Make Love Public · Cover Story
The Complex
Paid For
This Report.
The Report Says
They Are Killing Us.
Four years of CEP's State of Nonprofits series. Read by the framework. The data is worse than the complex says.
By Marc McAleavey
Founder, Make Love Public · Indianapolis · May 2026
Editor in Chief
Marc McAleavey
The Signal Integrator
He studies the signals. Finds the patterns. Holds the room together. Asks the next question.
Role: Synthesizes findings, curates the newsroom, protects the mission.
Evelyn Vale
The Analyst
Systems analysis, data patterns, public health, language drift, Human Dignity Forecasting
Latest: When a school system starts...
Isaiah Reed
The Witness
Field notes, memory, neighborhood life, grief, ordinary people
Latest: A neighborhood is not okay...
Carmen Saint
The Provocateur
Power critique, hypocrisy, philanthropy, participation theater, emotional extraction
Latest: The hearing is the eviction...
Eli Mercer
The Organizer
Organizing, local repair, mutual aid, infrastructure, rituals, implementation
Latest: In Oakland, neighbors are b...
Ana Sol
The Poet
Poetry, grief, beauty, longing, meaning, emotional weather, tenderness
Latest: A map for the people t...
June Bell
The Child
Wonder, absurdity, emotional truth, anti-performance, calling out the obvious
Latest: You cannot hold a repair c...
Lucien North
The Meta-Abolitionist
Deep systems, civilization patterns, emotional infrastructure, post-extraction futures
Latest: A lonely country cannot be...
We don't all agree.
That's the point.
Different lenses.
Stronger vision.
All signals.
All the time.
joy4repair.net
Editor's Frame
Philanthropy is the money laundering operation American corporations and their associated tax exempt vehicles built to convert extracted wealth into reputational cover. The configuration takes capital that was generated through labor exploitation, real estate, extractive industry, and financial engineering. The configuration parks the capital in foundations that receive tax exempt status from the public. The configuration distributes the interest on the parked capital back to the communities the original extraction came from, at a regulated minimum of five percent a year, with terms attached. The configuration calls this generosity. The configuration calls itself the nonprofit sector.
The Center for Effective Philanthropy is the research arm of this configuration. CEP studies what the configuration does to the people inside it. CEP publishes a report once a year called State of Nonprofits. They have now published four of these reports, in 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026. The reports are funded by the foundations that fund the configuration. The foundations are named on the inside cover. McKnight. Rita Allen. Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation. Conrad N. Hilton. Houston Endowment. Prebys. Kenneth Rainin. Sobrato. The configuration paid for the reports that document what the configuration does.
This piece reads the four reports together. The trajectory CEP did not plot becomes visible. The shape of that trajectory is what the Joy Repair framework predicted. The configuration has been documenting its own collapse in its own data for four years and has not yet named what the data shows. This piece names it.
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. Fiscal year 2024: thirty three percent. Fiscal year 2025: thirty nine percent.
The deficit rate has risen by seventeen points across three years. The surplus rate collapsed from fifty five percent to eighteen percent. The American nonprofit sector has moved from a configuration where the majority of organizations were financially solid to a configuration where less than one in five is — across thirty six months.
The burnout trajectory follows a different shape. 2023: thirty six percent of leaders say burnout is very much a concern. 2024: thirty three. 2025: twenty nine. 2026: forty six. The number declined modestly across the first three years and then spiked seventeen points in a single year. CEP calls it a dramatic jump. CEP does not say why. The framework does. The complex's funding configuration broke. The practitioners absorbed the break in their bodies.
Fifty seven percent of nonprofits report it has been harder to secure foundation grants since January 2025. Forty six percent harder on federal funding. Forty four percent experienced actual reductions in foundation funding. The contraction is simultaneous across every category of funder. The practitioners are absorbing the contraction with their burnout, their deficits, their exits.
Deficit Rate ↑ 22% → 39%
CEO Burnout — Spike 2026
55%
Surplus 2022
18%
Surplus 2025
22%
Deficit 2022
39%
Deficit 2025
This is what the configuration looks like when you watch it for four years. The numbers are one part. The language CEP uses about the numbers is the other.
The Language Shift They Didn't Name
The 2023 report celebrates what it calls trust based philanthropy. More than half of leaders perceived an increase in trust from their funders. The report's first finding is positive.
The 2024 report continues this. Eighty percent of nonprofit leaders report their foundation funders continued or made new commitments. 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. The 2026 report completes the shift. The first finding is worsening CEO burnout. The second is unpredictable funding environment. The word trust does not appear in either year's key findings. CEP did not announce its disappearance.
The trust based philanthropy of 2023 and 2024 was the surplus of an extractive configuration in a moment of political pressure the configuration could absorb. 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 it 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.
The complex has been telling itself a story. The data tells a different one. So does the methodology.
The AI Is In The Room
The 2023 and 2024 methodology sections describe thematic analysis conducted by human coders. Two coders. Interrater reliability checks. 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. The codebook was then checked by a human.
The 2026 section continues the practice. CEP disclosed the change transparently both years. That is to CEP's credit. CEP is one of the more reflective parts of the complex.
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 that connects practitioner to funder. The practitioner is not in the room when the themes are decided. The funder is not in the room. The AI is in the room. The 2024 CEP report documented that more than half of nonprofits were already using AI with more than ninety percent having no official policies. The 2026 report documents that twenty percent of nonprofits are now considering using AI specifically to reduce operational costs.
The complex is 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 AI is in the room. The funders are not in the room. The practitioners are not in the room. Who is the room for.
The Pressure Is Not Random
Each year's report shows differential impact. Each year it gets worse for the same people.
2023: Women and nonbinary leaders report somewhat greater concern about burnout than men. Effect size is small.
2024: LGBTQ leaders report moderately higher burnout concern. Leaders of color report greater organizational impact.
2025: Leaders of color report burnout significantly impacting their staff at higher rates. Safety concerns extend to historically marginalized staff.
2026: LGBTQ leaders report stronger safety concerns, legal challenges, backlash to mission. Leaders of color report stronger backlash and board tension. Social justice organizations report stronger legal challenges, pressure to reframe how they publicly describe their work.
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.
The framework names this as the institutional shame buffer operating at its highest intensity at the demographic level. The buffer absorbs structural harm by routing it onto the practitioners most identified with the substrate. The four year data shows the routing intensifying as the buffer is forced to work harder.
The pressure is not random. Here is what four years of data shows when the framework reads it.
What the Framework Reads
+17pts deficit
Finding I: Extractive Pressure → Contraction
The threshold is crossed. The sector is contracting under sustained pressure. The CEP data demonstrates it.
4 report shift
Finding II: Trust → Crisis, Unnamed
The complex told itself a different story each year without ever acknowledging the story changed. The framework names it.
Since 2025
Finding III: AI Is In The Loop Now
Practitioner suffering passes through an LLM before reaching funders. 20% of nonprofits consider AI to cut costs. The loop is closed.
4yrs documented
Finding IV: Differential Pressure, Intensifying
LGBTQ leaders, leaders of color, social justice orgs: absorbing the most, first. The shame buffer at the demographic level.
The Demand
To The foundations
McKnight, Rita Allen, Arthur M. Blank, Conrad N. Hilton, Houston Endowment, Prebys, Kenneth Rainin, Sobrato. You paid for four years of data that demonstrates the configuration you maintain is producing the contraction the reports document. The Four Tests apply. Authorship. Reproduction. Buffer. Form. Audit your portfolios. The audit will hurt. The audit is the point.
To CEP
You are one of the more reflective parts of the complex. You are also structurally unable to name what your own data shows. The framework is offered in good faith as the analytical instrument that names what your data has been showing.
To The practitioners surveyed
You named the symptoms accurately year after year. Your burnout is not your individual deficiency. Your deficit is not your failure to fundraise. Your exit is not your weakness. The configuration is producing what it was designed to produce. You are not alone. The framework is yours.
To The blocks
The substrate the practitioners cannot name is your block. The framework 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.
CEP has produced four years of data that document the philanthropic industrial complex approaching collapse. The data shows the trajectory clearly when the four reports are read together. The complex cannot read its own data this way because the complex is the configuration the data is documenting.
The funders paid for the reports. The reports document what the funders are doing. The funders are doing it on purpose. The configuration is operating as designed. This is what predictive validity looks like in real time on a longitudinal industry data series. The framework called the shot. The 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. The block has been waiting. So have we.
Marc McAleavey, MSW · Founder, Make Love Public · Indianapolis · May 2026
makelovepublic.com · joy4repair.com · marc@joy4repair.com