Leaning In on Nonprofits in Uncertain Times

Sometimes, the world just sucks. Jobs disappear overnight, bills skyrocket, and each day seems to usher in a new crisis. I’ve witnessed firsthand how these harsh realities—the uncertainty of 2025—can knock the wind out of families and erode our sense of hope. But I’m not here to wallow. It’s clear people need help, and our education, healthcare, and other critical systems urgently need improvement. So, how do we move from merely surviving and reacting to proactively building a future that empowers everyone?

A Vision for Empowerment Amidst Chaos

I see the impact of these challenges every day. Families confronting unexpected job loss experience financial stress, shaking their children’s confidence and sense of security. Teachers and therapists repeatedly emphasize that academic and behavioral issues are deeply interconnected with underlying issues like combative divorces, substance abuse, and financial instability. When neighbors and classmates struggle with mental health, the consequences ripple out, affecting the safety, productivity, and well-being of you and me. For example, ensuring the health and mental wellness of children at our local schools directly benefits each of us by creating safer, more productive communities. This isn’t just about one family or one community—it’s about our collective future.

You might assume I’m a bleeding-heart liberal because I started and funded a nonprofit, but the truth is, I don’t hand money to panhandlers at freeway exits—not because I don’t care, but precisely because I care deeply. I see the severity of their suffering, and how that weighs down on those who love them.  I care too much to give out bandaids that won’t fix gaping wounds. I’d rather invest in making sure individuals don’t have to show up at freeway exits tomorrow because they’ve found employment or conquered addiction. True empowerment is about solving problems at their root, not offering temporary relief.

The Daunting Scope of the Problem

Traditional charity—like soup kitchens or holiday gift drives—is no longer sufficient to meet today’s complex demands. Behavioral health and educational needs have exploded, intertwined with deep-rooted socioeconomic causes. Income inequality in the U.S. is at a 50-year high (Pew Research, 2020), and nearly 40% of Americans report serious mental health challenges (American Psychological Association, 2019). Nonprofits tackle these problems head-on, precisely because they aren’t easy or profitable enough for private businesses or governments to prioritize. These issues cannot be ignored—doing so exacerbates social instability, crime, and economic strain. Ignoring behavioral health issues today means paying more tomorrow—in higher taxes, lost productivity, overcrowded emergency rooms, and strained social services.

From Corporate Leadership to Nonprofit Innovation

Before founding curaJOY, I spent 25 years managing global teams in the electronics industry, navigating intense product life cycles, rigid hierarchies, and top-down decisions. Yet, chasing endless growth left little room for family well-being or ethical considerations. However, my daughter’s severe behavioral health and educational challenges forced a radical reassessment. I realized curaJOY needed to operate as a nonprofit because effective solutions cannot ethically depend on people’s continuous struggles. For instance, traditional for-profit models can sometimes lead to unintended conflicts of interest, where timely and comprehensive care may be inadvertently deprioritized due to financial pressures or cost management priorities.

Initially, I brought my corporate playbook into the nonprofit space—after all, people naturally do what they know. Yet, when I crunched the numbers, it became clear that standard scaling methods were unsustainable. Running a nonprofit with integrity isn’t free; it costs significantly to avoid short-term temptations like monetizing user data or pushing unnecessary services. We faced complex social issues others had already failed to address adequately, and traditional financial models couldn’t generate resources without compromising our core values.

It became clear we needed to think differently about how nonprofits create value and build sustainability.

The Epiphany: We Are Worth More Than Our Bank Accounts

curaJOY needed bold innovation to prioritize both integrity and impact. Nonprofits must recognize and cultivate their unique value by building strategic alliances. Rather than simply paying a cloud service provider hundreds of thousands of dollars, we could partner with them to reduce their internal absenteeism and legal challenges, creating mutual benefit far beyond a simple transactional relationship. curaJOY pivoted to a dual solution model addressing both problem scale and sustainable, ethical change.

Rethinking Value: Harnessing Community Co-Creation

curaJOY’s greatest asset is our community. Since 2023, over 458 community contributors—including licensed behavioral health professionals, software engineers, and data scientists from 16 countries, plus corporate volunteers from Atlassian, Okta, Walmart, VMware, and White & Case—have come together to build our flagship behavioral health solution, MyCuraJOY. Community co-creation is more than a buzzword—it’s transformative, though not always easy. Initially, I assumed everyone naturally knew concepts like SWOT analysis or obtaining multiple bids. I quickly learned otherwise. Rather than giving up, we invested in understanding and upskilling our community, enabling genuine contributions and meaningful involvement in solutions. Our community multiplies our impact far beyond financial resources alone.

Embracing Ethical AI as an Essential Equalizer

Traditional methods cannot overcome systemic problems such as provider shortages and escalating behavioral health crises. Our healthcare system faces a vicious cycle: shortages lead to burnout, causing further shortages and leaving critical behavioral health needs unmet. AI, under experts’ supervision and ethical stewardship, offers our best hope of interrupting this escalating crisis. At curaJOY, our clinician-supervised AI has proven 30% more effective at identifying root causes and recommending appropriate interventions than licensed clinicians alone. This model empowers non-specialists to collect clinically relevant data, extending expert reach without compromising professional integrity.

Because we’ve integrated families, providers, and educators from the start, we could realistically address systemic bottlenecks with supervised AI, allowing timely, accurate support for those who need it most.

Building a Circular Impact Model & Strategic Partnerships

I envision a new nonprofit model—one creating ecosystems where every stakeholder participates in solutions. Instead of viewing vendors merely as expenses, we transform them into strategic partners, jointly benefiting from mutual successes such as reducing absenteeism and minimizing risk exposure. This approach doesn’t just save resources—it cultivates a committed network invested in our collective mission. Nonprofits work to solve challenges for the common and greater good. One can even argue that charity exists out of self-interest and preservation because we’re all ultimately interconnected. Take infectious diseases as an example—it’s in my direct interest to ensure the kids at my children’s school are healthy and infection-free because I don’t want my own family to get sick. Similarly, addressing behavioral health issues directly benefits everyone’s safety, productivity, and quality of life.

Rethinking Metrics for True Impact

Traditional metrics like lines of code or referral numbers don’t reflect meaningful impact. If your metrics are wrong, you’re incentivizing people for activities that don’t align with your goals. We’ve abandoned counting lines of code or referrals made because they don’t reflect quality and impact. Bad, inefficient code or service referrals without services being rendered say nothing about how we’ve improved families’ social-emotional wellness. Instead, we focus on:

• Clinician Involvement: The number actively training and supervising our AI, reflecting true clinical effectiveness.
• Validity: How accurately our solutions align with expert clinician outcomes.
• Community Upskilling: Tracking community members’ successful transitions to full-time tech positions, showing sustainable empowerment.

These are some of the metrics that we track to better illustrate the transformative change curaJOY aims to achieve.

A Call to Band Together

In these uncertain times, as challenges intensify, we must lean into innovative nonprofits that address root causes, not just symptoms. By leveraging technology, fostering genuine partnerships, and embracing community co-creation, we can tackle what once seemed impossible. Join curaJOY. Together, let’s reimagine charity, transforming entitlement into genuine empowerment. Share your ideas, participate in our work, and help drive the systemic change our communities desperately need.