By Andrew Jamieson, part-time student in the M.S. in Nonprofit Management program; Associate Director of Annual Giving, Lycée Français de New York
There’s a children’s story about a woman named Miss Rumphius who made three promises to her grandfather: she would travel the world, live by the sea, and do something to make the world more beautiful.
The first two were easy enough. She had adventures across continents. She found her cottage by the ocean. But that third promise haunted her. What could one person possibly do?
Then one spring, she noticed lupines blooming near her house from seeds she’d scattered the year before, almost without thinking. And she understood. She spent her remaining years walking the countryside, pockets full of seeds, scattering them along roadsides and in forgotten fields. She never saw most of them bloom. But years after her final season, entire hillsides transformed into waves of color.
My classmates and I came to Columbia’s M.S. in Nonprofit Management program because we believed we could do something similar: make the world more beautiful through work that matters.
And then our education complicated that belief, in the best possible way.
The week after the 2024 election, our cohort arrived at class carrying something heavy. Our associate instructor, Elise, didn’t pretend the weight wasn’t there. She reminded us of something simple, something I haven’t forgotten: lean on each other, because you’re going to rebuild this sector and make it stronger.
That moment changed how I saw the people in that room. My classmates stopped being colleagues and became something closer to fellow seed sowers, each of us representing a different corner of this complex, nuanced sector, yet sharing a fierce commitment to the work. We didn’t just study together. We came together in a moment of real uncertainty, held together by a genuine belief in what this sector can become.
But being together in that room also meant we couldn’t look away from what we were being asked to confront.
We wrestled with an uncomfortable truth: the nonprofit sector—our sector—has sometimes used the language of service to maintain the very structures it claimed to dismantle. We confronted the reality that when we ignore community voice and prioritize funder preferences, when we treat marginalized people as recipients of our generosity rather than architects of their own futures, we don’t just fail to help. We become part of what needs to be fixed.
Good intentions are not enough when the systems we’re entering are designed to perpetuate harm. That realization is not a burden. It is a mandate, and the mandate has never felt more urgent than it does right now.
The sector we’re entering is under real pressure. Federal funding that civil society organizations depend on is being reduced or eliminated. Commitments to inclusion that took decades to build are being reversed under institutional and political pressure. The public’s trust in nonprofits, philanthropy, and institutions of every kind is more fragile than it has been in a generation.
This is the environment waiting for us. Not someday. Now.
And here is what I want everyone to understand: we were built for exactly this moment. Not because we have all the answers, but because we were trained to ask the right questions—and to keep asking them, even when it’s uncomfortable.
We are not graduating to manage the nonprofit sector as it exists. We are graduating to redesign it.
When you design your next program, whose voice shaped it? When you raise your next dollar, what power dynamics are you reinforcing, and what power are you returning? When you sit across from a funder or a board member, whose agenda is actually being served?
These are not peripheral questions. They are the work itself.
This work is slow. Sustainable change happens through countless decisions that choose community benefit over organizational convenience, through daily choices to lead with integrity when expedience is easier, and through telling the harder truth when the comfortable one is available. It happens through one conversation, one program design, one grant declined on principle, or one seat at the table given to someone who should have been there all along.
The seeds you scatter today will take root in soil you’ll never revisit, in fields you’ll never walk through, in lives you’ll never know you changed.
Miss Rumphius wasn’t at the beginning of her story when she started scattering seeds. She’d already traveled the world. She’d already found her place by the sea. She knew enough about life to be discouraged by it, and she chose, in the face of that knowledge, to plant anyway.
Most of you in this room are already in the fields. You’ve been scattering seeds for years: through budget cuts and board conflicts, through programs that didn’t land and funders who didn’t listen, through the quiet exhaustion of doing work the world chronically undervalues and underfunds.
What this seminar asked of you, and what I want to leave you with, is not a call to begin. It’s a call to reimagine. To look at the fields you’re already standing in and ask harder questions. Whose voice shaped this program? What power am I reinforcing with this dollar? Whose hands should be holding these seeds alongside mine?
That uncertainty—not knowing where the seeds land, not seeing the hillsides bloom—is not a reason to hesitate.
It’s the condition of the work. It always has been.
Class of 2026, you don’t need to see the full impact of what you’re building. You just need to trust that what you do next week, in the most ordinary moments of this extraordinary sector, is part of what makes the hillsides bloom.
Keep scattering. The world needs your fields.
About the Program
Columbia University’s M.S. in Nonprofit Management prepares graduates for leadership roles within mission-driven organizations in a wide variety of contexts, including global and community nonprofits, foundations, education, healthcare, the arts, or as fundraising and development experts.
Learn more about the program
here. The program is available part-time, full-time, on-campus, and online.
