Why We Keep Funding Decay

An Ecological Correction for the Nonprofit Sector

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

There is a tree in the garden riddled with small, deliberate holes. Neat rows. Revisited places. At first glance, it looks like damage. Something has been done to the tree. But the longer you stand with it, the clearer it becomes that this is not harm in the usual sense. It is participation.

The marks belong to a yellow-bellied sapsucker, the migratory woodpecker that winters in Zone 9A Houston. It is not here year-round. It arrives when conditions are right and leaves when they change. That detail alone carries more wisdom than most funding models ever account for.

The sapsucker does not create sap. It arrives because sap is already moving.

In this region, trees remain metabolically active through much of the winter. Temperature swings between cool nights and warm days create internal pressure. Stored carbohydrates move through living tissue. The bird’s role is not to initiate life, but to recognize where life is already flowing and make access possible without overwhelming the system.

This is where nonprofit funding quietly loses its footing.

Funding is often treated as the source of life itself, as if organizations lie dormant until money arrives. That assumption produces pressure instead of provision. Dormant trees can be forced to ooze briefly, but what appears is leakage, not flow. It is chaotic, unsustainable, and it accelerates collapse.

Sapsuckers avoid those trees.

They move from healthy tree to healthy tree, not because healthy trees need them more, but because healthy trees can host relationship without breaking. These trees compartmentalize wounds. They regulate pressure. They replenish reserves. They can absorb localized loss without losing coherence.

This is the first discernment the sector has largely forgotten.

Healthy systems are not the loudest ones. Constant urgency, visible exhaustion, and unlimited availability are not signs of faithfulness. In ecology, they are signs of decay. Living systems have roots, rhythm, boundaries, and internal clarity. They can receive support without reorganizing themselves around it.

A discerning funder does not arrive with questions first. They arrive with attention.

Over time, certain signals become unmistakable. Whether life existed before they arrived. Whether work continued in obscurity. Whether decisions were being made without an audience. Whether learning happened without incentive. Whether adjustment occurred quietly because it was necessary, not because it was fundable.

Healthy systems have a history that does not begin with money.

They also reveal whether they know how to remain faithful without visibility. Whether progress is measured by internal coherence rather than external validation. Systems that require constant performance to survive are already leaking. Living systems can function in shade as well as sun.

When access comes, it is restrained. Sap wells are shallow and specific. The sapsucker does not drill everywhere. It does not penetrate the heartwood. It opens just enough to participate in what is already moving. The core remains intact.

Funding that mirrors this posture does not demand total visibility, total compliance, or comprehensive transformation in exchange for support. It strengthens specific access points while leaving identity undisturbed. It trusts continuity over extraction.

And the relationship is revisitable.

Sapsuckers often return to the same trees year after year. Old wells are reused. New ones are added only when conditions allow. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is forced.

This is where solicitation quietly reveals itself as misaligned.

In living systems, provision does not chase attention. It circulates through health. Funders should not be solicited. They should be moving from healthy tree to healthy tree, listening for internal pressure, coherence, and capacity to give without breaking.

A healthy tree cannot move.
It can only remain rooted, alive, and available.

Sap is not what the tree was designed to provide. It is the overflow of the tree’s own health.

The tree’s work is not to feed birds. Its work is to remain alive. When health is present, something becomes available beyond itself. That availability is incidental, not owed. The moment sap becomes the goal, the tree is no longer being a tree.

This truth becomes unavoidable when set beside the current condition of the nonprofit sector.

Across the country, nonprofits describe themselves as being under pressure. Demand for services is rising. Funding is tightening. Government support is shifting. Inflation increases costs. Volunteers decline. Staff burn out. Leaders speak openly about survival mode and waiting for donor action just to keep the doors open.

Much of that is factually accurate.

But it is also diagnostically revealing.

Rising demand without regeneration is not health. It is imbalance. In ecology, it signals extraction outpacing replenishment. Funding instability reveals how many systems were never built to stand without constant external pressure. A tree that falls when the weather changes was not deeply rooted. It was being held upright.

Volunteer decline tells the same story. People are not withdrawing because they no longer care. They are stepping away from systems that feel transactional, exhausting, or perpetually urgent. Humans, like birds, do not remain long where life is being drained rather than circulated.

Burnout is not a moral failure. It is a physiological signal. It tells us the system is asking people to substitute their bodies and nervous systems for missing structure, missing rhythm, and missing regeneration. In nature, this would be recognized as collapse prevention. In nonprofits, it is often mislabeled as commitment.

This is why thriving organizations are so often passed over.

They are not frantic.
They are not collapsing.
They are not asking to be saved.

And because they are not leaking visibly, they are interpreted as fine, or worse, unnecessary. The assumption becomes that they do not need help, when the truth is that they are healthy precisely because they are doing something right.

This is how the logic flips.

Instead of asking where funding will strengthen life, the system asks where funding will prevent failure. One leads to regeneration. The other leads to managed decline.

In ecology, the answer is obvious. You do not pour nutrients into rotting roots and expect a forest to recover. You strengthen healthy systems so they can stabilize soil, outcompete decay, seed new growth, and carry life forward.

And yet philanthropy consistently rewards exhaustion, overextension, chronic urgency, and fragility framed as faithfulness, while overlooking coherence, boundaries, rest, and quiet multiplication.

This inversion is reinforced by a familiar belief.

“If we just had the money, we would be free.”

That sentence assumes that what is happening now is of lesser value. That faithfulness without scale is incomplete. That freedom comes from doing more rather than from being rightly ordered.

It trains organizations to treat the present as provisional and depth as a holding pattern. Value is deferred into the future. Meaning is postponed until capacity increases.

But this is not how Jesus moved.

Again and again, He stood at crossroads where scale was possible and chose depth instead. He spoke to crowds, but He walked with a few. And within that few, He went deeper still. Peter, James, and John were not a pilot group for something larger. They were the work.

What He was doing with three was not a limitation. It was the fullest expression of the Kingdom at work.

If freedom came from more, Jesus missed His chance.

And that belief is often paired with another phrase.

“We’re doing it, but we could do more.”

It sounds humble. It sounds responsible. It sounds like vision. But in practice, it is the death trap of well-intended nonprofit work.

It devalues the present. It treats current faithfulness as insufficient. It frames depth as temporary and scale as the true measure of worth. And because need is infinite, the work never rests. Freedom is perpetually deferred.

Jesus refused this logic.

He did not measure obedience by how much more could be done. He measured it by whether He was doing what the Father was doing. Faithfulness was not incomplete simply because more was possible.

In the garden, this is obvious. A plant forced to produce beyond its season does not become fruitful. It becomes weak. Roots shallow. Soil depleted. What looks like momentum is actually stress.

The nonprofit sector often calls this ambition.
Ecology calls it collapse.

This clarity became personal for me.

I have been the organization standing under the lights, holding the oversized check, smiling for a camera while knowing the amount written on it would barely touch the real work. I know how quickly that economy trains you to perform gratitude, to curate stories, to translate formation into optics so the giver can feel assured about themselves.

I will not stand in that posture again.

What makes our current support different is not only that it is significant, but that it arrives without demand for validation.

Both of our current supporters step into the garden. One has been present a handful of times simply to understand what is being stewarded, not to linger, not to be named, not to extract a moment. The other is also present in relationship, without urgency, without performance, without expectation of recognition.

In both cases, presence is not leveraged. It is relational.

By contrast, the one-time gift that required validation, the photographed check, the public affirmation, came from people who have never stepped foot into the garden at all. That posture was never about the work. It was about them.

Those who need validation rarely enter the work.
Those who are willing to enter the work rarely need validation.

So we do not list donors on our website. There is no sponsor page. No wall of names. Not because generosity is unimportant, but because the work is not for sale and the soil does not need branding.

Quiet generosity moves like yeast. It disappears into the work and everything rises because it is there. It strengthens life without redirecting it toward performance.

The garden does not need witnesses to exist.
It needs space to remain alive.

And the garden tells the truth without commentary. It cannot be impressed. It cannot be staged. It responds only to presence, patience, and care over time.

If sap pressure drops, the bird moves on. If the tree cannot sustain access, the relationship ends quietly. There is no punishment. No moralizing. No attempt to force flow where it no longer exists.

Some of the healthiest funders understand this instinctively. They are migratory. They arrive when life is moving, participate without taking over, and step back so the system remains intact. Longevity does not always mean permanence. Sometimes it means leaving at the right time.

This is not sentiment.
It is ecology.

Healthy nonprofits do not need saviors.
They do not need pressure.
They do not need to solicit funders.

They need partners who know how to see health before sap, who move from healthy tree to healthy tree, who strengthen life without redirecting it, and who trust that faithfulness at a human scale is already enough.

That is how forests persist.
That is how gardens mature.
That is how life actually multiplies.

And it is already written, quietly, in the bark of a tree in the garden.