Planning for an Uncertain Future: How a Scenario-Planning Cohort Built Nonprofits’ Resilience

For nonprofits across Maine and across the country, challenges — some expected, many unexpected — seem to be mounting. But when change is rapid and uncertainty persists, predicting what comes next is only half the battle. Being able to adapt with confidence to an unclear future is a skill unto itself.

Sandi McKinley, founder of the Massachusetts-based consultancy SectorWind, specializes in guiding nonprofits through the challenging work of planning for potentially difficult scenarios. Taking a comprehensive, relational approach to scenario planning, McKinley equips organizations with the tools needed to tackle the toughest problems that might come their way.

In 2025, the John T. Gorman Foundation and the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation initiated scenario planning skill development for Maine nonprofits by working with McKinley to offer a two-hour webinar on the topic. Later in the year, we built on that introduction by holding two workshops for Onion Foundation grantees aimed at building capacity to navigate change.

With a hands-on, collaborative format, the sessions gave arts and environment organizations the tools to think ahead and move into the future with resilience.

SectorWind’s Scenario Planning Process

The SectorWind sessions helped participants learn how to transform theoretical planning into actionable, adaptable strategies for managing plausible scenarios. Participating groups were required to bring at least one executive staff member and one board member to the sessions, and each team worked through unique forces shaping their organization. The process was intentional and methodical. McKinley asked participants to take the following key steps:

• Identify: Name three uncertainties within the organization’s operating context

• Expand: Build out a few plausible future scenarios based on those uncertainties

• Evaluate: Assess the potential impact of those scenarios across five core areas: programs and services; people, culture, and capacity; community and relationships; operations and infrastructure; and finance and money

• Strategize: Translate potential scenarios into actionable strategies

Having consulted for more than 1,500 nonprofits in her career, McKinley was the perfect guide for this work, helping organizations not only understand the importance of scenario planning, but also use tools for developing stronger organizational strategies.

Nonprofit Spotlights From the Sessions

Ten grantees from the Onion Foundation’s Arts Program and 12 from the Environment Program participated in the workshop sessions, all leaving with a greater sense of how to plan for coming situations. Here’s what two of those nonprofits had to say about their experience working with SectorWind.

Opera Maine

Founded in 1994, Opera Maine has long been the only company producing fully staged and orchestrated operas in the state of Maine. In addition to offering classic opera performances, the nonprofit also hosts a studio artist program for emerging performers.

Here, burgeoning opera artists can learn from veteran performers and get experience on stage in productions that highlight stories relevant to today. “We find that these performances allow us to break down some of the stereotypes that get in the way of us learning with empathy,” says executive director Caroline Koelker. “Art is wonderful in that way.”

Why Scenario Planning?

Like many nonprofit teams, Koelker and her trustees felt the pressure of planning for the future during the pandemic: “COVID required us to move directly from planning to action. That helped us see the value of having scenario plans in place before they’re even needed.”

While Koelker saw some commonalities across all the arts organizations in the group — including capacity concerns, trouble rightsizing, and knowing how to effectively market the work — she and her team focused on planning for:

• Leadership succession

• A volatile financial landscape

• Diversifying funding sources

• Managing emerging artist housing on a tight budget

One of the primary benefits Koelker gained from the sessions was being able to put seemingly abstract concepts into concrete terms. “We used a probability analysis to grade our scenarios based on best practices and the organization’s history,” she says. Transforming ideas into actionable insights enables Opera Maine to make more informed decisions about the future.

Similarly, Koelker and her team learned how to pull and analyze data effectively, which equips them to measure the success of their initiatives and the impact of their decisions more accurately going forward.

What the Future Looks Like for Opera Maine

The SectorWind sessions helped Koelker generate buy-in for the collective work of strategic planning. “Having an expert explain to our trustees in concrete terms why this work is so important was a great way to bring our leaders into the process,” she says.

With that collective focus in place, the Opera Maine team is now far more equipped to engage in longer-term scenario planning. “We identified scenario planning as a strategic priority for our three-year plan that we’re working on,” says Koelker. “We’re building off of the SectorWind work, which helped us find direction and best practices.”

A Climate to Thrive

In 2015, residents from Mount Desert Island came together to find ways to address the use of fossil fuels on the island. A year later, A Climate to Thrive was officially born.

The nonprofit is a community-driven organization committed to climate action, focusing primarily on clean energy, zero waste systems, transportation, and public policy. The team helps communities build resilience by planning and implementing strategies to boost local economies, infrastructures, and health programs.

Why Scenario Planning?

“In our strategic plan, we talk about how things might change and how we’d need to adjust, but we’ve never formalized that work,” says executive director Johannah Blackman. “The SectorWind sessions really opened our eyes to what we could do without expending too much time or too many resources.”

During the sessions, Blackman and her team learned how to develop potential scenarios using a graph with X and Y axes focusing on unique challenges they might experience in the future. They mapped out a spectrum of community support for their work on one axis and a spectrum of donor support on the other, which allowed them to visualize four quadrants representing four potential scenarios.

Then, the team zeroed in on one particularly problematic scenario: increased donor support but decreased community support.

“We don’t ever want to be in a position where we’ve lost touch with the needs of the community, but are aligned with donor needs. That would indicate we’re not achieving our mission,” says Blackman. “We want to think in advance about how we can communicate to donors what we’re hearing and learning on the ground so we don’t ever get to the point where those two entities are at odds with each other.”

What the Future Looks Like for A Climate to Thrive

Like Opera Maine, A Climate to Thrive benefitted from connecting with other organizations doing similar work. “We realized that there’s a lot we could be doing collectively to prepare for different scenarios,” says Blackman.

The connection between staff and board members was also impactful for the team, creating a cohesive focus and deepening strategic insight by enabling the team to problem solve together. Equipped with a common north star vision, A Climate to Thrive is now putting what it learned in the workshops into practice. “We’ve shifted our strategic plan to align with SectorWind’s framework,” says Blackman. “Now, it’s easier for us to apply scenario planning to our strategic work.”

A Climate to Thrive, Opera Maine, and the 20 other Onion Foundation grantees that participated in the SectorWind sessions are now empowered to balance short-term needs with longer-term organizational sustainability. When the future is unclear and challenges persist, this type of work equips nonprofits to proceed with confidence, knowing they’re resilient and sufficiently prepared to handle what comes next.