Selling Belief

I’ve spent a fair amount of time telling this community to sit with discomfort instead of running from it. This week, I’m trying to practice that instead of just preaching it.

I’ve never been comfortable asking for help, and financial help most of all. Given the choice, I’d rather go without. I used to think that was fear of rejection, but it isn’t, really. It’s closer to how I was raised — to make do with what I had, or didn’t, rather than ask anyone else to close the gap. That instinct served me fine for most of my life. It serves an organization much less well.

Here’s the difference I keep coming back to: when you’re raising money for a for-profit venture, you’re selling a return. There’s a model, a projection, a number that gets bigger over time, and the person across the table is buying into that math. When you’re raising money for a nonprofit, there’s no return to point to. You’re selling belief — belief that the problem is real, that the mission is worthwhile, that the people running it will do what they said. That’s a much harder thing to put a price on, and a much harder thing to ask someone to fund.

We’ve submitted more than fifty grant applications this year. Most of them went nowhere. At some point continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result stops being persistence and starts being denial, so we’re running a discovery process with fundraising consultants to help us understand what isn’t landing and why. That work is progressing, though we’re starting to apply what it has surfaced.

Along the way, I’ve heard a version of the same comment more than once: that from the outside, given how many initiatives we’re rolling out and how fast, it doesn’t look like we actually need funding. My honest response to that is — from your lips to God’s ears. I wish it were true. The reality is closer to the opposite. We keep launching programs because we’re still working out our product-market fit, not because we’ve got money to spare. Every new pilot is us testing whether an idea holds up, not evidence that the checking account does.

A lot of this wouldn’t be sustainable without the FRP alumni who’ve quietly become one of our biggest advantages. When a program needs hands — mentors, facilitators, whatever the gap of the moment happens to be — a meaningful number of them show up and fill it, unpaid, paying it forward because they went through the program themselves and believe in what it’s building for the next cohort. That’s not something you can budget for or replicate with a grant. It has to be earned, and they’ve given it to us anyway.

And then there’s the board member who likes to joke that she’s made it her cause célèbre to save me from myself. She’s only half joking. I keep pushing past reasonable limits to keep this vision moving, and she’s reminded me that telling me when that’s not sustainable is part of the job now — not to slow the work down, but to make sure I’m still standing to do it. Every organization that survives its founder’s stubbornness has someone like that. I’m lucky to have her.

She and the other board members are part of why we’re actively growing the board right now. One of the more useful things to come out of the fundraising consultant discovery was a piece of advice from a veteran in the field: to build a board that can actually fundraise, you look for affluence, influence, or confluence — people who can write the check themselves, people whose name opens doors, or people who sit at the intersection of networks we haven’t reached yet. What we’re really looking for, though, are people who believe in what we’re building enough to help carry it. If that’s you, or someone you know, I’d like to talk.

Help doesn’t only mean money, either. Sometimes it’s an introduction, an hour of mentoring, or someone willing to open a door we can’t open on our own. All of it counts.

Asking for help still doesn’t come naturally to me. But an organization can’t run on one person’s discomfort tolerance, and pretending otherwise isn’t discipline — it’s just another way of going without.

Chudi

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