Museum TrendsWatch 2026: Securing the Future of the Nonprofit Sector

Each year, the Center for the Future of Museums (part of the American Alliance of Museums) releases its TrendsWatch report to highlight the shifting landscape of the museum field.

To help distill the report’s big ideas into museum-scale action, each year we break down the Center’s findings, the challenges we face, and how they connect to our ongoing work. Throughout, I’ll offer analysis, insights, and tie-ins to topics we’ve previously covered. This post continues our series with Trend #3: Securing the Future of the Nonprofit Sector.

Executive Summary: The Sector at a Glance

The nonprofit sector is a massive economic and social engine currently operating in a high-stakes environment. While we often focus on the day-to-day work of our specific museums, it’s important to remember that our institutions are part of this larger apparatus. When nonprofits are threatened, so too are museums. The following statistics show just how powerful this social and economic engine is:

• A Massive Footprint: As of 2023, there are more than 2 million registered nonprofits in the U.S.
• Economic Powerhouse: The sector contributes $1.4 trillion to the U.S. economy annually.
• Public Mandate: 69% of the public believe that nonprofits and the government must collaborate to solve society’s most pressing issues.
• The Trust Factor: Despite broader social polarization, 57% of the public express high trust in nonprofits—a vital metric that remains resilient.

These figures remind us that the nonprofit sector isn’t just a charitable niche. Nonprofits are a $1.4 trillion pillar of American life that the public still fundamentally trusts.

The Questions to Answer

As the external environment becomes increasingly volatile, the TW 2026 report shifts our focus from internal operations to the broader survival of the nonprofit framework. The report challenges us to look beyond our own walls and consider the survival of the sector as a whole:

What can we do in the face of the rapidly escalating challenges to nonprofits? How can we depoliticize nonprofit status and empower the public to support our work?

Answering these questions requires us to move from a defensive posture to a proactive one, where we actively reclaim the narrative of our public value.

Navigating the Political and Economic Friction

The safety of nonprofit status is no longer a given. We’re entering an era in which the foundational rules of our sector are being openly challenged. Securing our future requires us to confront a new wave of systemic threats that target the very foundation of nonprofit work:

• Institutional Vulnerability: Nonprofits are increasingly facing grant cancellations, workforce reductions, and direct threats to their tax-exempt status.
• Triple-Threat Disruptions: We’re managing profound, simultaneous shifts across economic, political, and cultural lines.
• The Weaponization of Perception: The increasing politicization of the sector threatens to turn community assets into partisan lightning rods.
• The Advocacy Gap: There is an urgent need for legislative champions at all levels of government who will prioritize and protect nonprofit interests.
• The Linguistic Barrier: To survive, the sector needs a shared way of speaking about our value that resonates across the political spectrum.

To weather these simultaneous disruptions, we must move beyond siloed advocacy and find a unified language that demonstrates our worth to every corner of the political landscape.

Past Trends Inform Future Realities

The current threats to the sector didn’t appear overnight. They represent an escalation of signals we’ve been tracking for more than half a decade. The TW 2026 report’s focus on securing the sector is a direct continuation of themes the Center for the Future of Museums has tracked for years. This current moment is the culmination of:

• 2019: Truth, Trust, and Fake News. The early signals of public trust fracturing and drifting away from traditional sources of information, yet trust in museums remained.
• 2023: The Partisan Divide. An exploration of how museums must navigate a split public, in which both topics and the words we use face increasing scrutiny.
• 2024: Culture Wars 2.0. A deep dive into how museums are caught in the crosshairs of partisan conflict.
• 2025: DEI Backlash. A review of how nonprofits can be threatened with the revocation of funding and tax-exempt status when they’re seen as implementing DEI principles through content and programming.

By looking back at the progression from “Truth, Trust, and Fake News” to “Culture Wars 2.0,” we can see that our current vulnerability is connected to a society-wide erosion of shared truth.

Strategic Advice: Cultivate, Communicate, Elucidate

Unlike previous trends, this section incorporates a unique duology of perspectives from two industry leaders. While they cover different aspects of the challenges facing nonprofits, their collective advice emphasizes how advocacy is central to the long-term navigation of these challenges.

• Cultivate Non-Partisan Support: Build and maintain direct lines of communication with legislators to demonstrate museum value using language that resonates across the political spectrum.
• Practice Constant, Varied Advocacy: Use every tool at your disposal—from state-level networking and local op-eds to small, morale-boosting actions—to keep the value of your work in the public eye.
• Leverage Storytelling: Don’t just report data; use compelling narratives to illustrate the human impact of your institution to local and state stakeholders.
• Embrace Strategic Foresight: Move beyond reactive management by engaging in thought experiments to explore and prepare for the potential futures of charitable giving.

By treating advocacy as a daily practice rather than an emergency response, we can build the cross-sector alliances necessary to weather whatever political or economic shifts come next.

This idea is explored further on the Relicura blog in a discussion of how advocacy is like a plant, along with sustainable recommendations to keep your advocacy practice thriving.

Connections and Insights: The Think Clearly Blog Archive

The politically motivated scrutiny that the TW 2026 report identifies as a core threat today is a reality we’ve been documenting on this blog for the past two years.

• Federal Policy Impacts: My 2025 museum forecast, Words Will Carry Increased Consequences, correctly predicted the current environment of intensified political scrutiny over museum content and serves as a prologue to the TW 2026 reporting on government interference.
• The Rise of Censorship: My 2026 museum forecast dives into both anticipatory and self-censorship and provides case studies that illustrate a broader concern raised in the report: political pressure is now actively forcing nonprofits to alter their content and programming.

These observations confirm that the threat to our sector’s independence is no longer theoretical. We are now forced to rethink how we navigate political pressure in a space we’ve never before found ourselves: museums as a partisan issue.

How Museums Can Help Secure Our Shared Future

As we wrap up this look at Trend #3, we’re drawn back to the realization that the health of the individual museum is inseparable from the health of the nonprofit sector as a whole. The TW 2026 report concludes with a vital recommendation: we must direct our collective advocacy toward systemic change by supporting the legal, tax, and regulatory frameworks that protect the nonprofit model.

Securing the future of the nonprofit sector isn’t a task any one museum can tackle alone. It requires a unified front. By moving from a defensive posture to proactive, mission-driven advocacy, we can protect the legal and financial frameworks that allow our institutions to serve the public. As we look beyond 2026, our ability to speak with a common voice will be our strongest defense against political and economic volatility.