Has your organization suddenly started describing everything as mental health, climate justice or digital inclusion?
Are you responding to an emerging need – or to the words appearing in grant guidelines?
And if funders changed their priorities tomorrow, would your program change too?
Susan works for a small nonprofit that runs an after-school cooking program.
On Monday, she finds three funding opportunities. One supports youth mental health. Another prioritizes climate justice. The third wants innovative uses of artificial intelligence.
By Friday, the cooking program has become an AI-enabled, trauma-informed climate justice initiative promoting youth wellbeing through sustainable food systems.
Technically, it still makes soup.
I understand how Susan got there. Funding is scarce, the program needs to continue and the grant guidelines seem to offer a way forward. Sometimes the honest answer is: it isn’t a perfect fit, but we need the money.
I’ve done versions of this too.
I worked with a sports for youth development organization, so physical literacy was an obvious fit. Then we saw funding for programs supporting women and girls. That made sense too. Job readiness was another popular priority, and we could see a real connection through coaching, leadership and employment opportunities.
On paper, it all worked.
But then came the less convenient questions. What did our wrestling coaches actually know about teaching job readiness? Had we trained them? Did they have enough time within a wrestling session to deliver that content properly?
The idea wasn’t necessarily wrong. But aligning with a funding trend on paper didn’t automatically give us the capacity to deliver it.
Funding trends aren’t the enemy
Funding priorities can reflect changing needs, new research and issues that have been overlooked for too long. Organizations should pay attention to them.
They can also change quickly. Candid found that around one in five foundations surveyed expected to change its grantmaking focus following political and policy changes in the United States.
A new priority might help you recognize an important part of your work or make an existing program 10% better.
But it shouldn’t require you to pretend your organization is something it isn’t.
Adding a wellbeing survey doesn’t automatically turn Susan’s cooking class into a mental-health intervention. Buying local carrots probably isn’t enough to establish her as a climate justice leader.
And using ChatGPT to name the soup doesn’t make the program an AI innovation.
Small changes can pull you off course
One grant-shaped adjustment may not seem important. Then another opportunity appears, followed by another.
Research on practice drift shows how organizations can move away from their intended direction through small changes that gradually become normal.
I’ve seen good organizations become difficult to explain, not because their work lacked value, but because years of funding opportunities had pulled their programs in different directions.
Before chasing the next hot topic, ask:
If this issue stopped being a funding priority tomorrow, would it still belong in our program?
If yes, the opportunity may genuinely strengthen your work.
If not, it might simply be money intended for someone else’s program.
Sometimes a cooking program worth funding is still a cooking program.
