Behind Closed Doors
Mission-driven organizations should be built with end dates, not forever dates.
Earlier this month, the Center for Strategic and International Studies convened The Futures Summit in Washington, DC. The keynote, delivered by Nick Checker, the State Department's Senior Bureau Official for Africa, laid out what the US administration's development model is now. Aid is out as the primary tool. Deals, investment, and trade are in. Ambassadors are being evaluated on commercial outcomes. Diplomatic visits are organized around business, not bilateral relationships.
At the same time, the OECD released preliminary data for 2025. Official development assistance from Development Assistance Committee member countries fell 23.1%, the largest annual contraction on record, bringing ODA to its lowest level in a decade. The United States alone drove three-quarters of the decline. Bilateral assistance to sub-Saharan Africa fell 26.3%. Core funding to the United Nations system fell 27%, the largest annual drop ever recorded. The OECD projects a further 5.8% decline in 2026.
Commercial diplomacy, as articulated at the Futures Summit, is the most concrete public picture yet of what is replacing the old international development model. Less has been written about the internal conversations now taking place at the leadership level of the organizations most affected.
Over the past year, three scenarios have been in play within the international development sector:
Consolidation. There are too many international NGOs doing overlapping work, and the contraction of funding has made the case for mergers more rational than it has been in a generation. And yet mergers remain rare. Founder legacies, board politics, donor relationships built around institutional brands rather than missions, and leadership teams who understand that a successful merger often means the end of their roles. The organizations that most need to merge are frequently the least able to.
Mission. For many organizations, the funding crisis has exposed a question that has been deferred for years: is this still the right mission, and are we still the right vehicle for it? This question cannot be answered by a new business model or a diversified donor base. It requires boards and executives to sit with the possibility that the organization they have built, sometimes over decades, may no longer be the best instrument for the change they set out to create. Very few boards are prepared for this.
Endings. Some organizations are beginning to consider whether the most responsible path forward is not survival but a deliberate, dignified wind-down through transferring programs to local partners, returning restricted funds, preserving institutional knowledge, and closing well. The sector treats this as failure. It is not. In many cases, it is leadership. As Executive Director of the World Federalist Movement/Institute for Global Policy, I led the organization through this process, working with the Board's Executive Committee to wind down existing operations, reinvent the strategic direction, and secure the seed funding to rebuild it. It was the hardest work of my career.
The organizations navigating this period with the most clarity share a common set of qualities. They:
Started the hard conversations before the funding disappeared. Those that began realistically assessing their mission, their governance, and their institutional honesty two or three years ago are making choices from a position of agency rather than panic.
Have separated the mission from the organization in their own thinking. The mission is the point. The organization is the means. Protecting the organization at the expense of the mission is its own form of institutional failure.
Are willing to be unglamorous. The instinct in a crisis is to reach for bold external moves: a new campaign, a rebrand, or a high-profile partnership. The leaders navigating this well are creating durability by focusing on internal alignment, governance clarity, and narrative discipline.
Have built, over time, the kind of board relationships that can hold difficult conversations. Almost no organization does this in normal times. The ones that did are finding those relationships are the single most important asset they have.
The public account of this period will, eventually, be written as a story of political upheaval and sector-wide loss. The more consequential story is being written by leaders asking harder questions of themselves and their institutions than their predecessors were willing to ask. Some organizations will emerge stronger. Some will merge. Some will close well.
That distribution of outcomes is healthy. It is also a reform the sector has resisted for decades.
Mission-driven organizations should be built with end dates, not forever dates. Boards and funders have long treated institutional continuity as the measure of success, and closure as the measure of failure. That mentality prevents the sector from allocating its remaining resources to the organizations and missions where they will matter most.
The work ahead is not only for executives. It is for the boards and funders willing to ask different questions, earlier, and to define success in terms of mission delivered rather than organization preserved.
I have led an organization through systemic change. If yours is in a similar position, let's connect.