This month’s Work in Progress essays are focused on founders in the social good sector -- people who assessed the landscape around them, saw something missing and decided to create something out of nothing.

That probably sounds a little like the story of Next Stage, too, but I never really saw myself that way in the early years. I was a reluctant founder, emerging from a career spent largely as “the guy behind the guy” to start my own thing. I had been comfortable shaping strategies and supporting other people with big visions. Building something of my own took some getting used to.

In many ways, though, the timing was fortuitous. Next Stage came of age alongside a generation of founder-led nonprofits that were reshaping Charlotte’s social good sector.

I think of Charlotte’s nonprofit growth as having three distinct eras. The first stretched roughly from the late 1980s through 2007, a period defined by the city’s rapid rise from a midsized Southern city to one with ambitions of becoming “world-class.” Banking, energy and healthcare expanded here, and alongside that corporate growth came the expansion of what I think of as “agency nonprofits.” These larger, established institutions with recognizable names were able to leverage deep corporate relationships to fuel their own growth.

This was also the golden age of the luncheon and gala, when choosing chicken or salmon was arguably the dominant fundraising strategy in town.

… And Along Comes the Great Recession

I moved to Charlotte in 2008, just as the financial system was beginning to buckle, and by 2009 the nonprofit landscape had changed dramatically. Corporate institutions that had long played an outsized role in local philanthropy were suddenly dealing with challenges of their own. Resources tightened, longstanding assumptions about who would fund what began to shift, and into that environment came a new generation of nonprofit founders willing to build smaller, more focused and often deeply community-rooted organizations.

The early reaction was not always enthusiastic. I heard some version of the “not another nonprofit” complaint more times than I could count. There was a prevailing concern that the sector was becoming too fragmented, with too many people launching organizations instead of "joining forces" with something that already existed. As if that was ever really a thing.

And yet, by the end of the decade, many of those same founder-led organizations had earned something far more valuable than institutional longevity: trust. They had become embedded in neighborhoods and issue areas, closer to the people experiencing the challenges they were trying to solve. They built relationships, learned in real time and became increasingly important parts of Charlotte’s social good infrastructure.

COVID would usher in another era of nonprofit growth and change -- one I’ll come back to in a future essay -- but the 2010s gave Charlotte a new generation of social good leaders who became household names in some circles even as they built the organizations around them.
One of those people is Shannon Binns, Founder and Executive Director of Sustain Charlotte.

Passion Meets Perspective

I’ve long described that what gets me passionate is supporting passionate people. I never had a single calling that became fixed as my North Star, but I have always been drawn to people who did -- people who saw something in the world that felt unacceptable to them and decided they were going to do something about it.

Shannon is one of those people.

Next Stage first worked with Sustain Charlotte in 2016, and we have had the good fortune to work with Shannon and the organization several times since through strategic planning and organizational strengthening efforts. Over those years, I’ve come to know him as someone deeply committed to the idea that Charlotte can grow differently and better, and I’m proud to now count him as both a colleague and friend.

When Shannon arrived in Charlotte, he was coming out of graduate school having spent years thinking about climate change and sustainability. He found himself in a fast-growing region where development patterns seemed to run counter to nearly everything he had been studying. As he described it, he felt a responsibility to help “save Charlotte from its own success” -- from patterns of suburban growth that required more driving, consumed more land and trees, and carried environmental consequences extending well beyond our own lifetimes.

That sense of urgency helped fuel Sustain Charlotte’s growth, but Shannon has also spent recent years reconsidering some of the assumptions that come with founder-led organizations. At one point, organizational growth itself began to feel like an objective: more revenue, more staff and a larger operation.

“I’ve come to think more about the impact we can realistically make with the resources we have, and how to build the organization in a way that allows us to keep doing the work well over time,” Shannon notes. “There has to be some balance between the urgency of the mission and creating something sustainable enough to stay in it for the long haul.”

Making Peace with Longitudinal Impact

It’s a message that deeply resonates with me. Our arc through the pandemic at Next Stage mirrors Sustain Charlotte’s in some ways, particularly around organizational complexity and embracing the role we play in the long arc of systems change and forward progress.

Founders often begin with boundless enthusiasm for changing the world and gradually discover how much organizational infrastructure can accumulate around that ambition. Somewhere along the way, the leader has to ask whether the organization they have built is still serving the purpose that inspired them to build it.

Shannon seems to be making peace with a different measure of success.

“Sustainability requires us to think beyond our own lifetimes,” Shannon notes. “The decisions we make today about transportation, land use and how Charlotte grows will shape this community for generations. You and I may never fully see the impact of the work we’re doing now, but that doesn’t make it any less important.”

That feels very different from believing you have to save the world yourself.

The Work We Leave Behind

Perhaps that is one of the deeper evolutions of founderhood. The work may begin with urgency and the conviction that something has to change, but over time the measure of success becomes more holistic: whether the mission is advancing, whether the organization can sustain the effort, and whether the leader can remain meaningfully engaged without carrying the full weight of the outcome.

For Shannon, that means continuing to advocate for a better-growing Charlotte while accepting that some of the most important evidence of success may emerge long after his own chapter in the work is complete. There is something freeing in that idea. We do what we can with the time, resources and influence available to us, trusting that meaningful change is cumulative and that someone else will eventually carry the work forward.

Next week: What happens when changing lives requires changing systems?