The Work in Progress

There is a parable I heard years ago that I have never quite been able to shake.

A group of people are standing alongside a river when they notice a baby floating downstream. Someone jumps in, pulls the baby to safety and, before they can catch their breath, another baby appears. Then another. Soon, everyone is occupied pulling babies from the water.

Eventually, one person starts walking upstream.

“Where are you going?” the others ask. “We need you here.”

“I’m going to find out who keeps throwing babies in the river.”

The nonprofit sector is extraordinarily good at ‘bailing babies’ from the proverbial river. Organizations are built around meeting immediate needs, improving individual lives and helping people overcome challenges created by circumstances they often had little role in creating. The harder question for leaders is how far upstream they are willing — or able — to go.

I heard that analogy years ago and got religion around it. It disrupted what might otherwise have remained a perfectly nice management consulting firm helping organizations become stronger one at a time. Once you begin seeing the systems around the organizations, it becomes difficult to unsee them.

Lately, though, I’ll admit there are days when I would happily forget the whole thing. Systems change is difficult, slow and increasingly girded by institutions, politics and incentives that resist movement. There is something appealing about focusing on the organization in front of you, helping it get better at what it does.

Through The Work in Progress, I wondered whether I would encounter other founders wrestling with that same tension. I didn’t have to wait long.

When Programs Meet Systems

Henry Rock founded City Startup Labs to advance entrepreneurial opportunity, particularly for populations that have historically been excluded from it. Over the years, that work has increasingly focused on justice-involved people, helping individuals build the skills, confidence and economic agency necessary to create a more durable future.

But Henry has spent enough time doing the work to recognize where a program’s influence ends.

Funders understandably want to invest in programs and services, and nonprofits are then held accountable for the outcomes those programs produce. The challenge is that participants eventually leave those programs and re-enter systems that may have changed very little. For justice-impacted people in particular, barriers related to employment, capital, policy and institutional practices can quickly overwhelm even the strongest intervention.

“We can build a great program and prepare someone incredibly well, but at some point they have to step back into the larger system,” Henry told me. “If the institutions around them aren’t prepared to create pathways for their success, you’re asking the program to produce an outcome it can’t own by itself.”

Changing the Frame

That observation is helping reshape City Startup Labs. Henry described the organization as having functioned as a laboratory, experimenting and learning in the middle of Charlotte’s response to economic mobility challenges. He is now transitioning CSL from primarily a program provider towards an advisory model, centered in what the organization calls the Economic Citizenship Framework, so that other communities can benefit from a dozen years of work in the field.

The emphasis shifts upstream.

“Municipalities, philanthropy, employers, law enforcement, the justice system — they all have a stake in these outcomes,” Henry said. “We can’t outsource responsibility to a nonprofit and expect it to solve the problem alone. The institutions that shape the system have to be invested in changing it.”

Hardly a revelation from a guy who, as he noted, “has been around the block a time or two.” But perhaps the work occasionally requires relearning what we already know: Programs can prepare people for opportunity, but systems determine whether that opportunity exists in the first place.

The Bigger Picture

For Carrie Christian, that realization has emerged somewhat differently.

Carrie founded Families Forward Charlotte after becoming more aware of the barriers facing families experiencing economic insecurity in her hometown. The organization developed a model centered on helping families gain stability through relationships, resources and guidance. Nearly a decade later, Carrie has watched enough families navigate those systems to recognize patterns that extend far beyond any one participant.

“We’re seeing the same barriers over and over again,” she told me, pointing to affordable housing, childcare, transportation and access to living-wage employment. Her question now is how Families Forward Charlotte can help “change the conditions” so more families can see a path forward, including families who will never participate directly in its program.

That has Carrie thinking about the edges of her organization — what Families Forward Charlotte can reasonably own, where another institution needs to lead and where someone needs to serve as connective tissue between them.

“We’ve learned so much by walking alongside families about where access breaks down,” Carrie said. “Our role increasingly feels like helping bring the right organizations together, carrying what we are hearing from families into those conversations and asking how all of us can make the system easier to navigate.”

Connecting the System

That instinct is already shaping what she describes as the organization’s “next big thing”: convening other organizations doing this work, problem-solving around systems navigation and building stronger community support.

There is maturity in that evolution. Carrie told me that after more than a decade doing this work, the organization now has a strong team and board that give her room to ask a different question: “How can we do it even better” and truly move the needle?

“I think there comes a point where success can’t just be measured by how many people come through your own program,” Carrie said. “You start to see all of the other organizations and institutions that touch the same families, and you realize the bigger opportunity is getting that whole ecosystem working better together.”

Going Upstream

Maybe that is one of the benefits of staying close to a problem for a long time. You eventually learn where your organization ends.

That knowledge can be frustrating. It means accepting that some of the variables determining your success sit outside your control, and that accomplishing more may require engaging institutions with different incentives, language and measures of success. Collaboration introduces complexity — working alone can feel simpler.

But Henry and Carrie both seem increasingly interested in that complexity. Their organizations began by addressing needs they could see and touch. Years of doing that work have given them a clearer view of the conditions continually producing those needs — and a growing conviction that their accumulated knowledge has value beyond the boundaries of their programs.

There is something encouraging in that for me. At a moment when my own determination around systems change has wavered a bit, I find some renewed confidence in seeing leaders like Henry and Carrie lean further into it — helping to shape what is possible by imagining a new way forward.

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?