Remember that time those consultants came in and helped you write your mission statement? Or you had that board retreat with the bad food and the amazing late-night discussions about creating a better world? Remember the flip charts and sticky notes and white boards and markers?

Those were the moments and the materials that gave birth to your organization’s “mission statement”.

It’s the thing the experts told you to make, the sentence that some funder required you to type into a mandatory field on your first grant proposal.

Some mission statements were written quickly. Some mission statements were worked over by committees and poets for a year. Often your real mission statement is the thing you blurt out when your skeptical friend from college says “yeah, but what’s the point of what you do?” after too many beers.

Dust it off. Now.

Your mission statement has a lot to do with the ways you are trying to help other people or the planet. It’s about the positive change you’re trying to create in the world, the problems you want to solve and the needs you want to meet. It’s the instinctual, hard-to-articulate, real reason you do what you do every day. And it’s the north star that will guide you on a wild sea.

Things are hard right now. Whether you’re dealing with pandemic on the front lines or working to shore up your organization for next year, nonprofits (like everyone else) are in uncharted waters.

Hard decisions and hard work become even more difficult when they don’t feel like you're serving something meaningful.

There’s a reason mission-driven organizations are forced to write down their mission statements. In the absence of certainty, your mission guides you. It helps you make the best possible choices with the information you have, even in the most difficult of circumstances.

This day, or a version of it, was always coming. That’s why you prepared for it.

In the face of grave uncertainty, your mission is your lifeline.

So look up. Find your north star. Go forward.