Twenty-two years of incorporation documents. More than two decades of watching human services agencies navigate the unexpected — recessions, policy reversals, pandemic-era funding surges followed by sharp contractions, and now a federal funding environment that has left even well-run agencies uncertain about what comes next.
But the story starts earlier than 2003. FAMCare was conceived in 1998, when a group of child welfare agencies in Missouri went looking for software that could handle the complexity of their work and came up empty. They built what didn’t exist. That origin, built from the field, for the field, has shaped how we’ve worked alongside agencies ever since.
After all of it, the question we hear most often right now is some version of this: Will we be okay?
We can’t answer that for any specific agency. But we can tell you what we’ve seen. And what we’ve seen across more than two decades is that survival isn’t random. It follows patterns. The agencies that come through intact, sometimes stronger, tend to share a recognizable set of characteristics. The ones that don’t tend to share a different set.
Here’s what those patterns look like.
What do the agencies that survive every funding crisis have in common?
They don’t panic because they’ve already thought about the scenarios.
The agencies that handle funding disruption most steadily aren’t the ones with the biggest reserves or the most powerful board connections. They’re the ones where leadership has already asked the hard questions before the pressure arrives.
What happens if our largest federal grant doesn’t renew? What’s our 90-day plan? Our 180-day plan? Which programs are protected and which are at risk? What would we need to show a new funder to bring them in quickly?
These aren’t comfortable questions. Most leadership teams avoid them because asking feels like manifesting the crisis. But the agencies that have done the thinking, even informally, respond to disruption with clarity rather than paralysis. They already know the answers. They just hoped they’d never need them.
What happened to human services agencies during the 2008 recession?
The pattern was instructive and it’s relevant now.
Research on that period shows that government grants and corporate donations declined significantly during the recession years, while individual donor relationships proved far more resilient. Common Good Vermont the agencies that had spent years building individual donor bases and foundation relationships alongside their government contracts had buffers. The ones that were heavily concentrated in federal and state funding felt the cuts immediately and directly.
What made it worse was the compounding effect many nonprofits hadn’t fully recovered from the Great Recession when COVID hit, leaving the least diversified agencies facing a second major disruption without having rebuilt their reserves from the first. National Council of Nonprofits
The lesson wasn’t that government funding is bad. It’s that concentration in any single source; government, foundation, individual, creates fragility. Diversity creates resilience.
What do agencies that don’t survive have in common?
Usually, one of three things and often all three together.
First, they were too concentrated. One funder, one program, one revenue stream carrying too much weight. When that source shifted, there was nothing to absorb the impact.
Second, their data couldn’t tell the story. When funders asked hard questions about outcomes, about impact, about whether the investment was working…the agency couldn’t answer with confidence. Not because the work wasn’t good. Because the reporting infrastructure wasn’t built to produce defensible answers quickly. Doubt entered the room, and it changed the renewal conversation.
Third, they waited too long to adapt. The signals were there a funder shifting priorities, a policy change on the horizon, a renewal conversation that felt slightly different. But the response was to hope rather than act. By the time the crisis was undeniable, the options had narrowed significantly.
What does it mean to have defensible data and why does it matter during a funding crisis?
When a major funder pauses, reduces, or shifts funding, agencies face an immediate test. Can you quickly demonstrate your impact to a different audience, a new foundation, a state agency, an individual donor who wants to step in? Can you pull outcome data that tells a coherent story under scrutiny?
Agencies with structured reporting systems built on real-time data can do this. They don’t need weeks of reconciliation. The story is already in the system, consistent, traceable, defensible. As sector leaders have observed in the current environment, mission alone isn’t enough to ensure impact. Running a resilient agency requires the same rigor and discipline as running a well-managed organization. United Way
Agencies that have been assembling reports manually, pulling from spreadsheets, reconciling inconsistencies before every deadline, face a different situation. When a new audience asks different questions than the previous funder asked, the system can’t always answer them. That gap is where funding confidence erodes.
The Reporting Risk Audit was built specifically to help agencies see this gap before a crisis exposes it. It takes three minutes and gives leadership a clear picture of where the reporting infrastructure is solid and where it’s fragile.
Is your agency’s reporting built for today’s funding environment? Take 3 minutes to find out. The Reporting Risk Audit helps executive leaders identify structural vulnerabilities before a funder or auditor does. → See where your agency stands before someone else does.
Why Defensible Data Matters During a Funding Crisis
This is the pattern we find most worth paying attention to because it’s genuinely counterintuitive.
Some agencies come through funding disruption not just intact but in a better position than before. They’ve added funding sources, deepened funder relationships, and built internal systems that are more rigorous than what they had going in.
What distinguishes them is that they treated the crisis as a forcing function for things they knew they needed to do anyway. The diversification they’d been putting off. The reporting infrastructure upgrade that felt expensive. The board conversation about funding risk that felt premature.
The crisis removed the excuse not to do those things. And the agencies that moved on them, even partially, even imperfectly, came out with something they didn’t have going in: a more resilient operation.
What does the current moment look like compared to previous funding disruptions?
Different in pace. Similar in pattern.
The 2008 recession played out over years, a slow erosion of government budgets, gradual cuts, a grinding recovery. The current federal funding uncertainty is moving faster and with less predictability. Agencies that might have had 12 to 18 months to adjust in 2008 may have significantly less runway now.
That pace changes the calculus on timing. The agencies that are asking the hard strategic questions today about concentration, about reporting, about what a new funder would need to see, are buying themselves options. The ones waiting for certainty before acting may find the window shorter than expected.
After 25 years, that timing difference is the one thing I’d most want every executive director to internalize.
Where to start
If this post has raised questions about your own agency’s funding strategy start with the audit we described in last week’s post: When Did Your Agency Last Audit Its Own Funding Strategy?
If you want to understand where your reporting infrastructure stands before the next funder conversation, the Reporting Maturity Model for Human Services gives you a clear framework for seeing where you are and what moving forward looks like.
And if you want to go deeper on the funding diversification question, the Funding Risk Series covers the reporting side of that equation in detail.
The agencies that survive and emerge stronger, aren’t the ones that got lucky. They’re the ones that looked clearly at their situation and made deliberate choices while they still had room to choose.
Twenty-five years tells us that much is consistent, regardless of what’s happening in Washington.
Most agencies don’t discover their reporting gaps until a funder or auditor does. The Reporting Risk Audit takes 3 minutes and gives you clarity before that conversation happens. → Take the Reporting Risk Audit