Post GEO 2026 Reflection - What it takes to act like a sector

So, GEO 2026. I said I would share reflections following this conference here in Boston in June. Sorry to be slow to do so – blame it on summer, my favorite season.

GEO was great. I really enjoyed the conference – personally and professionally. The content was solid, relevant, and well presented. And all my favorite GOATs were there:

●      Audrey Jordan (brilliant dear friend and colleague) beating the drum of love and justice

●      Phil Buchanan ( my former boss), never giving up on the potential of philanthropy

●      Aaron Dorfman (truth teller) continuing to beat the drum of accountability

●      Jessica Bearman (another brilliant dear friend and colleague) patiently building the capacity of funders to do their best work

While some of the vintage sector topics made their rounds on the GEO agenda (unrestricted, general operating funding, measuring outcomes, trust-based philanthropy, capacity building, etc.), there were also new topics that showed up in the mix. There was a session on the role of AI in grantmaking. There was a case for philanthropy and the sector to get better at endings and closings to support justice. And there was a session focused on fighting back with a title borrowed from Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny, “Do not obey in advance.”

And then there was activist Ash-Lee Henderson. This is the second opportunity I have had to be affirmed and shaken to my core by Ash-Lee’s demand that we do better. The first time was in Montgomery, AL, with Bryan Stevenson and LaTosha Brown (Wow!). Her message was clear and unambiguous (hope I am quoting correctly):

●       I need you to act like a sector.

●       I need you to be honest.

●       I need you to be righteous in relationships with people.

She then had a specific message to funders and donors - “Fund me like you want me to win. Fund us like you have chosen what side you are on.”

I would like to believe that everyone reading this knows what it looks like to fund an organization or a leader like you want them to win - unrestricted, multi-year, general operating funding with reporting that serves the work, not the funder. I do not think I have further reflections to add, other than it would be nice to attend a GEO conference where this request doesn’t have to be made because the majority of funders are already doing it. A girl can dream!

Ash-Lee’s message to us to “act like a sector,” however, leaves me wondering what it would look like if the next time we met, we centered the sector as a whole. What if we worked backwards from a shared vision for what an effective, highly functioning, intentionally interdependent, collaborative, just, equitable, change-making, truth telling sector looks like? What would sessions for a gathering like that focus on? Instead of having a multitude of sessions that each address narrow and specific parts of the sector, what if we had spaces designed to plan, act, and do together across all the actors in the room? What if we took an ecosystem approach to designing the gathering?

I tried applying an ecosystem perspective during my breakfast roundtable at GEO called “Reimaging Board Relationships.” My goal was to encourage participants to treat their organizations as ecosystems and to consider their relationship with the board within that context. Drawing on existing writing on this topic, I led with the idea that organizations are complex, living networks of interdependent parts, continuously interacting with each other and their external environment. Everything in an ecosystem depends upon everything else – formally and/or informally. I then had them map their organization’s purpose and ecosystem and reflect on what needed to be true about their relationship with the board to support their organization to thrive - to meet its purpose.

Honestly, it was hard to keep everyone anchored in the ecosystem framing. This was in part because we had limited time, but also because as humans our tendency is to manage complexity by breaking things down into smaller pieces. Issues related to participants’ relationships with their boards flowed freely. But connecting those relationships back to the organization's purpose and the broader ecosystem was harder.

I do think this is what Ash-Lee was calling us to do -act like we are a sector. Frame our work and our decisions with an ecosystem perspective. For funders, this requires making decisions about where and what to fund in the ecosystem cognizant of and in respect to the interdependence of all the actors in the sector. The decisions funders make have an impact not just on the individual organizations they fund, but on the resulting ripple effects that occur from that funding (e.g., funders making decisions in reaction to the decisions of other funders). Taking an ecosystem view also means funders must see themselves as an integral part of the nonprofit sector as a whole - not a separate sector unto itself. And if you are integral to the sector, you have a responsibility to nurture the effectiveness of the sector.   In other words, Fund organizations like you want them to win.

Sit with it for a minute and let me know what you think.