Looking Out, Looking In: Why Fundraising Day New York 2025 Matters Now More Than Ever

Chapter Leadership Brief 5.30.25

by Adam Glick
​Vice President, Orr Group & Program Co-Chair, FRDNY 2025 Steering Committee

As we approach Fundraising Day New York 2025, this year’s program again aims to reflect and respond to the questions, challenges, and opportunities that nonprofit professionals and their organizations encounter in their work across missions, scales, and locations. Perhaps now more than ever before, our gathering to share ideas with, learn from, and inspire each other in an ever-changing philanthropic landscape is critical to the work we do. Looking outside ourselves and up from our task lists requires us to ask why we do this work, how our roles within the nonprofit sector impact others, and what our colleagues are experiencing that we can call upon to improve our own approaches and results for the organizations we serve.

In my role as a Vice President at Orr Group, I partner with organizations large and small, focusing on everything from health and health equity to the arts, STEM, refugee resettlement, and more. The one question I often receive from CEOs, CDOs, board members, major gifts officers, and many others is, “How do we compare to other organizations you work with, and what can we do better?” If I had an easy answer to that, I would not only be a bad consultant and likely, out of a job, but I would be doing these organizations a disservice. Learning from what others are experiencing is one thing–comparing your organization to others is something entirely different.

There is no magic bullet to making your organization more efficient and impactful on those it helps, which is something we all know and experience. The nature of nonprofit work–and fundraising, specifically–is more collaborative, time-intensive, and delicate than in other industries. None of us can exist in a vacuum and drive change single-handedly. In fundraising, acting as a catalyst to move resources where they’re needed is what motivates me most, especially when meetings, case revisions, portfolio reviews, meeting reports, and many other necessary tasks might seem like a slog. As Co-Chair of FRDNY’s Program Committee this year and in thinking about what would be of interest to me at FRDNY as an attendee, I wanted to hear from my friends and colleagues directly about what excites them, what difficulties are they facing that I might not be aware of (and therefore others would be interested in exploring more, too), and where they see their organizations going over the next year, five years, or even a decade from now.

At this year’s FRDNY, I’m grateful to have the opportunity to moderate a discussion with three vibrant members of the nonprofit community: Justin Zaremby, Partner in the Tax-Exempt Organizations department of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP; Elizabeth Berkowitz, Executive Director of the American Trust for the British Library; and Andrea Yglesias, Executive Director of the V&A Americas Foundation. Considering the unique challenges of UK-based organizations fundraising in the US, this discussion will explore the opportunities to increase donor engagement and retention, and how to continue making the case for US-based donors to support organizations in the UK with innovative programming, leadership opportunities, and the need for US-based groups to support their development efforts abroad. This panel is just one example of the dynamic programming at FRDNY, much of which presents sector-specific topics covering big ideas and opportunities for discussion, with an eye to broader application for anyone in the nonprofit sector.