My laptop screen glowed longer than it should have, a spreadsheet of company finances open in front of me. I felt it in my body before I saw it in the numbers—the grip in my chest, the way my breath caught as I scrolled.
It was January of last year, and I had carved out the morning for a familiar ritual: a routine check on the financial health of
Rosie, the nonprofit storytelling agency I’d spent eight years building. It was meant to steady me and set the tone for the year ahead.
But last January was different. Federal agencies were already signaling sweeping funding reviews. Civil rights organizations were receiving quiet warnings from legal counsel. Philanthropic partners paused conversations mid-sentence, waiting to see which issues, and which voices, might soon be deemed liabilities in a shifting political and legal landscape. The apartment was unusually still, my coffee beside me gone cold, as if bracing for what would come next.
Our work hadn’t always felt this fragile. From the beginning, it flourished because it was urgent and deeply resonant. And then the numbers landed.
The forecast showed my company was projected to bring in less than half of what it had the year before. There was no gradual decline, no warning curve—just the sudden knowledge that the ground I’d been standing on was gone.
Across the nonprofit sector, a pattern emerged quickly. Threats to strip funding from organizations working on civil rights, immigration, reproductive justice, LGBTQ+ lives, and racial equity arrived almost overnight. What followed was not chaos, but something more deliberate—a narrowing of what could be said publicly, to punish those who spoke up, and to quietly erase stories that needed to be told.
We felt the impact immediately. Contracts were stalled. Conversations froze. Decisions slipped into indefinite timelines. It was a structural chilling effect, felt first by organizations working on the issues people face every day.
But what hurt wasn’t only the financial hit. It was watching something I had built with care begin to fray. This wasn’t just a business—it was my life. The possibility that all of it could disappear settled into a deep ache.
I had prepared for this turn, even as I hoped it wouldn’t arrive. I ran numbers, set money aside, tightened expenses, and cut my own salary first to protect my team of six people. The planning didn’t bring relief. It introduced a steady anxiety shaped by the knowledge that this wasn’t only about me. Other people’s livelihoods, and my children’s stability so soon after my divorce, were tied to what happened next.
Beneath the financial strain was a quieter truth: I was carrying this alone. There was no partner whose income could steady us when work slowed, no one to share the weight when everything became heavy. The responsibility lived with me. It was frightening.
As everything around me began to fall away, my mind scattered. Even with preparation, I raced through contingencies, trying to map every possible way to keep our lives intact. Where could I cut back? What could I do to keep us steady? The questions multiplied, each driven by the same instinct to protect and survive.
In that spiral, my focus narrowed to damage control. But holding my own fear alongside what I was witnessing more broadly, something else came into view. The pressure to stay silent—to retreat, soften language, or make myself smaller—was not accidental. And the answer, I realized, might not be to flee or contort myself into safety, but to trust what I knew and stay.
Over that year, we listened more deeply and became clearer about what was essential, and more creative in how we moved forward. We continued telling stories many institutions were quietly backing away from, even as the risks increased. A year later, my business is smaller, but healthy. Revenue has rebounded, and a sharper sense of what is needed—and what we can offer—has carried our work further than we could have planned, into new partnerships, deeper collaborations, and spaces we would have never reached before. It became clear that when people refuse to disappear, the good work doesn’t just survive—it grows beyond what we imagined.
Moments like this have a way of stripping leadership down to its essentials. It isn’t about keeping up appearances or keeping things afloat—it’s about bravery: the willingness to stay visible, to tell the truth, and to hold steady in our values when fear is doing its best to scatter us.
Adrianne WrightFounder and CEO, RosieThe Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’
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