Guest Essay

Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit: You don't need to become someone else to raise money

How to stop performing for funders and utilize the skills you already have

By Jake Hylton

July 16, 2026

This essay is part of a series of reflections from the 2026 Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit sharing insights, lessons learned, and key takeaways from the conference, which was hosted in partnership with Press Forward. Access additional Summit resources here. 

We’ve built a fundraising culture that tells people they need to perform. To show up as a polished, carefully calibrated version of themselves that doesn’t actually exist the other 364 days of the year. And then we wonder why it feels so hard, so unnatural, so draining to be in this job, so much like something we have to survive rather than something we actually want to do.

Nobody told you that you, the journalism professional reading this, already know how to fundraise. The skills that make you good at your job as a journalist are the same skills that make someone great at fundraising. You were just led to believe that the training didn’t count here too.

That was the provocation hiding underneath “Engineering Serendipity,” the session I facilitated at the 2026 Lenfest Philanthropy Summit. And this is the first time I’m saying it out loud.

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On the surface, the session was a tactical playbook: how to prepare before you walk into a conference full of program officers, how to do your research, how to read the room, how to turn a chance encounter into a real relationship. The kind of stuff most of us were never taught but probably needed to hear the moment we realized fundraising was going to be part of the job.  

But here’s the thing: that session was really just the basics of being a great reporter. 

Source-building, pre-interview research, earning people’s trust, reading a room before you open your mouth. None of that is exclusively a fundraising skill. That’s just… journalism. It’s being a human in a new setting. It’s the exact stuff that sits at the foundation of this industry, the things you learned early and have used every single day since. And yet somehow, all of it gets thrown out the window the moment someone hands you a business card that says “Program Officer.”

After the session, I was talking with a colleague and dear friend of mine, Lee van der Voo from Uplift Local. She said something that I still keep coming back to. It was something along the lines of: “This took the fear out of fundraising for me. The old way always made it feel really scary and inaccessible. But now all I actually have to do is talk to a friend, to someone I know? Hell, I can do that.”

And that’s the disconnect. We’ve spent so long telling journalists they need to climb a tree while simultaneously convincing them they’re goldfish. But here’s what nobody said: you were never a goldfish. You’re a mudskipper (look it up. It’s a fish that breathes underwater and climbs trees). You can do both. And you always could. 

After the session, it took me 45 minutes to walk from the check-in table to the elevator. Not because I got lost, but because I couldn’t make it five feet without someone stopping me to share some version of the same thing: relief, like something had finally clicked that had been stuck for a long time.

People working across the nonprofit space don’t struggle with fundraising because they lack hustle or ambition or care. Most people I know in this industry are running on all three and still feel like they’re falling short every time they have to make an ask. The problem isn’t a skills problem; it’s a permission problem. We’ve been told, implicitly and explicitly, that fundraising requires us to become someone else: someone more polished, more strategic, more comfortable with transactions. And in trying to become that person, we abandon the thing that actually makes us good at building relationships in the first place.

The hierarchy we’ve built around funders is, to put it plainly, made up bullshit. Yes, they have resources that we need. I won’t pretend that isn’t real. But they’re also people who chose to work in philanthropy because they believe in something. They want to be in relationship with people doing work that matters. They’re not sitting across the table waiting for you to perform, they’re actually dreading that. They’re waiting for you to be real, to show up and be the great thing they believe in next.

The moment we stop collectively placing funders on a pedestal, the moment we stop shrinking ourselves into something smaller and more palatable and less real, is the moment everything changes. They’re not royalty. Yes, some of them are gatekeepers, and they know it too. But a gate only stops you if you let it. They’re people, the same as you or me. 

So stop performing. Stop giving away your power before the conversation even starts. Be a human. See the other humans in the room. You already know how. 

Go be a reporter.

Jake Hylton is the Founding Executive Director of LOOKOUT News, the Southwest’s only nonprofit LGBTQ+ newsroom, where fearless local journalism and deep community roots combine to ensure LGBTQ+ people in the region are centered and represented on the local news stage.