Building belonging in an age of disruption: Lessons in leadership

I recently stepped away from my role as president and CEO of United Way Worldwide, after several intense and meaningful years leading a large nonprofit organization through a season of extraordinary change.

Since that transition, I have found myself in conversations with nonprofit leaders across the country who sound tired in a very specific way. Not burned out exactly—but stretched. Carrying responsibility for communities that need stability and care while trying to lead in a world that feels increasingly uncertain.

What I hear again and again is this: People are craving connection. They want to feel grounded. They want to belong to something that feels steady and human in a moment that does not.

That longing sits alongside a difficult reality. Nonprofits are operating amid economic pressure, political division, and declining trust in institutions. Patterns of giving and volunteering are shifting. Community needs are rising. Leaders are being asked to respond quickly while also embracing complexity and compassion at the same time.

Leading through this moment has taught me leadership lessons I believe are useful for anyone navigating the sector’s next chapter by building belonging.

1. Listening is a leadership discipline, not a courtesy

Early in my tenure, I spent a great deal of time listening. Not informally or occasionally, but intentionally and at scale. I listened to nonprofit leaders, staff, partners, and community voices across regions and roles. Those conversations revealed things that reports and dashboards never could: fatigue, frustration, hope, and a deep desire to feel part of something that made sense.

Listening also surfaced where trust had worn thin and where people felt unseen. For leadership, the lesson is that listening needs to be treated as essential infrastructure. It requires structure, follow-up, and a willingness to let what you hear shape decisions. Change lasts when people recognize themselves in it.

2. Trust must be built before it can be mobilized

Trust is often described as a feeling, but in practice it behaves like a system. It is built through consistency, transparency, and respect for people’s intelligence and experience. It erodes quietly when decisions feel top-down or unexplained.

In complex organizations, especially those spread across many communities, trust cannot be assumed. It has to be tended to. Nonprofit leaders who invest in trust before asking people to move, change, or stretch are far better positioned to bring others with them.

3. Scale works only when it serves local leadership

One of the most persistent tensions in nonprofit work is the pull between scale and community. Centralized systems promise efficiency. Local leaders hold relationships, context, and credibility.

What worked best in my experience was using scale to support, connect, and elevate local leadership rather than replace it. Shared frameworks created coherence, while local decision making preserved relevance and trust with the staff and community. The goal was alignment of mission for community change across the network, not uniformity.

4. Leadership requires courage in the face of uncertainty

Times of disruption create pressure to act fast and visibly. That pressure is understandable. Communities feel urgency, and nonprofit leaders feel responsibility.

I learned that courage is about acknowledging when something does not work as intended, learning quickly, and adjusting without being defensive. Some efforts moved faster than systems or alignment could fully support.

There was a moment when we introduced a new strategic framework intended to unify the network around shared priorities. The vision resonated, but some local leaders felt it had been shaped too centrally and did not fully reflect their realities. Instead of defending the framework as designed, we reopened the conversation, invited direct feedback, and refined the approach together. The adjustment strengthened ownership and made the strategy genuinely shared rather than simply announced.

The leadership lesson was that those moments reinforced the value of humility and course correction. People trust leaders who can say, “We learned something here, and we are moving forward wiser.”

Nonprofit leaders can help build belonging

Across all these lessons in leadership is a simple truth: Community change depends on our willingness to see one another fully. It depends on building belonging.

Data and strategy matter. Systems matter. But they cannot replace empathy, listening, and care, especially in a time when many people feel unseen or disconnected.

In moments like this, I remind myself that people are not asking nonprofits to have all the answers. They are asking us to show up with honesty, steadiness, and care. They want to know that someone is listening, that someone sees them, and that someone is willing to walk alongside them as things change. In other words, that they belong to a community working together.

Leadership in this season is less about control and more about presence. It is about creating spaces where people feel safe enough to tell the truth and hopeful enough to imagine what comes next. If we nonprofit leaders can do that, if we can lead in ways that help people feel connected to one another and to something meaningful, we will have done work that matters.

Photo credit: fotostorm/Getty Images