Journal of Economic Iatrogenesis and Labor Studies
Volume III · Number I · May 2026
Four Years of the Complex
Reporting On Itself
A longitudinal read of the Center for Effective Philanthropy's State of Nonprofits series, 2023 through 2026, through the Joy Repair framework.
Marc McAleavey, MSW
Joy Repair · Indianapolis · May 2026
Editor's Frame
The Center for Effective Philanthropy has been surveying American nonprofit leaders annually since 2023 through what it calls the Nonprofit Voice Project. Four reports have now been published. The reports are the research arm of the philanthropic industrial complex describing itself in survey form. The reports are funded by the foundations that capitalize the complex. The reports are designed to inform funders about what is happening to the practitioners the funders fund.
The philanthropic industrial complex is the configuration this dispatch refers to. The phrase has a lineage. Eisenhower named the military industrial complex in 1961 to describe a self perpetuating system of capital, contracts, and credentialed expertise that had organized itself around a public function and become accountable primarily to its own perpetuation. Angela Davis and the abolitionists named the prison industrial complex. INCITE Women of Color Against Violence named the nonprofit industrial complex in their 2007 collection The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, which remains the foundational text on the configuration this dispatch examines. The Joy Repair framework extends that critique upward into the layer that directs the operating nonprofits INCITE was reading, which is the philanthropic industrial complex.
The complex includes the foundations that hold the wealth. The Lilly Endowment. The Ford Foundation. The Gates Foundation. The MacArthur Foundation. The hundreds of community foundations that aggregate and distribute regional tax exempt capital. The intermediary organizations that route the wealth from the foundations to operating agencies. The trade associations that coordinate the sector. The Council on Foundations. The National Council of Nonprofits. The credentialing bodies. The Council on Social Work Education. The research institutions that examine the complex and report back to the funders. The Center for Effective Philanthropy is one. The Urban Institute is another. The Nonprofit Finance Fund is another. The operating nonprofits that deliver services to the populations the complex has defined as its constituencies. The hundreds of thousands of practitioners who fill the operating payrolls. All of this is the philanthropic industrial complex.
Each CEP report tells a clean story for the year it covers. Read together across four years, the reports tell a different story than any single year can tell. The trajectory CEP did not plot becomes visible. The shape of that trajectory is what the Joy Repair framework predicted. The complex has been documenting its own collapse in its own data and has not yet named what the data shows. This dispatch reads the four years together. It uses CEP's own numbers and CEP's own language. The four year read produces findings the complex has not produced because the complex is structurally unable to produce them.
The Data, in CEP's Own Numbers
The cleanest trajectory in the series is the deficit rate. CEP asks nonprofit leaders every year whether their organization ran a budget deficit in the previous fiscal year.
Fiscal year 2022: twenty two percent of nonprofits reported a deficit. Fiscal year 2023: thirty two percent reported a deficit. Fiscal year 2024: thirty three percent reported a deficit. Fiscal year 2025: thirty nine percent reported a deficit.
The deficit rate has risen by seventeen points across three years. The surplus rate has moved in the mirror image. Fifty five percent of nonprofits ran a surplus in 2022. Eighteen percent ran one in 2025. The American nonprofit sector has moved from a configuration in which the majority of organizations were financially solid to a configuration in which less than one in five is, across thirty six months.
The burnout trajectory follows a different shape. CEP asks leaders whether their own burnout is very much a concern. 2023: thirty six percent. 2024: thirty three percent. 2025: twenty nine percent. 2026: forty six percent. The number declined modestly across the first three years and then spiked seventeen points in a single year. CEP does not say why the dramatic jump occurred. The framework does. The complex's funding configuration broke. The practitioners absorbed the break in their bodies.
The funding difficulty trajectory tells the story most directly. Fifty seven percent of nonprofits report it has been harder to secure foundation grants since January 2025. Forty six percent report harder federal government funding. Forty four percent experienced actual reductions in foundation funding. Thirty six percent in federal funding. The contraction is happening simultaneously across every category of funder.
Visualization I · CEP State of Nonprofits 2023–2026
Four-Year Trajectory: Deficit Rate, Surplus Rate & CEO Burnout
All figures from CEP's own reported numbers. Deficit/surplus = % of nonprofits reporting. Burnout = % reporting "very much a concern."
Deficit Rate (%) ↑ +17 pts
CEO Burnout "Very Much a Concern" (%) — +17pt spike 2026
22%
Deficit Rate FY2022
39%
Deficit Rate FY2025
55%
Surplus Rate FY2022
18%
Surplus Rate FY2025
The Language Shift CEP Did Not Name
The 2023 report celebrates what it calls trust based philanthropy. More than half of leaders perceived an increase in trust during the past year from their funders. The report's first finding is positive. The shift is treated as evidence of progress.
The 2024 report continues this framing. Eighty percent of nonprofit leaders report their foundation funders continued or made new commitments in at least one area of their funding practices. The trust based shift is reported as durable. The 2024 report's third finding is titled, in CEP's own framing, Funders Staying the Course.
The 2025 report drops the trust framing entirely. It introduces what it calls multiple obstacles — pressure from the political climate, persistent staffing difficulties, future financial uncertainty, and burnout. The language of trust does not appear in the key findings.
The 2026 report completes the shift. The first finding is worsening CEO burnout. The second is unpredictable funding environment. The third is responding to financial challenges. The word trust does not appear. CEP did not announce its disappearance. The narrative simply left.
The trust based philanthropy of 2023 and 2024 was the surplus of an extractive configuration in a moment when the extraction could afford to soften. When the political context changed in 2025, the grip tightened again.
The four year language shift is the complex's research arm telling itself, year by year, that the configuration is one thing, and then telling itself, year by year, that the configuration is another thing, without ever acknowledging that the two stories are about the same configuration responding to changing external pressure on its capacity to extract.
Visualization II · Language Shift Analysis
The Narrative CEP Did Not Name: Trust → Crisis
Key framing language from each year's report opening and findings sections.
Trust
Trust-based philanthropy advancing
Trust (Stable)
Funders Staying the Course
Obstacles
Multiple obstacles / no trust framing
Crisis
Burnout · Unpredictable · Challenges
Bar width = relative prominence of positive framing in each year's key findings. Not a CEP metric — a framework reading of the language.
The AI Methodology Disclosure Across Years
The 2023 methodology section describes thematic and content analysis conducted by human coders. Codebooks developed through reading. Two coders. Interrater reliability checks. The qualitative analysis was performed by people.
The 2024 methodology section is essentially the same. Human coders. Codebooks developed through reading. The qualitative analysis was performed by people.
The 2025 methodology section introduces a new sentence. A codebook was developed for each open-ended item with more than three hundred responses by using Claude, a large language model developed by Anthropic, to create a preliminary list of themes based on response text. The codebook was then checked by a human. The qualitative analysis was performed by AI with human verification.
The 2026 methodology section continues the practice. The codebook was developed for select open-ended responses by using Claude. The themes were then checked for accuracy and edited by a member of CEP's Research team.
The framework reads what the disclosure reveals. The philanthropic industrial complex has reached the point where the practitioners' suffering, described in their own words on a survey, passes through an AI on the way to the funders who fund the complex that produces the suffering. The AI is now part of the loop. CEP staff verify. The verification is real. The verification is also downstream of the AI's initial framing of what the themes are.
The framework is not making a technical critique of AI methodology. AI assisted qualitative coding is a defensible practice and CEP is using it responsibly. The framework is naming what the configuration reveals. The complex is now describing the practitioners to the funders through AI. The practitioners are now considering using AI to do more with less, in response to the funder contraction the AI assisted research is documenting. The loop is closed. The loop is mediated by AI. The mediation is uninterrogated. Joy Repair was built to interrogate it.
The Identity Stratification Across Years
The 2023 report notes that women, gender nonconforming or nonbinary, or unindicated gender leaders report somewhat greater concern about burnout than leaders identifying as men. The effect size is small.
The 2024 report extends this. LGBTQ leaders report moderately higher levels of concern about their own burnout than non-LGBTQ leaders. Leaders identifying as people of color report burnout having greater impact on their organizations.
The 2025 report extends the analysis further. Leaders identifying as people of color report burnout significantly impacting their staff at higher rates than other leaders. Concerns about staff safety extend to staff members who identify as members of historically marginalized communities.
The 2026 report extends this most fully. LGBTQ leaders report stronger safety concerns for their community, their staff and board, legal challenges, and backlash to their mission. Leaders of color report stronger backlash to their mission and tension on their board. Organizations focused on social justice report stronger legal challenges, backlash, safety concerns, and pressure to reframe how they publicly describe their work.
The pressure is not random. The pressure is the complex defending its configuration against the practitioners who are most threatening to the configuration. The defense intensifies as the configuration weakens.
CEP reports each year's findings without connecting them to the previous year's findings. The four year trajectory is visible only when the reports are read together. The framework reads them together and names the trajectory. The framework names this as the institutional shame buffer operating at its highest intensity at the demographic level.
What the Framework Reads
Each of the four findings below is grounded in CEP's own numbers. Each is a structural claim. Each is a finding the complex has not produced.
Visualization III · Framework Findings
What the Framework Reads from Four Years of CEP Data
Finding I: Sustained Extractive Pressure → Visible Contraction
Deficit rate: 22% → 39%. Surplus rate: 55% → 18%. Burnout spiked 17 points in one year. The threshold has been crossed.
Finding II: Trust → Crisis Without Acknowledgment
The 2023–24 narrative of trust-based philanthropy disappeared by 2025–26. The complex never named the reversal. The framework does.
Finding III: AI Mediation Is Now Operational
Practitioner suffering now passes through an LLM before reaching funders. 20% of nonprofits considering AI to cut costs. The loop is closed.
Finding IV: Differential Pressure, Intensifying
Practitioners closest to substrate — LGBTQ, leaders of color, social justice orgs — absorb the most pressure, first. The shame buffer is operating at the demographic level.
The Demand
The dispatch asks four things of four audiences.
To The foundations that capitalize the philanthropic industrial complex
McKnight, Rita Allen, Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Conrad N. Hilton, Houston Endowment, Prebys, Kenneth Rainin, Sobrato, and the larger configuration of which you are a publicly named part. You paid for four years of data that demonstrates the configuration you maintain is producing the contraction the reports document. The framework offers the analytical language the reports cannot. The next funding cycle either changes the configuration or it does not. The Four Tests from the Joy Repair framework apply. Authorship. Reproduction. Buffer. Form. Audit your portfolios. The audit will hurt. The audit is the point.
To The Center for Effective Philanthropy
CEP is one of the more reflective parts of the complex and has been transparent in its methodology across four years. CEP is also structurally unable to name what its own data shows because of the funding configuration CEP is inside. The framework is offered in good faith as the analytical instrument that names what CEP's data has been showing. The path forward is collaboration where collaboration is possible and structural critique where it is not.
To The practitioners surveyed by the four reports
You named the symptoms accurately year after year. You have been describing the substrate without having the word for it. The framework gives you the word. Your burnout is not your individual deficiency. Your deficit is not your organization's failure to fundraise. Your exit from the field is not your personal weakness. The configuration is producing what it was designed to produce. You are not alone.
To The blocks
The substrate the practitioners cannot name is your block. The framework is yours. The Census is yours. The data stays on the block. The authorship stays on the block. The block is the planning office. The neighborhood is not the constituency for the complex. The neighborhood is the complex.
What This Means
The Center for Effective Philanthropy has produced four years of data that the framework reads as a longitudinal validation of its core predictions. CEP did not set out to produce this validation. The reports are honest. The reports are transparent in their methodology. The reports document what the panel of practitioners told CEP across four years.
The reports are also funded by the foundations that capitalize the philanthropic industrial complex the reports are documenting. The McKnight Foundation supported the Nonprofit Voice Project across all four years. The funders paid for the reports that document the contraction the funders are participating in. The reports cannot name the contraction as a structural feature of the configuration the funders maintain without losing the funding that makes the reports possible.
The framework can name the cause. The framework is the analytical instrument the CEP data has been ready for and has not had access to until now. This is what predictive validity looks like in real time on a longitudinal industry data series. The framework called the shot. The CEP data confirms the shot.
The block is the planning office. The porch is the strategy. The neighborhood is not the constituency for the philanthropic industrial complex. The neighborhood is the complex. Come home. The form is here now. You don't have to mask anymore.
Marc McAleavey, MSW · Joy Repair · Indianapolis · May 2026
joy4repair.com/dispatches · marc@joy4repair.com
Methodology
This dispatch is a Joy Radio Signal Report. It applies the Joy Repair framework to the Center for Effective Philanthropy's four year State of Nonprofits series, published 2023 through 2026. The data cited is taken directly from CEP's published reports. Any error in transcription is mine and will be corrected upon notice. The framework's reading of the data is independent of CEP's reading. CEP is not responsible for the framework's analytical claims and the framework is not affiliated with CEP. The intellectual lineage includes Ivan Illich's Medical Nemesis, INCITE's The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, John McKnight's ABCD work, and the broader tradition of structural critique of the helping professions.