During the years I led a nonprofit, when a funder suggested “collaboration”, my gut reaction was to roll my eyes. This is not super helpful, I realize. As I scrambled to keep up with the demands on the organization, collaboration was an effort I often lacked the resources and energy to support. And when a funder required collaboration, it was a reminder of the strings attached to the funding – strings that sometimes created mission drift I could not afford.When I imagine collaborating with and among the Kinship Fund’s nonprofit partners, an important step is to examine my own expectations. I often talk about our practice of interrogating our philanthropic practices. For us, that means before (and frankly sometimes in the middle) we start a

The pressures on nonprofit organizations have never been greater. Shrinking funding.Rising demand for services.Staff pushed past the point of exhaustion. And at the center of it all: leaders who are expected to hold everything together while quietly coming apart. I know this because I lived it. Leading a nonprofit taught me that an unhealthy leader cannot build a healthy organization — no matter how much they care, how hard they work, or how worthy the mission. That lesson shapes everything we do at the Kinship Fund. Wellbeing isn’t a program we offer our nonprofit partners — it’s embedded in how we operate. We provide multi-year, unrestricted funding because we believe that leaders shouldn’t spend their limited energy jumping through annual grant hoops or squeezing their

October 10, 2025 At The Kinship Fund, we’re working to change the way philanthropy operates. Too often, funders set the terms and nonprofits are left to fit themselves into rigid boxes. We believe in something different: trust-based philanthropy that centers relationships, transparency and true partnership through unrestricted multi-year funding and support beyond the check. That’s why we’re so interested in the work of UpMetrics, a social impact organization that helps nonprofits and funders use data to tell their stories, learn from each other and build stronger collaborations. Together, we share a belief that when philanthropy shifts from transactional to relational, communities become more resilient. In this conversation, The Kinship Fund sits down with Stephen Minix, Vice President of Community at UpMetrics, to talk about collaboration