5 Things Small Nonprofits Do Better for Equity
I’ll announce my bias upfront: I love small nonprofits.
I love working with them, I love the work they do, I love donating to them, I love being a volunteer for them, I love everything about small nonprofits.
Because I love them, I see them clearly.
As a fundraising and equity consultant working daily with small nonprofits, I see common fundraising hurdles. Executive directors typically reach out to me when they’re writing grants off the side of their desk, lacking dedicated fundraising staff, or when they have that dreaded feeling that if they don’t invest or diversify their revenue fast, it will likely cause critical problems later.
But despite all these challenges, every time I work with small nonprofits, I’m always in awe of how much they’re able to accomplish for their community. And as someone who is regularly hired to resolve and think critically through these challenges often, I have a pretty good line of sight into the specific challenges but also advantages small nonprofits have.
Despite limited resources, small staff, and HUGE need, these organizations consistently achieve remarkable community impact through their commitment to equity.
Here’s 5 things that makes small nonprofits uniquely effective:
1) Risk-Taking Capacity: The Latitude to Innovate
Look, small nonprofits take risks because they have to. Because they can. Because their communities need them to. Small nonprofits are out there trying things, failing fast, learning faster.
Small nonprofits have greater autonomy and flexibility. During my time at a women’s shelter, this freedom enabled rapid implementation of equitable fundraising practices. While being the sole fundraiser was demanding, it allowed for quick experimentation, learning, and authentic community engagement.
As the person overseeing fundraising, communications, and advocacy, I was able to take on risk and adjust quickly. My team and I learned so much about our community, our messaging, our case for support, and was able to implement it in real time. Just pure, responsive action born from trust and necessity. Check out my fellow CCF Global Council member Kelly Phipp’s article on centering community in year-end appeals. It’s this commitment to experimentation, failure, and justice that creates these templates and frameworks for us all to use!
2) Collaborative Leadership: “Everyone’s a Leader”
Small nonprofits embrace innovative leadership models. Through my work with racial justice groups and community-centric fundraising movements, I’ve witnessed how flexible leadership structures nurtures creativity and shared responsibility. Small nonprofits, due to size, capacity, or values, have a tendency to cultivate everyone’s leadership potential- no matter what someone’s title is. And this is how we begin to shift the power dynamics omnipresent in the nonprofit sector.
When power and decision making is concentrated in too few hands, it starts to dissolve the transparency required for full accountability to our organization, team, and community. I learned this quickly in my first nonprofit leadership role. I stepped in, overcome with imposter syndrome and scarcity, and it wasn’t till I reflected on exactly what a leader’s role is, that I became successful at it. Check out the article here.
The magic happens when small nonprofits lean into this reality. When they create spaces where that new junior staff feels powerful enough to question or challenge the Executive Director’s assumptions. When they understand that wisdom doesn’t come with a fancy title – it comes from lived experience, from showing up, from caring deeply about the work.
3) Movement-Building Agility: Responsive and Ready
The truth of it is, when you ground fundraising in equity and justice, you’re not asking for money, you’re trying to build a movement. (Depending on the type of chaos you’re used to, the sentence above may have excited or terrified you.) Small nonprofits excel at cultivating communities of changemakers who invest time, money, and care in collective transformation.
It requires us to be agile, responsive, to the political issue at hand. And from my experience, small nonprofits, despite lacking staff and resources, are willing to be agile. They’re willing to put their voice and name to the issue at hand even if its shaking. That is powerful.
4) Clarity in the Culture
The thing I love about small nonprofits is that they’re usually so clear on the culture of their organization, their community, but most importantly, they understand that they have a role in shaping it. And they feel clear in it.
Everyone can visibly see the impact they have on the organizational culture. And thus, everyone can really embody it. Oftentimes, when a movement or mission looms larger than we can feel, we start to lose ourselves to the Organization, the Mission. Small nonprofits have a way of ensuring that everyone understands that they shape and influence the organization and how they serve the community.
When a nonprofit is small, culture change feels more possible. Small nonprofits agility, latitude for risk, and community responsiveness all contribute to this.
5) Community-Centric Approach
Community-centric fundraising requires ongoing dialogue with those we serve. Small nonprofits’ risk tolerance, flexible leadership, and adaptability enable them to prioritize community needs over donor wants.
Every organization has its role in social movements. Small nonprofits’ unique strengths make them particularly effective at advancing equity through direct community engagement and bold action.
They listen to the community so they can BUILD with the community. Check out this article for concrete questions to ask next time you’re thinking of implementing CCF into your fundraising practices.
CONCLUSION
Small nonprofits tend to understand that whatever power they gain, it’s their job to leverage that institutional power to amplify community voices, not replace them. It means understanding that their role isn’t to save anyone – it’s to stand alongside communities as they save themselves.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I didn’t write this piece to convince you that small nonprofits are perfect. They’re not. The work is messy, often underfunded, and yes – sometimes overwhelming. But I wrote this because I’m tired of seeing small nonprofits apologize for their size, as if being small is something to overcome rather than leverage.
One of the biggest myths of the nonprofit industrial complex is that only the most well resourced, the most well connected nonprofits can actually enact change. CCF is one of the movements that challenge this myth and continues to disrupt the philanthropic sector and compel it to be more equitable and more just.
What I’ve learned, through years of working shoulder-to-shoulder with these organizations, is that their size isn’t a weakness – it’s their superpower. It’s what lets them stay close to community, take bold risks, reshape power dynamics, and move with the urgency that justice demands.
So the next time someone questions whether small nonprofits can create real change, remind them: transformation doesn’t always come from the biggest organizations with the most money and the most influence. Fundraising that is grounded in equity is movement building. And we ALL have a place in the movement.
The size of your impact isn’t measured by the size of your budget or fundraising goal. It should be measured by how deeply you’re willing to listen, how boldly you’re willing to act, and how fearlessly you’re willing to stand alongside your community in the fight for justice.
That’s what small nonprofits do best. And that’s why I’ll never stop championing them.
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Esther Saehyun Lee, MA, (she/her) is a Community-Centric fundraiser and Consultant at Elevate Philanthropy Consulting. She is a fundraiser, storyteller, and advocate who works to mobilize resources to communities. In her work and volunteer positions, she challenges and dismantles systems of power in the nonprofit sector to ground its practices towards equity and justice. She’s helped many nonprofits increase their revenue, implement fundraising processes and structures in a CCF lens, and has demonstrated increase in both revenue and donor base.
She is dedicated to advancing the mission of justice in the nonprofit sector and does so in her roles as a Community-Centric Fundraising (CCF) Global Council member and Board Advisor of Association of Fundraising Professionals Greater Toronto Chapter. She is a movement builder dedicated to making space for people of colour within the nonprofit sector. In addition to these titles, she is an amateur banjo player and cat mom.
If you’d like to chat about equity in nonprofit, grab a virtual coffee, or just exchange memes, find her on LinkedIn. If you’d like to work with Esther, book a meeting with her.