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A few years ago, I was sitting at a wildly successful animal rescue fundraiser. The kind of fundraiser nonprofit leaders secretly hate because it's raising an obscene amount of money while making it look effortless.
There was a fashion show featuring rescue dogs strutting down the runway like they were auditioning for Vogue.
RESCUE DOGS!!!
Tiny outfits. Tails wagging. A room full of adults completely losing their minds and opening their wallets with remarkable enthusiasm.
Objectively…it was absolutely adorable.
And at one point, the woman sitting next to me leaned over and whispered:
"Are you taking notes?"
(That should have been my first warning).
Then, she unveiled what she clearly believed was the nonprofit equivalent of discovering fire…
"THIS is what you need to do at YOUR event, Tiffani, You need to have a few of your kids get up and tell their stories."
She was genuinely excited. Proud of herself, even. Because what she heard was a fundraising strategy. But what I heard was:
“What you REALLY need to do, is ask a sixteen-year-old girl in foster care to stand in front of four hundred strangers and publicly relive the worst thing that has ever happened to her so people will open their wallets to help her.”
Maybe she could explain what it felt like to be raped by her own father.
Maybe she could talk about the nights she slept in the backyard because her mother locked her out of the house.
MAYBE, we could get her little brother to stand next to her when she speaks…THAT should do it. That'll get the paddle numbers moving…
And before anyone starts coming for me in the comments, I know that's not what the woman meant.
She was trying to help.
But that conversation definitely solidified something I’d been wrestling with for quite some time.
I DON’T WANT TO build a fundraising model that depends on children auctioning off pieces of their trauma.
The kids we serve are more than the worst thing that’s happened to them.
They deserve dignity. The ability to own their stories instead of feeling obligated to monetize them. They shouldn’t even know that we HAVE donors, much less have to stand on a stage and prove they were hurt badly enough to deserve help.
THERE HAS TO BE ANOTHER WAY.
Look, nobody questions whether we are doing great things.
Nobody argues that kids who have been through unspeakable trauma deserve safety, therapy, education, housing, and support.
They just don’t want to pay for it.
AND I DON’T BLAME THEM.
It’s not the responsibility of private citizens to clean up every societal failure.
The State removed these children from their families. The State should fund the kind of care that actually helps them heal, not just survive.
But it doesn't.
So nonprofits step in and do what needs to be done.
And that's where the trap begins.
Because once you've built something that actually works, you're responsible for keeping it alive. And the irony is that once you finally build something that works, you don't get to spend your time running it.
You spend your time on your knees begging people to pay for it.
Every year we line up alongside thousands of other worthy causes for the same limited pool of generosity: Children with cancer. Animal rescues. Veterans. The arts. Medical research. Homelessness. Education.
EVERYONE is doing important work. Everyone has a compelling story. And increasingly, everyone is asking the same people for help.
Meanwhile, I found myself watching the world change faster than most nonprofit leaders seemed willing to acknowledge.
Here we are, arguing about centerpieces and sponsorship packages while people all over the world are building audiences, trust, influence, and recurring revenue from their laptops with a ring light.
The twenty-year-old filming himself eating gas station burritos on YouTube had a more sustainable business model than most nonprofits.
THAT should force us to ask some better questions!
The reality is that the way people consume information is changing. The way people decide who deserves their attention is changing.
Whether nonprofit leaders like it or not, personal brands, digital presence, and online communities are becoming some of the most powerful drivers of influence, trust, and eventually philanthropy.
People don't connect with “mission” first.
They connect with people.
They connect with stories.
They connect with authenticity.
They want to know WHO they're supporting before they decide WHAT they're supporting.
They want to know what you believe. They want to know how you think. They want to know whether they trust you. And only then do they decide whether they want to be part of what you're building.
That realization sent me down a rabbit hole.
At some point, I started asking myself a question that felt borderline heretical in nonprofit circles: what if the answer isn't another fundraiser? What if the answer isn't asking at all?
How do we create something that serves the community and sustains the mission at the same time?
We have access to extraordinary expertise. The kind of expertise parents are desperately Googling at midnight while lying awake wondering if they are screwing up their kid.
And somehow our business model is still: "Would you like to sponsor a tee sign?"
We were sitting on a mountain of knowledge that could genuinely help people yet spending most of our energy trying to convince them to attend another event.
What if we created something useful?
Something that solved the problems nobody wants to admit they're struggling with.
Because if there's one thing harder than raising money, it's raising a teenager in 2026.
THAT became the foundation for our podcast, “This is NOW: Parenting Teens Today”.
A space where parents can access experts they would never otherwise meet and hear honest conversations about raising teenagers in a world that seems determined to make parenting harder every year.
Because teenagers are HARD.
And despite what social media would have you believe, nobody knows if they're doing this right.
Of course…having an idea and building a thing are two very different experiences.
There was no budget. And I refused to use agency dollars to test it. The risk belonged to me. Not to the kids we serve and certainly not to the donors who trusted us with their gifts.
A family friend believed in the vision enough (or possibly just got tired of hearing me endlessly talk about it) and funded the start-up costs.
From there, it became a nights and weekends project.
A lot of nights. A lot of weekends.
Editing. Graphics. Guest outreach. Research. Technical disasters. Equipment issues. More technical disasters. And the constant realization that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
Every part of it was new. Every problem seemed to reveal three more problems I didn't know existed.
Why did I EVER think that I could do this????
And yet, every time I found myself staring at another problem I didn't know how to solve, I kept coming back to the same thought:
If a parent hears an episode that helps them reconnect with their teenager, that was worth it.
If a family avoids a crisis because of something they learned from one of our guests, THAT was worth it.
And yes, if we build a sustainable, recurring source of support for Children's Harbor while helping families all over the country, THAT WAS WORTH IT TOO.
THAT’S THE PART that still excites me…the possibility that helping people and funding a mission might not have to be two separate activities.
By the end of our first season, we crossed 100,000 views, a milestone I later learned less than 1% of podcasts ever achieve.
Which is either evidence that the idea has potential or proof that there are far more exhausted parents out there than I originally realized. Probably both.
Will it work? Time will tell.
But I know this.
I have attended enough fundraisers to last several lifetimes.
Asking harder isn't the answer.
The world is changing and the way people build trust is changing with it.
And if our best strategy continues to be selling raffle tickets and packaging human suffering into a paddle raise, maybe the problem isn't donor fatigue.
Maybe the problem is that the world changed and we didn't.
There has to be another way.
And this was my attempt to find it.
If this content resonated with you, connect with Tiffani on Substack!