Strengthening Your Fundraising Strategy Through Intergenerational Collaboration

Many nonprofit leaders are trying to answer the same question: how do we tell a story about our work that feels both honest and compelling to funders?

The answer is conceptually simple but often difficult to navigate in practice: ensuring that the organization’s mission and impact are shaped and articulated across generations of leadership and community engagement.

Intergenerational Collaboration in Fundraising

When you bridge generational perspectives inside your organization, your grant and development strategy becomes more grounded. Because intergenerational collaboration brings together lived experience, historical memory, and emerging ideas about how movements and organizations grow, that exchange is powerful.

You honor the wisdom of leaders who have sustained the work for decades while also creating space for newer voices to inform the work the future will require. This matters for any organization, but it can be especially important for nonprofits and movement-based organizations led by Black, Indigenous, and other historically marginalized and excluded groups.

Your organization is shouldering work that spans generations of advocacy, organizing, and community leadership. And each generation carries experiences and knowledge that strengthen how the organization explains its purpose, strategy, and long-term vision to funders.

When those perspectives are in conversation, fundraising narratives naturally become more honest and compelling because they reflect both legacy and, dare we say, radical possibility. The key, then, is to build this cultural and communal exchange into how your teams reflect, plan, and tell the story of your work.

So, here are three best practices to embed that collaborative approach into your fundraising:

Co-create your systems-change narrative across generations.

Bring together senior leaders, emerging staff, program officers, and organizers for a focused working session on how you describe your work to funders. In most organizations, development language gets written by one or two people or a single team in isolation, but the strongest narratives actually come from shared reflections.

Ask questions like:

• How do we name the systems we’re actually trying to change?

• Where are we softening or avoiding language that staff or community members feel needs to be explicit?

• What parts of our story feel most true to the people closest to the work?

Capture shared phrases, stories, and examples that resonate across the group. Then, build a short narrative framework that you can reuse across proposals and reports to ensure your messaging reflects the full experience of the organization.

Build a cross-generational funder advisory circle.

This can be a small internal group of senior leaders, Gen Z and Millennial staff, and, if possible, a program alum or community leader who understands the impact of the work. This group can review grant proposals and campaign messages before they go out, but give them a clear charge:

• Does this reflect the reality of our work on the ground?

• Are we honest about our systems-change goals, risks, and power dynamics?

• Would our community members recognize themselves in this story?

Their role is to assess whether your fundraising materials reflect the organization’s lived experience and values.

Translate internal learning into concrete shifts in your grant strategy.

Don’t let the collaboration stop at wordsmithing. The goal is direct alignment between how the organization talks about the work and how it pursues resources to sustain it.

Turn what you learn from emerging staff and community members into specific shifts in your development strategy, such as:

• Prioritizing funders who are open to explicit systems-change language and long-term outcomes

• Naming youth leadership, organizing, or narrative change as core strategies in your logic models and budgets

• Incorporating cross-generational leadership structures such as shared decision-making bodies into proposals as evidence of how you “walk the talk.”

When intergenerational collaboration is embedded into your development work, fundraising becomes more than a transactional process. You get to tell a deeper story about how your organization understands systems change, one rooted in cultural context and radical imagination. You get a team of emerging and experienced staff who see each other as co-strategists. You get grant proposals that are aligned with an expansive, scalable vision for the future.

This connective narrative will be compelling to funders who are serious about sustained growth and mission longevity.

Recommended Reading:

• Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown explores how movements evolve through adaptation, relationships, and collective learning.

• Building Movement Project – Race to Lead Reports is a research series examining leadership in the nonprofit sector, particularly barriers and opportunities for leaders of color.

• The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America by Ai-jen Poo illustrates how intergenerational organizing and narrative change shape long-term social movements.

• The Purpose of Power by Alicia Garza is a practical reflection on movement-building. Garza explores how organizing, coalition building, and community leadership create political power.

• Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Y. Davis examines how historical struggles inform present-day organizing.

• Resist: How a Century of Young Black Activists Shaped America by Rita Omokha traces a century of Black youth activism and the role young organizers have played in shaping social justice movements in the United States.