Stop writing the nonprofit world’s obituary. We have work to do.

Nonprofit and foundation leaders are drowning in a relentless stream of signals about what to fear, what to fix, and what the sector’s demise looks like this week. 

Constant reminders of federal funding disruptions, the rise of AI, growing ideological divides, wealth inequality, and so much more are all around us and make it hard to focus.

Those are real crises, but we’re not doing the sector or the public any good by obsessing over them. Instead, I think it’s worth borrowing an idea from three prominent psychology researchers who suggest that in today’s attention economy, knowing what to pay attention to matters far less than knowing what to ignore. Low-quality information hijacks our attention by triggering curiosity, outrage, and fear — and the act of engaging with it, even critically, means we’ve lost some of our focus. To cope, the researchers suggest a strategy they call “critical ignoring,” and we can use a dose of this across the nonprofit world to protect our collective health and resilience and to regain the public trust. 

Here are three ways nonprofit and foundation executives can put this scholarly insight into practice:

Ignore the obituary for the sector.

The past 18 months have been objectively difficult. Federal funding disruptions that began in early 2025 sent shockwaves across the country. A 2026 Center for Effective Philanthropy report found that 36 percent of nonprofits experienced government funding disruptions — leading to staff reductions, suspended programs, and hiring freezes. The elimination of USAID, sweeping grant cancellations from many federal agencies, and the longest government shutdown in U.S. history compounded an already strained landscape. What’s more, the relationship between government and philanthropy, once uneasy but aligned in purpose, may be shifting toward an adversarial stance, as the Johnson Center, where I work, noted in our latest trends report.

These are real crises. They deserve attention, advocacy, and action. But this will not be the end of the nonprofit sector in America. The narrative that nonprofits are on the verge of collapse — that the sector is broken beyond repair — is itself a form of low-quality information that saps energy and erodes morale. Independent Sector’s 2026 trust survey found that nonprofits remain the most trusted institutions in America, outpacing government, business, and media. Fifty-six percent of Americans trust nonprofits to generally do what is right, compared with 17 percent who trust the federal government. Half of Americans believe that nonprofits are making things better in this country. 

The sector is under pressure. It is not in hospice. There is a meaningful difference, and conflating the two does real harm to the people doing the work.

Ignore the panic cycle around every policy announcement.

The current political environment generates an extraordinary volume of policy signals — executive orders, proposed budget cuts, regulatory shifts, and inflammatory rhetoric — at a pace that would exhaust even the most seasoned policy analyst. For nonprofit leaders, the temptation is to respond to every development as if it were a five-alarm fire. This is the organizational equivalent of what the “critical ignoring” researchers describe as attention hijacking: our cognitive resources are consumed before we can evaluate whether the threat is real.

Consider the proposed tax increases on private foundations contained in the 2025 tax bill (the most recent major example from the legislative side). The changes could have resulted in a 3 to 15 percent drop in foundation dollars reaching nonprofits, according to the Johnson Center’s own analysis. That’s a serious concern worth tracking. But it was one of dozens of proposed changes swirling through Congress last year. Nonprofit leaders who organize their strategic planning around each draft provision risk allowing the information environment to dictate the organization’s emotional state and priorities. 

A better approach is this: Rather than dwelling on the alarming headline, step away and verify. What is the actual legislative status? Who are the credible analysts tracking it? What do the organizations dedicated to policy advocacy — like the National Council of Nonprofits or the Nonprofit Alliance — say about the timeline and likelihood of implementation? 

Let the specialists do the specialized work, and let lobbyists or your national associations monitor the day-to-day news cycles. Trust them to alert you when direct action is needed. Redirect your attention to fulfilling your organization’s mission.

Ignore the provocateurs who want us fighting each other.

Bad-faith actors — whether political operatives, online provocateurs, or media figures — benefit when the sector turns inward and begins attacking itself. Debates over DEI language, the politicization of grant-making criteria, and the weaponization of terms like “woke” and “activist” are designed to consume our attention and fracture our coalitions.

This does not mean ignoring genuine internal conversations about equity, effectiveness, and accountability, which are essential. It does mean recognizing the difference between a conversation and a provocation. When DOGE canceled $100 million in affordable housing contracts after scanning nonprofit websites for diversity-related language, the intended effect was not efficiency. It was intimidation. The sector’s most powerful response is not to rewrite every mission statement in fear but to continue doing the work — transparently, competently, and in genuine partnership with the communities we serve, following the laws of our democracy.

Research conducted by the Johnson Center reinforces this: Americans’ confidence in nonprofits is highest when organizations are perceived as transparent, local, and mission driven. Trust erodes when organizations appear to be chasing political winds rather than serving their stated purpose. The best defense against manufactured controversy is demonstrated competence.

The scholars who developed the concept of critical ignoring argued that the approach should be taught in schools as a core competence of digital citizenship. I think it should also be practiced in boardrooms, staff meetings, and funder gatherings as a core competence for nonprofit organizational leadership.

The nonprofit sector’s attention is a finite and precious resource. Every hour spent doomscrolling through worst-case scenarios is an hour not spent strengthening programs, building relationships with donors, or listening to the communities we serve. Every reactive pivot away from strategy is a concession to the attention merchants and provocateurs who profit from our anxiety.

The challenges facing the sector are real and demand sustained, strategic engagement. But strategic engagement requires the discipline to choose what we will not engage with — to protect the cognitive and emotional resources that make good work possible. As William James wrote more than a century ago, the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. Today, the nonprofit sector could use a lot more of that wisdom.