Collaboration, not competition, should be nonprofits’ default.
The nonprofit sector has long been described as a landscape of scarcity—underfunded, overburdened, and competitive by design. Leaders are expected to give everything to their causes, often sacrificing their own peace of mind and leaving work-life balance at the door.
No one person or organization created this reality. But decades of scarcity culture have deepened competitive norms, hardened silos, and left organizations—and the communities they serve—more burnt out and less supported as a result.
It doesn't have to be this way. In fact, this was never what most organizations wanted in the first place.
As founder of Lighthouse, a Colorado-based network that connects nonprofits for resource sharing and collaboration, I've heard this frustration firsthand. In order to tailor our offerings to meet nonprofits’ needs, I dove deep into conversations with nonprofit leaders—75 interviews and over 50 hours of listening—to understand what was actually happening in the trenches and what tools could genuinely help rather than hinder their work.
Collaboration is craved; outdated methods are the barrier.
After these conversations, one theme was clear: leaders weren't chasing competition—they were craving collaboration. But the systems to promote collaboration simply didn’t exist, and with many nonprofits working over capacity, barriers to collaboration are difficult to overcome.
One leader shared how their method for finding partners often followed a familiar pattern: Find a potential nonprofit partner using Google keyword searches. Explore their website. Scan the team for someone who seems open to connecting. Write a thoughtful email. Try not to sound like spam. If there's no contact info, guess the email address. If a send error is returned, try again. Eventually, give up and send it to the info@nonprofit.org email. Hope for a reply, knowing that email is likely rarely monitored.
In the age of technology, that cumbersome, ineffective process is shocking, and untenable.
The issue isn't intent; it's infrastructure.
What these conversations highlighted above all else was that these leaders aren't resisting collaboration. They're doing their best in a system that hasn't been built to support it.
We've created a landscape where funding is competitive, referrals are manual, and relationships are left to chance—which causes even more chaos in a sector with high turnover rates. Even funders who champion collaboration rarely provide the shared tools, spaces, and time that make it possible.
In that kind of environment, even the most collaborative leaders inevitably end up siloed, although not of their own volition.
Silos bear a cost, even in a thriving sector.
We see this clearly in our home state of Colorado. Even here—where over 34,000 nonprofits generate $62 billion in economic activity and support more than 262,000 jobs—organizations often duplicate services and scramble for resources while missing out on connections with others doing similar work just down the street.
So we asked: What would happen if we removed the barriers?
From bed frames to breakthroughs.
We started with something simple: an email network where nonprofits could share tangible goods they no longer needed and make requests for resource needs.
Within a few weeks, Decade2Connect, a residential treatment program shifting to outpatient care post-COVID, shared that they had 23 bed frames they no longer had a use for. Meanwhile, on the other side of Denver, CASA of Jefferson & Gilpin Counties was preparing housing for youth aging out of foster care—and hadn't yet secured beds.
We helped put two and two (or 23 and 23) together, and through the email chain, they connected. The bed frames were delivered, no longer gathering dust in a storage unit but instead meeting community needs in real time.
"I just wish the resource exchange had been around sooner," said Jody Olsen, executive director of Decade2Connect. "We had desks and chairs and all sorts of other furniture that we would have loved to see go to another nonprofit."
That was our "aha" moment. Collaboration didn't need to be complicated. It just needed a system built to allow it.
Since then, we've built out a network to simplify this process even further. Not only have over $40,000 in resources been reallocated among organizations, but nonprofits have come together to collaborate on events, grant applications, and even just to offer advice to one another.
These are the collaborations that excite us the most because with federal funding cuts tightening budgets across the sector, collaboration is no longer a luxury. It's a necessity for survival.
Reallocation: the opportunity hiding in plain sight.
The gap between social needs and available capital continues to widen as demand outstrips funding, and federal cuts are tightening budgets across the board, making already lean organizations struggle to find places to cut to stay afloat. We aren't arguing that this isn't difficult and damaging.
However, we do believe that while we can't control the macro funding landscape, we can control how goods, time, and relationships flow through our communities.
When collaboration is easy—when sharing is simpler than wasting—organizations get time back, dollars go further, and trust deepens.
Think of the sector as a rainstorm: thousands of droplets falling—beautiful, urgent, full of potential. But without the right container, those droplets scatter. They evaporate before they nourish anything.
With the right infrastructure, those droplets become a current. They fill a glass. And in that system, the glass isn't half-full or half-empty.
It's overflowing.
A different future is possible.
While our interviews highlighted significant obstacles to overcome, what has come since gives us hope. Running our pilot in Denver with 250 organizations has already shown what can happen when we remove the barriers to collaboration.
This is our chance to rewrite the story of the nonprofit sector—from one of scarcity and competition to one of abundance and collaboration. What started as simple resource sharing has shown us the potential for something much bigger. Through Lighthouse, in collaboration with countless nonprofits, we're building the network that can make this kind of connection standard practice.