment where nothing was guaranteed.

On paper, that sounds straightforward. In practice, it meant navigating procurement rules that didn't account for the reality of what partner agencies needed, federal processes that moved slower than the threats we were preparing for, and a funding structure that punished flexibility while demanding results.

At one point, partner agencies wanted to purchase specific equipment that wasn't on the approved vendor list. Many other program sites had asked for the same thing. Every one of them had been told no.

But I kept pushing. Not because I'm uniquely s̶t̶u̶b̶b̶o̶r̶n̶ persistent—though I am—but because I knew that if we couldn't get the tools agencies actually needed, the entire program would be performative. We'd be checking boxes instead of building capacity. We'd be compliant instead of effective.

It took months. It required lots of persistence, creativity, and a willingness to reframe the request in language that aligned with federal priorities without compromising local needs. But we got the approval. We became one of the first sites to secure a fully approved Concept of Operations. And we recovered over $2.5 million in previously unreconciled expenses because I built a fiscal tracking system that didn't exist when I started.

None of that should have been heroic. It should have been how the system worked in the first place.

But it wasn't. And here's what matters: those same dynamics show up every single day in the nonprofit sector.

Cooperative agreements. Government contracts. Foundation grants with compliance requirements that assume you have a finance department when you're a team of three. Partner MOUs that distribute risk unevenly. Reporting frameworks that measure outputs instead of impact because impact is harder to quantify.

The lessons I learned navigating government bureaucracy translate directly to the third sector—because the dysfunction isn't unique to one sector. It's baked into the way power and resources flow across the entire ecosystem.

The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed: to keep the third sector scrambling, compliant, and too under-resourced to challenge the structures that create the problems we're trying to solve.

Why This Matters Beyond One Program

Here's what I've come to understand after 25 years in this work: the lack of reliable systems isn't just inefficient—it's a form of structural violence.

It extracts labor, creativity, and hope from the people doing the work. It creates environments where talented leaders burn out not because the mission is too hard, but because the conditions are unsustainable. It forces us to reinvent the wheel every time we start a new project, because there's no institutional memory, no documented processes, no shared infrastructure to build on.

And it disproportionately harms the communities we're trying to serve. Because when we're spending 60% of our time managing dysfunction, navigating compliance, or compensating for broken systems, we're not spending it on program quality, community relationships, or long-term strategy. We're just surviving.

This isn't about individual resilience. This is about justice.

Because a sector that was built to challenge inequity shouldn't be structured in a way that replicates it.

What It Looks Like to Build Power, Not Just Programs

I'm not offering a blueprint. I'm offering what I've learned from building in the margins, translating across sectors, and refusing to accept that "this is just how it is."

If you're leading a grassroots movement:

You're operating with the least resources and the most accountability to community. That means your infrastructure has to be simple, shared, and designed for high turnover. Start with one repeatable process that currently lives in someone's head. Maybe it's how you make collective decisions. Maybe it's how you track who committed to what. Write it down in plain language. Test it. Adjust it. Share it. That's not bureaucracy—that's how you protect the work when people leave, when funding shifts, when the crisis changes.

If you're running a small nonprofit:

You're at the stage where informal systems stop working, but you don't have the budget to professionalize everything. So focus on the infrastructure that protects your mission. If you don't have clear decision-making authority, document it. If you don't have financial systems that show real-time budget vs. actuals, build them or hire someone who can. If you don't have an onboarding process that transfers institutional knowledge, create one. These aren't distractions from your work—they're what make your work sustainable. And they're what allow you to say no to funding that comes with strings that compromise your mission.

If you're leading a mid-sized organization:

You're at the scale where you're being asked to "scale impact" without being given the resources to scale infrastructure. That's the trap. So start by auditing what's actually breaking. Where are you losing staff? Where are programs stalling? Where are you doing the same work twice because systems don't talk to each other? Those aren't operational problems—those are power problems. They're signals that your infrastructure can't hold the work you're being asked to do. Fix them one at a time. Document the solutions. And be willing to say out loud that scaling without infrastructure isn't growth—it's extraction.

Why I Do This Work

I didn't get into the nonprofit sector because I love systems. I got into it because I saw injustice and refused to accept it as inevitable.

But I've stayed in it—and built a skillset and practice around capacity-building—because I've learned that infrastructure is how we protect the work from the people who want to control it. Systems are how we ensure the mission outlasts the founder. Processes are how we make sure that when staff leave, the knowledge doesn't leave with them.

I use my law degree not to practice law, but to translate power. To help organizations navigate government contracts without losing their integrity. To help leaders understand that compliance and justice don't have to be in conflict. To build the infrastructure that lets fierce, creative, persistent people do their work without being crushed by the dysfunction of the systems around them.

The third sector didn't come into existence because people were humble. It came into existence because people were unwilling to settle.

That's the legacy we're building on. And that's the work I'm here to support.

If you're ready to stop compensating for broken systems and start building infrastructure that matches your courage, let's talk.

What resonates?

What needs to shift?

Tell me what you think—or reach out if you want to build stronger together.

What resonates? What needs to shift? Tell me what you think—or reach out if you want to build something stronger together.