Camille Carter has a familiar lament in the nonprofit world.
Carter, president of the Madison Black Chamber of Commerce, a nonprofit that provides services to Black-owned businesses, has run out of federal grants and is looking for new funding sources to maintain its support of Black-owned businesses and Black entrepreneurs.
Having used a $3.6 million American Rescue Plan Act grant from the COVID era to build capacity, a lack of continuing federal support has placed the organization in a position where it has to pivot in order to sustain that capacity, Carter said.
At the moment, she said none of the chamber’s remaining employees are getting paid a salary or benefits as the organization tries to make do with modest annual membership dues from its roughly 200 members in southcentral Wisconsin.
“We are going to have to potentially get creative,” Carter said. “We currently have some funding to keep the chamber’s doors open and support basic programming. What we don’t have is the budget to support staffing for the organization and right now my No. 1 mission is to refund the organization.
“This work takes people,” she said. “It does not run on its own and in order to uplift people and to support them, we have to have the staff in order to do that.”
Thanks to a shift in federal priorities — including what Carter called an attack on diversity, equity and inclusion under President Donald Trump — her plight is familiar to many nonprofit organizations across the country.
They have experienced the cessation of contractually obligated federal funds for programming, stop-work orders, disruption to payment systems, threats of targeting nonprofits and uncertainty due to recent government shutdowns.
According to some nonprofit executives, the shift has caused significant disruption of existing funding and relationships between the federal government and state and local government and nonprofit partners.
Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, said in February ahead of Trump’s State of the Union address that nonprofits are strained but resilient as payment delays and funding pauses disrupt their operations.
Nonprofits depend on consistency, clarity and reliability in federal policy, but now they need to navigate a new landscape.
Shifting priorities
The policy shifts are reflected in a variety of executive orders, agency directives and legislation. Among the most controversial alterations are cuts in Medicaid spending, including decreases in eligibility and increases in administrative and work requirements for food assistance benefits and health care access.
The shifts keep coming. The most recent example was on March 26 when the Trump administration, which views diversity, equity and inclusion programs as racially discriminatory, issued an executive order prohibiting the practice of DEI in federal contracting (e.g., vendor agreements), including program participation and the deployment of a contracting entity’s resources.
The sheer number of changes has prompted the United Way of Dane County and Goodman Nonprofit Center (a project of the Madison Community Foundation) to partner with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies to collect and assess information on the policy changes and their anticipated effects.
Lauren Martin, senior director of community impact for the United Way of Dane County, said the purpose of the partnership is to help nonprofits understand and react to the changes.
Martin said the Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies website offers updated information so organizations can make contingency plans when there is a change from a specific funding source.
The partnership began with a survey of local nonprofit leaders and its analysis focuses on the following community areas: basic and household needs; heath care; education, child care and the arts; workforce and immigration; and civic health and participation.
“What we have heard and have been hearing since the beginning of last year is just the fear of loss of potential funding,” Martin said. “There was an actual loss of some funding in our community but there has been significant disruptions to that reliability of contractual relationships that the study found as well.
“And there is the ongoing uncertainty and work that has to be done once something is announced,” Martin said.
Since early 2025, there has been a steady drumbeat of alterations as the Trump-appointed Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE significantly altered funding to programs such as AmeriCorps and disrupted the payment system for programs like Head Start.
One local casualty of reduced AmeriCorps funding is the shuttering of long-standing elementary school Schools of Hope and high school Achievement Connections programs of the Madison Metropolitan School District and UWDC.
Starting in the 2026–27 school year, the organizations will try to provide student support by other means, and they cited reduced federal support of AmeriCorps, the independent U.S. agency through which they are funded, as the reason.
Also, the 43-day federal government shutdown in the fall delayed payments to 700,000 beneficiaries of Wisconsin’s FoodShare program until a federal judge ordered the payments released. The benefits are fully funded by the federal government as part of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
While FoodShare benefits are used at grocery stores, nonprofit organizations and food banks that distribute food for those in need would have been relied on more heavily in the absence of those payments.
“At the end of last year, when there were some potential changes to FoodShare, that was one direct place where changes were happening,” Martin said. “Individuals were looking for additional resources to plan to meet their needs but in general there’s also changes that are affecting nonprofits that are also affecting our communities.”
One adjustment the United Way made in response to this instability was extending its impact grants into a third year to support affected nonprofits — an approximately $5 million commitment, pending the results of its annual community campaign.
Mary Beth Collins, executive director of the Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies, said nonprofits should lean into collaborations.
“We’re seeing conversations happening with cross-sectors, potential activities and collaborations that can address some of these more specific policy shifts,” she said.
For example, regarding new work requirements for Medicaid, Collins said there are already conversations happening about how the nonprofit sector can work with public sector agencies and those that provide basic needs services to make sure people are getting the information they need to meet those work requirements.
“We will continue to update the (website) with further information because … it’s a fluid situation and we’re continuing to learn things about impacts and whether certain executive orders and other actions will even stick because some of them are being challenged (in court),” Collins said.
“It’s about working double time. It’s having to be more creative. It’s having to be more and more anticipatory about what is actually happening, and it is, as usual, being extremely dedicated and creative in that,” she said.
“It is a lot to ask of a sector that is often the last stop for our communities, especially those that are most vulnerable.”
Transition period
For the Madison Black Chamber and the services it provides local entrepreneurs, Carter said membership fees only covered 5 to 7% of its budget historically, so a restoration of grant funding would enable it to better serve minority businesses.
“Right now, we are retooling our budget,” Carter said, “and we’re still going to do our best to deliver on a lot of our promotional services that really elevate our businesses and help our businesses connect with their customers via some of our events, in particular.
“I imagine that the way that we’ve done them before will shift because it will require a great deal of financial resources to support those efforts,”
Carter said. “So, there will be some changes and some transitions. I just don’t know to what level at this point in time.”