As you close out your last weeks of 2025 and prep for Your New Year of Impact in 2026, I offer you a framework for grounding your art, your mission and your relationships in the three pillars of gratitude: feeling, thinking and expressing.
These three layers aren’t just personal wellness practices. For social impact artists, they are strategic tools for building trust, raising funds with integrity, and cultivating partnerships rooted in humanity rather than transaction.
Here are tips on how to bring each pillar into your fundraising and collaboration process.
1. FEELING GRATITUDE: The Heartbeat Behind Your Ask
This is the deep, emotional appreciation that lives inside you. The recognition of the people, experiences, and opportunities that have shaped your creative journey.
When approaching funders or collaborators:
- Ground yourself in the mission that moves you.
- Acknowledge the people who have already supported you and your work.
- Let your emotional clarity guide your tone and presence.
Funders can sense when your work comes from a place of gratitude instead of urgent scarcity. Feeling gratitude helps you show up open, confident, and relational, not performative or pressured.
2. THINKING GRATITUDE: The Mindset That Clarifies Your Partnerships
Thinking gratitude is your reflective, intentional practice. It’s where you name what you appreciate and understand why it matters.
Before you send that email, deck, or application:
- Make a list of what you already have—skills, community, shared values.
- Reflect on the strengths you bring to the partnership, not just what you’re seeking.
- Recognize that funders and collaborators are humans with their own hopes, pressures, and missions.
This mindset prevents you from approaching potential partners as gatekeepers. Instead, you see them as co-architects in your vision. Thinking gratitude shifts your internal narrative from “I need something from you” to “We can create something powerful together.”
3. EXPRESSING GRATITUDE: The Practice That Builds Long-Term Trust
Expressing gratitude is where your intentions become action. Your thank-you notes, your updates, your reciprocal efforts, your follow-through.
When building funder or collaborator relationships:
- Send genuine acknowledgments, even if you didn’t receive the grant or investment check.
- Offer updates without being asked.
- Celebrate partners publicly and uplift their work.
- Notice small contributions and name them out loud.
Expressed gratitude is what transforms a single collaboration into a long-term relationship. It signals reliability, respect, and humanity—qualities funders always remember.
Why Gratitude Matters in Social Impact Work
Fundraising and partnership-building aren’t simply administrative tasks—they are acts of connection.
They require emotional intelligence.
They require clarity.
They require care.
By weaving in the three pillars of gratitude, you create interactions that feel human, relational, and collaborative — a recipe for long-term support.
Thank you for the art you make, the justice and impacts you pursue, and the communities you uplift.