Who Are We Willing to Stand With?

Oct 2

Reflections from Madison Nonprofit Day

At this year’s Madison Nonprofit Day, nINA co-creator and director dr. ananda moderated the opening panel on a question that feels increasingly urgent:

What do organizations owe one another when the ground is shifting beneath us?

The conversation brought together leaders representing three different approaches to collective power: unions, membership organizations, and cooperatives. On paper, the topic was collaboration. But very quickly, the conversation moved somewhere deeper.

Because collaboration sounds good, but solidarity asks more of us.

Across Wisconsin, nonprofits are navigating funding uncertainty, growing community needs, staff exhaustion, and increased competition for limited resources. A 2026 survey of Wisconsin nonprofit professionals found organizations calling for greater solidarity with one another and a shift away from the competition they often experience within the sector.

That creates a tension many of us know well.

We may believe deeply in collective action while also worrying about “keeping the lights on” in our own organizations. Competing for the same funding opportunities sets us up as adversaries. We meet and talk about partnership while protecting our relationships, access, funding, or reputation. The news headlines become a measurement of our relevance.

So what does it actually mean to stand together through the fire?

What is this moment asking of us?

One of the first questions we brought to the panel was simple:

What do you need from the rest of us right now?

Not just from philanthropy. Not just from government. From one another.

The same Wisconsin survey found that more than half of respondents were experiencing increased difficulty responding to community needs, while organizations also reported funding disruptions, increased workload, and pressure to reconsider the focus or language of their work.

Dr ananda brought up an important survey…

Scarcity can pull us inward: we protect our programs, our funding, our staff, our organization. Sometimes that is necessary. Organizations cannot serve anyone if they cannot survive.

But there is also a harder question underneath it:

When does protecting our organization begin to pull us away from our mission?

That question does not have an easy answer. But we think it is one worth asking together.

Collective power requires practice

Another part of the conversation explored how collective power actually works.

Panelists included a union leader, an Executive Director of a membership organization, and a leader in cooperative organizing and they share comonalities and differences on how they navigate people and power differently. But all of them require people to wrestle with questions like:

Who belongs in our “we”?
Who gets to make decisions?
What happens when we disagree?
What are we willing to give up in order to gain something collectively?

At nINA, we have learned this firsthand.

Calling ourselves a cooperative does not magically eliminate hierarchy, conflict, ego, or unequal power. A structure can create conditions for shared power, but people still have to practice it again and again.

That practice includes listening. Repair. Accountability. Sharing information. Sitting with disagreement. Making decisions differently. And sometimes accepting that collective work will move more slowly than individual action.

Collaboration is not the absence of conflict.

Sometimes conflict is evidence that people care enough to stay in relationship while figuring out what comes next.

Collaboration and solidarity are not the same thing

Maybe the question we are carrying most strongly from the panel is this:

What does solidarity require when standing with another organization, worker, or community might cost us something?

Collaboration asks: what can we do together?

Solidarity also asks: what are we willing to risk, share, or change for one another?

That distinction matters.

It is relatively easy to stand together when our interests align, the funding is available, and nobody has to give anything up.

The harder test comes when there is disagreement. When resources are scarce. When speaking up could affect a relationship. When another organization’s need is urgent but does not directly advance our own work.

That is where solidarity becomes something more than a value statement. It becomes a practice.

Rebuilding together

Our theme at nINA this year is After the Fire: Rebuilding Together.

We chose it because surviving something is not the same thing as deciding what we want to build afterward.

And rebuilding is relational work.

It asks us to think beyond organizational survival and toward the ecosystem we are creating together. It asks us to remember that nonprofits do not exist simply to sustain nonprofits. At their best, they exist because people and communities matter.