This article series, coordinated by First Nations Development Institute, highlights voices of respected Native American nonprofit leaders. They sound off on a variety of topics related to philanthropy and its interactions with the Native American nonprofit sector.

This is a rare opportunity for a larger audience to hear and learn from Native people who have been leading the way in fighting for Native communities and advocating for greater philanthropic support for the innovative work taking place in Native communities across the United States.

This article introduces a new NPQ series, titled Building Power, Fighting Displacement: Stories from Asian Pacific America, coproduced with the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development (National CAPACD). Authors in this series highlight stories of comprehensive community development in Asian American and Pacific Islander communities across the United States.

On the pink carpet at the July 13 Barbie film premiere in London, Margot Robbie made one thing clear: “I’m very much in support of all the unions.” She added that as a member of SAG-AFTRA—short for the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, a union representing around 160,000 media workers worldwide—she was “absolutely” in support of the imminent strike.

Just hours later, SAG-AFTRA’s demands had still not been accepted by the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (the negotiating body representing the corporations behind the entertainment industry), so the glamorous press tour for the highly anticipated summer blockbuster went back into the box. 

We are experiencing a time of deep uncertainty and change. Both the depth and speed of change are creating growing anxiety in our accepted norms, in our political institutions, and in our very sense of self. These changes are reflected in five critical, interrelated areas: climate change, globalization, technology, the economy, and migration. The stories we collectively hold are an important part of how we respond, and will help determine whether our responses will be up to the task.

The US middle class is dead. The sour national mood shows that the time for a national refounding is now. Instead of mourning, let’s build a more durable, more inclusive, more prosperous United States. But what can that look like? To start, we must be a nation that makes economic equity available to all—one where people can thrive.

Only 30 percent of millennials believed that “it is essential to live in a democracy,” down from 75 percent of people born in the 1930s. That’s a pretty scary thought, and a statistic to which our nonprofit community ought to pay attention. What has brought us to this point? Is the world’s greatest experiment in democratic governance under threat? How can we revive our democratic institutions and ensure that everyone in America has a stake in our society?

Dr. Lester M. Salamon, who died August 20, 2021, has been described as one of the world’s most prolific and influential scholars of nonprofit organizations. That we think of the nonprofit and civil society sector as a sector at all is due in large part to the work of early scholars in the field like Salamon and the research teams he galvanized.

With over two decades of experience in the nonprofit sector, Venu Gupta has learned that key to building a strong democracy is strong connections—and, more specifically, strong friendships. Gathering in Support of Democracy is a recurring column exploring the essential connections between gathering, community, and democracy building.

In his new book People, Power, Change, author-activist Marshall Ganz writes about the art and science of organizing and social change. In the section excerpted here, taken from the book’s introduction, Ganz issues his call for a renewal of US democratic practice.