Two organizations made the news this spring in ways that stopped a lot of leaders I know.
In April, the Department of Justice indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center — a 55-year-old civil rights institution — on federal fraud charges related to its decades-long use of paid informants inside extremist groups. The SPLC says it is the victim of a politically motivated prosecution. Multiple legal experts have publicly called the case thin. The organization has pleaded not guilty and is fighting back.
In June, FBI agents searched the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a nonpartisan voter registration organization that helped register nearly 160,000 Ohio voters in 2024. Agents also showed up at the homes of staff, volunteers, and canvassers. The FBI has offered no public explanation. The investigation has since expanded to include a national voting rights network connected to the organization.
I am not going to tell you what to conclude about either case. Both are active. The facts are still developing. And the legal outcomes will turn on specifics that aren't yet fully public.
What I will tell you is this: the pattern these two situations reveal is not primarily a legal story. It is a leadership story. And it belongs to every leader navigating change and complexity right now — not just in nonprofits, but in law firms, bar associations, civic institutions, and boardrooms of every kind.
The Leadership Insight
Here is the pattern I keep seeing, across sectors and across the leaders I work with:
Most institutions were built for a world that no longer exists.
The nonprofit built its governance for an era when federal scrutiny was theoretical. The law firm built its practice for a world where AI was a future concern, not a present infrastructure question. The bar association designed its guidance protocols for a pace of change the profession could manage. The civic institution structured its board for a political environment that has since fundamentally shifted.
None of those decisions were wrong at the time. They reflected the world as it was. The problem is that the world changed faster than the institutions did — and many leaders are now governing with frameworks that were built for a different operating environment.
The SPLC and the Ohio Organizing Collaborative are vivid examples. But the underlying pattern belongs to almost every institution navigating this moment. Whatever scrutiny, disruption, or pressure your organization faces — regulatory, political, technological, financial — the question is the same: is your governance built for the world you're actually operating in, or for the world you were designed for?
Clarity is the prerequisite to everything. You cannot lead through uncertainty you haven't named. Courageous leadership doesn't mean pretending the landscape hasn't changed. It means seeing it clearly enough to act.
I don't have a clean fix for that. But I think it's worth naming, because a lot of you are quietly wondering whether you're the only one struggling to fund this work. You are not. The sector is in a moment of misalignment, and that is a structural problem, not a personal failure.
The Institutional Implication
Here is the question every leader and every board should be sitting with right now, regardless of sector, size, or mission:
If we were scrutinized tomorrow — by a regulator, an investigator, a competitor, a hostile funder, or a political adversary — where would we be exposed?
Not: did we file what we were supposed to file? That's a compliance question. It's necessary and it's not sufficient.
The deeper question is whether your institution is built to withstand the environment it is actually operating in. That looks different depending on where you sit.
For a nonprofit leader, it means your board understands the difference between what your organization does and how it will be characterized by someone who wants to harm it. For a lawyer, it means your practice is built on infrastructure you understand and can defend — not just tools you've adopted because everyone else has. For a civic leader, it means your governance reflects the accountability demands of a public that has fundamentally changed its relationship to institutions.
In every case, it means knowing — before something happens — who makes decisions, who speaks publicly, and what your organization's posture will be when the unexpected arrives.
These are not crisis preparations. They are leadership fundamentals that most institutions haven't updated because, until recently, they didn't feel urgent.
They feel urgent now.
TLR Reflection
The leaders navigating this moment best share one characteristic: they had already asked the hard questions before they needed the answers.
That doesn't mean they anticipated exactly what happened. It means they had built — before the pressure arrived — the clarity about their exposure, the courage to act on what they saw, and the community of advisors, board members, and peers who could help them respond when the unexpected arrived. Not alone. Together.
Most leaders haven't done this work. Not because they're negligent, but because the environment didn't demand it. The board chair who told me he hadn't slept properly in months wasn't describing a failure. He was describing accurate perception. He could feel the gap between the environment his organization is operating in and the governance it was built for.
That gap is closable. But closing it requires something most institutions resist: treating the current environment as the actual environment. Not as an aberration that will pass. Not as something that happens to other kinds of organizations. As the operating reality that leadership now has to account for — with clarity about what's changed, courage to make the decisions that reality demands, and the community to sustain that work over time.
The leaders who do that work this summer will be in a fundamentally different position than the ones who don't. That's not a threat. It's a pattern.
The Discussion Question
When did your institution last update its governance, its practices, or its leadership framework to reflect the environment it is actually operating in — and do the people at the table have a clear-eyed picture of where you are exposed?
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