Nearly 13 Million People Work in Nonprofits. Almost None of Them Planned On It.

Think about that for a moment.

The nonprofit sector is the third largest workforce in the United States — behind only retail and food service. Thirteen million people. And yet, if you walked into any nonprofit office in the country and asked "did you grow up planning to do this work?" — most people would laugh.

Nobody plays pretend capital campaign as a kid. Nobody announces at their fifth grade career day that they're going to spend their life asking people for money to end homelessness or save animals or support kids in crisis. No, most of us found our way here through a side door. A job posting that felt interesting. A cause that lit something up inside us. A colleague who said "you'd be really good at this." A season of life that sent us looking for work that meant something.

And here you are.

You might have come from teaching, where you spent years learning how to connect with people, read a room, and advocate fiercely for those who couldn't advocate for themselves. You might have come from social work, where empathy wasn't a soft skill — it was the whole job. You might have come from sales, or marketing, or a career that feels completely unrelated on paper. Transferring skills from an education background is highly impactful and very common in the nonprofit world. The same is true for backgrounds in social services, business, communications, and dozens of other fields. The nonprofit sector is, in many ways, a profession built by people who brought their whole selves from somewhere else.

That is not a weakness. That is actually the point.

The Thing Nobody Tells You

Here's what I've observed after years of working with nonprofit professionals: the skills that make someone exceptional in this work — genuine relationship-building, deep empathy, strategic thinking, the ability to connect a donor's values to a mission that matters — are almost impossible to teach in a classroom. You either have them or you're developing them through lived experience. And a lot of you have them in abundance.

But here's the catch. Because most of you didn't come up through a formal "this is how you do nonprofit work" pipeline, there's a persistent voice that shows up at the worst possible moments. Right before a major donor meeting. Right when you're asked to lead a campaign. Right when someone looks to you like you have all the answers.

Do I actually know what I'm doing?

Research shows that up to 70% of individuals experience feelings of inadequacy at some point in their lives — and in a sector full of people who "figured it out as they went," that number feels very believable. In the nonprofit sector especially, imposter syndrome often presents as feeling that one is not good at their job, not in the right profession, or otherwise just out of place.

I want to say something directly to that voice: it is lying to you.

Your sincerity is not a gap in your training. Your ability to connect with people is not a workaround. It is the work. The frameworks and systems that get taught in courses and consultancies? At their best, they are simply trying to replicate what you already do naturally. The structure exists to support the relationship — and the relationship is yours.

And Yet — Knowledge Still Matters

I don't want to oversell this point into something unhelpful. Passion and natural talent are real and they matter enormously. And also — there are things worth knowing. There are frameworks that can help you stop second-guessing yourself because you understand why something works, not just that it does. There are strategies that save you from having to reinvent the wheel every time you face a new challenge.

That's why I developed the Fundraising for a New Era course in partnership with Winona State University. Not because the people in this sector need to be fixed or trained from scratch — but because they deserve to have language and structure wrapped around the strengths they've already built. Because confidence isn't just about feeling good. It's about knowing you have the tools to show up fully for the mission you care so deeply about.

If fundraising is part of your role and you've ever felt that flicker of self-doubt right when it matters most, this course was built for you.

You Belong Here

The nonprofit sector doesn't need people who grew up planning to be here. It needs people who chose to be here — who looked at the problems in the world and decided their skills, their heart, and their time were going to go toward something that mattered.

That's you.

Thirteen million strong. Most of you side-door entrants, career-changers, and purpose-finders. All of you doing work that matters more than almost anything else.

You're not an imposter. You're exactly who this work needs.