Samwise Nonprofits and Charities Newsletter
Saturday, June 6, 2026
Saturday Deep Dive
Today we step back from the daily news cycle and surface the best recent research and long-form analysis on nonprofit impact, philanthropy, and sector policy. Worth a slower read.
The New Counterterrorism State: How the 2026 U.S. Strategy Targets Civil Society
The Trump administration’s 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy integrates domestic and global counterterrorism into a unified governing framework under an “America First” doctrine, according to an analysis published June 3 in Nonprofit Quarterly by Darakshan Raja of Muslims for Just Futures. The strategy categorizes anti-fascists, anarchists, transgender advocates, and broadly defined “far-left” organizers as priority domestic threats, subjecting them to surveillance, financial targeting, and immigration enforcement alongside designated foreign terrorist organizations. Raja argues the strategy normalizes a two-tiered structure in which movements aligned with the administration face no scrutiny while those challenging state authority face the full weight of the national security apparatus. The approach deepens what Raja calls structural Islamophobia within counterterrorism policy. She warns that confronting this apparatus requires long-term philanthropic investment at a scale commensurate with the $48.5 billion in private venture capital flowing into defense technology in 2025 alone.
Sources: Nonprofit Quarterly
May Day Marchers Modeled the Intersectional Solidarity Philanthropy Has Long Avoided
On May 1, 2026, tens of thousands of workers, immigrant families, and community organizers took to the streets across California in what Women’s Foundation California CEO Bia Vieira describes as a demonstration philanthropy must take seriously. In Nonprofit Quarterly, Vieira argues that May Day marchers—representing domestic workers, immigrant rights coalitions, youth organizers, and labor unions—modeled the intersectional solidarity that philanthropic institutions have long compartmentalized. The Supreme Court’s recent gutting of Voting Rights Act provisions, new ICE detention centers in California, and ongoing conflict in the Middle East represent, Vieira writes, one crisis moving through different doorways. She calls on foundations to fund general operating support for worker centers and immigrant rights organizations, follow the intersections across issues, name explicitly what they fund and why, and commit to multi-year grantmaking cycles of five to ten years. “Philanthropy’s answer cannot be silence,” she writes.
Sources: Nonprofit Quarterly
The Boardroom Belongs to the Community, Not to Donors or Institutional Habit
Nonprofit boards risk drifting toward serving institutional interests rather than the communities they exist to serve, argues Kristin Lincoln, executive director of the Washington Idaho Symphony, in a June 4 essay for Nonprofit Quarterly. Lincoln contends that board training focuses overwhelmingly on mechanics—compliance, oversight, fundraising—while the community disappears into the background. Familiar voices fill the vacuum: major donors whose priorities may diverge from community need, and the comfort of doing what has always been done. Lincoln calls for a reorientation grounded in two questions: “Who does this serve?” and “How does serving the organization or donor serve the community?” She argues that boards built primarily around wealth and credentials produce structurally less accurate decisions. Community representation, she writes, is governance itself—not a diversity initiative layered atop existing structures. Boards that reflect the communities they serve catch blind spots that homogeneous boards miss every time.
Sources: Nonprofit Quarterly
How American Independence 250 Years Ago Transformed the Practice of Philanthropy
As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, Smithsonian curator Amanda Moniz argues in Nonprofit Quarterly that American independence also transformed the practice of philanthropy. Moniz, the David M. Rubenstein Curator of Philanthropy at the National Museum of American History, traces how charitable organizations proliferated after 1783 as Americans applied revolutionary ideals to civic life. Colonial charity had been controlled by elite white men; the post-Revolution decades saw women found major charitable societies, Black Americans create mutual aid organizations and independent churches, and donors give across ethnic and denominational lines for the first time. Humane societies rescued drowning strangers regardless of race or nationality; Benjamin Rush promoted antislavery; Isabella Graham and Eliza Hamilton led women-run orphan asylums. These innovations, Moniz argues—not Carnegie’s later mega-philanthropy—established the defining features of American giving: civic engagement, organizational invention, and love of humanity as a founding value.
Sources: Nonprofit Quarterly
Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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