The Community Value Alliance recently released a report on the St. Louis nonprofit ecosystem. One statistic immediately caught my attention: there is an estimated 23,000 nonprofits operating across the St. Louis region.
I’ll say what I’ve been saying for years. St. Louis has too many nonprofits.
The report suggests there are roughly 8-9 nonprofits per 1,000 residents, nearly three times the level at which organizational health begins to deteriorate in many sectors. It also estimates that supporting those organizations would require approximately 138,000 board seats. As a proud board member of more than one board, I can tell you those empty seats are being felt.
As I sat with the report, I found myself thinking less about the numbers and more about the people behind them.
If you’ve spent any time serving on boards, leading nonprofits, reviewing grant applications, or working alongside community organizations, you already know what those statistics look like in practice. You see organizations chasing the same funding opportunities. You see well-intentioned leaders carrying workloads that would challenge even the strongest teams, and you see missions that are deeply aligned operating just a few miles apart, often without meaningful connection to one another.
The report calls out fragmentation and duplication as one of the most significant challenges facing the sector. That observation will undoubtedly generate debate, and perhaps it should. I suspect most of us can think of at least one organization whose work overlaps significantly with our own. We can think of partnerships that should exist but don’t. And I’ll even go as far as saying that we’ve had conversations and panels about why we should collaborate, and then never actually do it.
The reality is collaboration sounds wonderful until it requires sacrifice.
It’s easy to support collaboration when it means co-hosting an event or working on a committee. It’s much harder when collaboration requires sharing resources, changing long-standing practices, or acknowledging that another organization may be better positioned to lead a particular effort. Harder is considering whether two organizations could accomplish more together than they can apart.
I don’t say that lightly.
Organizations are not just legal entities. They represent years of work, relationships, identity, and commitment. Many founders, board members, and executive directors have poured an extraordinary amount of themselves into building something they care deeply about. Asking someone to consider consolidation or a merger can feel personal because, in many ways, it is.
Yet, I keep coming back to a simple question. What are we trying to preserve?
If the answer is the mission, then every option should remain on the table. If the answer is not the mission, then we may need to pause and ask whether we’ve unintentionally reversed the order of priorities.
The strongest organizations I’ve encountered are not the ones that insist on doing everything themselves. They are the ones who have a clear understanding of what they do best and where partnership can strengthen the outcome. They know when to lead. They know when to support. Most importantly, they understand that community impact is rarely the result of a single organization’s effort.
The report highlights funding pressures, workforce challenges, governance concerns, and growing competition for limited resources. Those challenges are very real. Yet beneath all of them is a question of leadership. Are we willing to make decisions based on what gives the mission the greatest chance of success, even when those decisions are uncomfortable?
I don’t believe St. Louis needs fewer people committed to solving problems.
I believe we need more honesty about where collaboration could strengthen outcomes, reduce duplication, and better steward the resources entrusted to us. We also need to be willing to have more candid conversations about mergers, acquisitions, and other structural changes that may ultimately serve the mission better than maintaining the status quo.
These conversations are difficult because they force us to separate the mission from the institution. None of this is easy. This requires humility and willingness to put the work ahead of our own attachment to an organization, a title, or a legacy.
The communities we serve do not care which organization receives the credit. They care whether the problem gets solved.
And if we’re honest, most of us already knew that.
