TL;DR. I hear a lot of people talking about a big funding wave that is coming and that we need more ambitious organisations to use it. I agree. But I also think that money and people grow faster than the structure and the leadership can hold. So impact never reaches its full heights. I experienced it myself as a leader of a fast growing movement. Below you find what growth taught me, and five warning signs, each with a first step you can take right away.
A few months ago Aidan Alexander, Aaron Boddy and Ambitious Impact wrote that now might be the best time to start an animal charity. And Bentham's Bulldog said that philanthropy needs ambitious projects immediately. Looking at the numbers, Stray Dog Institute mentions $259.6 million in annual farmed animal advocacy spending in 2024, a raise of 30 percent compared to 2021. The EA Animal Welfare Fund has since grown from around $3 million to $10 million raised every year. Also, Vox says that giving to AI charities could eventually reach tens of billions of dollars per year.
Funders see the bottleneck too in organising capacity. The Animal Welfare Fund reserves its largest grants for organisations "with infrastructure prepared to effectively absorb multi-million dollar grants".
Of course not everyone sees that money yet. Some founders are still having a hard time finding sufficient funds. And if the wave comes this year or later, money will only help an organisation that can absorb it and build sustainable capacity.
It is about the people, and systems that are in place in order to channel the energy and resources that become available.
It matters for EA organisations that run national and city groups, student groups, advocacy organisations with volunteer networks, campaigns with local chapters, or field building initiatives. Often there is a small paid team with a large circle of volunteers or members around it.
I learned it the hard way. From the age of 28 I was a board member, and I burned out trying to do almost everything myself. It took me months to recover and come back. Then at 31, I became president of the movement reaching up to 13,000 members.
During high times we grew with about 10,000 new members in four months. It was crazy. We set up phone teams and ran them on coke and pizza evenings. Although we quickly put automated systems in place, we still wanted personal contact to welcome new members, and called every new individual. It only worked because so many volunteers jumped in.
Growth like that is a real gift and a challenge at the same time. Thousands of people arrive with energy and want to contribute, but if there is nothing to hold them, the energy fades away quickly. I have seen it many times. It is fairly easy to energize people, but making them stay is another thing.
What I learned from it was fairly simple. Working harder was not part of it. You have to build something that does not need you at the centre. Otherwise people will burn out, including yourself. Data shows that 95% of nonprofit leaders say they were concerned about staff burnout. And, about three quarters said it was affecting their mission (Center for Effective Philanthropy's State of Nonprofits 2024). 56.1% of executives who were leaving or planning to leave named burnout as a reason.
So growth without the capacity to hold it burns out the important people that you need in order to reach your mission and impact you want to see in the world.
I see three capacities needed at the same speed as the funding and the increase of people.
Direction, a mission and strategy people live. A mission only does its job when people feel it in their daily work, and a strategy to choose against. When every project clearly connects to something bigger, people can make good decisions without asking you first, because they know what it is all for. People want to be part of something bigger than themselves. If the mission and strategy only live on the website or paper, you don't have a group that belongs, that goes the extra mile and often performs projects that are not linked to the direction you set out.
Connection, shared leadership. An organisation that runs on one person is fragile. Shared leadership means other people carry real responsibility, including the hard conversations, and not only the tasks that are left over. Coaching leaders becomes more important than executing the work itself. The result? Work continues when you are away, people protect what they help lead, and your capacity can grow with the number of people instead of being capped by one calendar. But without clear agreements, shared leadership turns into endless consultation, where everyone is involved and nobody decides.
Structure, clarity about who decides what. Clarity lets people move without waiting for you. Who owns this? Who decides, also when we disagree? Who needs to be consulted, and who just needs to know? And what does good and quality work look like here? The important part is that you answer those questions together with the people doing the work during calm times, not top-down because people actually use the agreements they helped shape. If you did not put it in place properly, you will notice when times get hard or stressful. Then you see where the organization leaks.
And you need all three together. Because direction without structure and clarity leads to chaos rather than results. Structure without direction turns into slow processes, lack of flexibility, and bureaucracy. A shared leadership without direction or structure leads to a lot of meetings.
Growth also changes what the person at the top should need to do. You need a shift from doing to steering.
It starts with delegating. I think a lot of delegation fails because we treat everyone the same. Before you hand something over, look at skill and will: can this person do it, and do they want to? Someone with high will and little skill needs coaching. Someone with high skill but low will needs a conversation about what motivates them. Someone with both skill and will just needs a clear goal and autonomy.
As the organisation grows, your focus shifts again. You stop coaching every volunteer yourself and start coaching the people who lead others, like coordinators, chapter leads and team leads. That is where the capacity of your organisation grows without you. This is called the shared leadership model (as mentioned above).
A big bonus that I wished I knew before: let go of perfect.
I am quite a perfectionist and very results driven. Underneath it sits a strong sense of responsibility, and sometimes fear of not doing it right. That makes me wanted to reach 100 percent. But in an organisation that is simply not possible. Especially when you work with large groups of employees and volunteers. So if someone else does something at 70 to 80 percent of how you would have done it, ask yourself honestly whether the mission suffers, or only your need for control? This will give you a more honest picture of where to look.
Remind yourself: if everything has to be done your way, you end up with an organisation only you can run.
You do not need to be in fast growth to use these. Also when a new grant, a campaign or a recruitment push is coming, this may be useful to check beforehand.
Important decisions still come back to you. When you are offline you notice things stop fast. More money or more people will only make that bottleneck bigger. Two steps: 1.Sometimes you are still holding the decision because you are not sure someone else will do it well enough. Before you redesign anything, ask yourself: if this lands at 80 percent of how I would do it, does the mission actually suffer, or only my need for control? 2. Look at the decisions that landed on your desk in the last two weeks and pick one. Just to start. Then sit down with the person who could own it and agree together what they decide, what they bring back to you, and when you will look back on how it went together.
People cannot explain how their work connects to the whole. Ask three people from different teams why their project matters for the mission and how it connects to the strategy. If the answers drift apart, the direction is not clear enough. Do this: bring people together and let them connect their projects to the mission in their own words. If you notice the projects can't be linked to the direction you have a different problem and need to go back to the drawing table. Either the strategy is too vague, or people are filling the gap with their own projects under the label of freedom. Then you need to go back and check whether you are actually doing the things that feed the mission and the strategy.
Roles live in people's heads instead of in shared agreements. Two people both think they own the same thing. Or a volunteer lead and a staff member give opposite instructions. It often feels clear until friction shows it was not. That is where a lot of energy disappears: people fill the space that nobody defined. First step: sit down with the role holder and the people they work with most, and fill in together what this role owns, decides, passes on and shares. Then ask them what is missing.
Paid staff and volunteers start working against each other. Work gets redone, instructions clash, and nobody is sure who owns what. That does not always end in people leaving. Often it just becomes chaos, and everything costs more energy than it should. Capable volunteers go quiet, or they stay but stop taking real ownership. Next to that sits a second pattern: a few deeply dedicated people who do not leave. They take on more and more, until one of them drops out and nobody else knows how their work runs. There is no backup. The Do Good Institute found that 46.8% of nonprofit CEOs call recruiting enough volunteers a big problem, and keeping them is getting harder too: median volunteer retention dropped from 80% in 2003 to 70% in 2020 to 2021. Every person you lose, or burn out, has to be replaced, onboarded and trusted all over again. First step: Go back to the drawing table on what is paid work and what is volunteer work, and be transparent about that split. Then check the volunteer roles one by one: is every task clear, do they have a clear mandate, do they get real autonomy to execute, is there a feedback loop, and is there coaching so they feel supported? Last bonus question: do people feel belonging to the group, that their voice matters?
Your board asks how do we raise more? but never can we absorb more? You could, before the next big grant or recruitment push, take an hour with the people who will carry it. What new work and decisions will this create? Who will own them? Who coaches the people stepping up? And what will we stop doing?
So I think the posts from May and June are right. This moment needs people that build and we need more ambitious organizations. But organisations that make the most of it will be the ones that can hold what they attract. They have a mission everybody lives and makes choices from, built systems that enable people to step up other then only the top of the organization, and have clear agreements that people shape together.
So I am curious. If your organisation has grown fast, what broke first, and what helped you hold it together? And if growth is about to arrive, what worries you most?
I would love to read your story in the comments, or find me at EAGxBerlin (13 to 15 November).
Warm regards, Emmy
Founder Social Movement Lab
