On March 12, 2020, Tami Heim learned the governor had shut down public gatherings in Texas. The Outcomes Conference was weeks away. And she was facing the possibility that Christian Leadership Alliance was, in her words, completely bankrupt.

In the next 24 hours, she called legal counsel before the board, received an unexpected offer from a tech platform, and decided to pivot the entire conference online before anyone else in the sector was doing it. Within 30 days, she took it global.

CLA eventually trained over 11,000 leaders in more than 100 countries on the platform she built that week.

Tami also names something I hear from CEOs frequently: crisis has a unique power to make leaders think the unthinkable. The question is whether you can get there before the crisis forces you.

Tami Heim is President and CEO of the Christian Leadership Alliance, celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2026.

In one month, CEO Bill Simmons shipped more than 15 working applications and 70,000 lines of code to his team, without adding a single software license or outside developer.

He did it with about $25,000 in internal time, replacing software that would have cost over $750,000 to build. Most nonprofit CEOs are still asking whether to pay attention to AI. He's already restructuring how his organization functions by using it.

Bill Simmons is President and CEO of Hope Rises International, a Christian global health organization working in more than 50 partnerships across Africa and Asia to address neglected tropical diseases. Annual revenue: $11.3 million.

This is the first time I've seen how AI can transform the processes and outcomes of the nonprofit sector.

Jody Levison-Johnson had a big idea and had to decide whether to bet her organization's resources on it. A film was coming out that could either quietly fade or become an inflection point for how the country thinks about the nonprofit sector. She had to decide if Social Current should lead the campaign that followed, and how much to ask her board for.

She also talks about the two ways CEOs drift into bad decisions: chasing off-mission funding and refusing to sunset programs they love, plus why she thinks the hardest decision most nonprofit CEOs eventually face is knowing when to leave.

Dr. Jody Levison-Johnson is President and CEO of Social Current, a national organization that accredits, trains, and advocates for a network of approximately 1,800 human service organizations across the US and Canada.