Five Stories of Balance: What 250 Years of American Nonprofits Teach Us About Impermanence

When we tell the story of American democracy, we usually tell it as a story of movements and victories. A revolution. An abolition. A Civil Rights Act. Women’s suffrage. Marriage equality. We mark the moments when the pendulum swings and we declare progress.

But the real story—the one nonprofits have been living for 250 years—is messier. It’s not about winning. It’s about balancing. It’s about showing up in the space between extremes, knowing you’ll never permanently succeed, and doing the work anyway.

The Mosher Family: Recognizing and Acting on What Government Won’t  

In 1819, the Mosher family and their Quaker neighbors built something in Morrow County, OH, that the state refused to build: a network of safe passage for enslaved people seeking freedom. Underground routes ran through their county. Dozens of families risked fines and imprisonment to shelter fugitives—sometimes a dozen at a time.

But the real story—the one nonprofits have been living for 250 years—is messier. It’s not about winning. It’s about balancing. It’s about showing up in the space between extremes, knowing you’ll never fully succeed, and doing the work anyway.

But here’s the impermanent truth: people were often recaptured anyway. The system regularly failed. The Moshers’ maps and modest cabin couldn’t protect them. Yet the Moshers didn’t stop. After the passages, they built a new house in 1832, and kept going. Charles Mosher documented everything in a 1,000-page family manuscript to bear witness to what government would not acknowledge, what the market would not value, and what the law would not protect.

This is what nonprofit work really is: observing injustices that the dominant system denies, framing them as incompatible with human dignity, and acting despite knowing you cannot win completely. The Moshers knew slavery would not end because of their farm station. They did it anyway. That’s impermanence as commitment.

Hull House: The Danger of Grounding Too Rigidly

Jane Addams founded Hull House in 1889 to democratize access to culture, education, and civic participation. It was revolutionary. Settlement houses became the infrastructure through which immigrant communities—poor, working-class, often racialized people—gained footholds in American civic life.

But Hull House also embodied something else: the danger of grounding too tightly in one vision of what democracy should be.

Addams opposed unrestricted immigration. She supported eugenics. Hull House’s vision of “American” civic participation often meant assimilation: stripping immigrants of their own languages, traditions, and forms of knowledge in favor of a White, nationalist ideal of belonging. Ironically, the very institution designed to include marginalized people in civil society also worked to culturally erase them.

This is one of the nonprofit sector’s recurring failures: grounding so rigidly in our own vision of justice that we let go of the very communities we claim to serve. We become the corrective mechanism that over-corrects. We swing from one extreme (indifference to immigrant communities) to another (coercive assimilation).

Sarah Josepha Hale: When Women’s Rights Exclude Brown Women 

In nineteenth-century America, Sarah Josepha Hale wielded enormous power as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which had 150,000 subscribers and was widely read across the North and South. She advanced women’s education, published women writers, and founded institutions like the Seaman’s Aid Society. As the daughter of an American Revolutionary General and fundraiser for the Bunker Hill Memorial, she petitioned to proclaim Thanksgiving as a national holiday explicitly centered on women’s domestic labor and moral authority. In 1862, this was a radical claim that women’s work mattered enough to shape national culture.

But Thanksgiving, as Hale envisioned it, was a White woman’s holiday. It was built on the fetishization of Indigenous peoples and centered on a nationalist mythology that excluded women of color and immigrant women. She was an abolitionist, but her solution was to send Black people back to Africa. Her vision of women’s rights was grounded in the assumption that women’s proper sphere was domestic and moral, not political. When we celebrate what Hale, a working widow, achieved for women and families in terms of cultural influence and economic equality, we often disavow what she excluded.

This is impermanence in its most painful form: the recognition that even our victories are partial, that our focus on one community’s liberation often means the sacrifice of another’s.

Planned Parenthood: Sustaining Core Mission Through Transformation

Planned Parenthood was founded on a vision: that reproductive autonomy is essential to women’s freedom and dignity. That vision remains. But the organization has had to interrupt and transform its own assumptions repeatedly—about whom it was designed to serve, about the politics of abortion access, and about the limits of a clinical model divorced from broader justice work.

Planned Parenthood continues not because it has solved the issue of reproductive justice, but because it keeps reflecting on what it is not doing and what communities it is failing—and acting to adjust. It sustains its mission precisely by being willing to transform how it pursues and funds that mission.

This is the nonprofit sector at its best: repeating core commitments while interrupting and transforming the methods that no longer serve the mission.

Regional Theater: Artistic Vision Requires Economic Justice

The regional theater movement emerged in the 1960s as a democratic vision: that great art shouldn’t be confined to Broadway and coastal cities. That communities across America deserved access to world-class theater. That theater could be a civic institution, not just an entertainment commodity.

Fifty years later, regional theaters are collapsing. Not because the vision failed, but because the economic and political model was never sustainable. Artistic vision without economic justice leads to perpetual crisis at theaters like Victory Gardens in Chicago, which has struggled since 2020. Organizational structures that allow for abuse in the name of art eat their young, like Children’s Theatre of Minneapolis did for decades, only recently coming to terms with its abuse. Theater companies have had to let go of dreams of permanence and stability. Many are closing. Others are grounding in smaller, more sustainable models. Some, like Austin’s Rude Mechs, are challenging the very idea that a theater needs a building, a budget, and a season.

This is impermanence as reality: the recognition that even our most beautiful creations will not survive unchanged.

Nonprofits: Existing in the Paradox of Democratic Capitalism 

Here’s what 250 years of American nonprofits actually teaches us: philanthropy works in troubling, imperfect, but sometimes triumphant ways. Some generationally wealthy people are unexpectedly generous and open-minded, and a handful of social activists are rigid and selfish. Our relationship with each other is often a paradoxical, love-hate dynamic: We need them to supply the resources for our projects, they need us to assuage their guilt and give them purpose, but it’s hard to forget that the very existence of a donor class is at the root of the structural inequality nonprofits generally aim to ameliorate.

Capitalism, riddled with unfettered greed, creates immense wealth alongside immense suffering—by design. It doesn’t account for the people that the market deems unprofitable. The purpose of democracy is to elevate and empower voices otherwise left unheard and supply the basic needs otherwise unmet. And that’s why we must fight to maintain a dynamic and thriving nonprofit sector.

When a government system that barely provides a social safety net for its citizens fails (or refuses) to meet human need, nonprofits emerge. Ideally, we all work together for the betterment of all.

The Unending Work of Social Justice

This is where we need to be honest with each other: there is no permanent solution to inequality. There is no final victory for justice. The work is impermanent by definition.

This doesn’t mean the work is futile. It means the work is different from what we’ve been taught to expect. It’s not about reaching a destination. It’s about maintaining a balance.

The Moshers knew the Underground Railroad wouldn’t end slavery. Addams knew Hull House wouldn’t end poverty. Hale knew one holiday wouldn’t secure women’s rights. Regional theaters know their existence doesn’t solve the crisis of public memory and truth and culture.

They did the work anyway. They keep doing it anyway.

What the 250th Anniversary Demands

If we’re honest about what America’s 250 years have really been, we see not a story of progress but a story of balance, of perpetual correction, of impermanence as the fundamental condition of justice work. Perhaps what the nonprofit sector needs to offer the country right now is more immediate awareness of the actual daily struggles our constituents are going through. Not more certainty about what the “right” solution is, in terms of fidelity or impact or scalability, but sharing lived realities without the quick bite-sized solutions of fundraising rhetoric.

So, what do we need?

We need compassion. We need to honor the limitations of philanthropy and our ability to change human behavior, attitudes, and conditions. We need reflection. We need to cultivate an honest reckoning with where we’ve over-corrected, where we’ve excluded, where we’ve grounded too rigidly in our own vision and lost sight of the communities we claim to serve. We need commitment to each other’s welfare—including staff, volunteers, and yes, our donors—and centering wellbeing as the core of mission-based work. We need commitment to the person in front of us, to the communities we live in and we’re accountable to, to the essential work of maintaining balance when everything wants to swing to extremes.

For 250 years, the nonprofit sector has embodied an existential function in a democratic capitalistic society: the willingness to act knowing you won’t win completely. The willingness to ground in values while staying flexible about methods. The willingness to cull the wealth of individuals and the nation to help those who are not in power, control, or health. The willingness to let go of what doesn’t serve while holding tight to what matters most: We, the People.

The 250th anniversary should be a moment when we name this explicitly—not as failure, not as a minor charitable pastime, but as deep organizational wisdom. We should host inclusive spaces where complex and constructive conversations are held.

The pendulum will keep swinging. Extremes will keep emerging. The market will keep trying to privatize the public good. Government will keep failing to meet basic human need.

And American nonprofits—if we stay rooted in compassion, reflection, and commitment to each other and the whole of society—will keep showing up to maintain the balance. Not to win, or grow exponentially, but to keep democracy alive through the impermanence that defines it.

That’s the real American story. That’s something to celebrate on the 250th.