How to Connect With Donors When the Economy Feels Hostile: Notes on Uncertainty, Generosity, and the Politics of Nonprofit Survival in 2026 The year 2026 arrives not as a marker of progress but as a reminder of the elasticity of crisis. Inflation has become a kind of national background noise—persistent, dull, and impossible to tune out. Economic forecasters talk about “cooling” in the cautious tone one uses to describe a fever that has lowered by a degree but still threatens what it inhabits. For nonprofits, especially those that survive on the thin membrane between donor optimism and donor fatigue, this is the landscape: ambient anxiety, deferred generosity, the ever-present suspicion that giving—once a gesture of civic participation—is now a luxury.