Having sat on a board of a 501(c)(3) organization before, it does indeed sound like a collapse of funding for their operating model, which is unfortunate for such a worthy mission. I've always wondered how well US-based donation-funded organizations placed in such a situation would fare with the following pitch to their donors, and would like others who have sat on more such boards for most of their lives to help me understand why funding models are so aggressively donation-driven year-to-year such that it exposes them so much to economic headline risk: everyone is cognizant of the economic precarity facing us all, how about we ask for one last donation until the Federal Reserve declares we're out of the (next) recession, we'll go into hibernation if necessary (only filing paperwork to keep the organization alive on paper, with a static web presence, and responding to inquiries with unpaid volunteers), but we'll dollar cost average the donation funds into a broad market index fund as we go into this economic slowdown on a timetable you agree to, only perform a 2% Safe Withdrawal Rate, we'll survive through this together, and once we're officially out of the recession and a year past that, only then we'll go around shaking the tin can for donations again.
