Hub ONE

Hub ONE started out with a single question. What power would we have to address issues in the sector

09/01/2026

A funder steps into a convening and says "we got this wrong."

That's harder than it sounds.

Most funder communication is built around certainty. The strategy is set. The theory of change is documented. The board has approved the cycle. Showing up to a room of grantees and naming what isn't working is a different kind of speech act. It requires giving up the protective posture of the institution.

Pia Infante has spent two decades practicing and teaching what changes when funders do exactly that.

Her observation: vulnerability moves first, and trust follows. The funder who can name uncertainty out loud, in front of the people the funder is asking to be vulnerable, builds the kind of relationship that lasts.

Nonprofit leaders see how rare that posture is. Most funder rooms default to the script of confident strategic direction. The funders who break that pattern, and stay in the room when their own uncertainty is on the table, change the dynamic immediately.

Trust as practice means the funder going first sometimes.

Link below for Pia Infante's writing on trust-based philanthropy.

https://www.trustbasedphilanthropy.org/multiyear-transcript

08/31/2026

Funders sometimes worry that loosening reporting requirements means losing accountability.

Some funders are starting to experiment with reporting requirements and have often found something different.

When a nonprofit leader can pick up the phone and say the program pivoted, the funder knows what is actually happening. When the only communication between nonprofit and funder is an after-the-fact formal report, the funder and nonprofit miss the opportunity to co-create real impact together.

A debrief conversation can sometimes do more accountability work than a polished document.

The sector often confuses the appearance of accountability with actual accountability.

What would change if your grantees could call you when something went sideways?

08/26/2026

Nonprofit leaders serving the same community sometimes do not know what each other is working on.

Some of that is capacity. Some of it is something harder to talk about: years of competing for the same funding trained organizations to protect their ground, even from people working on the same problems two miles away.

Hub ONE puts those leaders in the same room and what happens once the guard comes down is worth paying attention to:

- Organizations find overlapping work.
- They share resources.
- They make connections that no grant application ever produced.

The conversations about collaboration and duplication go somewhere different when all people are actually present.

"Once you can let that guard down a little bit, we can co-create those solutions," says Danielle Sielatycki, CEO of Prevention Works and lead executive of Hub ONE.

08/25/2026

A program officer gets an email from a grantee that something in the grant isn't working and the plan needs to shift.

In most funder relationships, the nonprofit leader spent an hour drafting that email. Chose every word carefully. Made sure it didn't sound like failure.

In a different kind of relationship, she picked up the phone.

"I'm able to pick up the phone, call the funder, have an authentic conversation and work out together what is the path moving forward," says Danielle Sielatycki, CEO of Prevention Works and lead executive of Hub ONE.

That phone call only happens when both people know there's no repercussion waiting on the other end.

Psychological safety between a funder and a nonprofit leader is what makes that call possible. Without it, the report looks fine. The relationship stays polished. And the work suffers in ways no one ever talks about.

Funders - What do you think it would it take for your grantees to make that call?

08/24/2026

A new study from the The Bridgespan Group looked at more than 160 nonprofit leaders across Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, and found something familiar close to home.

Seven in ten cited a lack of long-term, flexible funding as their biggest constraint. More than 40% had less than six months of operating reserves.

Accross the world, we are encountering similar issues when it come to the nonprofit-funder relationship.

https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/strengthening-nonprofits-across-indonesia-malaysia-and-singapore

08/20/2026

Most funder-nonprofit convenings run on an unspoken agreement: funders evaluate, nonprofits perform.

Saint Luke's Foundation decided to name that dynamic out loud, before anyone said anything else in the room. They called it what it was. And then they asked what it would take to change it.

A few things happened once they did.

Nonprofit leaders stopped carefully framing challenges as minor setbacks and named them plainly. In one session, a housing organization shared that transportation barriers, not program design, were keeping residents from services. Another grantee in the room had relationships that could help. They connected on the spot. That conversation had never happened in years of separate reporting relationships with the same funder.

Funders started hearing what rarely makes it into grant reports: leadership transitions, capacity constraints, the need for partnerships outside a program's stated scope. The things that actually shape whether work succeeds or fails.

What changed was not the funding. What changed was the room: https://candid.org/blogs/funder-grantee-power-dynamics/

08/19/2026

The funder-nonprofit relationship is usually separate rooms making separate decisions with a lot of polished reports that don't say what's actually happening on the ground.

Hub ONE exists to change that by getting funders and nonprofit leaders into the same room with enough psychological safety to tell each other the truth.

"Once you can let that guard down a little bit," says Danielle Sielatycki, CEO of Prevention Works and Hub ONE's lead executive, "we can co-create solutions."

That is the work. When a nonprofit leader can call a funder to say a program pivoted, something failed, or the grant application no longer reflects what the work actually needs, and the funder's response is to problem-solve together rather than hold the organization to a piece of paper, something real has shifted. Hub ONE convenes the relationships where that call is possible.

08/18/2026

Diane Yentel, President and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, said this at the CEP State of Nonprofits 2026 webinar, responding to data showing nearly half of nonprofit CEOs are concerned about their own burnout. Her point was simple: funders already have tools that cost very little and change a lot for the people leading their grantees.

CEP's 2026 survey found that 46% of nonprofit CEOs say burnout is "very much" a concern right now, up from 29% last year.

What's one thing your nonprofit or foundation has tried to reduce burnout?

08/17/2026

56% of Americans highly trust nonprofits.

29% highly trust philanthropy.

Same sector with a 27-point gap. Independent Sector has been tracking this for seven years and the distance keeps widening.

The real question is... Why?

08/13/2026

Most grant policies were written for a different sector.

That doesn't mean every grant policy needs to go.

Here's what to keep:

- Clear timelines, even if they're long. Predictability is a form of respect.
- Specific reporting questions, when the questions are about the work and not about justifying the dollars.
- Site visits, when they're actually about learning.
- Strategic review cycles, when they're tied to grantee input.
- Board-level engagement, when it's done with grantees and not just about them.

Here's what to scrap:

- The annual application written from scratch every twelve months.
- The reporting requirement that exists because it existed last cycle.
- The decision timeline that runs faster than the strategic question or slower than the operational one.
- The "partnership language" applied to relationships that operate as vendor contracts.
- The third request for the same data already in three prior reports.

Together, these are the policies that erode trust.

Address

Kalamazoo, MI

Telephone

+12693504029

Website

http://www.hub1one.com/

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