Mission Forward with Carrie Fox

Gary Green told Carrie he could hire ten more people tomorrow and still be redlining. Nearly a thousand calls came into the Student Press Law Center's hotline last year, from 46 states, up 42 percent in two years. So he slowed the organization down long enough to build a plan.

Carrie comes back this week with what stayed with her: why the step back belongs in the middle of the chaos, what it takes to hold a crisis clock and a fifty-year clock at the same time, and why capacity comes from the community you keep. What sticks hardest is Gary's answer on hope — thousands of young people walking into journalism, seeing only the opportunity in front of them.

Listen to the full conversation: Practicing Patient Urgency With Gary Green. Learn more at splc.org.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

Some organizations run at the speed of the crisis in front of them. Others play a long game measured in decades. The Student Press Law Center does both at once, and Gary Green has spent the last year making sure his small but mighty team knows exactly how.

Gary is the executive director of the Student Press Law Center, which since 1974 has managed the hotline that a student journalist calls when someone with authority wants a story to go away — and censorship has been the leading reason for those calls ever since. Last year alone, students and their advisers reached out nearly a thousand times, from across 46 states, with calls up more than 42% in two years. Gary will tell you he could hire ten more people and still be redlining, given the increased demand in student press legal services.

So he did something that sounds backward in a moment like this one. Last year, he slowed the organization down. Over the better part of a year, SPLC asked students, advisers, board members, and funders what they actually needed, and turned those answers into a three-year strategic plan called To Our Future, built to stay nimble in a landscape no one can predict five years out.

The phrase that anchors this conversation isn't in the strategic plan, though. It's one Carrie brings to it: patient urgency. It's what it takes to answer today's hotline crisis while quietly working, state by state, toward student press freedom laws in all fifty — a New Voices movement that, as Gary says, may take another fifty years to finish.

Underneath all of it is a promise Gary makes plainly: SPLC turns no one away. Every student journalist, every call. That matters more than ever now that students working through news-academic partnerships filed more than 44,000 local stories last year — in many communities, the only account of the county commission or the school board that exists anywhere. Plenty of those newsrooms have had SPLC's number for decades.

This conversation is about everyone else: the newsrooms that have never heard of it, and have no idea there's been someone standing beside them all along.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

Define the guardrails, then let people loose inside them. That is how Ike Anand leads ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and it shapes everything from how the organization takes on new technology to how it regards the other charities working alongside it.

Carrie Fox returns to her conversation with Ike Anand on leading people through a moment that makes them anxious, and on the definition of the job she hasn't stopped thinking about since.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

Every so often, a leader steps into a moment that seems built for them. New CEOs appointed days before the COVID pandemic, or during economic volatility, or any number of other challenges — and it's like they were made to be there, in that moment, to steer the ship calmly through the uncertainty.

Ike Anand is one of those leaders. He is the president and CEO of ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, a seat he stepped into a year ago, after joining the organization in 2020.

That work reaches well past Memphis. Mission Partners' research with nonprofits and foundations last year found the sector split roughly down the middle on AI: half ready to lean in and trust that it's part of their future, half not willing to go there at all. Anand's answer starts with how rather than whether, and it rests on the principles he brought with him to the job. The first of them gives this episode its name. Get a little bit better every day. You aren't competing against anybody else, Anand says; you're competing against yourself, and the race is long.

Which suits an organization whose reputation was built the same way — a game of inches, every day, for more than sixty years. Anand describes himself as carrying that brand for a period of time, with a responsibility to hand it on in good condition to whoever comes next.

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Forty years into leading one of the country's pioneering community development financial institutions, Elyse Cherry has changed nearly everything about how BlueHub Capital does its work — and nearly nothing about why. In this week's reflection, Carrie Fox sits with what that distinction makes possible, and why the leaders who last tend to be fixed on a question rather than attached to a product.

It's a short conversation about proximity, persistence, and a particular kind of courage — the quiet kind that looks less like defiance and more like refusing to stop. If you've ever felt forced to choose between staying true to your mission and adapting to the moment, Cherry has a reason to think you've been asked the wrong question.

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In Brockton, Massachusetts, a Cape Verdean grocery store sits next door to a community health center. They're side by side on purpose. When BlueHub Capital looked at the neighborhood, it saw residents wrestling with food and health and decided those weren't two problems but one, so it financed the store and the clinic together and put them within a few steps of each other. A small decision. It also explains how an organization stays alive for forty years.

Elyse Cherry co-founded BlueHub in 1985 with $3,500 and a single idea: build healthy communities where people of limited income live and work. The idea has never changed. Almost everything else has. Over four decades the organization has run a loan fund, a venture fund, a utility-cost company, a foreclosure-relief program, and a one-percent loan to cover the cost of citizenship. Cherry separates the why from the how. The why is fixed. The how gets reinvented whenever the work demands it.

Which raises the obvious question: how do you know when to change the how? Cherry's answer isn't vision or instinct. It's location. BlueHub keeps its offices inside the neighborhoods it serves, because the people who live there understand what they need before anyone downtown does. They may not know how to build a capital structure. They know which corner needs a grocery store. Sit close enough and the next move tends to announce itself.

The longest test of the idea is Roxbury, where BlueHub has been headquartered for twenty-five years. A new 40-year impact study counts $147 million in financing, another $910 million leveraged on top of it, and more than 3,200 homes, along with childcare, schools, and job training. Numbers like that come from the same nerve that, during the 1992 banking collapse, led a then-tiny BlueHub to buy its own distressed loans back from the federal government at ten cents on the dollar and rewrite them so families stayed housed. When you're making something that has never existed, Cherry figured, you have nothing to protect, so you may as well be bold.

All of which brings up courage, a word Cherry uses carefully. Courage can be quiet, she says, but it can't be silent. Stop moving, and the people who don't share your values win without a fight. It's a modest creed for a hard season, and a workable one. The leaders who last are the ones who stay close — to the community they serve, and to the financial realities that let them keep serving it.

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In 2020, the emergency announced itself. The need was visible, the urgency undeniable, and that clarity gave leaders permission to act — to move a million dollars across town before lunch and hand-walk the check to a barely-open UPS store.

Five years later, Carrie Fox reflects on her conversation with Tanir Ami of the CARESTAR Foundation and lands on a tricky puzzle: the urgency hasn't gone away, but it has gone quiet. The systems are still shifting, but they're shifting in ways that are less visible, and that invisibility is what makes them so hard to act against. This is where a North Star stops being a poster on the wall and becomes an operational imperative.

This week, takeaways from an important and ongoing conversation: clarity of purpose makes action possible, strategic planning is a lifeline rather than a luxury, and the most meaningful impact is the momentum you’ve created, and then leave behind. And for CARESTAR, that momentum has a name — eliminating racial disparities in emergency medical services. What they measure as achievement isn't just in the form of grants or the dollars deployed. It's that an organization sitting just outside the center created the space for a statewide conversation no one else could convene, and then committed to keeping that conversation alive long after its own work is done.

If you haven’t listened to the main conversation with Tanir, it’s a good one. You can find it right here.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

You probably know the dream where you need to run and your legs won't obey. Carrie names that dream halfway through her conversation with Tanir Ami this week, and from there it's hard to let the idea go. What Tanir describes, and what the whole nonprofit and foundation sector seems to be describing right now, is the waking version of it.

In 2020, leadership looked like a million-dollar check hand-walked to a closed UPS office. Decisiveness was the whole job. The uncertainty was acute but legible: a virus, a curve, a set of immediate needs. You moved, or people died. Today's uncertainty is different. Tanir calls it "quieter." The threats are diffuse, the timelines unclear, the systems shifting in ways that might not surface for months or years. The instinct to charge forward survives. The sense of which way to charge does not.

Tanir, in the middle of all this, did the opposite of what the field expected. She narrowed. While other leaders were being told that strategic planning had become too hard to attempt, she and her team spent the year writing one. Not a sprawling, hedge-everything plan. The CARESTAR Foundation's new strategic plan turns on a single sentence: eliminate racial disparities in emergency medical services care across California.

The 2026 Insights on Purpose research that anchors this season found that most leaders are making major changes to grantmaking or fundraising, and most are doing it without a strategic plan at all. The reasoning is easy to follow: when the ground keeps moving, why commit to a destination? Tanir's answer runs the other way. When the ground keeps moving, the destination is the only stable thing on the horizon. The path will change. The collaborators will undoubtedly change. The question of what you are trying to alter about the world only gets sharper under increasing pressure.

When Tanir shared this new, tighter focus publicly, nobody backed away. They moved toward her. Committing publicly to one specific thing made her easier to find, and the plan turned into an invitation. 

In this week’s Research Brief, Matt Price points the same direction: health-focused nonprofits report the lowest optimism of any subsector in the study, and they are the ones who most need a funder willing to cover work that is, as he puts it, "sometimes under attack."

Carrie's dream, the one where you run and stay in place, marks one texture of leadership in 2026. This conversation points to another. Choose one thing, say it out loud, and build the plan around it. The legs start moving again. The dream hasn't ended. You've just stopped trying to outrun it.

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Most organizations talk about resilience as if it's a single thing — a quality you either have or you don't, summoned in a crisis and admired after the fact. Phil Weinberg, president and CEO of STRIVE, draws a sharper line. There's the resilience of the person, and there's the resilience of the institution, and conflating them is how good organizations end up brittle.

One is mindset. The other is muscle.

Carrie sits with that distinction this week, and with two more ideas from her conversation with Phil that are worth carrying into the work: the quiet damage of the nonprofit starvation cycle, and what it actually looks like to lead with consistency when every signal in the environment is asking you to react.

Links & Notes

• Listen to Resilience as a Muscle and a Mindset with Phil Weinberg
• STRIVE
• Mission Partners' 2026 Insights on Purpose™ Report

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

Every generation inherits a story about how people move up in the world. Go to college, the story goes. Get the degree. Climb. It's a story that has shaped policy and philanthropy for three generations running, and for tens of millions of Americans, the story does not describe reality. What remains is a gap. Not a talent gap, as this week's guest is careful to distinguish, but an opportunity gap.

Two populations standing on opposite sides of a chasm, motivated people looking for a path, and employers who cannot find workers. This chasm is not bridged by ambition alone. It has to be built.

Phil Weinberg has spent fourteen years at STRIVE building exactly that kind of bridge, and what makes his account worth hearing is the architecture underneath it. This week, Carrie Fox talks with Weinberg about what it takes to grow a nonprofit through three successive crises without losing the thread, why he draws a sharp line between individual resilience and the organizational kind, and how the conventional wisdom American philanthropy has held about nonprofit overhead may have had it backwards the whole time.

It's a conversation about consistency as a form of leadership, about the unglamorous decisions that compound into durable institutions, and about what happens when an organization stops apologizing for the infrastructure that makes its mission possible.

This week also marks the debut of a new recurring segment on Mission Forward: Research Briefs, a short conversation tucked into the end of each episode for the next three months, featuring Mission Partners' Researcher in Residence Matt Price. In each brief, Matt connects the themes of the week's conversation to what the latest data is telling us about the field. This first installment puts Phil Weinberg's reflections in context with new Gallup data on how American workers are feeling about the job market — and what the numbers reveal about resilience, leadership, and the gap between struggling and thriving. Stay tuned at the end of the episode.

Links & Notes

• STRIVE
• STRIVE's Story (40-year history, founded in East Harlem, 1984)
• STRIVE Programs (Career Path, Future Leaders, Fresh Start)
• STRIVE Network (directly operated sites in Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, and New York, plus affiliate partners)
• Phil Weinberg on LinkedIn
• Mission Partners' 2026 Insights on Purpose™ Report
• Matt Price, Researcher in Residence at Mission Partners
• Gallup: U.S. Worker Thriving Declines as Job Market Pessimism Grows (March 2026 release)
• BDO's Ninth Annual Nonprofit Standards Benchmarking Report

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