What Grows After the Fire

I have always been inspired by nature. Whether it was as a nerdy and precocious kid who answered any adult who asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up with "An Entomologist," to then be met with their reactions that were a mix of puzzlement and the laughter they were trying to suppress.

As a kid, I would stare for hours at my ant farm, watching how the colony would move, collaborate, and build things together. Out in the wild, I would watch how they interacted with each other and with the world, looking for food, responding to crises, and adapting to changes in their environment.

I didn't end up studying entomology. Instead, I found myself drawn to how human beings understand themselves and each other, and what it actually takes to collaborate in evolving the systems that sustain us.

In the early 2010s, as a board member of the Whidbey Institute, a transformational retreat center for social impact leaders and thriving communities, I first encountered the idea of biomimicry, which is the practice of looking to nature's time-tested patterns and strategies to solve human challenges. It felt like everything clicked together in an instant. Ever since then, it has been a lens I see the world through, drawing inspiration from natural systems and what they can teach us about designing for connection, balance, and resilience.

We can learn a lot from nature in this moment; the way it evolves, moves resources to where they are needed, and finds ways to adapt in the midst of crises.

We just lived through a year full of shocks and also one filled with confusion and an alarming lack of coordination. The first year of the second Trump administration was staggering in its impact. Roughly $425 billion in federal funds have been frozen or canceled across health care, education, the arts, and other sectors. One in three community-serving nonprofits lost government funding in early 2025. At least 20,000 nonprofit jobs have disappeared since Inauguration Day 2025, and the full extent of the losses won't be known for many more months.

A lot has burned, and a lot more is still burning.

The question is, what is going to emerge after all the chaos?

Enter the morel.

Morel mushrooms are among the most prized and elusive fungi in North American forests. What makes them remarkable is that certain species of morels fruit only after wildfire. Their mycelium, the vast, threadlike network that lives underground, intertwined with tree roots, can lie dormant for up to fifty years, waiting. When fire sweeps through and burns everything on the forest floor to ash, the morels emerge, growing across the scorched landscape in numbers that wouldn't have been possible without the wildfire.

But here's the part that matters most for our purposes: the morels don't just emerge because of the destruction. They emerge because of the underground infrastructure that was already in place. The hidden, relational network woven quietly through the root systems of trees over decades is what makes the post-fire mushrooms possible. Without it, there is just ash.

This is exactly where the social impact sector finds itself right now.

A lot has burned in 2025. And a lot more is still burning. But underneath the surface, something is happening. The relational infrastructure that practitioners have been building quietly, often without adequate funding or recognition, is beginning to bear fruit precisely because it was there before the fire came through.

The signs of emergence are real and growing.

Nonprofits are finding each other. The appetite for mergers and strategic consolidation has surged as organizations recognize that they may be stronger together than scrambling separately. Across the country, cross-sector coalitions are forming in cities to coordinate responses that no single organization could mount alone.

Some foundations are moving money in ways they haven't before. Foundations like Scherman, Weissberg, and Freedom Together "doubled their minimum payout to roughly ten percent." MacArthur increased to six percent. Marguerite Casey Foundation increased its 2025 grantmaking to five times its usual level. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Skoll Foundation launched a $25 million emergency fund and is actively helping grantees to explore mergers, strategic pivots, and alternative revenue models. A Public Media Bridge Fund backed by Ford, Knight, MacArthur, Robert Wood Johnson, and Schmidt Family foundations is not just providing grants but advisory services to help organizations share resources, collaborate, and potentially merge. Thirty percent of foundations increased their payouts beyond what they had originally planned for 2025, and sixty-four percent provided emergency or rapid response grants to nonprofits in crisis.

I share these examples because they are genuinely encouraging. But they are the exception, not the norm. Seventy percent of foundations did not increase their payouts last year. And even among those that did, much of the response was reactive and fragmented; emergency grants here, rapid-response funds there, rather than the kind of coordinated infrastructure investment this moment demands. That fragmentation isn't a failure of individual funders. It's a symptom of the very problem I've been describing: we haven't built the relational infrastructure that would make a more coordinated response possible.

And yet something more subtle, and I would argue more important, is also shifting. Emergency funding is starting to evolve from crisis response toward longer-term resilience. Funders are beginning to ask not just "how do we stop the bleeding?" but "how do we build the kind of infrastructure that means we're not starting from scratch next time?"

None of this is happening by accident. It's happening because somewhere, someone invested in the mycelium. Someone funded a learning community that built the trusted relationships that made a rapid coordination call possible. Someone designed a cohort program that created the shared vocabulary the two organizations needed to explore a merger. Someone held space for funders to learn alongside their grantees, so that when the moment demanded a different kind of response, the relational foundation was already there.

That's the lesson of the morel. The fruiting is dramatic and visible. But the real work happened underground, years before anyone could see it. And the organizations and movements that will emerge strongest from this moment will be the ones whose relational infrastructure was already woven into the soil.

We have a window right now. Funders are waking up. Practitioners are connecting across boundaries that used to feel fixed. Over the past six weeks, a series of posts I made about community infrastructure has led to dozens of amazing conversations I have gotten to have with community builders, network weavers, foundation officers, and cohort designers around the world.

The question is whether we'll invest in the mycelium now, so that the next time fire comes through, and it will, something extraordinary can emerge from the ash.

When things get tough, learning is more important than ever. It's time we acted like it.