Design Nonprofit Programs Around People, Not Grant Categories

by Jocelyn Chamba Barerra

People rarely experience challenges in neat categories. A family experiencing a loss may also be dealing with financial stress, childcare, housing concerns, mental health needs, transportation barriers or changes at work. Someone experiencing homelessness may also be navigating unemployment, health issues, substance use and family relationships. These needs don’t arrive one at a time, and they don’t stop at the boundaries of a nonprofit program. People are living one life — even when the systems around them are organized into separate pieces. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identifies economic stability, housing, transportation, healthcare, education and social and community context as interconnected factors that shape people’s well-being. And nonprofits are seeing the pressure firsthand: according to the Nonprofit Finance Fund’s 2025 State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey, 85% of organizations expected demand for their services to increase, while 36% ended 2024 with an operating deficit and 52% had three months or less of cash on hand. As needs grow more complex, organizations are being asked to respond within systems that were not necessarily designed for that complexity. 

That creates a fundamental tension for the nonprofit sector: People live whole lives, but funding often pays for pieces of them. Grants target specific populations and outcomes. Programs are designed around particular needs. Success is measured by what fits into a reporting system. The challenge for nonprofits isn’t simply how to deliver more services, but how to design experiences around real life, even when the funding structures supporting that work remain divided into categories. 

Designing Around People Instead of Programs

For many people, one of the first barriers to getting support is simply not knowing where to go or who to turn to. This is especially true when what someone needs doesn’t fit neatly into one service category. 

Grief offers a clear example. People arrive for support at very different points. Some are ready to talk about what happened; others need time. Some may come once and find what they need, while others return for months. Sometimes the most meaningful outcome isn’t a discrete service at all, but feeling less alone, finding community or knowing where to turn next. 

That illustrates a broader principle — nonprofits don’t have to solve every problem to make a difference. They can create connections, relationships and pathways that help people navigate what comes next. But doing that well requires flexibility to respond to the person in front of you rather than forcing every person into the same program pathway. 

Funding What Makes the Work Possible

The challenge is that flexibility can be difficult to fund and even harder to measure. 

Nonprofits are expected to demonstrate impact, and measurement matters. But for work involving mental health, grief, relationships or community connection, meaningful change does not always happen on a predictable timeline or show up in a single metric. A person may report feeling better after a program, but that self-reported outcome may not capture whether they feel less isolated, have built a support network or know where to turn months later. 

Funding can create a similar mismatch. The Nonprofit Finance Fund’s regional survey for Greater Philadelphia found that a majority of respondents identified flexible funding as a top need. A nonprofit lender and intermediary, Nonprofit Finance Fund notes that project-specific funding can limit organizations’ ability to maintain infrastructure, build administrative capacity, respond to emerging needs and sustain programs. Research from the Urban Institute has likewise documented how different reporting requirements and formats can create additional work for nonprofits and drain already limited resources. 

This is important because the infrastructure behind a program is part of the program. Staff, facilities, technology, utilities, insurance and administrative capacity may not make for compelling grant proposals, but without them, the work can’t happen. 

For funders and donors, that means supporting existing capacity, rather than creating a new program, can give a nonprofit more room to respond to what their communities actually need. Flexible funding allows nonprofits to adapt when circumstances change rather than continually reshaping their work to fit the next funding opportunity. 

Building for Real Life

People don’t experience their lives as a collection of grant categories. Their needs overlap, evolve and change over time. Nonprofits can’t solve every problem, but they can design their work with that reality in mind. 

That means creating connections between services, allowing people to enter support at different points, investing in relationships and community, and recognizing that meaningful outcomes may take longer than a grant cycle. It also means asking funders to consider whether the structures they create give nonprofits enough flexibility to respond to the people they actually serve. 

Accountability and measurement will always matter. But rather than making people’s experiences fit neatly into our systems, the goal should be to build funding, programs and measures that better reflect the complexity of their lives. 

People live whole lives, and our nonprofit systems should be designed to meet them there. 

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of NonProfit PRO.