2025 Trends & Tensions Shaping the Social Purpose World

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What does the future require of us?​

Grace Lee Boggs once said, “Transform yourself to transform the world.”

In 2024, the social purpose world took a lot of hits, the downpour of conflict around the world with the first livestreamed genocide, escalating cost of living, growing hate, othering, and bullying, cyberattacks, extreme weather-related displacements, misinformation, caregiving responsibilities, more families being food insecure than ever before, and the rapid rise of anxiety and loneliness. The scale of division, racism, xenophobia, and resistance to change was a lot.

At the same time, leaders across the social purpose world—managers, executives, and board directors—offer reasons to hope. Leaders in corporate, government, community services, humanitarian aid, philanthropy, impact investing, and academia are showing up. They are learning and unlearning to better guide their teams and build hope, trust, and optimism. They continue to do the important work.

Big changes are coming—what do leaders need to do in order to future-proof their work?

The social purpose landscape is in-between worlds, applying new and more band-aids to old problems while simultaneously looking to reinvent itself to be innovative, trustworthy, and relevant in a world that looks nothing like it did just 10 years ago. At the heart of this transformative journey are leaders, and the practice of leading teams is evolving quickly.

Learning, unlearning, and relearning are becoming integral to leading.

Instability has become a defining feature of our times. Instability sometimes feels scary, but it can also be the source of significant inspiration, ideas and leverage if we use it strategically to recast systems, norms and structures that no longer serve the social purpose world well. Now’s the time to assess your default reactions to change. In a time when more than 60 per cent of social purpose leaders report feeling unprepared for the pace of change, Future of Good’s 2025 Trends & Tensions Shaping Leadership in the Social Purpose World report aims to illuminate areas of focus and attention for leaders newer and experienced in managing teams and missions.

Canada’s federal power vacuum (and eventual power transfer) and a second Trump presidency in the U.S. will have significant implications for leaders in 2025 and beyond—from mass funding cuts to rollbacks on progress on critical issues. The systemic fragility of the non-profit and charity business model will be exposed again, with profound implications for the future viability of the sector and communities. This is the year to reflect on which funders you as a leader rely on and the volatility of those dependencies, reimagine your business model, jettison parts of your organization that are no longer relevant, and diversify income sources.

These times ask more of us. I’m grounding myself in the philosophy eloquently articulated in Afrofuturism author adrienne maree brown’s writing: that “what we pay attention to grows.” In the spirit of learning, unlearning, and relearning, I invite you to pay attention to these next 20 pages. As leaders, we often hold conflicting perspectives of the world we find ourselves in, but we are wired to resist the possibility that something fresh is needed.

As Alvin Toffler reminds us all, “The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Given the trends, tensions, pressures and possibilities shaping leadership, what does 2025 require of us? What can we learn in order to be better leaders?

This report offers guidance on what to watch, understand, and act on for social purpose leaders and teams. It provides guidance on future-proofing to inform strategic and annual planning, program design, board conversations, and leadership discussions. The ability to anticipate disruption, act on trends, understand complexity, shift worldviews and practices, develop inclusive solutions, and evolve institutions matters more than ever.

As UK-based changemaker Cassie Robinson points out, crisis and chaos can help us see what was unseeable before, revealing the hidden wiring and patterns in which we’ve been enmeshed. We believe crises can help managers, executives and board directors understand today’s leadership practices less as the water we swim in and more as things we have built and internalized.

The prospect of progress and winning should outweigh the risk of failure. As we enter into challenging times, it is time to be more risky, and lean into our convictions and our core values. We invite you to use this report to plan your year, to have deep conversations with your board, managers, funders and donors. Use this report to talk to your teams. Use this report to future-proof your work.

Anouk Bertner, Executive Director

Vinod Rajasekaran, CEO & Editor-in-Chief

What’s inside this report?

Social purpose teams, leaders, and organizations coast-to-coast-to-coast rely on Future of Good’s journalism, conferences, and research to fuel their learning, development and decision-making.

With 15 key trends and tensions to watch and 23 pages of in-depth insights, perspectives, and data, the report highlights trends you, as leaders, need to know and how to act on them. Through research, scanning, and journalism, we have synthesized insights from more than 1,000 articles, inputs, and papers.

Based on our journalism covering news, trends, solutions, and transformations, we ask ‘what if’ questions for some significant and below-the-radar developments shaping leadership. You’ll notice these questions scattered throughout the report as a way to nudge your thinking in slightly alternate directions for the scenarios ahead.

In identifying trends and tensions to watch in 2025, the report asks leaders and teams critical questions: What will the end of identity-based politics mean for your work? As we witness new forms of volunteering and the decline of existing ones, which types of organizations benefit the most? With urgent humanitarian needs swamping the global development system, what resources will be left for long-term cooperation and development? How can more social purpose funders and organizations be incentivized to assess the intergenerational effects of their work? With the reevaluation of DEI initiatives, what has changed, if anything?

Over the last five years, Future of Good’s annual trends report has become an essential guide for discussion, prioritization and action among managers, team leaders, board members, executives, and more.

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2025 Trends and Tensions Shaping the Social Purpose World

1

Scenario planning will begin as social purpose leaders and teams prepare for a likely Trump-Poilievre duo this year.

What it means for you: All major national surveys on vote intention show that Conservatives remain well ahead if a federal election were to be held any time soon. With the Conservatives comfortably in majority territory, if Poilievre wins, what could happen to gender-based analysis for public policy? Core funding for climate action or 2SLGBTQ+ organizations? How about Canada’s ambitious targets for greenhouse gas emissions? What about the social finance fund? What about Canada’s aid and official development assistance advocacy?

There’s a lot that is fragile. A possible Trump-Poilievre duo could mean serious funding cuts, program wind-downs, and rolling back on gains across various fronts—from embedding social equity in policy development to sustainable jobs legislation. How might leaders and teams future-proof their causes or hold ground in the Poilievre era?

Boards and leadership teams have a number of strategic choices, one of which is: Do you play defence and be angry at the new government or proactively pursue bridge-building with people who may not share the same views or values as you?

The key challenge to navigate here will be how social purpose organizations can continue to do their core work, while avoiding attacks and distractions on polarizing issues. Although it’s easier to be angry for a term or two, in 2025, social purpose teams and leaders must learn how to listen to those they don’t share the same values with to successfully navigate a Trump-Poilievre era.

2

People working and volunteering in social-purpose organizations will increasingly demand urgent action from team leaders to prioritize wellbeing in the workplace.

What it means for you: Three years after the COVID-19 pandemic forced workers everywhere to grind away from their couches, spare rooms and kitchen tables, teams are still navigating the most significant shift in professional life in more than a generation.

With that shift, health and wellbeing at the workplace entered the mainstream of the social purpose world. In addition, managers, leaders, boards and teams are facing chronic stress, microaggressions, anxiety and burnout, as well as the early onset of chronic illness.

In a global survey on changemakers conducted by The Wellbeing Project, they found that while 75 per cent of respondents felt that looking after their wellbeing was ‘very important,’ merely 25 per cent reported that they looked after their wellbeing ‘to a great extent.’

Whether it’s addressing the rapidly increasing demands for community services or addressing the complex social and environmental challenges facing society, teams, executives, board members, volunteers, and frontline workers are being called upon to do even more. In 2025, employees will speak up, pressuring their managers, boards and team leaders to learn, understand, and act on improving factors affecting health and wellbeing at the workplace.

3

Move over generative AI. Agentic AI will change how teams work in 2025, prompting a critical question for leaders: how strong is your overall AI literacy?

What it means for you: The human-AI collaboration will increase in 2025. For the last few years, generative AI or gen AI, has been all the rage, but a new technology has crept into the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape.

“Agentic” is the latest AI technology and refers to a tool capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or another platform by designing its workflow and using available tools. The agent has “agency” to make decisions, take actions, solve problems and interact with external platforms beyond the data upon which the system’s machine learning models were trained. Agentic AI could make recommendations, make purchases based on their user’s recommendations, monitor data streams, and more.

A truly personal AI assistant is emerging to augment and enhance tasks. People working in social purpose teams already use generative AI tools—from communications to writing grant applications. AI tools are already demonstrating promise for social purpose teams.

However, according to Charity Insights data, nearly 90 per cent of Canadian charities lack a digital strategy. So, overall, AI adoption literacy among team leaders is almost nil. There are still pressing questions, such as: What information can I input into an AI tool? Where does the data go? Can I input sensitive information? How do AI tools learn?

In 2025, team leaders across the social purpose world will have to prioritize becoming versed in the basics of AI tools to know the right questions to ask, to know when the use of generative or agentic AI is safe and appropriate, and perhaps more importantly, to understand how their teams can create value with agentic AI. Overall, AI literacy is now an essential leadership skill.

4

The debate on work-from-home is over. In 2025, managing, mentoring, and motivating hybrid teams will become pivotal leadership skills.

What it means for you: The hybrid workplace model, blending in-office and remote work, has become a lasting feature of the modern work landscape. Yet, according to the recent Global Leadership Forecast, only 27 per cent of leaders consider themselves highly effective at managing hybrid or virtual teams.

This gap highlights a pressing need for leadership development. While flexible work arrangements have existed for years, hybrid teams emerged as a widespread model during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Initially, there was uncertainty about whether this approach would endure. As a result, some leaders delayed adjusting their management styles or investing in skills essential for leading dispersed teams.

Today, this lack of preparation continues to hinder effective team leadership. Research further indicates that while employees favour hybrid work for its flexibility, they often grapple with challenges such as diminished belonging, loneliness, reduced productivity, and compromised wellbeing. In 2025, mastering hybrid team management will be a critical leadership competency.

Organizations must prioritize upskilling leaders to navigate these complexities, ensuring engaged, productive, and resilient teams.

5

2025 will mark a decade since the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report and Calls to Action. How might social purpose leaders mark the decade?

What it means for you: In April 2024, nine years after the release of the Calls to Action – the federal government established the National Council for Reconciliation.

That was the only Call to Action fully completed that year. Visible and tangible progress continues to be frustratingly slow, with former AFN National Chief RoseAnne Archibald commenting, “If we were in a chapter of a book on reconciliation — we are, today, on the first sentence of that book.”

We have also seen some significant actions and efforts taken in the last few years, including the fourth National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a papal apology, the repeal of the Doctrine of Discovery, and legislative progress toward establishing a National Council for Reconciliation.

Hopefully, these actions, and many other commitments and efforts, will lead to accelerated change over the next 10 years.

Team leaders, executives and boards are responsible in 2025 to reflect on their organization’s contribution to reconciliation and how they might plan to mark the decade with their teams and communities beyond land acknowledgements.

6

The frequency of floods, wildfires, hurricanes, hailstones and their cascading effects will continue to increase, requiring leaders to build emergency preparedness plans for their teams in 2025.

What it means for you: According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, in 2024 alone, there were approximately 5,700 fires. The overall evacuation numbers were well above its 20-year average. The Canadian Red Cross noted that climate change, global travel and urbanization, and infectious disease outbreaks are rising.

Experts have predicted that 2025 will see large-scale outbreaks, hurricanes, floods — and their cascading effects, such as food shortages, loss of work, lack of childcare, an increase in domestic violence, and a rise in depression and anxiety. Following the 2013 Calgary floods, local stakeholders convened to create and distribute an emergency preparedness plan for non-profits called EPIC (Emergency Preparedness Initiative for Calgary).

Today, the majority of Calgary’s 8,000 non-profits have emergency preparedness plans. The same can’t be said for other social purpose teams across Canada. More than ever, leaders and boards need to understand how to anticipate, assess, coordinate action, and understand the immediate and follow-on effects at work for various emergencies.

2025 will be the year for alarm bells on pan-Canadian emergency preparedness plans to focus on prevention, coordination and mitigation before organizations face another crisis.

7

As funders focus on programs and political landscapes shift, securing sustained funding for core operational costs will become a critical priority for leaders and boards in 2025. The question is: from where?

What it means for you: In Canada, nearly 70 per cent of charities must secure funding for core operating costs at least twice a year, reflecting an alarming trend of diminishing core financial support.

Core operating expenses—such as administrative expenses, insurance, staff salaries, and infrastructure—are critical for social purpose organizations to function effectively and fulfill their missions.

However, as core funding sources shrink, more organizations struggle to deliver essential programs, upskill teams, drive innovation, and expand services. In 2024, this challenge became more pronounced, placing increased pressure on leadership teams and boards to find sustainable financial solutions.

With only eight per cent of Canada’s 8,000 or so philanthropic funders reporting that they provide core funding, charities face a pivotal strategic choice in 2025.

To future-proof their work and navigate this evolving landscape, organizational leaders and boards must adopt bold, creative strategies to diversify revenue streams, expand donor networks, and attract strategic partnerships.

2025 should be a year where leaders boldly examine merging with other organizations with similar mandates, winding down if they are not meeting their community needs anymore, scenario planning for closure to ensure they don’t leave their employees bereft and other previously unattractive scenarios.

8

Canada will become more diverse than ever in 2025. However, leadership teams and boards will not.

What it means for you: Social purpose teams and boards have a racial leadership gap.

Even as Canadian communities become more diverse than ever, boards and teams are unable to diversify at a meaningful pace. While there are significant numbers of racialized workers in Canada’s social purpose sector, only a small minority occupy roles with influence and leadership.

It quickly became apparent that the COVID-19 pandemic had an ugly, racist side, and people were being sidelined. It’s a significant tension that will continue in 2025.

Critical questions remain for leaders: Are you going beyond tokenistic inclusion to ensure that members of equity-seeking groups have a voice and decision-making power? Are you investing in creating a more diverse board or leadership team?

Most common measures, such as having standardized hiring and performance-review processes or equating experience with formal qualifications, are more consistent with good hiring practices rather than being specifically intended to advance leadership diversity or equity.

Measures with more impact, such as intentionally recruiting people from underrepresented groups, ensuring that interviewee pools include candidates from underrepresented populations, and requiring recruiters to have equity training, are less common. Moreover, these practices are least likely to be implemented by white-led organizations.

9

In 2025, strengthening environmental and climate literacy will become a priority for managers, executives, and boards. This will help them understand and act on their organization’s footprint and procurement practices and mitigate planetary harms.

What it means for you:The world’s “take, make, waste” system is deeply entrenched but untenable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in 1988 after decades of scientists raising the alarm about global warming.

Thirty-seven years later, little binding policy exists to address climate change in the social purpose world. Non-profits, aid organizations, corporate social impact teams, and funders face no accountability for unsustainable procurement practices, potentially causing and contributing enormous harm through their operations, technology use, travel footprint, program delivery, and investments.

By 2025, the global temperature will continue to trend upward, bringing more disruptive and unpredictable weather. While the Government of Canada has committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, the non-profit or philanthropic sector leaders have made no such targets. Most leaders have yet to embed sustainable procurement, divest from fossil fuels and carbon-intensive industries, create a carbon-neutral plan, assess environmental harms, and set targets.

Yet, much social purpose work exacerbates the climate crisis—from investment portfolios to humanitarian aid delivery. This topic will be crucial for leaders to make progress on as Gen Z further joins the workforce and demands to see efforts and progress on this critical issue for human survival.

10

Changing political landscapes, global issues, and resulting social outrage will create tense times within teams. There will be continued pressure to speak out—will leaders find themselves in a cycle of perpetual statement-making?

What it means for you: Employees today, especially younger workers, expect their employers to speak out about the social, political, and environmental issues they care about.

Many organizations have complied, only to find themselves locked into a cycle of perpetual statement-making that sometimes may be tangential to their organizational priorities or mission. Organizations can’t weigh in on every issue that employees care about. According to a recent Canadian Hub for Applied and Social Research study, three out of four Canadians feel our society is increasingly polarized.

The changing political landscape also brings strong reactions and advocacy pressures into the workplace. The spread of misinformation, rising general anxiety, declining trust in leadership, far-right and far-left politics and increasing polarization is a trend for leaders to watch — often inflamed by social media and ideological dogma — and will continue to be fuelled by rising distrust in expertise, data, colonial structures and authority.

As 2025 progresses, public sentiments will become more explicitly divisive, ideological, and hate-filled—among both the left and right. There will be increased pressure from employees for leaders and boards to advocate and take stances on social or environmental issues. Managers and executives will have to act by curating spaces for their teams to listen to their peers who may not believe in the same things they believe in.

How might leaders cultivate workplaces where politics or ideologies are a healthy part of team discourse? How will social purpose leaders respond to increasingly polarizing views with their teams and the pressure to take public stances? Cultivating a culture of active listening, skills for having difficult conversations, and viewpoint diversity will become essential to effective leadership.

11

The movement for intergenerational mentoring in the workplace will gain momentum in 2025—championed by newer leaders.

What it means for you: Research conducted by Mentor Canada and Future of Good reveals that 71 per cent of young leaders in the social purpose world attribute career success and improved mental health to having a mentor. Despite this, more than half report challenges in securing workplace mentorship opportunities.

This growing need underscores the importance of fostering mentoring programs supporting young professionals. As organizations strive for authentic inclusion, executives and managers must increasingly involve younger team members in strategic processes such as governance, annual planning, and program design. This shift could enhance organizational impact and prepare future leaders for expanded responsibilities.

Additionally, “reverse mentoring,” where experienced professionals learn from younger colleagues, is gaining traction. This practice promotes mutual learning, bridges generational gaps, and fosters a culture of continuous development. Platforms like One Young World exemplify this concept by facilitating intergenerational learning at their global summits.

In 2025, organizations will have a unique opportunity to strengthen workplace intergenerational mentoring practices. By integrating mentorship programs that leverage the expertise of both newer and experienced leaders, organizations can better navigate organizational transitions, enhance collective intelligence, and drive more significant impact.

12

In 2025, team diversity, inclusion, and belonging will transcend race, gender, ability, and age and involve people from different parts of the political spectrum.

What it means for you: DEI will not die but will undergo a makeover. In the recent U.S. presidential election, more than 77 million people voted for Donald Trump, including 46 per cent of young Americans.

In Canada, as the country prepares for a federal election this year, recent Abacus Data polling indicates that 37 percent of 18 to 35-year-olds would vote for the Conservative Party, compared to only 22 percent for the Liberal Party. In response to evolving societal dynamics, corporations, INGOs, philanthropic funders, and social purpose organizations launched diversity, belonging, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

These efforts have included staff training programs, solidarity statements, and policy reviews, often yielding mixed results in driving authentic and systemic change. However, a critical oversight has emerged: DEI initiatives have frequently failed to account for diversity across the political and ideological spectrum, socio-economic status, or groups that don’t fall into a BIPOC category.

It will become imperative to regenerate your curiosity and genuine interest in different opinions, beliefs and ideologies. As the political landscape shifts in 2025, executives and board directors of social purpose organizations will face growing pressure to address this blind spot thoughtfully and inclusively, ensuring that DEI frameworks embrace a broader range of political and ideological perspectives.

13

In 2025, leaders and boards will prioritize acting on supporting caregiving responsibilities—as Canada’s caregiving crisis continues.

What it means for you: Caregiving responsibilities have significantly increased in the past few years, but caregivers and their families in Canada typically do not have sufficient financial or wellbeing support from their employers.

While there were signs and posters in neighbourhoods thanking essential workers during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been no pan-Canadian movement to acknowledge the invisible unpaid contributions of millions taking care of children, elderly, immuno-compromised, those with health care needs, and others.

Twenty per cent of Canadians are pursuing unpaid caregiving. As well, 1.25 million caregivers in Canada are 15 to 24 years old.

A recent Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence survey found that 87 per cent of caregivers experienced loneliness, 73 per cent experienced moderate to high anxiety, and 69 per cent said they noticed a deterioration in their mental health.

In 2025, managers, executives and boards will begin to explore shifts in their caregiving commitments, policies, and narratives, as the cost of inaction this year will mean families suffer, prompting mass-scale caregiver financial, emotional and health exhaustion.

14

As X fizzles out, leaders will prioritize scouting and switching to alternate social media platforms for communications and community-building. But what are the benefits of a more ‘social leadership’?

What it means for you: As social media platforms like X become more unhinged, polarizing, and toxic, prompting more users to flee, a growing number of social purpose leaders will turn their attention to newer and smaller platforms such as Bluesky, Discord, BeReal, and Mastodon in 2025.

Social media platforms have been instrumental in thought leadership, fundraising campaigns, building movements, crowdsourcing ideas, and communicating impact.

Plus, it’s taken several years for social purpose organizations to fully adopt social media technologies. However, turned off by the trolls, toxic content, call-out culture, and extremists, and burnt out by the pressure of chasing “likes,” leaders will reconsider their relationship with legacy social networks such as X, Instagram and social media more broadly.

A search for safe and creative shared online spaces to reflect, organize and mobilize communities will be a key driving force in leaders’ decisions to pause or completely abandon platforms they currently use.

As the mass switching continues, perhaps a more fundamental debate will emerge in leadership teams everywhere: Should leaders be on social media platforms at all?

Who decides? And how can leaders future-proof their social media capital by working on channels that they fully own such as their websites, newsletters, direct mail campaigns and SMS lists?

15

Liveable wages will dominate discussions among leadership circles again in 2025. A key question remains: Who bears the cost of accommodation?

What it means for you: The affordability of life as a topic and point of employer advocacy continues to show up in management and leadership circles in social purpose teams everywhere.

While there is no universally accepted definition of ‘liveability’, the inflation rate has been used as a proxy to date in order to guide managers, executives and boards. However, while the inflation rate is helpful, it also misses out on the complexities of modern life beyond the ability to purchase essential goods such as bread, milk and transit fares.

Conventional liveability indicators can miss caring obligations, neuro-diversity, invisible disabilities, and more. Some even argue that the flexibility to fully work from home or work from anywhere is an important marker for liveability. In 2025, leaders and managers will continue to face this discussion.

One aspect that isn’t clear however is who should bear the costs of accommodation? The emotional labour of delivering accommodations and supporting these groups is undeniably essential — and part of a diverse and effective workforce, but it takes time, energy, and thoughtfulness.

Leaders should reflect on how they support their teams to put in the additional work for accommodation.

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Acknowledgements

Heartfelt gratitude to the tireless efforts of the entire Future of Good reporting and learning team for their journalism and learning experiences over the past year diving into trends, solutions and transformations shaping the social purpose world in social finance, philanthropy, fundraising, humanitarian aid and development, workplace wellbeing, AI and digital transformation, equity and anti-racism and a whole lot more. Your courageous journalistic reporting and professional learning experiences illuminate nuanced insights and questions essential for the social purpose world.

And lastly, a sincere thank you to our Executive Director Anouk Bertner, Managing Editor Elisha Dacey and Marketing Specialist Lynda Nyangweso, for their thought leadership, creativity and rigour that helped this report shine.

Vinod Rajasekaran is available for speaking engagements for your team, board, strategic planning, or conference. Vinod is a regular commentator in the media, an invited speaker, panellist and moderator to conferences worldwide on emerging trends in social purpose, sector modernization, shifting narratives, social finance, social innovation, philanthropy, and corporate social responsibility. Vinod has offered in-depth presentations on social purpose trends to philanthropy leaders, humanitarian leaders, academia, public policy leaders, and corporate teams. 

Address any speaking invitations to community@futureofgood.co.

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