Choosing Abundance When Everything Around You Is Screaming Scarcity
You probably know the feeling, even if you haven’t named it yet. A peer organization does something that looks a lot like what you do. And your first reaction isn’t curiosity or a thought about reaching out. It’s something quieter. Something that, if you’re honest with yourself, feels a lot like a threat.
That’s scarcity thinking. And according to EFG CEO Muneer Panjwani, who opened #EFG2026 with a keynote on leading with abundance, it’s running through this sector right now, not loudly, but steadily, in the background of almost every strategic conversation happening in corporate social impact.
The last year has changed how people in this field talk about their work. A few years ago, when you asked a colleague what they were building, they’d tell you about a new initiative, a bold partnership, or something in motion. These days the answers sound different. Holding on to what we have. Figuring out what we can protect. Waiting to see how things shake out.
Those answers make sense. Budgets are still not where they were. Teams are smaller. Programs that took years to build have been dismantled in a quarter.
But there’s a cost to staying in that mode. As Panjwani put it: “Survival mode doesn’t build the future. It is designed to protect what exists. To minimize loss. To get through.”
Survival mode is rational. It’s also, if it goes on long enough, self-defeating. When the entire sector focuses on not losing ground, it gradually forgets how to gain it. The present gets protected at the cost of the future.
When “Being Strategic” Is Actually Scarcity in Disguise
Panjwani candidly named his own version of it.
Over the past year, he realized he had been quietly treating peer organizations — CECP, ACCP, NationSwell, the Social Innovation Summit — like competition. Not openly. He was friendly at industry events, shared stages, and sent polite emails. But privately, he was keeping them at arm’s length. When they did something adjacent to what EFG does, something tightened.
The questions that sounded like strategy: What if they replicate our programming? What if I share too much? What if I invite them in and they go after our partners?
He was protecting market share in a sector trying to solve hunger, homelessness, and cancer.
“Scarcity thinking always sounds rational,” he told the room. “It will look you in the eye and say ‘this is just being strategic’ and it’s convincing enough that you believe it for a while, until you stop and actually look at what you’re protecting.”
A few months ago, he started sending emails. To his ‘competition.’ Not to pitch anything. Just to say: I think we should be talking. I think this field is stronger when we act like a field. And I think I’ve been part of the problem by not reaching out sooner.
Some of those conversations are still early. Some feel fragile. He doesn’t know yet what they’ll become. But he shared it publicly because he was about to ask the room to do something similar, and they deserved to know he was trying first.
EFG regulars will remember last year’s potluck metaphor — the idea, borrowed from Eboo Patel, that the sector works better as a table where everyone brings something rooted in who they are than as a melting pot where everyone dissolves into something uniform.
Panjwani returned to it this year, but pushed further.
The sector, he argued, has gotten good at showing up. Putting the dish on the table. Accepting the compliments. What it hasn’t figured out is sharing the recipes: the actual methodology, the hard-won lessons, the things that didn’t work before it clicked. Those get held close, because the prevailing assumption is that your best thinking is your competitive advantage.
“Imagine what this sector could build if we stopped treating our best practices like proprietary secrets and started treating them like open-source code.”
The most loved food didn’t reach us because one chef guarded their technique. It traveled across borders, kitchens, and generations and became something no single person could have made alone. That’s the table worth building. Not just showing up. Sharing the recipes.
What does actually moving from scarcity to abundance look like? Panjwani offered four starting points.
- Make the call you’ve been avoiding — to the adjacent organization, the peer you’ve been watching from a distance while telling yourself it’s strategic. You don’t need a plan. You need to start the conversation.
- Share something you’d normally protect. A methodology, a framework, a lesson from a program that failed. Teach it. Write it down. Giving it away doesn’t diminish you worth, it establishes you as someone worth building with.
- Redefine what winning looks like. If the outcome you’re chasing could only happen because of you, you’re probably thinking too small. The question isn’t how do I get credit for this. It’s, how do I create something that becomes a catalyst for something bigger?
- The hardest: build a coalition, not just a congregation. This sector is extraordinarily good at gathering people who already agree with each other, who use the same language and read the same reports. Our work right now requires being in the room with people who don’t share your starting assumptions — and choosing to find the 20 percent of overlap instead of fighting about the 80 percent of difference.
Depolarization is not a soft skill. It’s the work the sector requires now.
The keynote closed with something harder to summarize than a framework.
There is a phrase in Farsi — delam barat tang shode — that translates roughly as “I miss you.” But the literal meaning is closer to: my heart has become tight for you. The world gets smaller without you in it.
Panjwani used it to say something specific about the people in that room, and about anyone who has spent a career in this work.
“There are people alive today because of decisions you made. People who got what they needed at the exact moment they needed it. People who were seen because you showed up.”
Not metaphorically. People who found the program that caught them. People who survived. Young people who found their reason to stay. The work that has already been done is permanent. It cannot be legislated away, defunded, or rolled back into nonexistence.
“Don’t carry this work like a burden you’re not sure was worth it. Carry it like what it is.”
Pressure doesn’t have to kill purpose. It can clarify it. Tighter budgets force harder questions: what’s working, who are we doing this for, who should we be building with. That’s not a threat to purpose. That’s purpose getting more precise.
The choice Panjwani kept returning to is one this community faces in some form every day. “Choosing abundance when everything around you is screaming scarcity is one of the hardest things. It goes against every instinct that survival mode has spent years building in us.”
Scarcity says protect what’s yours. Abundance says build something bigger than you.
The question is still open. That’s the point.