What happens when you demand brilliance but refuse to pay for sustainability? The brightest ideas shatter from exhaustion. I watched it happen to Lava Mae.

Part 3: When Great Ideas Die from Exhaustion

In 2014, I was asked to join the Advisory Board of Lava Mae as their first member with ‘lived experience.’ As I’ve said before, I hid my experience for years out of shame and I had no idea that my experience was valuable to anyone. After a few months of working alongside our teams on the streets, I took on the first operations role and held various program roles until I left in 2019. This story is deeply personal to me. The values and practices I bring to my work now, I learned from Lava Mae. The experiences I’ve had since then

Lava Mae was everything funders say they want: innovative, scalable, human-centered, measurably effective. Founded in 2013, we provided mobile showers and toilets for unhoused people in San Francisco. We pioneered the concept of "Radical Hospitality," offering an unexpected level of service to our guests, an approach that won us praise around the world and birthed a movement which still exists today.

Our impact was remarkable:

We provided over 75,000 showers
We served over 30,000 unhoused neighbors
We hit our 5-year goal 16 months early
We expanded to Oakland and Los Angeles (and I moved to LA)
We received a $1 million grant from the San Francisco Foundation in 2018
And, we inspired 80+ mobile hygiene services worldwide

By every measure funders claim to care about, Lava Mae was a massive success.

But Lava Mae didn't survive.

In 2019, they dramatically scaled back operations:

From 6 trailers to 2
From multiple service locations to just Tuesday mornings outside the Main Library
From 22 staff to 11
From serving 12,000 people annually to 8,000
And LA operations were shut down

Doniece's explanation was stark: "For the first three years, I was working 100 hours a week... When you're working with vulnerable populations, the stress and the responsibility increases 100-fold... I'm pretty exhausted and needing some self-care."

When they told me we were shutting LA down I was gutted. My hours were cut, eventually I left.

After they shut down street operations, Lava Mae became the nonprofit accelerator known as Lava Mae X. They didn't last long after that.

No amount of innovation overcomes systematic underfunding of infrastructure and leadership sustainability.

But we had made a huge impact in the small corner of the nonprofit world where we worked. Lava Mae received 4,250 inquiries from cities, nonprofits, and refugee organizations globally. At least 80 launched as shower services and many still exist today.

Lava Mae made the conscious choice to avoid government contracts. It worked for us in the beginning, but when foundation funders went looking for other new projects, we were left behind. We may have died a quick death, but we avoided the slow death and mission drift I've seen so many of our peers experience.

We kept our mission and programs intact and avoided the slow strangulation of government contracts.

The National Council of Nonprofits research reveals systematic underfunding through government contracts. Among nonprofits reporting government caps on indirect cost reimbursement, 25% receive ZERO reimbursement for overhead. This means government is systematically underpaying by 15-25 percentage points.

Additionally:

72% report government requirements are complex and time-consuming
45% experienced late payments

State governments owed an average of $200,458 per nonprofit
Federal government owed $108,500
Local government owed $84,899

44% experienced mid-stream contract changes including cuts to payments or redefined expectations

For most nonprofits, being routinely paid 6-9 months late, paid you less than cost, and having the contract terms changed halfway through, would be fatal. That's the government contracting environment for nonprofits. And it's getting worse under the current administration.

An Urban Institute survey from April-June 2025 found:

One-third of nonprofits experienced government funding disruption
21% lost a grant or contract
27% faced delays or funding freezes
6% hit with stop-work orders

As a result:

29% reduced staff
21% were already serving fewer people

Despite need remaining constant or increasing. This is a sector constantly on the brink of collapse.

One survey found that while 76% of nonprofit executives said impact measurement was a top priority, only 29% thought they were "very effective at demonstrating outcomes."

The problem with impact measurement isn't measurement itself. It's who controls what gets measured and why.

We default to measuring easily quantifiable inputs and outputs: dollars raised, people served, overhead costs. Not meaningful outcomes.

This creates multiple distortions:

First: Organizations avoid serving the hardest-to-reach populations because success metrics are more difficult. They want to keep the dollars flowing and If you work with people experiencing chronic homelessness with complex mental health issues, your "housing placement rate" will be lower than an organization that works with recently homeless families. So you cherry-pick easier cases to show better outcomes.

Second: The focus on quantity over quality means "number served" metrics don't capture depth of impact. One children's charity wanted to raise fees to provide better quality services, but the charitable side resisted because it would mean serving fewer people—and funders measure number served.

Third: Short-term grant cycles force focus on immediate measurable results. Preventive work that prevents problems years in the future gets undervalued because impact is harder to measure within typical 12-18 month grant timeframes.

And research on mission drift shows how metrics cause organizational distortion. A 2021 study found nonprofit social enterprises use strategies including:

"Structured ignorance" – deliberately not measuring certain things
"Problem reframing" – changing how success is defined
"Defensible trade-offs" – making mission compromises they can justify

Research shows organizations expand, distort, or shift services to be competitive for funding. Mission drift driven by resource dependency.

We're not measuring what matters. We're measuring what's measurable. And then we're distorting our missions to optimize for those measurements.

So, what do we do?

Funders say they want innovation, but punish investment in capacity. They say they trust us, but require surveillance-level reporting. They say they want impact, but won't pay for the infrastructure that produces it. They say they value lived experience, but their boards are filled with Ivy League MBAs. They say they want to solve social problems, but their restrictions guarantee we can't. And when great organizations like Lava Mae scale back because their founders are exhausted, or when visionaries like Dan Pallotta are destroyed for investing in capacity, funders express surprise and concern.

But they don't change the rules that created the outcome.

The evidence is overwhelming: as nonprofits grow and attract funder attention, the funding itself warps the mission. Not through malice. Through mechanisms that are well-understood, well-documented, and completely predictable.

Funders force us to look like corporations. The starvation cycle prevents infrastructure investment and funder-determined metrics distort priorities. And the power imbalances silence our voices.

But I know there are alternatives. I know organizations that have resisted these pressures for decades. I keep hearing about funding models that strengthen rather than weaken our missions.

And that's what we'll start to explore in Part 4.