We're Building Kingdoms. Community-Centric Fundraising Demands We Build Movements.

When I was nine years old, my mother, my sibling, and I arrived in Canada as refugee claimants from Mexico. We lived in a World Vision shelter for six months. When I was in high school, I skipped school to go to the food bank; we got Christmas presents from the Toronto Star’s Santa Claus Fund.

The organizations that served my family kept us safe. I will never forget that. 

But here’s what they didn’t do: they never fought the systems that made us need charity in the first place. They fed us, but they didn’t fight for living wages or immigration reform. They gave us Christmas presents, but they didn’t advocate for affordable housing. They treated the symptoms of poverty, but they never touched the root causes.

I went on to become a fundraiser. And for years, I did exactly what I had been taught: I kept donors comfortable, softened the truth, protected the gift. It wasn’t until I learned about Community-Centric Fundraising that I could name what had been wrong the whole time. Not just ethically. Strategically, too.

The Model We Were Taught Is Keeping Us Stuck

Donor-centric fundraising – the model where donors and their comfort come first, above everything else – has been the foundation of our “best practices.” And it is the single biggest reason the sector largely addresses symptoms rather than systems.

I see this every single day through the fractional fundraising work we do at Further Together, and in my role as host of The Small Nonprofit podcast. The funding model we operate in was not designed for collaboration; it was designed for competition. Funders pick winners. Boards measure survival. And donor-centric fundraising locks all of it in place.

So we get organizations in the same city, serving the same communities, working on the same problems – duplicating each other's efforts entirely. Every organization builds its own onboarding manual. Every organization hires its own HR person. Every organization guards its donor list because, as I've heard more times than I can count: "If we introduce our donors to other organizations, they might become their donors instead of ours."

And we also get to kingdom builders – a pattern I see most often in middle to older white male leaders without lived experience of the issues they're working on, who take up enormous amounts of oxygen from media coverage and capital campaigns without elevating the people closest to the problem. They could use their government access (and many of them do have it) to push for radical change. Instead, they talk about the organization’s mission through an apolitical lens, even though each policy decision impacts the communities we serve.

They play it safe because safety protects the organization – their kingdom. And the communities they were meant to serve pay the price.  

What CCF Demands Instead 

Community-Centric Fundraising (aka CCF) asks organizations to put community needs and dignity first, rather than centering donors. It treats donors as partners instead of heroes. And it requires organizations to be clear about what they are trying to change: publicly, consistently, even when that’s uncomfortable.

I saw what this looked like in practice when I was working in-house at a food security organization. We connected with another organization doing food justice work. Their whole fundraising team and our whole fundraising team sat down together over a few months and reviewed each CCF principle to see what we were doing well and where we could learn from the other. That conversation changed how both organizations operated. It didn't cost us donors. It didn't dilute our brand. It made both organizations more effective. 

As another example, in my last in-house role at a food security organization, I spoke with donors about the gap between our services and the systems driving food insecurity. I explained that while we distributed food, the deeper solution was advocacy: living wages, stronger income supports, and policies that would reduce the need for food banks in the first place.

Those conversations opened the door to bigger questions about wealth, power, and inequity. Donors told me: “I never thought about it that way" and "No one's ever been that honest with me before."

One foundation that hadn't given in two years returned with a $50,000 gift. Another donor went on to write a public post reckoning with the origins of her family’s wealth and then talked her family into closing their donor-advised fund. She said it wasn’t aligned with their values. They wanted the money dispersed now.

These donors had been wrestling with these questions for years. No one had given them permission to act on them.

That’s what happens when you center justice instead of organizational survival. Donors don’t just write bigger checks. They start thinking differently about wealth, about systems, about their own role. They become partners in the work rather than funders of symptom management.

Donors Can Handle The Truth

At that same organization, we stopped telling stories that showed people at their lowest. We talked about community, joy, and dignity. We named systemic barriers. We cancelled our successful gala. I wrote an op-ed for a major national newspaper arguing that food banks should not exist.

My board worried donors would leave. Instead, end-of-year campaign revenue went up 55% compared to the year before. Total revenue increased by $400,000. We secured the organization’s first-ever million-dollar gift.

Since then, I have found that these results are repeatable. In just 12 months of CCF implementation: Coastal Jazz saw 100% increases in both gifts and donors. Growing Up Green Charter School saw a 163% increase in donors. The Prosperity Project saw a 91% increase in major gifts received.

A 2025 national study surveying 283 different nonprofit organizations found that over 90% of those nonprofits are familiar with CCF, and 76% have already started changing their practices. Most have seen their revenue line stay the same or increase after the change.

The sector has spent decades believing that telling the truth would cost us donors, but evidence says otherwise. What CCF does cost us are donors who were never going to help us change the system and donors who only wanted logo recognition.

And now we know, for sure, that we don’t need them.

The Question Worth Bringing to Your Next Board Meeting 

When's the last time your organization made a decision that benefited another organization, not just your own? 

If you can't answer that, you're not alone. It's not a personal failure. It's what the model produces. But it is a place to start. 

Reach out to one peer organization this month. Not to extract information. Not to compare. To ask: where are we duplicating each other, and what would it look like to stop? That conversation is the beginning of sector-level thinking. And sector-level thinking is the only thing that builds movements. 

Maria Rio is the founder of Further Together Fundraising, a Canada-based fundraising consultancy helping nonprofits raise more money in ways aligned with their social justice values.