There’s a scene in an old episode of Friends (I know, but stick with me) where Ross and Rachel and Chandler attempt to move a couch up the stairs of their apartment building. But the stairwell is curiously riddled with right angles. They make it about halfway up before Ross, for once the optimist of the group, shouts his famous line of encouragement on repeat:
“Pivot!” “Pivot!” “Pi-VOT!”
Ultimately the pivoting doesn’t work, the couch gets stuck, the audience laughs, and 25 years later, boom, it becomes a cheesy meme for the very online.
I recently attended a gathering of some of Charlotte’s leading charitable minds that felt a little like that scene. The federal government’s 2025 heel turn under the new administration is shifting billions of dollars away from health and human services programs, remodeling the economic staircase for nonprofits that provide social safety nets. They’re reevaluating, downsizing, or giving up altogether.
Oh well, you might say, we all have to adjust. But philanthropy is a big deal In Charlotte. It’s an economic machine, worth billions, that’s long worked alongside private corporations and governments to try to cover the community’s challenges. It was, after all, the nonprofit industry that dove first and deepest into addressing economic mobility in the 2010s, and where local civic leaders turned to raise millions to help small businesses affected by COVID-19 in 2020. How these organizations adapt will determine, to a significant degree, the overall well-being of our community over the next decade. If their services were to vanish altogether, the city would be sicker, less engaged and educated, more dreary and dangerous.
The meeting I attended was part of an “agility” series, designed to move nonprofit leaders beyond their feelings and politics to a place where they’re thinking rationally — dealing with reality as it is instead of how they wish it to be. It included a clinical breakdown of the new federal spending bill and a depressing but useful discussion about how to downsize with dignity.
Peter Blair, the president and CEO of a foundation that oversees the Lee Institute, told the crowd, “Not-for-profit is our tax status; it is not our goal. We are running businesses.”
I went out of curiosity, both as a writer who covers the city and as a fellow nonprofit founder. With one full-time staff member (hey), The Charlotte Optimist was at least tied for the smallest organization there. I also spent some time over the past few weeks having conversations with other leaders in the philanthropy space to try to understand what the future looks like. The answers were blunt.
“We are experiencing what I would consider a seismic shift in how nonprofits will function in the world going forward,” Laura Yates Clark, the president of the Foundation For The Carolinas, told me in a phone call. “We’re all figuring it out. What I do feel pretty confident about, and as do others I’ve talked to in the funding world, is that philanthropy cannot solve this because the holes that are created are just too deep.”
Clark added, “Some days I feel like it makes what we went through during COVID look like small potatoes.”
Some nonprofits are already cutting back. Communities in Schools, a longstanding organization that puts staff in schools to help economically disadvantaged students and their families, reduced its Charlotte staff and presence across the region, WCNC reported. Local NPR affiliate WFAE is slashing its team by a half-dozen, and last week launched a $1 million fundraising campaign.
Those are just the high-profile cases. Share Charlotte executive director Melissa Hovey says her organization works with about 750 nonprofits in Charlotte, which employ an estimated 9,000 people, and all have different needs. Hovey’s organization is working with FFTC, the Lee Institute, and the local United Way to put on the agility series. FFTC and the United Way are also working with the Urban Institute on a survey to better assess the landscape in this new era.
I admire Charlotte’s nonprofit community, and I’ve met so many stellar souls through it. But its greatest strength — bellies full of passion for their missions — can also be a weakness. Hovey told me she’s talked to at least one leader who was using their personal credit card to keep their organization afloat.
My conversations over the past month felt different. They were strikingly … proactive.
“The reason we’re diving in with the tools on how to work on the business side of it, it’s because we can only control what we can control,” Hovey told me. “I’m excited to see where we’ll be a year from now, where these nonprofits are learning how to run their business. … They have a bigger menu than they think.”
A few weeks ago, after I published a story about OurBRIDGE, two different sorts of emails filled my inbox in response.
The first category: If Charlotte has all these foundations with all this money, why can’t they just spend it and solve the issues now?
It’s a reasonable question, with reasonable answers.
Take the Foundation For the Carolinas. It has about $5 billion in total assets, but a significant portion of that is tied up in donor-advised funds, where money is channeled directly to support the desires of the donors. FFTC does have some discretionary money, Clark said, and they’re assessing how to shift some of that to nonprofit partners in the next year.
Charlotte also has a handful of prominent foundations, like the Levine Foundation, which has approximately $2 billion in assets, and the Merancas Foundation, which has more than $150 million. Foundations are required to distribute at least 5 percent of their investment assets each year. Many give away a little more; the Merancas Foundation doled out roughly 11 percent in 2023, according to its filings. The best practice is to invest the rest and keep the organization operating for generations, giving and giving. In other words, if they gave it away all at once they’d have nothing left to give.
Case in point: The Levine Foundation announced last month it would increase its yearly giving over the next 50 years and close up shop. If successful, it’ll likely become a national model for winding down a foundation. Why wouldn’t they spend it down now, rapidly? By giving away $100 million next year and bumping it up annually over the next 50 years, while investing the remainder, the impact will be north of $5 billion, probably well north of it, as opposed to a $2 billion lump today.
The other question that arrived in my inbox: Will you write a story on my nonprofit, like you did with OurBRIDGE? I received several of these, and it was a small window into a twofold issue. Nonprofits here need help getting their stories out, and funders large and small are going to be inundated over the next few years with heartstring-tugging tales and financial asks.
Charlotte is blessed with civic-minded wealthy people. But while they have plenty of money, they’re usually bankrupt for time. They can’t possibly meet and sort through every organization in town.
“It’s so important for for us to hear from our nonprofit partners, to understand what they’re feeling from the folks that they serve,” Levine Foundation’s president and CEO Tom Lawrence told me. “The challenge is, how does philanthropy, or charitable giving in general — the hole in the bucket is just too big for it to cover, unfortunately — so how can we be impactful? How can we be a part of the solution?”
Many large funders in Charlotte are already convening, working with organizations like FFTC to help them determine and prioritize the areas of greatest need, and to establish dashboards of impact.
“What I have seen Charlotte do over and over and over again is rise to the occasion,” Clark said. “So I’m very optimistic that Charlotte will do everything we can in our power to try to meet the needs and be creative and be innovative. I don’t know that other communities will have that.”
Even here, Clark says, time is the greatest enemy.
“The outcomes of this will be devastating, and they will be long term,” Clark said. “Doesn’t mean some good won’t come from it. Doesn’t mean we can’t figure out how to find the silver lining. But for a lot of children and a lot of families, it’s going to be too late by the time we figure out how to pivot.”
“This is what I call a ‘double squeeze,’” Matt Kain told the crowd at the recent agility series gathering. Kain’s an attorney with Moore & Van Allen, which FFTC and the other organizations tapped to help nonprofits understand the implications of the new federal spending bill. His presentation was clear, clinical, and void of political commentary: This is what the bill means for you.
He explained the “double squeeze” like this: “We’re going to have more individuals in need; there’s going to be more demand for our services. … But we’re going to have to deliver with less resources and more competition for those nonprofit dollars.”
There are a few bright spots in the new tax law, Kain said. Beginning in the 2026 filing year, people who take the standard deduction — now more than 90 percent of taxpayers — will be allowed to deduct up to $1,000 per individual, or $2,000 per couple, for charitable giving. That’s a potential boost for small-dollar donations.
But the market for mid-range and larger donations is murkier. Under the new rules, itemizers can’t deduct any charitable contributions until they give more than 0.5 percent of their adjusted gross income. Someone with a $1 million AGI won’t get any charitable deduction unless they give more than $5,000. Plus, the cap on deductions is dropping, from 37% of a person’s tax bill to 35%. Corporate giving is also affected: Businesses will no longer be able to deduct the first 1 percent of their taxable income when making charitable contributions.
Eyes glazing over? Here’s the upshot: The law may encourage more small donations, but it could discourage larger ones. The National Council of Nonprofits says it could result in a net loss of $7 billion in charitable giving over the next decade in the U.S.
Of course, projections are just projections. And Charlotte’s wealthiest people historically are programmed to give beyond whatever benefits their tax bill. What’s more, perhaps the biggest wild card is what the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers do with their money when they pass on. Some studies predict that $18 trillion will flow to charity over the next quarter-century, in what’s being called the Great Wealth Transfer.
Still, Hovey says, “There’s no big stick that says, Hey, go invest in your community. It really is up to the individuals.”
Clark, with FFTC, told me that the Charlotte Executive Leadership Council is already working to bring in retired executives to help with assessments and advise nonprofits on how to find new streams of revenue. Organizers of the agility series say that in a survey of attendees, that part — helping them find money from new sources — was the top request for future workshops.
The bottom line here is that Charlotte’s nonprofits are entering a period of great change. Organizations that have done a ton of good over the past 10 years might not be here for the next 10.
But they also have more resources than at any other point in Charlotte history, and the optimistic view is that some will emerge stronger, with more balanced revenue pipelines, and they’ll be durable enough that they won’t have to make desperate appeals at the end of every fiscal year.
“We constantly put nonprofits in a really difficult situation of telling them to solve the most intractable problems humanity faces, and yet do it on a shoestring and do it with no hope that tomorrow you’re going to have what you need,” Clark said. “I think there’s always opportunity in every dark moment or every difficult moment. I think this could be the time when we finally say we need to invest in the nonprofit sector in a way that really shores them up to weather these kinds of things.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify that FFTC and the United Way are working with the Urban Institute on a survey of nonprofits.
