The Shallow Work of Scarcity

Why thin funding can never sustain the kind of transformation God is building

By Josh Singleton | Founder and Lead Cultivator, The Neighborhood Garden Project

My heart yearns for the day when storehouses are opened and funds flow through relationships built on trust and transparency. I long for the day when people are resourced not because they filled out the right form or fit the right box, but because their lives and their work bear the kind of fruit that speaks for itself. I long for the day when the nonprofit world moves from survival to stewardship, from chasing scraps to cultivating abundance.

The recent “no” from the Whole Foods Market Foundation reminded me that we are still living in a culture that invests in shallow work. Not because people intend harm, but because the systems themselves are shallow. They reward thin metrics, short-term outputs, and wide scattering instead of deep formation. They celebrate big numbers at the top and small distributions at the bottom. They call it generosity, but it rarely produces transformation.

In 2024, according to the Whole Foods Market Foundation, the organization invested $14 million across 39 countries, supporting 1,239 organizations and schools around the world. On the surface, it sounds like an ocean. But once divided, each organization received an average of about eleven thousand dollars. It looks big, it feels big, but it lands thin. Most Executive Directors celebrate because they’ve been trained to celebrate anything at all. Years of scarcity have left leaders with a trained mind that chases scraps as if scraps are abundance. They stretch thin dollars into thin impact, calling it success because the system has never shown them another way (Whole Foods Market Foundation, 2024).

And that word — impact — is part of the problem. It has become a kind of camouflage. It sounds powerful, but it often hides how little is truly being transformed. The nonprofit world has learned to use impact as a substitute for intimacy. It measures activity, not change. It counts how many were reached, not how many were restored. It satisfies the donor’s need to feel effective while bypassing the slow, relational work that actually renews lives. The word gives permission to stay shallow. As long as there’s a report, there doesn’t have to be relationship.

The language of “our impact” adds another layer of distance. It allows institutions to flow money through the work that others are faithfully carrying out and still call the results their own. It extracts outcomes without ever knowing the names or stories that produced them. It turns relationship into reporting and fruit into data. But real impact isn’t something that can be claimed — it’s something that’s shared, cultivated, and witnessed together. When people are known, when stories are walked with, when presence replaces paperwork, impact becomes what it was meant to be: transformation that can’t be separated from relationship.

The Foundation itself is stretched thin to carry out so many initiatives that it never fully feels the weight of the lives in front of those on the front lines. The people doing the daily work — the ones sitting with the stories, holding the tension, and carrying the cost — feel the full weight of wanting to see transformation but are often forced to keep it shallow just to keep the doors open. They know what depth requires, but the system won’t pay for it. They hold the tension between what they’re called to do and what they’re funded to do — between the Kingdom work they see and the metrics the world demands. And for many, they’ve accepted the thin system as the only way to care for others, not realizing that scarcity has disguised itself as compassion.

But the garden teaches something different: nothing lasting grows without presence. Real fruit can’t be forced, hurried, or tallied — it must be tended. Impact measures what can be counted. Cultivation reveals what can endure.

Ten thousand dollars is helpful. It can move something forward. But what gives money its true weight is the intention behind it. There is a world of difference between someone giving ten thousand dollars because they believe in the work, have walked with it, and are investing themselves into its future, and a multimillion-dollar foundation offering ten thousand dollars simply because it fits within a scattered funding model. One is rooted in relationship. The other is rooted in distribution. One carries meaning. The other carries metrics. The amount is the same, but the heart behind it changes everything.

And none of this dishonors the Foundation or the organizations it supports. Every one of those 1,239 organizations is doing meaningful, important work in real communities. And the employees at the Foundation and in the stores genuinely care. They want to help. They want to uplift. The thinness is not in their hearts — it is in the model they are required to operate inside.

Imagine if that model shifted. Imagine if fourteen million dollars were invested into one hundred deeply aligned organizations instead of more than a thousand. Suddenly, each organization would receive one hundred forty thousand dollars — not as a handout but as a partnership. And imagine if those organizations were not chosen through paperwork alone, but through presence. Imagine Foundation staff visiting the soil, sitting at the tables, hearing the stories, witnessing the depth of the work, and walking with organizations before funding them. That kind of discernment would deepen everything. It would turn grants into relationships, employees into companions, and funding into transformation.

Because one thing is true across all nonprofit work: over-caring leads to striving. Striving leads to unrest. And unrest comes from believing we must carry what only God can. It comes from the fear that if we do not help someone today, they will not be sustained. But God sustains those we cannot reach. He carries the ones we cannot help today. He tends the places where our hands cannot be. When we over-carry, we step into a role that is not ours. When we rest, we return the weight to the One who never stops working.

And sometimes, we intercede too soon. We step into a moment God is still forming. Out of compassion, we rush to relieve pain that was meant to refine. We ease pressure that was meant to reveal. We offer comfort where conviction was meant to grow. But love doesn’t always look like rescue. Sometimes love looks like waiting long enough for God’s work to take its full effect. The hardest part of discernment is knowing when to help and when to hold back. The soil teaches us that timing is everything. If you pull the seed from the ground too early, you interrupt what God was nurturing in the dark. Rest is not neglect — it’s trust. Trust that God knows the rhythm of every root, the pace of every process, and the moment when fruit will finally appear.

This truth became clear the moment the invitation to apply came — because it didn’t come from the Foundation at all. It came from the people in the Katy Whole Foods store. Real people with real stories and real weariness. People not looking for a grant, but for rest. They felt something in the garden before any application was submitted and before any announcement of whether we would be awarded the grant or not. And when they arrived, something holy happened.

They didn’t rush into tasks. They didn’t grab tools. They didn’t even make it to the soil. They came and rested. We sat together at old wooden tables beneath a young sycamore, sunlight flickering through its leaves. Lunch was already spread across the tables — sandwiches half-eaten, drinks open, conversation flowing. Smiles were easy. No one was in a hurry to get back to work, and for once, there was no dirt under anyone’s fingernails. They had come on their day off — not as part of a corporate initiative or paid volunteer shift, but because something in them wanted to be here. Whole Foods wasn’t funding their time. They simply showed up, drawn by rest they didn’t know they needed.

It wasn’t a workday — it was a still day. The kind of day that reminds you that belonging doesn’t require productivity. There were no checklists or metrics, no reason to capture the moment other than to remember that it happened. People from the garden and people from the store simply shared a table. There was laughter, quiet, and peace. Nothing had to be done, and somehow, everything that mattered was being done.

And God sustained the garden so we could rest. Not one plant was waiting on us. Not one bed suffered because we paused. The soil did not demand our attention. Creation held steady while we stepped into stillness.

This was not a workday. It was a restoration day — a quiet act of resistance against a world that equates care with constant movement. It was a reminder that the first work God ever gave humanity was not activity but presence, not production but abiding, not output but rest. And in that moment, it became clear that the depth of what happened around those tables could never be funded by eleven thousand dollars. Thin grants fund thin work. Thin funding sustains thin relationships. But relationships born from rest carry more weight than any grant application.

Scraps come through systems, but storehouses open through relationship. Scraps fund activity, but storehouses fund presence. Scraps produce reports, but storehouses produce restoration.

The Neighborhood Garden Project was never meant to live off scraps. We are not here to survive on crumbs. We are cultivating an assignment that depends on alignment. And every time we choose alignment over opportunity, God reveals more of the storehouse. Not in one large check, but in people finding their way to the garden. In tired souls breathing again. In conversations that soften hearts. In moments that carry more holiness than any foundation report could ever capture.

The “no” from Whole Foods did not set us back. It clarified our path. It reminded us that the world still scatters thinly, but God is preparing a deeper way where resources flow through trust, where transparency replaces transaction, where people are cultivated and not programs, and where depth matters more than reach.

Until that day comes, we will keep showing up at the table, seeing people, letting them breathe again, and trusting that the God who sustained the garden while we rested is the same God who will open the storehouses in His timing.