The Social Impact Firm & Podcast

09/24/2026

Every organization I work with has a story it believes would change things if enough people simply heard it.

That belief is half right, and the missing half is expensive.

Festival season is running, and every film in it will be called important between now and March. A few genuinely were. Two days after watching The Invisible War in 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta moved the authority to investigate reported sexual assaults away from immediate unit commanders. SeaWorld spent three years disputing Blackfish and ended its orca breeding program in 2016 anyway. Crip Camp put the disability rights movement’s own footage on screen and reminded a generation that the ADA was won in the street. An Inconvenient Truth was, functionally, a slideshow.

What those have in common is not that they were persuasive. Plenty of persuasive films change nothing.

It is that each one landed on top of infrastructure that already existed. Organizers with a list. Lawyers with a filing ready. Funders who had committed before the reviews came in. Campaigners who knew which office to call on Monday. The attention arrived and something was standing there to catch it.

This is the part most mission-driven organizations skip. They invest everything in the telling and nothing in the catching, then conclude that the story wasn’t good enough. Usually the story was fine. There was just nowhere for the attention to go.

A story changes something when somebody has built the thing that catches it.

So if you are making something you hope will move people, build the catch first. Decide now what you want a viewer to do in the seventy-two hours after they watch, and make sure that thing exists before anyone sees the film.

09/16/2026

Hispanic Heritage Month starts today, and before the graphics go up, here’s a number worth sitting with.

Nonprofits serving Latino communities received 0.26% of all charitable giving. That comes from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, measuring 2022. For context, organizations primarily serving communities of color received 2.9% of total giving that year, so Latino-serving organizations took home roughly a tenth of an already small slice, while Latinos make up close to a fifth of the country.

The trend underneath the number is worse than the number. Between 2012 and 2022, expenses at these organizations grew faster than the philanthropic support coming in, which means the work got bigger and the funding didn’t follow it.

Heritage months tend to be generously celebrated and thinly funded. Over the next thirty days there will be an enormous amount of content and comparatively few wire transfers, and the organizations actually doing the work will feel the difference between those two immediately.

If you have a budget, this is the month to move it. Multi-year if you can. Unrestricted if you can. To organizations genuinely led by the communities they serve. And renewed before somebody has to ask you twice.

If you’re not sure where to start, tell us what you care about in the comments and we’ll point you somewhere real. 💙

09/15/2026

The Emmys are tonight at the Peacock Theater, about fifteen minutes from our door, and somewhere in the next four hours a person with an enormous platform is going to thank a cause on live television.

That moment is worth something real. It’s also worth about 72 hours, which is roughly how long the attention lasts before the internet moves on to the dresses. What happens inside those 72 hours is the entire difference between a nice moment and actual money moving.

We work with public figures launching foundations, so here’s the unglamorous version. A foundation is an entity, a board, bylaws, an EIN, a bank account and a giving strategy, and doing it properly takes six to twelve months. The ones that stall almost always started with a press release instead of a plan. The ones that work start narrow, with one issue, one geography and a clear grant size, because a funder who spreads thin funds nothing well and gets remembered for none of it.

And the option nobody mentions is not starting one at all. A donor-advised fund, or a multi-year unrestricted commitment to an organization that already knows the work, will move more money faster than a brand new nonprofit with your name on the door. That isn’t the smaller choice. Most of the time it’s the smarter one.

If you have a platform and you’re serious about using it, the speech is the easy part. We do the rest.

Link in bio. 🤎

09/12/2026

09/11/2026

The US Open women’s final is tomorrow, and the champion will be paid exactly what the men’s champion is paid. That’s worth remembering as a negotiation rather than a norm.

In 1970 the men’s champion at that tournament earned $3,500 and Billie Jean King earned $600. By 1972 the gap had grown to $15,000, and at no point did anyone announce a change of heart.

What happened in 1973 is that King threatened to boycott. She had just founded the Women’s Tennis Association, she had 63 players organized behind her, and she made the tournament choose between equal prize money and no women’s draw. The money was found, partly through a corporate grant from Ban deodorant, and both champions were paid $25,000. The US Open became the first Grand Slam to pay equally.

Then the rest of the sport took its time. The Australian Open followed in 1984 and then went backwards from 1996 to 2000. The French Open reached parity in 2006 and Wimbledon in 2007. Thirty-four years between the first major and the last.

This year the tournament is paying out a record $108 million, up 20% on last year, and almost nobody watching tomorrow will know it was ever in question.

Three things in that story are worth carrying into this work. Equity is demanded rather than granted. A moral case needs a funder standing next to it. And a won argument goes backwards when nobody is watching it, which is what those four years in Australia are really about.

Save this for the next time you’re told the timing isn’t right. 🤎

09/10/2026

Job title: Executive Director. Actual job: eight jobs, one paycheck.

You’re the grant writer. The bookkeeper. The person who orders the chairs, fixes the printer, and posts to this app at 10pm. Somewhere along the way that stopped being a temporary situation and quietly became the job description.

This sector loves to call it devotion, and it is. It is also the reason a program can’t grow and a leader can’t take a week off. Doing eight jobs at once because there’s no budget for eight people isn’t a personality trait. It’s a staffing gap in a very convincing outfit.

So take this as a permission slip. Name the gap out loud in your next board meeting. Put it in your next application as capacity building, by name. Ask for the unrestricted money that pays for a person rather than a program.

You deserve all the praise for slaying your job while wearing all the hats, but you also the deserve to ask for help when you need it ✨

We love helping social enterprises for this very reason. Because we see you! 🫶

09/03/2026

We’re hiring interns for the fall and spring☀️

The Social Impact Firm partners with nonprofits, foundations, and values-driven companies, so every project you’d touch here is tied to a cause that matters. It’s a good place to learn what strategy and storytelling look like when the stakes are real.

Open roles: ✨ Social Media & Content Intern 🎨 Design & Creative Intern 📊 Impact & Research Intern

What it looks like day to day: remote, flexible around your class schedule, with occasional on-site opportunities to capture behind-the-scenes content at client events and shoots if you are interested.

Who we’re looking for: someone curious, reliable, and genuinely interested in the impact space. Comfort with Canva, Figma, CapCut, Google Workspace or a similar tool helps for the creative roles, but we care more about how you think than what software you’ve already opened.

We are so happy to work with your university if you’re pursuing course credit as well!

To apply, email [email protected] with your resume, samples of your work or a portfolio link, and a short cover letter naming the role you want. We read every one. 💕

Share this if there’s any students in your life wanting to work in social impact!

08/28/2026

The reason a small organization misses out on funding is rarely eligibility. It’s that nobody on a team of four has a spare afternoon to go find the money.

So here’s September, in one place 🫶🏻

For nonprofits, The Lawrence Foundation opens September 1 with $5,000 to $10,000 for environment, human services and disaster relief, and there’s no letter of inquiry in the way. Walmart’s Spark Good Local Grants run through November 30 at $250 to $5,000, and the account verification is the slow part, so September is when to start. In LA County, the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation accepts letters of inquiry year round and its median award is $50,000.

For founders, the Amber Grant closes September 30 at $10,000 for women-owned businesses. Verizon Small Business Digital Ready funds ten businesses a month at $10,000.

And the Awesome Foundation gives $1,000 to anyone with a community project, individuals included, with no 501(c)(3) required.

Two things worth knowing that most lists leave out. Amber’s $15 application fee is waivable on request, which almost nobody does. And the Verizon application only unlocks after you complete two free courses on their platform, which is why so many people start it and never finish.

We publish this every month because funding information is unevenly distributed, and the organizations that most need the money are usually the ones with the least time to go looking for it. If you’re working on something and want a second set of eyes on your funding strategy, our door is open. 🙌🏻

08/27/2026

Women are 67% of the nonprofit workforce. At the largest organizations in the sector, they hold 31% of the CEO seats.

That gap is the whole story, and it repeats everywhere you look.

A woman running a nonprofit earns 73 cents for every dollar a man in the same seat earns, and the gap gets wider as the budget gets bigger, not smaller. Of the $289 billion in venture funding that moved globally in 2024, all-women founding teams received 2.3% of it. Not 2.3% of the ideas or 2.3% of the ambition, just 2.3% of the money. And in the Fortune 500 this year, 55 companies are led by women, which works out to 11% and is an all-time record, up from 7.4% in 2020.

We say that last one out loud on purpose, because progress is real and it deserves to be counted. But a record of 11% tells you exactly how much room is left.

Here’s what we take from it. The women in this sector are not short on capability or commitment, they’re short on capital, on titles, and on being paid what the work is worth. Closing that is not a side project inside the mission of building a better world, it is one of the fastest ways to get there.

So that’s who we build for, and it’s why we do this work at all. Save this one, and send it to a woman who’s building something. 🤎