Mission Forward with Carrie Fox

In Brockton, Massachusetts, a Cape Verdean grocery store sits next door to a community health center. They're side by side on purpose. When BlueHub Capital looked at the neighborhood, it saw residents wrestling with food and health and decided those weren't two problems but one, so it financed the store and the clinic together and put them within a few steps of each other. A small decision. It als...

In 2020, the emergency announced itself. The need was visible, the urgency undeniable, and that clarity gave leaders permission to act — to move a million dollars across town before lunch and hand-walk the check to a barely-open UPS store. Five years later, Carrie Fox reflects on her conversation with Tanir Ami of the CARESTAR Foundation and lands on a tricky puzzle: the urgency hasn't gone away,...

You probably know the dream where you need to run and your legs won't obey. Carrie names that dream halfway through her conversation with Tanir Ami this week, and from there it's hard to let the idea go. What Tanir describes, and what the whole nonprofit and foundation sector seems to be describing right now, is the waking version of it. In 2020, leadership looked like a million-dollar check hand-...

Most organizations talk about resilience as if it's a single thing — a quality you either have or you don't, summoned in a crisis and admired after the fact. Phil Weinberg, president and CEO of STRIVE, draws a sharper line. There's the resilience of the person, and there's the resilience of the institution, and conflating them is how good organizations end up brittle. One is mindset. The other is...

Every generation inherits a story about how people move up in the world. Go to college, the story goes. Get the degree. Climb. It's a story that has shaped policy and philanthropy for three generations running, and for tens of millions of Americans, the story does not describe reality. What remains is a gap. Not a talent gap, as this week's guest is careful to distinguish, but an opportunity gap....

In this week's reflection, Carrie draws out three lessons from her conversation with Amanda Kwong, director of the Public Health Communications Collaborative . The throughline: when your goal is building trust, the words you choose — and the ones you're willing to let go of — matter more than most of us realize. It's a short but worth-your-time listen before you head into your week. (00:00) - Welc...

There's a version of this conversation that could feel heavy — a public health communications director navigating a moment when national guidance has gone quiet, trust in federal institutions is eroding, and the very words her organization was built around have become politically radioactive. That version exists. But it's not the one Amanda Kwong, from the  Public Health Communications Collaborati...

Tonia Wellons became president and CEO of the Greater Washington Community Foundation thirty days before COVID-19 shut down the world — and her first major move was to build a ten-year strategic framework. Not because the future was predictable. Because it wasn't. A plan, she understood, is not a forecast. It is a fixed point, and fixed points are most valuable when everything else is in motion. S...

In a recent staff survey at the Greater Washington Community Foundation , 100 percent of employees said they were clear on the organization's mission and vision. Six years ago, that number was 39 percent. That gap is what happens when an organization decides, at the height of a pandemic, to stop thinking in three-year cycles and commit to a ten-year framework instead. Tonia Wellons was thirty days...

Something we've learned about good conversations is that they don't end when the recording stops. The best ones keep working on you — in the car, in the shower, in the middle of a meeting about something else entirely. That's the idea behind this episode, and behind a new format we're trying this season. After each full-length interview, Carrie is coming back with a shorter solo reflection — a cha...

What if the defining feature of nonprofit leadership right now isn’t burnout or bravery, but a kind of double vision—an ability to stare straight at worsening conditions and still believe, perhaps stubbornly, that impact can grow? As we launch season twelve of Mission Forward , Carrie Fox sits down with Stacy Palmer (CEO of the Chronicle of Philanthropy) and Brian Fox (Chief Strategy Officer of Mi...

Nonprofits and foundations have always done the quiet, essential work of holding communities together. Season 12 starts with the premise that the work hasn’t changed—but the conditions have. The pace is faster, the decisions are knottier, and “resilience” is being redefined in real time. This season, Mission Forward goes behind Mission Partners’ new research report to surface what leaders are seei...

Leaders want to bring more compassion into the culture of work, yet many wrestle with how to do it in a way that feels both authentic and respectful. The answer lies in the simple act of looking out for one another. This short-form episode is part of the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication insights directly to your inbox. If you like w...

The volume of one-way communication is ramping up everywhere we turn—our feeds, inboxes, meetings, and media. All that noise leads to an increased feeling of distraction but rarely an increased sense of connection or understanding. All that noise affects our ability to listen to one another, too. This short-form episode is part of the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday th...

When Dr. DeRionne Pollard talks about leadership, she doesn’t begin with titles or institutions. She begins with memory: a two-year-old child clapping cymbals in a community college classroom, a six-year-old sitting outside a glass-paneled door while her aunt trained to open an in-home childcare center, a young girl learning generosity from neighbors who showed love through casseroles and practica...

Some stories begin with a single alarm bell. This one begins with dozens of small ones—nonprofit leaders quietly signaling the same thing at the same time: the ground under them was shifting, and shifting fast. Because the France-Merrick Foundation funds discrete, one-time capital projects across Baltimore, they hear from an unusually wide cross-section of organizations. And in early 2025, all tho...

Twenty-one years ago, when I started my first communications firm, a mentor offered a warning I’ll never forget: “Starting a firm focused on nonprofits is bound to fail. There won’t be enough work to sustain you.” Twenty-one years later, and we’re still here. This short-form episode is part of the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication in...

It starts with a handful of seeds. When Mission Partners’ design director Anne Kerns shows up at a civic rally with paper packets filled with flowers, herbs, and vegetables, she’s there to share. To spark a conversation. To see what happens when you hand a stranger something living. That image—Anne with her seeds—is at the heart of this week’s conversation. Because design, as she tells Carrie Fox,...

Pete Wright has spent decades amplifying other people's voices. As a producer, he's an invisible architect of countless conversations, the one who shapes stories without telling them, who creates space for others to shine while remaining carefully out of frame. But what happens when the producer becomes the protagonist? In this episode of Mission Forward, Carrie turns the tables on her own show's...

This is a story about invisible infrastructure—the kind you only notice when it's gone.  Peter Panepento started his career covering planning board meetings for a weekly newspaper in upstate New York, watching in real time as the binding agents of community life dissolved. Now he runs a communications agency working with community foundations, institutions that have operated in nearly every Americ...

What happens when a community refuses to let its story be told from the outside in? In this conversation, Carrie Fox sits down with Lisa Snowden, Editor-in-Chief of Baltimore Beat , to explore what it means to build journalism as a thriving business model and an act of community care. Born out of the ashes of the Baltimore City Paper and shaped by the unrest following Freddie Gray’s death, Baltimo...

Here’s what we know: journalism in America is in upheaval. Free speech is under attack. Trust is being challenged, and reporters are under siege. And yet—walk onto a college campus today and you’ll find students running toward journalism, not away from it. Why? That paradox is at the center of today’s conversation between Carrie Fox and returning guest Michael Bolden, the newly appointed Dean of t...

Here’s what we know about political violence in America: it’s getting worse. Here’s what we think we know about why: polarization, social media, extreme rhetoric. But what if we’re looking at this all wrong? Rich Harwood has spent the last 30 years in the places many of us have written off—communities fractured by poverty, loss, and division. What he’s found in those places challenges our assumpti...

Every ending carries within it the seed of a beginning. To leave something behind—whether it’s a beloved job, a familiar city, or the comfort of a community—requires not only courage but also an embrace of uncertainty. In this first episode of Season 11, we step directly into that tension: the sacred space between goodbye and a new hello . Carrie Fox sits down with nonprofit leader Mike Pope and t...

Two builders walk into a podcast studio… no, seriously. This isn’t the start of a joke, but the beginning of a deeply fascinating exploration into the very architecture of social change. We’re talking about the kind of change that doesn’t just rearrange the furniture, but rebuilds the house from the foundation up. And that, my friends, is a far more intricate and precarious undertaking. This week...