From Scarcity to Frugality: Reimagining Nonprofit Sustainability

A few weeks ago, I found myself reaching for a cookbook I've had for 20 years. More with Less—a Mennonite cookbook that extols the virtues of simple ingredients and stretching your dollar. As I flipped through its worn pages, I was transported back to my college days, when my partner and I lived on a few hundred dollars a month and were absolutely insufferable about it.

We made everything from scratch. Bread rose on our tiny counter. We hauled vegetables from the farmers market in the baskets of our fixed-gear bikes and brewed beer in our closet. It was like a sketch from Portlandia. But those memories? They're filled with abundance.

Here's what I need to name clearly before I go any further: that abundance was only possible because of privilege. We were two college-educated people with jobs and family safety nets. With whiteness and citizenship and able bodies and a thousand other advantages that meant our frugality was a choice. We - individually and collectively - cannot budget out of systemic poverty. You cannot frugal yourself free from oppression, from racism, from ableism, from the structural violence of capitalism that ensures some people will always have less so that others can have more. When I talk about frugality in this piece, I'm talking about it as a strategic choice available to those of us with enough privilege and resources to make choices at all.

That's what struck me as I held that cookbook again, pinching pennies in 2025 just like I did in college. Even with so little money, we felt rich because we could. We were creative. We were intentional. We opted out of a consumer-driven lifestyle not because we had to, but because we chose to. And in that choice—that privilege of choice—there was liberation.

This reflection got me thinking about the nonprofit world I've spent my career in, and how desperately we need to reclaim that same sense of intentional abundance. Not as a way to excuse inadequate funding or to romanticize scarcity, but as a framework for the organizations that do have resources to steward them differently.

The Language We've Inherited

"Scarcity mindset" has become nonprofit consulting shorthand for everything that's wrong with how organizations approach their work. Financial educators and thought leaders throw the term around freely: You just need to shift from scarcity to abundance! Think bigger! Believe in growth!

But here's what bothers me about that framing: it places the burden of transformation on individual mindset while ignoring the very real systemic constraints nonprofits face. We can't positive-think our way out of inadequate overhead funding. We can't manifest better donor retention rates. And we certainly can't "abundance mindset" our way through a recession that's hitting the social sector particularly hard.

The definition is technically correct—a scarcity mindset is a belief system where you consistently feel there's never enough of a key resource, leading to fear and focus on what could go wrong. But when we tell nonprofit leaders they just need to "shift their mindset," we're essentially gaslighting them about very legitimate resource constraints.

To be absolutely clear: we cannot frugal our way out of systemic poverty or the failures of capitalism. I'm not here to suggest budget cuts as a solution to underfunding, or to romanticize organizational deprivation.

But I am suggesting something different. Something I think could actually help.

Frugality as Strategic Choice

Frugality isn't scarcity. They're fundamentally different orientations.

Scarcity is fear-based, reactive, constrictive. It's the feeling that there will never be enough, that one wrong move will collapse everything, that survival depends on hoarding whatever resources you can grab.

Frugality, on the other hand, is intentional, value-driven, and surprisingly creative. It's about making strategic choices with the resources you have—not out of deprivation, but out of clarity about what matters most. It's the difference between clutching your budget in fear and stewarding your resources with purpose.

When my partner and I were living on almost nothing in college, we weren't in scarcity mode. We were privileged enough to choose that lifestyle, to see it as temporary, to find joy in the creativity it required. We were being frugal—making do with what we had in ways that felt empowering rather than limiting.

That's the energy I think nonprofits desperately need right now.

We're told constantly that we need to grow year over year. That success looks like increased budgets, expanded programs, higher headcounts. We've imported corporate America's primary objective—generating wealth for stakeholders—into mission-driven work. And that imported framework is killing us.

Because here's the truth capitalism doesn't want us to examine: sustainability doesn't need to mean growth. And growth for growth's sake is an incredibly erosive tenet of white supremacy culture that has no place in our work.

What Frugal Nonprofit Leadership Looks Like

If we know our budgets can't grow—and in fact might contract—what becomes possible when we shift from scarcity panic to frugal pragmatism?

Being Creative with What You Have

Frugality demands creativity. It asks: given these actual resources, what's the most interesting thing we can do?This might mean exploring fractional staffing models where expertise is shared across organizations. It might mean rethinking the role of your board from fundraising engines to strategic partners who contribute skills rather than just dollars. It could mean leveraging better tools that automate what doesn't need human touch, freeing staff for relationship-driven work that actually matters.

I've seen organizations get incredibly inventive with paid internship programs that build the next generation of nonprofit leaders while meeting immediate capacity needs. I've watched coalitions form where three organizations share a development director instead of each trying to fund that role independently.

These aren't compromise solutions. They're often better than what fully-resourced organizations are doing, precisely because constraint forced creativity.

Reusing and Streamlining What Already Exists

Too often, we're duplicating efforts across our organizations because we've never taken the time to map what we're actually doing. Different departments create their own impact measurement systems. Multiple staff members maintain separate donor databases. Programs operate in silos, each reinventing wheels the organization has already invented.

Frugal thinking asks: where can we reuse, replicate, and streamline?

This isn't about forcing collaboration for collaboration's sake. It's about being pragmatic. If your education program has a fantastic curriculum framework, can your advocacy program adapt it rather than starting from scratch? If your events team has donor stewardship systems that work, can that become organizational infrastructure rather than tribal knowledge?

Breaking down silos isn't just good for culture—it's good stewardship of limited capacity.

Being Mercilessly Pragmatic About Money

Here's where frugality gets uncomfortable: it requires us to stop performing for our boards and funders.Far too often, we're projecting revenue to make people happy. We set ambitious fundraising goals because it feels more impressive than realistic ones. We craft budgets that stretch every dollar to its breaking point, then wonder why our staff are burned out and our programs are underwater.

Frugal leadership means getting really honest about financial projections. It means planning for the worst-case scenario while hoping for the best, rather than the reverse. It means saying "we can sustain this program with current funding, but expansion would require X additional dollars we don't have" instead of promising expansion and scrambling to make it work.

This pragmatism feels risky. What if donors don't want to fund "sustainability"? What if boards push back against "lack of growth"?

But here's what I've learned: the alternative—constant stretching without materials to fall back on—doesn't actually work. It burns out staff, degrades program quality, and ultimately serves no one. The illusion of growth isn't worth the reality of collapse.

Being Okay with What You Have (Knowing It's Not Forever)

This is perhaps the hardest shift, and the most important one.

Frugality invites us to find peace with our current reality while still working toward something different. It's not resignation—it's the opposite. It's choosing to stop measuring our worth against an impossible standard and instead asking what excellence looks like right now, with these resources, for these people.

I think about those college years often. We knew that lifestyle was temporary. We weren't going to brew beer in our closet forever. But we also didn't spend those years in anguish about what we couldn't afford. We found richness in what we had.

What would it mean for nonprofit leaders to do the same? To run a $500K organization with excellence rather than constantly apologizing that it's not $5 million? To serve 100 people deeply rather than performing metrics about reach and scale?

This doesn't mean giving up on sustainability or accepting inadequate funding as inevitable. It means refusing to let the gap between current reality and desired future steal our ability to do good work today.

The Freedom in Opting Out

When I reached for that cookbook,  I reconnected with a time that felt a whole lot simpler.  The background of my kids yelling about dinner, my dogs barking at the back door, the conference call in my headphones, the alerts from the Ring doorbell…they faded away just for a moment.  As I made my favorite bean dish for the first time in decades, cleaning out the fridge of a few old carrots and last nights’ leftovers, I felt a simple freedom. 

Freedom from the constant pressure to do more, be more, raise more. Freedom from metrics that measure everything except what actually matters. Freedom from the exhausting performance of perpetual growth.

The nonprofit sector is facing incredible challenges right now. Funding is contracting. Needs are expanding. Staff are exhausted. The work feels nearly impossible some days.

And into that reality, I want to offer this gentle provocation: what if the answer isn't figuring out how to grow despite these constraints, but rather learning to lead differently within them?

What if we stopped importing corporate capitalism's playbook and instead drew wisdom from communities who've always known how to make abundance from limited resources? What if we recognized that the constant push for "more" isn't neutral strategy, but rather the water we're swimming in—and we have permission to get out of the pool?

The Invitation

I'm not suggesting we accept inadequate funding or abandon advocacy for better nonprofit infrastructure. We absolutely need to keep pushing for overhead funding, multi-year grants, trust-based philanthropy, and all the systemic changes our sector desperately needs.

But while we're doing that advocacy work, we also need to lead the organizations we have right now. And I believe we can lead them with more creativity, more pragmatism, and more peace than we currently are.

We can examine where we're performing growth instead of practicing sustainability. We can get honest about what our budgets can actually support. We can break down the silos that waste our limited capacity. We can find new models that serve our missions better than tired assumptions about how things "should" work.

We can choose frugality over scarcity.

Not because we have to make do with less, but because intentional stewardship of what we have might actually be more liberating—and more effective—than the constant, exhausting reach for more.

Those homemade hamburger buns and bison burgers we ate in college? They were better than anything we could have bought. Not because poverty is noble or constraint is virtuous, but because when we got creative with what we had, we made something remarkable.

I think our sector can do the same.

And maybe, just maybe, in choosing frugality over the endless pursuit of growth, we'll rediscover what drew us to this work in the first place: not the bigness of our budgets, but the richness of our impact. Not the metrics we hit, but the lives we touch. Not the appearance of abundance, but the real thing.

That cookbook is back on my shelf now, dog-eared and stained. A reminder that sometimes the wisest path forward is also the simplest one. That creativity flourishes under constraint. That enough can actually be enough.

And that the revolution the nonprofit sector needs might not be about thinking bigger—it might be about thinking better.