Carrie Fox is the founder and CEO of Mission Partners, a woman-owned strategic communications firm and Certified B Corporation that guides high-potential nonprofits, foundations, and socially responsible corporations in realizing their greatest social impact. Since launching her first firm in 2004, she has guided hundreds of organizations around the world to lead with purpose, fueling organizations and their missions forward in new and more impactful ways. She is host of the Mission Forward podcast on TruStory FM.
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The instinct in uncertain times is to keep your options open. Tanir Ami built her foundation’s strategic plan on the opposite bet — and this conversation is about why it’s working.
Carrie reflects on her conversation with STRIVE’s Phil Weinberg and the difference between the resilience you feel and the resilience you build. Three takeaways on mindset, muscle, and the cost of apologizing for the work that holds everything up.
Phil Weinberg has spent fourteen years building STRIVE into one of the nation’s most durable workforce development organizations, and he thinks the sector has been wrong about overhead all along. This week, he tells Carrie Fox why the infrastructure nonprofits are taught to apologize for is, in fact, the product.
In this week’s reflection, Carrie draws out three lessons from her conversation with Amanda Kwong, director of the Public Health Communications Collaborative at the de Beaumont Foundation.
When the words that once built trust start closing doors instead, how do you keep communicating — and keep people listening? Amanda Kwong, director of the Public Health Communications Collaborative at the de Beaumont Foundation, joins Carrie to talk about the art of plain language, the politics of the words we choose, and what it looks like to lead a public health communications network of 40,000 through one of the most turbulent moments in recent memory.
Thirty days into a new CEO role, COVID arrived — and Tonia Wellons responded by building a ten-year plan. This week, Carrie Fox reflects on why that counterintuitive decision is still the right lesson for every leader navigating a world that keeps demanding reaction.
When the pandemic hit, Tonia Wellons had been CEO of the Greater Washington Community Foundation for thirty days — and instead of retreating to short-term thinking, she and her board committed to a ten-year plan. In this conversation with Carrie Fox, she explains why a fixed point on the horizon is most valuable precisely when everything else is in motion.
Carrie reflects on the findings that stuck with her from the 2026 Insights on Purpose™ report — including the tension between how hard leaders say it is and how much impact they still believe is possible. A new companion format this season, designed to help you hold onto what matters most from each conversation.
Leaders across nonprofits and foundations say the environment is getting tougher—yet most still believe they can increase impact over the next five years. In this episode, Carrie Fox, Stacy Palmer, and Brian Fox unpack that contradiction, and what it means for resilience, funding volatility, strategic planning, and the very real question of whether the sector can keep up with rising demand.
The work of holding communities together hasn’t changed—but this moment is asking more. In Season 12 of Mission Forward, Carrie Fox takes you behind the new research and into the decisions leaders are making to keep their missions moving.