The Tide Pool
The resources of a seasoned consultant, built for the whole sector.
We're not another training program. We're a room where the sector's own knowledge finally has somewhere to go.
The knowledge already exists. We're building the room for it.
Most capacity building starts from the same assumption: organizations need to hire an expert to fundraise well. We start from a different one. The knowledge is already out there — in practitioners who've been doing this for decades, in funders who actually want to tell you what they're looking for, in the peer org down the street that figured something out and never had a venue to share it. The gap isn't expertise. It's a room.
So The Tide Pool isn't really a training program, even though it runs like one sometimes. It's a convener. We build the room, we hold it well, and we get out of the way.
No other national organization is doing fundraising-specific capacity building through a Community-Centric Fundraising, intersectional feminist, and anti-racist lens at a price point that doesn't require a grant just to attend. That's the gap we're building into.
You've stared down the blank LOI.
Executive directors doing their own grant writing at 11pm. Development staff who inherited a donor database and a prayer. Board members who said yes to the fundraising committee and immediately regretted it. Anyone who's stared down a blank LOI, or a major gift ask, or a board retreat agenda, and thought: I know this matters, I just don't know where to start — and I definitely can't afford a six-figure consultant to tell me.
Three ways we show up.
Lunch 'n Learns
Low-lift, ask-me-anything sessions built around whatever's actually coming up across our client work. Come on camera or off. Pay what you want, or nothing — it's free, and it always will be. (It does cost something to produce. Donate if you can.)
Cohorts
Six to eight weeks, built around one topic at a time — individual giving, grants, board fundraising. Every cohort opens with a practitioner panel and closes with a funder forum: not a networking event, the room you've been working toward. Sliding scale, always.
Convening & Partnerships
Roundtables, CCF chapter conversations, partnerships with organizations already doing adjacent work. The parts that don't fit neatly into a cohort schedule but matter just as much.
The ROI of Community Building
Tuesday, August 18th
11am CT/12pm ET
September’s Lunch ‘n Learn
You Know Why, Now Let’s Talk How: A Tactics Panel on Ethical Storytelling
Wednesday, September 16th 3:00 PM CST | Virtual
Ethical storytelling sounds simple until you're the one actually doing it. Writing the email. Sitting across from someone and asking them to talk about the hardest year of their life. Deciding, in real time, what belongs in the ask and what doesn't.
And your End of Year Giving campaign is coming whether you're ready or not. The stories are probably already in your files somewhere: in an inbox, a half-transcribed voice memo, a board member's aside you've been meaning to write down. What you're missing isn't the material. It's a plan for using it well.
So this month we're skipping the theory and going straight to tactics. Three people who think about ethical storytelling for a living are joining us to talk about what actually works: how you find the time when you don't have any, how you run an interview that doesn't feel extractive, how you get real consent, and what you do when someone says no. What holds up under a deadline, and what quietly falls apart.
Bring your EOY plans, sketched, stalled, or still just living in your head. And bring your questions — send them our way ahead of time and we'll put them to the panel.