The last time I wrote this post, I went to bed, tucked myself in, and woke up at 5:30 am to an email saying my surgeon’s flight was cancelled and my surgery was being rescheduled.

So…

Fingers cross that by the time you read this I am undergoing a laparoscopic procedure to remove adhesions in my abdomen that have made me sick for the last 12-months.

I will be taking at least a week off from writing Substack.

As my friend Jules likes to joke, this will likely be me post-operation:

Don’t worry, I already told her that AI photo clearly has man-hands.

Hopefully I will be back soon to share whatever random things I think up under anesthesia.

Until then, take good care of one another.

Liz

So you are considering becoming a fundraiser.

I hope this will help you decide if this job is for you. This is just my perspective, and I’d certainly encourage you to reach out to other people to gather as much information as you can about this work.

I’m notorious in the fundraising sector — and frankly in the town I live in — for being critical of our work. A lot of people think that means I don’t like what I do, and they could not be more wrong. I love what I do. I feel incredibly lucky to have had two decades doing work that I love. There are some incredible people I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of working alongside. There are donors who make incredible gifts, many of whom do it quietly, without any pomp or circumstance. I have worked with children who wanted to raise money to support a sick friend, or a family member who was helped by an organization. I’ve seen families come together in grief to raise funds in honour of someone they loved. I’ve seen people, who no one knew had the capacity, give incredibly generous gifts after they passed away. There are so many generous people in our society who never ask for anything in return. They are the definition of philanthropists — to give without any expectation of anything in return.

But every sector deserves critique, and I’d argue ours more so than others. We cannot cling to the veil of “goodness” by virtue of our work. We need to analyze and dissect what we do, or we become lazy. The halo effect is real. We need to be careful that we look not only at what we do, but why we do it.

So when I tell you that training in anti-racism and anti-oppression is imperative to becoming a good fundraiser, it is not hyperbole. Knowing how our work impacts the most marginalized communities in our society is imperative to being good at our jobs. It is not enough to think that finding money and designating it to certain programs and projects is enough. That may have been enough when I started in the early 2000s, but it’s not enough anymore. We cannot claim ignorance on this after the global racial reckoning of 2020. Nor can we pretend that what we do isn’t as important as how we do it. That’s just not going to fly anymore. As a fundraiser, you are in a unique position to influence how organizations ask for support and how organizations fund the work they do. Don’t forget that.

If you want to enter fundraising as a profession, be prepared to navigate some really complex territory. You will be a conduit between a charitable organization and funders. You will be in conversations and in rooms where people say things you don’t agree with, and it may tear your heart out to hear them say it. I once sat in a donor meeting where a couple complained that the downtown core was becoming full of “drug addicts and homeless beggars.” These were people we were asking to give to healthcare. They didn’t even understand that the social determinants of health are rooted in how the most marginalized members of our society are treated. They wanted to put their money towards something “reputable,” but looked down on the people they walked past day to day. These types of conversations used to eat away at me.

You’ll find there seems to be no pattern to how donors treat you, or the expectations they come with. I’ve found that some of the wealthiest people I have worked with gave anonymously and with little expectation of anything in return. I’ve also found that some of the donors who gave the least had the most demands of our organizations. The reverse could also be true. It was less about what they were giving and more about the lives they were living. People who seek attention will always want it, even if it’s related to charitable giving. People who like to live a quiet, unassuming life almost always seek that in their charitable giving too. Money isn’t the deciding factor — mindset is.

And sometimes you’ll work really hard at meeting with people and asking them to consider giving, and it will work. Sometimes it won’t. Sometimes you’ll underestimate people’s interest and capacity to give, and sometimes you’ll grossly overestimate it. Sometimes you’ll offend people by asking for too little. More often, you’ll offend people by asking for too much. Over time you’ll get a bit better at guessing what people can contribute. As you get older, more experienced, and frankly have fewer f*cks to give, you’ll just tell people you need to know what they want to do, so you can maximize your time and theirs, and everyone can win.

And sometimes you’ll work with a leader or CEO you really admire. Someone with vision. Someone who cares a great deal about doing the right thing, not just the expedient thing. They get that fundraising is a long game, that it’s about relationship building, and that you cannot expect fundraisers to work miracles. Sometimes you’ll work with leaders and CEOs who make their funding shortfalls your problem — as if you created them in the first place — and they will pressure you to ask faster, ask for more, and push people before they’re ready. Those leaders and CEOs are making their problem your problem. You will eventually learn to tell them that, and find a way out of those organizations, because those leaders don’t get it. Their crisis was years in the making. You will not be able to fix it overnight.

You’ll find that your work is also a bandaid on the larger issues in society. Fundraising is not an answer to systemic problems — it is simply one of the ways we address them. Sometimes you’ll be deeply irritated that the government doesn’t fund programs and services the way it should. I know I have been enraged at times. You’ll also find that because your organization likely receives government funding, you’re not permitted to have an opinion on it. In fact, you’re actively discouraged from having an opinion of any kind. It appears that politicians are allowed to have thin skin, but you are not. You have to pretend and play nice while you watch politicians, of all stripes, play political football with people’s lives. You will be angry. At times you will want to quit. Maybe you will quit. You’re allowed to quit! You may end up as a consultant, just so you can have an opinion of your own.

So what allows someone to last twenty years in fundraising and still believe in the value of giving? Honestly, I don’t know of another line of work I would enjoy more than what I do now. I don’t know if I’d be able to find work that combines meeting with lots of people, in lots of places, building relationships, building trust, asking people to part with something they’ve likely worked hard to earn, and asking them to care about causes I believe in deeply. It is an honour and a privilege to be welcomed into people’s homes, businesses, and inner worlds. But you will have to learn how to navigate those situations, to read the room, to keep yourself safe — and sometimes you will be put in impossible situations. I truly hope you never experience the awful situations I have found myself in at times. The world has changed a lot, but some people will always take advantage of young women in vulnerable power dynamics. If that ever happens to you, I want you to reach out to me. You can find me at UpRising Philanthropic, and I will do my best to answer any questions you have.

Fundraising isn’t perfect. It’s not easy. It’s not even fair at times. But it is deeply rewarding in certain moments, and it can be incredible to be part of building something. To watch equipment be purchased, to help fund medical research, to help support people struggling with being unhoused, with addiction, with mental health. To see a cancer diagnosis met with real support because you helped raise the funds for it. To see children live longer because of a drug you helped fund. To see people build connection and community. To see communities who have suffered unimaginable discrimination and racism, rise up. To see the future you believed in become a reality. To be part of something bigger than yourself.

But never, ever forget that the most important thing you can do is take care of yourself. No job, no career, no role is worth compromising yourself or your dignity. You matter. You deserve respect. No cause carries more value than your mental health and wellbeing.

And if you decide to become a fundraiser, know I am here — ready to talk, ready to answer questions, ready to tell you the reality of the work. Ready to be honest with you.

So you want to become a fundraiser? Go into it with eyes wide open.

In solidarity,

Liz

Friends,

Last week took a lot out of me.

I am an open book. I write about my thoughts, feelings, and experiences on this platform. My thoughts about work, life, politics, and culture come out in my writing. This is who I am.

But what I write can be weaponized against me. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it is a damaging and painful experience. Last week was one of those moments.

So when I sat down to write a post last night my brain froze. Truth be told? I think this was a way to protect myself against more pain.

So I am working through this somatically, the way that my community has taught me to work through it.

I am listening to music that brings me joy.

I am painting water colours.

I am spending time with my pups.

I am spending time with family and friends.

I am spending time in nature.

I am just letting my body do what it needs to do.

So until next week my friends. Thank you for your patience as I work through this.

In solidarity,

Liz

By the time you read this, I will be sitting in a law office in the middle of a civil suit discovery session. This is a fancy legal term for sitting in a room, with both legal teams present, under oath, reviewing documents, testimony, and other relevant facts.

By the time you read this, I will likely be sitting face-to-face with the man I have accused of intentional infliction of mental distress and harm. So I am writing this to you all the night before one of the most stressful days of my life.

People often refer to my choice to come forward about my experiences with sexual harassment and assault as courageous. I often balk at the term because I think that word should be reserved for people who exhibit real courage. People who put their lives on the line; people who take significant personal risks. I do not feel that what I am doing is courageous.

But then I remember what I have lost.

I lost jobs.

I lost friends.

I lost opportunities.

So today I am going to walk into the law office where I will be interrogated by his legal counsel with my head held high.

I will remember that I chose to speak up.

I will remember that when it came down to it, I said no.

No to any further subjugation and humiliation.

No to any further degradation.

No. To all of it.

And that does take courage.

So, today I will wear that title of courageous and I will wear it like a shield.

I know that every single fundraiser out there has felt this. Has been in a room, or on a call, or at a donor dinner, and known that something was wrong. We've all wanted to say no. I hope one day, we all can — without penalty or persecution.

In solidarity,

Liz

P.S. That photo of the youth protestors is one I learned about from my lawyer Gillian Hnatiw. She proudly has it hanging on a wall in her office. I love it so much, and wanted to share it with you all.

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Hello friends.

So I was scheduled ot take time off in June to recover from my surgery and prepare for my civil suit discovery. Alas, things never go as planned.

On the morning of June 15 (the day I was scheduled for my operation) I woke up to this email from my surgeon’s office:

That was fun.

Nothing like preparing your client work, moving meetings around, and being ready for two-weeks of recovery to wake up that morning and find out it’s a total bust.

My surgery is rescheduled for July 20 so I have more time to write. Good for some, not so good for others.

And that’s not the only piece of news. Here’s a bit of an update from me on my civil suit as well:

Speaking of sexual assault, I want to share with you a piece I just finished about a documentary called “Code of Misconduct.” For those of you in the UK, this is a distinctly Canadian story that had international impacts. I hope you’ll take time to read and learn more about the outcome of the Hockey Canada scandal and the ensuing trial. This is about hockey, but it is not unique to hockey. This is a societal issue.

What Code of Misconduct Taught Me About Silence, Survival, and Consent in Hockey Culture

This weekend, I finally brought myself to watch Code of Misconduct.

If you have not heard of it, Code of Misconduct is a Canadian documentary directed by Sébastien Trahan that premiered at the Hot Docs festival in April. It features investigative journalist Rick Westhead who broke the story of the Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal. This is a case in which five former World Junior Hockey players were charged with sexually assaulting a woman in 2018, and in which Hockey Canada paid close to $3 million in a civil settlement to help cover it up. The documentary draws on text messages, conversations, and other evidence that did not reach the public during trial due to publication bans. What it reveals is both infuriating, heart breaking, and oddly clarifying.

What struck me most was not the obvious horror of what those men did. It was the more fundamental rot the film exposes: a hockey culture that has never learned or taught the importance of consent. Not just consent between men and women, but consent as a value in how people treat one another as human beings.

Journalist Rick Westhead examines how young hockey players are systematically taught that consent is an impediment to team cohesion rather than a foundational value. The documentary explores hazing rituals that function in cult-like ways, normalizing coercive group dynamics from an early age. One young player describes a pervasive culture in which the “kill count” (i.e. the number of women a player has slept with) is openly discussed and celebrated. Rather than being taught what healthy adult relationships look like, these young men are encouraged to compete with one another around sexual acts. Women are reduced to numbers, not human beings.

This competitive, sexualized culture breeds a deep sense of entitlement—one that does not stay confined to the locker room. You see this culture front-and-centre during the trial and the evidence provided by young woman known through the trial only as E.M. In one video provided by police, E.M. is visibly intoxicated on the dance floor, and the players close in around her, pulling her ponytail, slapping her on her buttocks. It is a disturbing image. And as one journalist from The Walrus described it, it looked like “a pack of sharks circling a seal.” They were on the hunt.

From left: former Canadian world junior hockey teammates Dillon Dube, Cal Foote, Alex Formenton, Carter Hart, Michael McLeod.

Detective Lindsay Ryan, the police officer who led the investigation and recommended laying charges against the player, pointed out something about the group chat amongst the players that speaks to the lack of consent-culture amongst hockey players. Of the 19 men in the team group-chat that evening, when asked who wanted to come to McLeod’s hotel room for a threesome, not one of them raised an objection. No one said anything. No one raised a single objection.

When we hear the refrain, “not all men,” in response to accusations of sexual violence this is why women laugh. Of course, it’s not all men. But more often than not, there are not enough men willing to break out of the culture of misogyny and violence to stop their peers from committing crimes.

Breaking Down Stereotypes and Rape Myths

One of the most important parts of the documentary is the focus on rape myths and how they are so pervasive in the court rooms and locker rooms. The documentary spends important time on the concept of dissociation as a trauma response. Most people are familiar with fight or flight responses, but far fewer understand the fawn response.

Fawning is a survival mechanism in which a person in danger appeases, complies, and tries to become whoever the threat needs them to be in order to stay safe. As the experts in the film note, E.M. exhibited this response. She did what she needed to do to stay safe. When surrounded by a group of men (all of whom were largers and stronger than she was) she said that she disassociated from herself and did what she needed to be able to survive that evening.

People often mistake fawning for consent. This is not a surprise, as this is a feature of our culture that tells us that women lie, and men are victims. It is a feature of a society that aids and abets perpetrators. When a victim’s compliance is reframed as consent, the men in the room are absolved. What is never asked is: what would have happened to her if she had not complied? What would these men have done to keep her silent?

The documentary also examines the ways rape myths were perpetuated in the courtroom by the defense attorneys. E.M. was on the stand for nine days, being asked everything from what she wore, to how drunk she was, to whether or not she was cheating on her boyfriend. The questions were implying that she was to blame for what happened to her, not the other way around.

What was never centered in those questions was the conduct of the men. The men who looked at a heavily intoxicated, outnumbered young woman and decided, collectively, that this was their moment. The men who coordinated afterward to manage the fallout. The men who filmed a woman to demand consent be recorded for posterity. The men who believed they could do what they did and just move on.

This is how rape culture survives in institutions: not through individual acts of cruelty alone, but through the systems that turn the attention away from perpetrators and onto victims and survivors.

It’s Not Too Late to Change the Culture

And yet, the documentary does not end in despair. It takes time to examine the people working to change hockey culture from the inside: the consent educators, the younger players, the journalists who refused to let this story be buried. One survivor who now teaches consent to young athletes said something I found genuinely moving: many of these young men are exhausted by the shame that comes with wearing a hockey jersey. These men want the culture to change too.

Watching Code of Misconduct is not easy, but it is necessary. What happened to E.M. is not an aberration. Instead, it is the outcome of a culture that has, for generations, treated consent as optional.

But that culture is not limited to hockey arenas.

It lives in boardrooms, workplaces, in classrooms, and in courtrooms. It is in the ways we treat those who come forward and report harm, and in the agreements that ask victims to stay silent while institutions protect their reputations. Never forget that Hockey Canada settled with E.M., but required her to sign an iron-clad non-disclosure agreement.

The documentary makes an important distinction between what is legal and what is ethical. As Rick Westhead states in the film, “just because the judge did not find that something criminal in the room did not happen in that room, it does not mean that what players didn’t say and do things that were depraved.”

For E.M.’s sake, and for everyone who has survived something they were told to stay quiet about, I hope the shift happens sooner rather than later.

To learn more you can visit: https://cineflix.com/shows/code-of-misconduct/

In solidarity my friends,

Liz

Friends, this is my last post before I take a sabbatical in the month of June. And by sabbatical, I mean, have a laparoscopic abdominal surgery on June 15 (painful and likely some good drugs) and then go through a full-day discovery for my civil suit on June 29 (more painful, fewer drugs).

Wish me luck!

On Grief in Its Many Forms

I have selected a nice stack of books to read over the recovery period, including a re-read of bell hooks’ “All About Love.” I want to spend my recovery period reading both fiction and non-fiction. I have been approaching this month with a sense of trepidation and fear. My hope is that reading will help centre me in the midst of this storm.

My friend, and Co-Conspirator, ’s recent post on LinkedIn talked about grief through her poem “Unraveling”. At the bottom of the post, she quotes bell hooks from “All About Love” where she writes:

“Grief doesn’t only show up when someone dies. It shows up anytime something meaningful ends–a relationship, a dream, a version of yourself you always thought you’d be.”

I feel this in my bones.

Every time I go under the knife — and this will be the 12th time in my 46 years — I am reminded that the body I live in will never be pain free. I have grieved that over and over again.

I also grive the versions of myself before I became an advocate. I often think about the person I was before I went public about workplace harassment and assault. The person who thought the systems worked for everyone. I will never be the person I was before. I have had to grieve that as well.

The month of June will bring both of those parts of me together, in one lunar cycle, and I must contend with it. We cannot avoid our grief, but we can sit with it, and let it teach us what we need to learn. I hope I can find my way through that and come back here to share with you what I have learned.

My TEDx Talk on How Our Stories Help Us Heal

But before I disappear, I wanted to follow up on my recent TEDxPugwash talk experience. I wrote about it here, and they have now uploaded my talk to the TEDx website. The topic is “On Silence and Ending Violence - How Our Stories Can Help Us Heal.”

In this talk, I speak about how society responds to hard truths. I talk about my friend and the campaign. I talk about my friends Erin Casey and Wendy Carroll. But most importantly I talk about the power of retaining your voice.

You can watch the TEDX Talk here:

In some ways, that talk was its own act of grieving — and of letting go.

I’ll be honest, when I was first approached to do this talk, I was really surprised. In fact, it took me a few days to realize this wasn’t spam or some kind of scam email. I genuinely thought that there was no way that this group was serious about having me speak. I am grateful to my friend Marni Tuttle (who is from Pugwash) for convincing me otherwise, and encouraging me to do the talk.

I am so grateful to have been in that space, with those people, on that weekend. I am so grateful my mom, my husband, and my best friend Sarah and her partner Mattieu all came to bear witness to this moment. I am grateful to the committee for encouraging me, to volunteer RikkiRene for helping me craft my talk, and to the other speakers who shared in this truly magical experience. This was the first time, in a long time, I felt I could speak about the topic without getting angry. This was the first time I spoke about the subject with the knowledge that change was coming.

I looked out into the audience that day and saw the faces of my loved ones, of other people who were navigating journeys similar to my own, and of strangers who simply came to hear what we had to say. It was an experience in community-building that I will never forget.

All of this to say, I head into this very difficult month of June with the knowledge that I am supported by many different communities, in different places, and it gives me the confidence I need to face the challenges ahead of me.

See you all on the other side.

In solidarity,

Liz

On Saturday, I sat in a circle.

Not a committee. Not a task force. Not a working group with terms of reference and a mandate to report back to a Minister. A simple circle. Seating was arranged so that no one sat at the head or the back, and everyone was equal. That arrangement was not incidental. It was the point.

This was the second Community Sharing Circle co-hosted by Cumberland North MLA Smith-McCrossin and the teams at Autumn House, Lilac Place, and Sexual Health Centre of Cumberland County, held at the YMCA’s The Anchor facility in Amherst. I joined my friend Kristina Fifield — trauma therapist, social worker, and a fierce and grounded advocate in the gender-based violence space — to hold space for a community that has been asking for exactly that: space.

The context matters. These circles are happening because the incidents of sexualized violence in this region are rising. Not because the community is more broken than others. Because it is paying attention, and because it had the courage to ask for something different.

A sharing circle is not a complex concept. In fact, it is a profoundly simple one — which is part of why it is so easy to overlook, and part of why it works.

Rooted in Indigenous culture and values, the circle is a form that carries meaning in its shape. A circle has no head. It has no back row. Everyone is an equal distance from the centre, meaning everyone has equal space and power. The conversation is not dictated. It is facilitated by everyone in it. You speak when you feel it is right to speak. You listen when it is not yet your time. No one is forced to contribute, and no one is permitted to dominate.

We came in with intention. We came in with compassion. We came in understanding that this was a listening space not a debate, not a briefing, not a strategy session. We came together to help one another feel less alone in a world that is working very hard to make us feel exactly that.

What emerged from the circle was not surprising. It was clarifying.

The consistent thread running through our conversations was how hard it feels right now. How difficult it is to stay present — for ourselves, for our children, for our partners, for our communities. How exhausting it is to carry both the weight of daily survival and the ever present terror of a world where violence feels increasingly normalized and close. People described a kind of fog. An overwhelming fatigue. A sense that no matter how much they do, it is never quite enough.

Kristina offered a framework for this that I keep returning to: a disconnected society is a fearful society, and fear is politically useful.

She is right. The erosion of community, the defunding of public services, the hollowing out of nonprofit organizations, the rhetoric that “trickle-down economics” will solve things, is not accidental. Isolated people are easier to control. Frightened people are easier to manipulate. When we cannot turn to one another, when there are no services to turn to either, we are left with nothing but our own precarity and whoever is willing to exploit it.

This is the political logic of disconnection, and it is playing out in real time across communities in this country.

When people’s basic needs are not met—when they struggle to feed their families, afford housing, access mental health care, or find safety—we see an escalation in violence. This is not a controversial claim. It is well-documented and intuitive: scarcity breeds desperation, and desperation, when it has nowhere to go, can turn inward or outward in ways that harm.

The cascading effect of budget cuts and scarcity rhetoric lands hardest on the people already carrying the most. The organizations built to catch those people — the shelters, the sexual health centres, the community mental health programs — are themselves underfunded, under-resourced, and under siege. The workers inside them are exhausted. The communities they serve are exhausted. And everyone is being asked to do more with less, in a political climate that frames this as efficiency rather than cruelty.

We are not just tired. We are bearing the weight of policy choices that have been made on our behalf, without our consent, and often against what we are advocating for.

But here is what I also witnessed on Saturday: people showing up anyway.

One participant offered something that landed for everyone in the room:

“This is a form of harm reduction,” they said.

They were right.

When the systems meant to protect us fail — when the legislation hasn’t passed, when the funding hasn’t come, when the supports aren’t there — community care is what stands between people and harm. It is not glamorous. It does not scale easily. It cannot replace a properly funded social infrastructure. But it is real, and it is something we can actually do.

What we can choose is to pool what resources we have. The spaces we have. The time we have. The capacity we have. To show up for one another.

This is not a long-term solution. Let me be clear about that. We should not romanticize community care to the point where it becomes an excuse for governments to abdicate responsibility. The people in that circle should not have to be each other’s mental health system. Advocacy for systemic change must continue—loudly, persistently, and collectively.

But while we advocate, we also need to survive. And survival, right now, looks like sitting in a circle. Listening. Refusing to let one another disappear into isolation.

What ails our society, and what is being deliberately cultivated, is isolationism.

The antidote is always community.

It has always been, and it will always be.

The sharing circle is not a new idea. It is one of the oldest ideas we have. And perhaps that is exactly why it still works.

We come together. We hold space. We remind each other that we are not alone.

That, right now, is an act of resistance.

In solidarity my friends,

Liz

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Well friends, we are barreling straight ahead into summer here in the Maritimes. In Canada, we had what we affectionately refer to as the “May Two-Four” weekend (a play on it usually being the weekend of May 24 and the term we use for a 24-case of beers). The spring here in Halifax has been unseasonably wet and cold. At some points, we were starting to wonder if we could ever see the sun again (for those of you living in the UK, I am well-aware it’s been miserable there too as my mother is currently visiting family). But this weekend was glorious. And while the last six months of my life I have been chronically ill, I have been pushing myself to get back on my bike and back to my happy place — the Saltmarsh Trail.

I’ve written about the Saltmarsh Trail in my Substack before. It is a ten minute drive from my home. It is a part of the Trans Canada Trail system and stretches 6.5 kms in one direction straight to Lawrencetown Beach. As soon as it is warm enough, I ride the trail on the weekends to clear my head, to be in nature, and to anchor myself. This weekend was especially spectacular and I hope that this video of the ocean can help get you through your week as well.

A New Addition to Our Fur-Family.

Losing our beautiful boy Rusty in March was one of the hardest things I have navigated in recent years. He was my soul-dog, and that kind of loss doesn’t just pass. I have been mourning him for months, sometimes crying at the strangest things like the nail marks in our wooden floor from where he would run around the house. I found myself sitting on the floor just sobbing, running my fingers across the marks in the wood, wishing that he was still here with me. My dogs are my family, and losing Rusty continues to break my heart. He wasn’t supposed to go this early, but every day gets a little easier.

That’s why we were so lucky to find little Cooper, who is basically a tiny stuffed animal pretending to be a real dog. He joined us the weekend after the TEDx talk and is fitting into the family perfectly. If videos of the ocean don’t bring down your blood-pressure and help you relax, perhaps super cute puppy photos will?

To be clear, he is also a tiny menace, as evidenced by this very long fight sequence between him and our other dog Lewys. I could never get a chill dog. Our house thrives on total chaos.

A Growing Community of Fundraisers on Substack

It seems that every day there are more and more fundraisers joining Substack. When I first arrived on this app, my wonderful friend Caroline (of ) welcomed me with open arms. Her kindness was part of what made joining this community so great. Since that time, I have been thrilled to see so many other thought-leaders starting to write, share content, and build their own communities. It’s also wonderful to see a growing nonprofit and fundraising Substack that includes diverse voices that are often suppressed or shadow-banned on other platforms like LinkedIn (IYKYK).

I am thrilled to be in community with people like my fellow Co-Conspirators , , , and .

I love my friend Substack and the community of care she is building.

I follow the deep thinking of and the irreverent and (often flat-out hysterically funny) writing of .

I love seeing the younger generation of fundraisers like Esther Lee and so I can learn from their perspectives.

I also love that this platform connected me to Leigh of and we met in Toronto over a coffee to learn about one-another.

I am grateful to my paid subscribers who choose to support my writing.

I see so many friends as subscribers.

know that my opportunity to speak at TEDxPugwash came from a subscriber (thank you).

Every single person that subscribes and opens my Substack each week means so much. No matter if you read a little or a lot, what matters most is that we are in community with one another.

Community is the antidote to what ails our society in this moment.

Taking A Break from Articles in June While I Prepare for Discovery

There is another deadline approaching for me in June. At the end of that month I will be in the discovery phase of my civil suit against the man I have accused of sexual harassment and intentional infliction of mental distress and harm.

I have spent the last seven years of my life trying to find some semblance of justice. I have fought hard to name what needs to be named. To protect others from the same fate. I put my own career, my livelihood, and my personal life at risk — and I am not backing down now. I will be heading into that meeting on June 29 with my head held high. The shame is not mine to own. It never was, and it never will be.

This said, I am feeling the need to anchor myself and spend some time really preserving my energy for what is coming. That’s why I plan to take the month of June off from writing my weekly posts. I will still be on Substack Notes — so if something moves me in the moment, you’ll find me there. But I won’t be writing full articles. I will be reserving my energy and my thinking for what lies ahead.

I know that you are all with me in some way, shape, or form, and that brings me comfort. So I will keep posting until the end of May — perhaps more puppy photos and videos. Who knows?

Thank you all for being my community. It has been the most important lesson I have learned in this entire journey, and I am so thankful to have this space with you all.

In solidarity my friends,

Liz

Last weekend, I returned to a place where I once experienced some of the weirdest and most disturbing moments of my career.

On May 3, 2026, I stood on a stage in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, and delivered a talk about non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), the silencing of survivors, and why peace cannot begin with silence.

The night before I did the talk I stayed at a place called Fox Harb’r Resort.

The Place I Never Thought I’d Return To

Fox Harb’r was the site of one of the most eye-opening — and frankly one of the more disturbing — professional experiences of my career.

Nearly a decade ago, I attended a donor event there for a former employer. It was the kind of event where private jets landed on the golf course’s airstrip and men whose names I only knew from business reports descended on golf carts before the start.

I remember the entrance to the clubhouse being lined with paintings of nude women. I remember a former premier Ontario sidling up alongside me at the bar, asking how long I’d been at the organization, and how old I was—for the record, I was in primary school when he was elected. I remember the way the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. And I remember smiling, deflecting, moving on — because that’s what the job was. Make sure that the guests feel comfortable, no matter how uncomfortable you feel.

As my former colleagues described in a CBC piece in 2020, the golf tournament was filled with inappropriate and frankly dangerous behaviour from the attendees — most of whom were older, wealthy men. One colleague recounted “a potential donor asking her to meet him outside so they could drive his luxury car down a nearby private runway — even though he was drunk.” I witnessed that incident, and I was grateful she didn’t get in the vehicle with him. I even remember the former CEO of the health centre having to physically remove men from the vehicle we were getting into to head back to our accommodations at the end of the evening.

When I returned last week, the nude paintings were gone. Oil landscapes had replaced the images of mostly naked women at the entrance. At least some things change. But I could still feel the ghost of that younger version of me, navigating that room, calculating every move.

The irony of spending the night in that place, before walking into a room to talk about the dangers of silencing survivors, was not lost on me.

This was a full-circle moment.

Pugwash: A Place of Peace

I’ll be honest: I had no idea about the incredible history of Pugwash before I was invited to speak there.

I have lived in Nova Scotia, off and on, for about twenty years. I have driven through that part of Cumberland County more times than I can count. And somehow, I had never absorbed the significance of this small village on the Northumberland Strait.

In 1957, Cyrus Eaton (a Nova Scotia-born industrialist) invited scientists from both sides of the Cold War to gather at his estate in Pugwash to discuss nuclear weapons, global annihilation, and what it would take to pull the world back from the edge of apolcopyse.

They came. They talked in spite of their differences. In spite of long-held beliefs about one-another. In spite of their hatred for one-another.

What emerged from those talks was the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which became one of the most significant peace movements of the twentieth century. The organization even won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.

This is where I came to do my talk.

There is something known as the Pugwash spirit. It is the idea that that you can sit across a table from those you disagree with, speak uncomfortable truths, and still work toward something better.

This is exactly what survivors of gender-based violence are asked to do every single day. Except survivors are rarely lauded for their bravery. We are almost always asked to stay quiet. And more often than not, that comes with an NDA.

The Talk: On Silence, and Ending Violence

My talk was called On Silence, and Ending Violence. The through-line was simple, even if the subject matter was not: peace does not begin with silence.

I talked about what it means to be a woman fundraiser — to navigate boardrooms and donor dinners and golf courses and galas while performing a particular kind of professional cheerfulness, all while absorbing things you are not supposed to name.

I talked about writing my CBC op-ed in 2019. About what happened when I stopped protecting the problem and started describing it. About the hundreds of people who reached out to say: this happened to me too. About filing complaints. About being offered a settlement that required me to sign away my voice and why I said no.

I talked about Zelda Perkins — Harvey Weinstein’s former assistant and co-founder of the campaign — who in 2017 became one of the first women to break her NDA. I spoke about how much I admire her for her courage, her tenacity, and her unwavering commitment to giving survivors back their voices.

I talked about Wendy Carroll and Erin Casey, who lived for twelve years under a silencing agreement following complaints of sexual harassment at the University of Prince Edward Island — and who had to leave their province, their careers, and their community because they couldn’t explain to anyone what had happened to them. In January 2026, after a two-year process, they were finally released. Twelve years of being silenced.

I talked about PEI becoming the first jurisdiction in Canada to ban the misuse of NDAs in 2022; the United Kingdom passing some of the strongest such legislation in the world in January 2026; and Nova Scotia, where advocates including myself have been pushing for reform for years, still stalled.

And I talked about what it costs to speak up.

Professionally. Personally. Legally.

About the days when staying quiet would have been so much easier.

What I Said, and Why It Matters

The central argument of the talk, and the thing I most wanted the room to leave with, is this:

We have been asking the wrong question all along.

We ask: why don’t survivors speak up?

But the right question is: what are we doing that makes silence safer than truth?

Truth-telling is framed as a brave individual act. That framing is convenient for systems that would prefer not to change. The real test isn’t whether a community makes room for one person to speak — it’s what happens after they do.

Are they believed?

Are they protected?

Does anything actually change?

NDAs are one of the most powerful tools we have for ensuring the answer to all three of those questions is no.

And yet — change is happening. Slowly, imperfectly, but happening.

As I said in Pugwash:

Real peace is not the absence of conflict. It is not the absence of noise. It is not the quiet that comes when people are afraid to speak. Peace is what becomes possible when the truth is safe to tell.

On Being Back in Spaces Like This

The evening before the talk, I stood on the patio at Fox Harb’r and looked out at the water.

I thought about the younger version of me who had stood in that place almost a decade ago, calculating how to get through the day without making it worse. Who had smiled at the lewd comments and brushed them off. Who had looked at those paintings on the wall and thought: this is just how this job is.

That version of me was doing the best she could with the tools she had. The structures around her were designed to make her small, and she hadn’t yet found the words — or the power, or the community — to push back.

I have those things now. And part of the reason I do is because other women — Zelda, Wendy, Erin, and so many more — refused to stay silent even when it cost them everything.

So I stood there on the grounds of Fox Harb’r, looked at how far I have come, and then I went and gave a talk that I hope will make a difference in someone else’s life.

And I’m not done.

Not even close.

In solidarity my friends,

Liz

I will be heading up to Pugwash, Nova Scotia this weekend to participate in a TEDx talk, which means my post will be delayed next week.

If you are interested in learning more about the TEDx event please visit: https://tedxpugwash.com/.

I will be speaking on the topic of how silencing survivors inhibits our ability to create peaceful societies. I will be sure to share the video of the talk as soon as it is available.

If you can, wish me luck, send me all of the good vibes, and pray I don’t fall on stage (I am a klutz).

Picture this scene from the Oscars, minus the fancy dress:

Take good care and I will be in touch soon.

In solidarity,

Liz

“Every house is a shelter.”

That line stopped me when I first heard it. It came from CAREAWO — a Baltimore-based organization working to change how Black, Indigenous, and communities of culture experience the animal welfare sector. It’s a simple sentence, but it quietly dismantles one of the most entrenched assumptions in the work: that animals are safer with organizations than with people.

That the shelter is the solution.

That certain communities are the problem.

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White Women Dominate Animal Welfare

Last week, my friend and co-conspirator presented at the Humane Canada Conference on a session titled Whose Comfort Counts? Fundraising, Respectability Politics, and the Work Ahead. I was supposed to be there with her, but as always, my chronic pain had other plans.

Esther and I have been trying to bring a community-centric fundraising lens to the animal welfare sector — a space that is, by almost every measure, deeply monolithic. The majority of volunteers, staff, and donors are white women. That’s not an attack, but it is extremely important to note, because if we’re serious about animal welfare we have to be honest about who gets to define it, and who has historically been on the receiving end of its enforcement.

An Eye Opening Experience

I came to animal welfare relatively late in my career, through a contract at the largest animal welfare organization in our province. I won’t speak to specifics. What I will say is that what became clear almost immediately was the depth of dedication people in this sector bring to animals. It is genuinely moving. Organizations will move mountains to pull an animal from harm. The compassion is real.

And it sits alongside something that is also real: the routine exclusion of the people connected to those animals.

I heard donors express more grief, more outrage, more mobilizing fury over animals in distress than I had ever witnessed directed toward unhoused people, or children in poverty, or communities without clean water. And more than once, I heard donors say — without hesitation — that they would wish harm on humans who hurt animals.

I’m not going to pretend it never happened. I have to admit it was disturbing. These individuals were vitriolic in their rhetoric and their desire to punish people. This was an eye opening experience, and it told me something important about what this sector has been built to protect, and who it has been built to police.

What I also came to understand, working in that space, is that the health of companion animals is a direct reflection of the health of the people caring for them. The sicker the animals, the sicker the people. Animals are a bellwether. The community is the unit of care — but we keep treating animals as separate from it, extractable from it, rescuable from it.

This isn’t a new observation. It’s actually the foundation of the One Health, One Welfare framework that Humane Canada has been advancing — rooted in Indigenous teachings about interconnection, and recognized by Health Canada. The idea that human health, animal health, and planetary health are inseparable. That you cannot meaningfully address one without attending to the others.

What troubles me is how rarely that framework changes the fundraising ask.

Welfare Isn’t Helpful When It’s Weaponized

In 2024, I sat on a Humane Canada Conference panel with James Evans, CEO of CARE, to talk about how the animal welfare sector has excluded and actively harmed marginalized communities. The history here is not subtle. Animal welfare enforcement in Black, Indigenous, and communities of colour has long mirrored child welfare enforcement: remove the animal, penalize the person, offer no education, provide no support. A carceral model dressed up as compassion.

White women have dominated these spaces for a long time. And in some cases — not all, but enough — those spaces have been used to punish people deemed unworthy of their animals. Unworthy of care. Unworthy of the benefit of the doubt.

CARE’s model is a different one entirely. Their programming is built to cultivate and sustain human and animal wellbeing within the community — not by removing animals from it. Every house is a shelter. The goal is to help people, pets, and communities find a healthier path forward together.

That’s a fundamentally different theory of change. And it has profound implications for how we fundraise, how we communicate, and whose story we decide to tell.

Different Ways to Keep People and Pets Together

Since I wasn’t able to join Esther at the conference, I put together a short video to share with conference participants. I’m embedding it here.

I had a chance to share some of the programs happening with one of my clients, Bide Awhile Animal Shelter, who are doing their utmost to think holistically about animal welfare. I made the video because I wanted to ask the question, in room full of people who care deeply about animals: what do we actually mean when we say welfare?

Because welfare, as it has been practiced, has not been neutral. It has been a mechanism of judgment. It has decided who is a fit caretaker and who is not. It has removed animals from poor communities, from Indigenous communities, from communities of colour, from people whose care looked different than those running the animale welfare organizations — and called it rescue.

And fundraising has funded that story. Donors have given generously to that story. Communications have reinforced it.

If we are serious about One Health, One Welfare — if we actually believe that the health of animals and people and communities is bound together — then we have to be willing to interrogate what our sector has been built on. Not to shame anyone, or to burn it down, but because the work ahead requires honesty about how we came to be.

We need to talk about whose comfort counts, and why that is problematic. Until we do that, we won’t change the systems of oppression that we participate in.

I hope you’ll consider this an invitation to think deeper about this issue.

In solidarity my friends,

Liz

People ask me sometimes what drew me to fundraising.

The honest answer is that I didn’t choose this work so much as my trajectory was shaped by the people I watched growing up, by the values that were modeled for me before I had words for them, and by one extremely important and indomitable woman who showed me, over the course of a lifetime, what generosity actually looks like in practice.

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My mother is a nurse. She has a bleeding heart in the best possible sense — the kind of person who has never once asked what she would get in return for giving. I have spent my entire career trying to find donors like her and to help others find it in themselves.

True generosity is giving with no requests for naming, no quid-pro-quo, and no reporting requirements. It is showing up when you are needed most and hoping that what you can give —no matter how big or small— can help.

Living Up to Our Parent’s Legacies

It was a recent article written for Toronto Life by Avi Lewis that made me think more carefully about how this happens — how a parent’s passion becomes a child’s vocation, and what we do with that inheritance.

Avi Lewis is the newly elected leader of the federal New Democratic Party, and he comes from a storied political family. His grandfather was a labour lawyer and one of the key architects of the NDP in the early 1960s. His mother, Michele Landsberg, is a journalist and one of Canada’s most important feminist voices — known for her scathing political commentary and her lifelong commitment to social justice. His father was Stephen Lewis: beloved politician, diplomat, and one of the most profound moral voices this country has ever produced. Stephen Lewis led the Ontario NDP to a historic role as official opposition in 1975, served as Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s, and later became the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS: a role that made him a household name and a conscience for a generation of Canadians.

He was controversial. He was enigmatic. He was beloved by many.

I remember hearing Stephen Lewis speak on the radio and on television when I was growing up. I would sit in the living room and watch him talk about the AIDS crisis ravaging the African continent with a passion and a precision that I had never heard from anyone before. I remember thinking: one day, I hope I can do something that matters like this man does.

Growing up, I was a hard-core political wonk. In university, I studied political science and comparative religion, drawn to the place where politics and faith intersect — to understanding what moves people, what compels them to act. Many of history’s great orators came from deep faith traditions and I wanted to know what motivated them. I thought I could achieve that by pursing work at the highest political levels. I had a dream of working at the United Nations.

I Am Leslie Knope

It was at a Model UN conference (yes, I said that out loud) that I met my future mentor, Margaret Carrington, a public affairs officer with the World Food Programme (WFP). That connection led to a summer internship at the WFP in New York City — three months of working full time, attempting to write my Masters thesis, and living in student residence with no air conditioning, surrounded by cockroaches. It was one of the hardest and best experiences of my life.

What I learned quickly was that the UN was a place where it was nearly impossible to get anything done. I watched the WFP constantly negotiate and fight for funds just to feed the world’s most marginalized people — to save lives that could easily be saved. I began to understand, from the inside of an international aid organization, the particular frustration that Stephen Lewis must have carried: watching a world turn away from people dying from something that could have been treated, if only there had been the political will.

When I returned to Toronto, I struggled to find work. Overqualified for some roles, not yet qualified for others. A former high school contact was working at the Stephen Lewis Foundation, and I reached out. I spent that fall volunteering — inputting data from hard-copy documents into their newly acquired CRM software, hour after hour. It was unglamorous work, and I felt honoured to do it. To contribute, in even the smallest way, to what Stephen Lewis was building felt like a privilege.

Eventually I found a job and had to leave my volunteer role. But something more lasting had happened: my mother had become connected to the Foundation through my work there, and that connection would define the next two decades of her life.

Mamma Linda

In 2006, my mother Linda attended a World AIDS Day event and the inaugural Grandmothers to Grandmothers Gathering in Toronto — a remarkable convening of over 200 Canadian grandmothers who came together in solidarity with African grandmothers raising children orphaned by AIDS. Thousands more would eventually join the movement. My mother was among the first. In 2008, she was selected as one of twenty women to travel on the first Solidarity Trip to South Africa, visiting projects on the ground. She returned to Uganda in 2010, where she became deeply connected to the Reach One Touch One project, and has visited their work there on a regular basis ever since.

My mother has become a beloved member of that community. She is called Mamma Linda by many people. I cherish the many Ugandan “brothers and sisters” I have been fortunate to meet because my mother is their mother. They lost their parents to the AIDS pandemic, but they gained my mother, and she loves them like they are her own.

After years of my mother visiting, volunteering, and contributing to the welfare of grandmothers and their families in Uganda, her commitment was recognized by ROTOM. She decided to make a significant contribution to help build an Outreach Centre in Mukono and they decided to name it the “Mamma Linda Village Outreach Centre” in honour of her commitment. This was one of the most sacred expressions of their love for my mother. She was deeply touched, as was I. She never expected it, making it all that more special.

On The Legacy’s Our Parent’s Leave Us

I cannot tell you everything about my mother in one essay — but anyone who knows me knows Linda. Whatever she puts her mind to, she will achieve. I am in awe of her tenacity, her persistence, her love, her compassion. Most of all, I admire her generosity — not the performative kind, but the sincere, exhausting, unglamorous kind. She gives of herself in every possible way to ensure that the people around her live better lives. I measure myself against her constantly.

So I understand something of what Avi Lewis describes when he writes about living in the shadow of a parent’s legacy of giving back. Avi and I are in perpetual motion, trying to catch up. We measure our lives by our contributions to society. We are just trying to be ourselves, while still making sure we honour the high standards our parents set.

This is, I think, what philanthropy looks like at its most honest. Not a gala. Not a tax receipt. Not a naming opportunity on a building. It is every-day people, showing up—who keep showing up, no matter what is happening—to make sure people knew that they deserved love. To become a part of a community, thousands of miles away from home, and become a mother (a mamma) to others.

That is the model I carry into my work every day. Generosity as a practice, not a transaction. Giving not because it feels good to be seen giving, but because the need is real and you have something to offer. My mother never once asked what she would get in return. She just went.

For those of us who work in this sector — who spend our days asking others to give — I think it’s worth pausing to remember why we got here. Most of us didn’t stumble into fundraising. We were shaped into it. By a parent, a mentor, a moment when we watched someone speak with such conviction that we thought: I want to do something that matters.

That’s the inheritance worth claiming.

Not money.

Not status.

The belief that generosity, offered consistently and without condition, changes the world.

My mother taught me that. And every time I sit across from a donor, or help an organization find the words to tell their story, I am still just trying to catch up to her.

In solidarity my friends,

Liz

We are slowly creeping into summer here in Nova Scotia. The days are longer, the weather warmer. The snow has melted and the crocuses on my lawn are starting to emerge. For those of you who live in warmer climates, this may sound ridiculous. I know my friends out West are thoroughly enjoying posting photos of cherry blossoms and planting their gardens. We get it, okay? You are better than we are!

As for the political scene in Nova Scotia — on Friday they closed the sitting of the legislature, literally 30 minutes before I managed to show up in person. It was quite hilarious that this was the longest sitting of our provincial legislature in recent memory, and I still managed not to make it on time. Perhaps that is its own kind of metaphor: the door closes just before you arrive, and the decisions are already made.

What’s Next?

We are now all settling into the new financial reality and waiting to see what damage the budget cuts will have on the operations and program delivery of thousands of organizations across this province. Philanthropists and corporate partners are already seeing a massive increase in proposals and asks as organizations scramble to fill the gaps left behind.

This brings me to an excellent piece by my friend and colleague Martina Ulrichs (https://substack.com/@martinaulrichs) a consultant based in Montreal. Martina has spent years working in the philanthropic space and has written a fantastic piece for Policy Alternatives on solidarity philanthropy and changing how we give to support social change. I highly recommend you read it.

What Martina highlights — and what I think we need to keep reinforcing right now — is that people who run philanthropic foundations are not the experts in what works on the ground. Access to a cheque book does not equal superiority in knowledge. Full stop.

“Admitting you don’t know it all is uncomfortable. But setting up rigorous due diligence processes just to give yourself a sense of control undermines your mission. This doesn’t mean abandoning standards. It means front-loading the due diligence. Once we have verified that a movement’s mission and strategy align with our goals, we need to trust them to execute.”

This is exactly what we need more of right now. We need funders to loosen their white-knuckled grip on process and control, and to refocus on what actually moves the needle: relationships, trust, and long-term commitment.

What makes Martina's piece so powerful is that she is not writing from the outside looking in. She is writing from inside her own experience — the discomfort of sitting at the funder's table and watching how much deference flows toward the people holding the chequebook, and how little flows toward the people doing the work on the ground in community. That is not an easy thing to say out loud. It takes courage to name the culture you were once part of, and I am grateful she did

Solidarity Means Trust

And here is the part I want to sit with for a moment, because I think it is the piece we talk about least: long-term means long-term. It does not mean a two-year grant with a renewal contingent on a 40-page report. It does not mean showing up with resources when an issue is trending and disappearing when the news cycle moves on. It means being in relationship with communities and organizations through the hard seasons — including this one.

The organizations currently flooding funders’ inboxes with emergency proposals are not doing so because they lack creativity or capacity. They are doing so because the rug has been pulled out from under them by a government that made decisions made behind closed doors. They are doing so because our sector has been chronically underfunded for decades, patched together with project grants and good intentions.

Funders who genuinely want to support social change have a choice right now. They can process the influx of proposals through the same slow, gatekeeping machinery as always — or they can ask themselves what Martina is really asking: do we trust these organizations or don’t we? And if the answer is yes, then act like it. Pick up the phone. Release a grant early. Remove a reporting burden. Extend a timeline without being asked.

The crocuses will come up every spring whether or not we pay attention. The organizations holding this province together may not have the same resilience to weather these changes. We need to act accordingly.

In solidarity my friends,

Liz

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Last week, I posted a piece on LinkedIn called “Can you be a fundraiser and a protestor?” The responses to the piece were mostly positive — but one comment really stopped me in my tracks.

The commenter argued that there’s a more nuanced approach — one that doesn’t involve offending funders or staying silent with wealthy donors. That fundraisers have a unique opportunity to expand a donor’s worldview by leaning into hard conversations graciously. And that when fundraisers embrace a protest mindset, they create a barrier for those conversations to occur.

I understand where that comes from. I really do. Because for most of my career, I was that person.

The person I used to be

When I was in university studying political science and international development, I was the person in the classroom arguing for systems change from inside the systems. I believed that if we could embed ourselves within institutions, we’d be able to influence decision-making and improve outcomes for others. My fellow classmates told me I was being naïve. I thought they were the ones who didn’t understand.

What I didn’t reckon with until about a decade ago was this: I never changed the systems I engaged with. Instead, the systems had changed me.

I had become increasingly obsequious. Afraid to challenge the status quo. Frankly, someone I was not proud of being.

Some of my most shameful professional moments came from proximity to power and influence. When you’re doing high-level work inside an organization, it becomes very hard not to justify — to perform the mental gymnastics required to explain why you did something that fundamentally didn’t feel right. It happened to me too many times.

It’s a significant part of why I left the sector and began consulting. I needed to make choices that were aligned with my core values. I couldn’t spend another day telling someone I reported to that I was okay with their decisions when I wasn’t. I have to live with the choices I made over my career. There are many I do not feel good about. All I can do now is try to make better ones — and work toward better alignment between what I believe and what I do.

On moderation

If you are not familiar with Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, I would recommend you read it — in full.

Like many white people, I was familiar with the MLK the media gave us. The peaceful protestor. The father. The orator. The man of the famous quotes about solidarity and a world where people are judged not by the colour of their skin. Those quotes are real, and they matter. But it wasn’t until 2020 — in the midst of the racial reckoning — that I started to learn, and frankly unlearn, much of what I thought I knew about him.

The fuller picture of MLK includes his strident, unflinching critique of moderation. And when I read this passage from the Letter, I thought immediately of the LinkedIn comment I described above — because King named that posture with precision more than sixty years ago:

“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

— Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

I am not drawing a direct equivalence between the civil rights movement and the work of the nonprofit sector. The stakes are not the same. But the logic King names — the preference for order over justice, the belief that the person seeking change should moderate their methods to make the powerful more comfortable, the idea that there is always a more convenient season. That logic is alive and well in our sector. I have been on the receiving end of it. I have, to my great shame, deployed it myself.

“I cannot agree with your methods” and “leaning into hard conversations graciously” are, at their core, the same ask: slow down, soften up, don’t make people uncomfortable. Wait for a more convenient season.

I’m done waiting.

What changed

So when someone tells me there’s a more nuanced way to change the hearts and minds of wealthy donors, it lands differently than they might intend. I’ve spent years trying to do exactly that. I’ve sat in those meetings. I’ve had those gracious conversations. I’ve softened my language, picked my moments, and waited for people to get comfortable with change.

Over the last month, since the Nova Scotia PC government tabled its budget, I’ve spent weeks working alongside advocates and activists to raise awareness — in person and online — about the real impacts of these cuts to the nonprofit sector. It’s been clarifying work. It’s reminded me of something I know to be true: I am tired of negotiating. I am tired of quiet conversations. I am tired of acting graciously so we don’t offend people with power.

I want to fundamentally challenge and disrupt the fundraising ethos — because I believe it causes more harm than it acknowledges. I think we can do more than wait for people to get comfortable with change. We can help push people into action.

Pick up your tools

My friend Stephanie Domet recently asked people to “pick up their tools” and help.

Alongside that, she shared something that has stayed with me: ’s Social Change Role Map — a framework for understanding the many roles people play in social movements. You can explore it at socialchangemap.com.

When I look at the map, I see myself in many of the roles — but the one I most align with now is the Disrupter.

Iyer describes disrupters this way:

“Disrupters take uncomfortable and risky actions to shake up the status quo, to raise awareness, and to build power.”

After 20+ years of being part of the system — reinforcing it, facilitating it, defending it — this is where I’ve landed.

Is disruption for everyone? No. But are there other roles for those who find it uncomfortable? Absolutely. Over the last few weeks, I’ve watched people show up in every form they felt capable of. Through art. Through music. Through storytelling. By organizing events and rallies, by showing up in person, by watching the government online even when the public had been locked out of Province House. Some people built resources. Some people taught others how to engage. Some people supported those on the front lines. Every role mattered.

I’ll leave you with this, as we head into another week of watching governments make decisions that harm the communities we serve:

What’s your social change role? And has it evolved over your lifetime and your career?

In solidarity my friends,

Liz

Can you be a fundraising professional and also attend public protests?

Yes. Yes you can.

On Friday, I spent two hours standing in the cold with my fellow Nova Scotians who are furious about the way this government has handled budget cuts to the organizations that hold our communities together. I was glad to be there. I am also acutely aware of how long it took me to get to a place where I felt comfortable being there.

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For most of my career, I was told — explicitly and implicitly — that having a public opinion was a career ending move.

Stay bland.

Don’t upset the funders.

Don’t say anything that might cost you a seat at the table.

I internalized that message for longer than I’d like to admit. And then, in 2021, I wrote a piece for CBC about sexual harassment in Nova Scotia’s nonprofit sector. I named what had happened to me. I refused to sign an NDA. And I learned, in a very concrete way, what the sector does to people who stop being quiet.

I’m still dealing with the consequences.

So when I talk about the pressure on fundraisers to placate people in power, I’m not speaking theoretically. I know what it costs.

The Risks of Having An Opinion

Being at a protest is not controversial. It is active participation in democracy. It is about reminding the people we have elected that they work for us, not the other way around.

But for fundraisers, it has always been framed as a risk. You might upset a donor. You might signal an affiliation. You might make yourself too legible, too political, too much of a person with actual convictions. Better to be useful and invisible. Better to smile and ask for the gift and save your opinions for the privacy of your own head.

Here’s the thing about that arrangement: it only works if you believe that your access to powerful people is worth more than your integrity. And the longer I’ve been in this work, the less I believe that.

“Not All Donors” but “Some Donors”

There are genuinely generous, kind, and principled people with wealth who give because they care. I am lucky to know many of them. But there are also people who have stepped on others to get where they are, who use philanthropy as reputation laundering, who expect gratitude and deference as part of the transaction. And we have built a sector culture that cannot tell the difference — or worse, doesn’t think it’s our place to try.

I once sat in a car with a very wealthy man who told me his success was nothing but luck. Right place, right time, right partner willing to do whatever it took — legal or otherwise — to win. He said it with a mix of disgust, shame, and apathy. And this man is celebrated in our community as a philanthropist.

Why do we keep acting like wealth tells us something about the value of a person’s soul? Why do we treat business success as a proxy for wisdom? Why do we assume that because someone has made a lot of money, they deserve our deference?

I think it’s because we’ve been trained to. And I think that training is worth resisting.

The Right Moment To Start Is Now

On Friday, I stood in the cold next to Indigenous elders and land defenders, African Nova Scotian leaders, artists, musicians, poets, people with disabilities, people who are desperate and people who are furious. I thought about how many of them have been told, in various ways, to be quieter. To be more strategic. To wait for the right moment.

The right moment is now. The right moment is always now.

We are only fundraisers because there are programs and causes worth fighting for. When those programs are under attack, the most professional thing we can do is show up — visibly, loudly, and without apology.

Go to a protest. Stand with the people you serve. And remember that democracy only works if we actually participate in it.

In solidarity my friends,

Liz

This weekend, I had to say goodbye to one of the sweetest souls I’ve ever known. Our beloved dog, Rusty, got very sick, very suddenly, and the kindest thing we could do was let him go. He has been with me through so much — surgeries, illness, most of my legal battle, and countless ups and downs. He was the cuddliest and gentlest dog you’d ever meet. He leaves a big hole in our home. I loved him so.

For those of you who are pet owners, you know what this loss feels like. All we can do is muddle through the grief and find a way to live without them. I am so grateful I was there at the end, to see him over to the other side.

These Buget Cuts are Contemptuous

The last three weeks have been some of the most demoralizing — and also some of the most galvanizing — of my career in the nonprofit sector.

When our provincial government tabled its budget, it did so without consulting the communities it was gutting. Indigenous communities, Black and African Nova Scotian communities, 2SLGBTQAI+ groups, and disability-serving nonprofits did not receive a phone call, a meeting, or even a warning. They opened their emails one morning and discovered that their operational grants had been cut by anywhere from five to forty percent. Some programs disappeared overnight.

That is not fiscal responsibility. That is contempt.

I want to be direct about what I believe will happen as a result: these cuts are going to prove more detrimental to Nova Scotia’s nonprofit sector than COVID-19 ever did. At least during the pandemic, financial supports existed to cushion the blow. Emergency funds were created. Programs were extended. There was a recognition, however imperfect, that the sector needed to survive.

There is no equivalent safety net here. And people are already losing their jobs.

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Collective Pain and Collective Action

In response to these cuts, a group of nonprofit consultants and I organized an emergency fundraising resource call. In one week, 65 people registered — fundraisers, nonprofit staff, sector leaders, and community members from across the province trying to make sense of what comes next. The response was sobering. Organizations are in crisis. The ripple effects are already being felt in communities that were already under-resourced and already being asked to do too much with too little.

Premier Houston built his political identity on speaking up for people who felt ignored by government. He made his name standing at microphones on behalf of the victims of the Mass Casualty, calling out a premier he felt was not listening to the people. And yet, when thousands of his own constituents showed up to the legislature, he walked past them smirking.

He told the media the protests were organized by the opposition. They were not. They were organized by people who are scared for the future.

This was an arial shot of the protest on March 4. This was not a group of “professional protestors", this was a massive collective action.

In spite of what politicians think, the arts, culture, and heritage sector is not a “nice to have.” It is the infrastructure through which marginalized communities build identity, access services, process trauma, and participate in civic life. When you defund African Nova Scotian cultural organizations, you are not trimming fat. You are cutting the connective tissue that holds communities together. When you eliminate funding for Indigenous arts and language programs, you are not making a budget decision. You are continuing a historical project of erasure. This is racism and bigotry in budget form.

Stephanie Domet, co-executive director of the Afterwords Literary Festival and a fellow advocate, has been documenting this moment in real time through a podcast she never wanted to have to make. It’s called Culture is Critical, and in its first three episodes she has interviewed people working in environmental, arts, and archives sectors — all of whom reinforce the same message – these cuts make no sense. As Domet put it herself: “these cuts are not for Nova Scotians, they are not about the way we live here. It hurts. It hurts deeply.”

Don’t Let Them Count On Our Exhaustion

I know that many of the organizations in Nova Scotia are exhausted. We are trying to figure out how to keep the lights on, keep staff employed, and keep serving people who depend on their services — while also being expected to fight for your their survival. That is an impossible ask. And it is one that the government is counting on you being too tired to meet.

We cannot let them count on that.

What I have seen over the past three weeks has reminded me of why I do this work. People are showing up. Organizations are reaching out to each other. Sector leaders who have never worked together are building coalitions. The fundraising community is sharing resources freely and without reservation. That is what solidarity looks like in practice — not as a slogan, but as a survival strategy.

We have put together a free resource repository for any organization navigating these cuts. We are building a community of practice. If you want to learn more about how these cuts are impacting our nonprofit sector please visit our visual report called “The Ripple Effect.”

The opposition members who are holding this government to account deserve our thanks and our continued pressure. The organizations doing this work deserve our resources and our respect. And the communities being harmed by these decisions deserve better than a smirk.

In the meantime, we will continue to show up to protests. I even bring my mom!

We will continue to remind Houston that he is not the CEO of Nova Scotia. He is an elected official. He works for us, not the other way around.

In solidarity my friends,

Liz

Trigger Warning: Sexual Harassment and Abuse in Fundraising

Last week, a publication called All Nova Scotia posted a piece about my civil suit against a wealthy donor I was required to work with. You can read about that case here.

I’ll spare you the details of the All Nova Scotia piece, but the essential gist was a near-verbatim regurgitation of false statements in the defense filing from the man I am suing. I wouldn’t exactly call that journalism.

What was genuinely disappointing was that the journalist completely glossed over the most significant part of my recent win in the court of appeals. I’ll let my lawyer, Gillian Hnitew, explain it better than I can — here’s what she wrote on LinkedIn:

For those of us who aren’t lawyers: in Canada, there is a statutory12-month reporting period for psychological harassment or abuse.

Twelve months.

Most people haven’t even fully processed what happened to them within that window. Having a claim that tests our interpretation of intentional infliction of mental distress matters enormously. I am grateful I will have the opportunity to put the full evidentiary record before the court.

What Happens When We Speak Up

But beyond the legal developments, I think we need to talk about something bigger: the way people in the fundraising profession continue to be placed in dangerous situations — and what happens when they speak up.

I came forward with my allegations in 2019. I spent two years as Chair of the AFP Women’s Impact Initiative (WII), advocating for women and vulnerable people in the sector to be protected from sexual harassment and abuse. I hosted an annual online event called the National Day of Conversation where we discussed harassment and abuse and shared free resources. I have shared my story and bared my soul publicly so that anyone entering this sector — especially young women — knows that you have a right to be safe at work.

So I’m not entirely surprised by All Nova Scotia‘s journalistic standards. What I do find remarkable — and enraging — is that eight years after #MeToo, after changes in legislation, after years of advocacy, we are still contending with journalists and lawyers willing to reach for the same tired tropes. The narrative that our lawsuits are money grabs. The insinuation that we’re building a name off of an incident. The same old machinery used to shame victims and discredit their fight for accountability.

I am not going to quietly let that pass.

I did not spend the last decade speaking publicly about sexualized violence and harassment in the fundraising profession to take this lying down. What we allow persists. If we allow people to shame us, we internalize that shame. And if we allow the narrative that women fundraisers are somehow selling themselves for donations, we are — implicitly, insidiously — calling young women in this sector sex workers.

In response to the All Nova Scotia piece, I made this video:

If I have said it once, I will say it again — the shame is not mine to own.

Revisiting Statistics on Harassment in Fundraising

I also want to use this moment to revisit some research that doesn’t get nearly enough attention.

During my time as Chair of AFP WII, I had the privilege to work with Ohio State University researchers Dr. Erynn Beaton and Dr. Megan LePere-Schloop. They did a comprehensive study of the AFP membership and published two studies that showed that harassment and abuse in fundraising was not an anomaly, but in fact, the norm.

• 3 in 4 fundraisers have experienced some form of sexual harassment on the job

• The majority of harassment comes from people in positions of power: CEOs, Executive Directors, board members, and donors

• The most severe form is sexual coercion — being solicited for sex

I saw my experiences represented in the reports. I suspect, many of you will too.

You can read more here and in the AFP’s Speaking Truth report here.

The Shame is Not Mine to Own

I will not be shamed for what I had to endure in a role where I had very little protection. Where I disclosed what was happening to multiple senior members of the team and no one helped me. Where, years after I reported, the organizations involved continued accepting millions of dollars from that donor.

I am not the one who needs to feel shame.

This post is for the women just starting out in their careers who read my story and feel seen.

This is for the people inside organizations who have stood up since I went public, demanding that their organizations refuse gifts from predatory donors.

This is for anyone who has ever been harassed on the job and wonders if there will ever be any justice.

I see you.

I will keep fighting — for you, with you.

You are not alone. Neither am I.

In solidarity,

Liz

I have been speaking out against the misuse of NDAs in the charitable sector for almost five years. I think I know this issue well. But after reading Michele Fugiel Gartner’s recent piece on confidentiality agreements in foundation spaces, and after a conversation with a friend who helped me see what I had been missing, I realized I had been approaching the issue in a way that left out some critical layers.

So this is me doing the work of saying: I missed some important things.

Here’s what I think deserves more attention.

Gender isn’t a new lens here — and that matters

NDAs have been studied through a gender lens for years. Since the Me Too movement accelerated scrutiny of how confidentiality agreements function in workplaces, researchers have consistently documented how NDAs silence sexual harassment claims, protect institutions over individuals, and land hardest on women and junior staff.

Philanthropy and fundraising are gendered professions. Women make up a substantial share of nonprofit and fundraising staff (often more than 80%), while decision-making authority tends to sit with boards, senior leadership, and major donors. In that context, NDAs aren’t neutral governance tools at all. They operate inside hierarchies where the people with the least power are often the ones being asked to stay quiet.

When we talk about NDAs in our sector without naming gender, we make the issue look less studied than it actually is. That’s worth fixing.

Race Was Ignored

The Black Canadian Fundraisers Collective and similar practitioner networks have been documenting something important: Black fundraisers and other racialized professionals carry expectations around representation, community engagement, and emotional labour that their white colleagues often don’t. These aren’t abstract concerns — they shape day-to-day experiences inside philanthropic institutions.

In that context, an NDA isn’t just a governance mechanism. It can be a tool that prevents marginalized staff from speaking openly about the inequities they’re navigating. When our analysis of NDAs doesn’t include race, we’re missing a significant part of how these agreements actually function.

Indigenous governance perspectives deserve more than a footnote

Some of the conversations happening in philanthropy right now rightly acknowledge that Indigenous governance traditions don’t treat relationships as conflicts of interest — they treat them as sources of accountability. That’s a meaningful challenge to Western assumptions about neutrality and distance.

But here’s what I think we need to push further: if relational accountability reframes how we think about conflict-of-interest policies, those same principles should be informing how we evaluate confidentiality agreements. An NDA is, at its core, a tool for managing relationships and information. If we’re serious about bringing Indigenous governance perspectives into philanthropy, that analysis can’t stop at conflict of interest.

What I think We Should Actually Be Asking

Michele’s piece raises the question of how many foundation staff have signed NDAs and how that shapes their behaviour. It’s a great question. But I think we need to go further and ask: how do the effects of NDAs vary across gender, race, professional seniority, and employment precarity?

Because governance tools don’t operate in a vacuum. They operate inside gendered workplaces, inside racialized professional dynamics, inside hierarchical institutions where some people have a lot more to lose than others.

That’s the analysis I want to see more of. And honestly, it’s the analysis I should have been centering all along.

I am so grateful to my community for calling me out, and calling me in, when it’s needed.

In solidarity,

Liz

I am late writing this piece as it’s been a pretty terrible week.

My best friend lost her youngest son last week and we have been navigating all of the pain that comes with loss of a child. He was the kindest of souls. I loved him dearly. He was a singular thinker. He was his own person. No one will ever be like him. He was unapologetically himself, always.

My best friend read’s this Substack on occasion so if you can send her all your love and support as she navigates her journey with grief it would mean so much. She is the best person I know. She is, as we say, “my sister from another mister.” She is all of the best things you could hope for in a friend for life.

NDAs and the Charitable Sector

So I haven’t written a Substack this week. But I want to share this fantastic piece by around the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in Foundation spaces, and how they impact staff behaviour.

I have been speaking out against the misuse of abuse of NDAs for almost five years. I highly recommend that every employer, no matter what country, learn about the issues related to the misuse of NDAs.

But for now, take a moment to read Michele’s post. This is an angle I had never considered!

Foundations Shaken

Let’s Talk About Confidentiality and NDAs in Foundations

I’ve come to use this space as something of a research journal, a place to record questions that arise alongside my work on philanthropy and foundation professionals. Ideas have a way of appearing briefly and then vanishing if they aren’t written down. This one has surfaced several times in recent months, and each time I’ve let it pass. So I’m writing i…

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5 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Michele Fugiel Gartner

In solidarity my friends,

Liz

Last week, the Nova Scotia government tabled a budget that included $130 million in cuts to grants and programs across the province.

It was a bad week.

A very bad week for many of the most marginalized people in Nova Scotia.

Show me where you put your money, and I’ll show you what you care about.

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We Are More Than Our GDP

For context, Nova Scotia is the country’s second smallest province (geographically speaking) and what Canadians often call a “have not” province. We have a lower-than-average capacity to generate tax revenue, which makes us a recipient of federal equalization payments — a contentious political issues at the federal level.

We are not a major political or economic power, but what we lack in financial prowess we make up for in many other ways.

There is a reason I chose Nova Scotia as my home.

Nova Scotia is a province of lush scenery, incredible beaches, and breathtaking coastline. We are a patchwork of fishing villages, mining towns, rural communities, Acadian communities, Indigenous communities, and African Nova Scotian communities — spread across 55,000 square kilometres, from Yarmouth to Sydney.

I feel blessed to live here.

We carry a history both painful and proud.

We honour the history of all people’s in Nova Scotia. Of perseverance and determination. Of community care in moments of crisis.

We are rich in stories and we punch well above our weight when it comes to creativity.

You may have heard of a little global sensation called Heated Rivalry? The author Rachel Reid lives and works in Halifax. This city is full of artists, musicians, and authors.

The arts and culture sector in Nova Scotia is not a drain — it’s an economic engine.

The Canada Council for the Arts released a study in 2025 showing that Canada’s cultural sector contributes $131 billion to the national economy and $1.18 billion to the Nova Scotian economy in 2025.

But you wouldn’t know that listening to our provincial government.

Instead of recognizing that contribution, our provincial leadership chose to defunded programs supporting Indigenous and Black communities, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, immigrants, front-line service providers, and — more than any other sector — arts, culture, and heritage.

Our Premier is fixated on mining and start-ups as the answer to our economic challenges.

These cuts were targeted.

They were cruel.

Show me where you put your money, and I’ll show you what you care about.

(Note: The only highlight of the weekend? Watching our Premier get booed off stage at the African Nova Scotian Heritage Month gala in Halifax.)

When they Cut, We Show Up

So, what is a fundraiser to do?

It’s a question I’ve been sitting with since the budget dropped.

History has shown us, time and again, that when crisis hits, the answer is not to retreat into isolation — it’s to turn toward each other.

The most enduring solutions to the hardest problems have never come from the top down. They have come from communities who refused to abandon one another, who pooled their knowledge, their energy, and their care, and who chose to act collectively rather than suffer individually. This moment is no different. We are stronger together than any of us can be alone, and it is together that we will find a way through.

I’m fortunate to be part of a community of fundraising consultants — varying in expertise and background — who gather twice a month as a community of practice. We’re not a formal group, but we are connected, and we are committed to equity and justice at the root of our work. When the budget landed, our WhatsApp group lit up.

How do we help?

We landed on two streams: providing practical guidance to organizations that have been sideswiped by these cuts, and advocating to funders to step up — to unlock the capital they hold and deploy it now, when it’s needed most.

On Monday, March 9, we’re hosting an open community call for any organization wanting to understand the impact of these cuts and start thinking through where to look for alternative revenue. Come as you are. We may not have all the answers, but we’ll think through it together.

Now is Not the Time to Sit On Our Hands

To be clear: I don’t believe the answer is downloading these costs onto people who are already struggling.

The answer is to apply pressure.

We will apply pressure on the government to think again about these proposed budget cuts. I won’t shy away from that conversation.

We will also apply pressure on philanthropic partners to give more and reduce administrative burden on the organizations they support. We cannot wait for people to get comfortable with these ideas, we need to unleash the power of philanthropic giving now. Not in five to 10 years from now.

We Can Build Communities Of Care

But the most important message here is that we can build communities of care.

Fundraisers play an important role in the resiliency of our communities.

We are the conduits between those with power and resources, and the communities who do not.

We can influence discussions around tables. We can advocate. We can use our expertise, our networks, and our contact lists to build communities of care.

We did it during COVID and we can do it again.

To the fellow fundraisers who have already reached out asking how to help — get in touch.

To the organizations navigating this right now — we are here to listen.

And to keep me going, a poem that inspires me to action:

In solidarity my friends,

Liz