The RISE Framework: Rethinking Financial Sustainability for NYC Nonprofits

The Association of Fundraising Professionals New York City Chapter, alongside Infinite Giving, just dropped the RISE Framework — four letters promising to drag NYC nonprofits out of what they're diplomatically calling "widespread nonprofit financial strain."

Let's call it what it is: a cash flow hemorrhage that's been bleeding the sector dry while board members patted themselves on the back at galas.

What RISE Actually Promises

RISE stands for four pillars: non-cash assets, institutional investing, donor stewardship, and endowment building. In plain English, that means stop begging for $25 monthly sustainer gifts and start getting serious about the tools wealthy donors and institutions have been using for decades.

Non-cash assets — think securities, real estate, the occasional painting collecting dust in a founder's study, or the crypto windfall nobody wants to acknowledge at board meetings. Institutional investing — moving beyond the sleepy money market account your CFO treats like a sacred relic. Donor stewardship — actually treating major givers like long-term partners instead of ATMs. Endowment building — the long game most mid-sized NYC nonprofits have been too financially fragile to even consider without flinching.

None of this is revolutionary. Private foundations and major institutions figured out this playbook long ago. What RISE does is repackage it for the rest of us, which is either long overdue or slightly insulting depending on your mood and how many fundraising conferences you've sat through this year.

Why Now, and Why We're Skeptical

Here's where we put on our reading glasses. The framework lands in a week where FGV published analysis warning that tax reform will reshape nonprofit funding, and Fragasso is out telling nonprofits that funders are rewarding collaboration over solo acts. Translation: the money spigot is tightening from multiple directions at once, and the old playbook of "write the gala invitation, wait for the check" is collapsing in slow motion.

So AFP-NYC isn't releasing RISE because the sector is thriving. They're releasing it because the sector is stressed, and "keep doing what you're doing" stopped being a viable fundraising strategy somewhere around 2022 when the post-pandemic donor fatigue set in and institutional funders started demanding actual proof of outcomes.

We should be appropriately skeptical of any framework that promises to fix systemic underfunding with four tidy steps. The RISE Framework isn't a magic strategy — it's a belated recognition of what should have been standard practice years ago. Nonprofits that weren't already diversifying revenue streams, courting institutional money, and slowly building endowments have bigger problems than a catchy acronym can solve. RISE won't fix a weak finance committee. It won't fix a board that treats fundraising as beneath them. It won't fix leadership that confuses busywork with strategy.

What NYC Nonprofits Should Actually Do With This

Treat RISE as a diagnostic, not a destination. If your organization can't point to active, functioning programs in all four areas, you don't need a framework — you need a brutal board retreat, a finance committee that actually understands compound interest, and at least one board member who has personally written a six-figure check to something other than themselves.

The real question isn't whether RISE is clever. It's whether your leadership has the stomach to tell a loyal 30-year donor that their $50 check, while touching, isn't the future of your organization. Because if they don't have that conversation, no four-letter acronym is going to save you from the next funding cliff.

RISE is a map. Most of us still need the backbone to follow it.