Over the past year, I've been in conversation with social impact leaders across sectors and geographies, asking: what's actually going on? The presenting problems were different — fundraising, communications, talent, earned revenue streams — but underneath almost all of them I found the same feeling: Something that once moved easily had slowed to a grind, and the leader was the last one still pulling.
When the inside stops matching the outside, people feel it before they can name it.
Somewhere between the founding conviction and today, an organization can lose its integrity — not ethical integrity, but organizational integrity: The alignment between what it believes, what it says, and what it does.
When that alignment breaks, people feel it before they can articulate it.
They feel it as the decision — conscious or not — to stop betting their best effort on this particular organization.
I am not good at functioning in misalignment.
I sense it the way some people experience humidity — physically, before I can fully explain why.
It's what eventually led me out of work that felt important but wasn't mine, and into work that is genuinely mine: sitting with leaders who already know what they're for, and helping them make that clarity travel.
What I've learned, doing this work, is that every leader will eventually experience the gap between the organization they founded and the one they're currently running. And that gap has a name.
Losing momentum doesn't happen all at once. That's what makes it so hard to catch.
Think of a tree in the middle of a difficult year. From the outside, the leaves still grow. But cut through the trunk and you'll find a ring that tells the truth: thin, stressed, the record of a time the tree survived but didn't thrive.
Organizations leave the same kind of record. The damage shows on the inside long before it shows on the outside. And by the time it's visible in the fundraising numbers or the staff turnover or the board's silence, it has usually been building for years.
For leaders dealing with this:
The people around you are not indifferent. Your staff, your funders, your board members, are all waiting to believe that your organization knows what it is again.
Getting back to your CORE is not a communications fix. It's a restoration.
The framework I use to address a loss of momentum is called CORE — because that's what it returns you to. The process moves through four sequential steps:
Here’s an example:
Eight years in, Amara's organization1 had trained over 3,000 young women in financial literacy across three countries. She had a team of 22, a board of 11, and a funder list that read like a who's who of global philanthropy. She also hadn't slept properly in six months.
The grants were getting harder to close. Two board members had stopped showing up to meetings. Her best employee had resigned to "pursue an opportunity that was a better fit." Amara came to me saying she needed to fix her pitch deck.
She didn't need to fix her pitch deck.
Confront happened in our second session. I asked her to walk me through the last three grants she hadn't won. As she talked, a pattern emerged that she hadn't seen from inside it:
Every proposal described a different version of the organization. One emphasized financial education. One emphasized economic empowerment. One emphasized gender equity. All true. None of them the same thing. She had been growing so fast, adding programs and geographies and partners, that the organization had become whatever the funder in front of her needed it to be. By the time she finished talking, she said something, almost to herself: "I don't think we've pitched the same thing twice this year."
Own came next. I asked her what she would do if she had to cut everything except the one thing she believed in most. She stared at the screen for a long time. Then she said: "The moment a girl realizes money is something she can control — not something that controls her. Everything else we do is just trying to recreate that moment at scale." We built everything from that sentence.
Reconnect took three months. We rebuilt the case for support around that single conviction. We rewrote the stakeholder messaging so that funders heard the evidence, governments heard the policy angle, and corporate partners heard the workforce development story — but all three versions traced back to the same center.
The board onboarding document started with that sentence on page one, followed by one question: what does this organization need from you specifically to make this real? Two of the board members who had gone quiet came back. One of them made a large personal gift. The star employee who had left reached out six months later to say she had been following the organization from the outside and was so proud to have been a part of Amara’s journey.
The Embody is still happening. Amara now opens every all-staff meeting with one story — a specific girl, a specific moment, and a shift. Every new hire gets the founding sentence in their first week.
Every grant proposal, regardless of the funder, starts from the same conviction and adapts from there. The organization finally sounds like itself, consistently, in every room it walks into.
Three months after we finished, a funder who had passed on her twice emailed to say how the last annual report had moved him, and asked her to apply for their upcoming opportunity. Amara sent me the update with one line: "I think we found it."
She had rediscovered her core.
Each ring of a tree is a record of what the tree lived through: what nourished it, what stressed it, what it survived. The organizations that regain momentum are the ones that know how to return to their CORE; to do the patient, challenging work of restoration.
Your CORE might be buried under growth and complexity, or under the daily work of keeping your organization alive, but it’s there - and it’s waiting for you to return to it.
What does this bring up for you? Reply and tell me where your organization is in this journey.
1 The details in this story are a composite from several client experiences.
