Making Space for What Matters - Letter for the Year Ahead

Ana Ranković
Jan 16
4 min read

Welcome to Making Space, our newsletter for nonprofit leaders navigating the real and challenging work of becoming more data-driven.

This year, we’re changing things up.

We know your inbox is crowded and your time is limited. So we’re redesigning this newsletter to be shorter, sharper, and even more useful. Each edition will follow a simple structure:

A real problem → A practical solution → One organization doing it well

We're building on the insights we shared last year, now in a more consistent and focused format.

Here’s a preview of what we’ll cover in the months ahead:

You’re collecting better program data. Now what? How do you make sense of it and share it across your teams?
Funders want to know your impact, but your data shows what you do rather than how you're moving the needle. How do you address their requests and shift how you measure impact?
You do meaningful work but struggle to quantify it, especially if you're a policy organization raising consciousness rather than delivering countable services. How do you tell that story with data?
Your communities have resources that could help people, but many don't know about them. How do you make those resources visible and accessible?

We will also introduce features of critical cartography scholarship that inform our work and keep highlighting map initiatives and nonprofits doing interesting things with data.

If there is a challenge you are facing that you’d like us to address, reply to this email. We’d love to hear from you.

Our co-founder’s wishes for 2026: From Fatalism to Fire

From Charles Grosperrin, North Arrow co-founder

Life presents us all with a sense of schizophrenia.

To open any news site is to be bombarded by messages of profound dread about a world unraveling: a moribund global order; climate,

technological, and social crises that never cease to worsen; and a combination of political impunity and incompetence, the two edges of the same blade that destroys rather than builds.

Yet, to open my inbox is to be immersed in an industrious and courageous world, filled with honest and upright people driven by a luminous will to change things—to heal the wounds of our communities one by one, and to strike at the root of the evil to radically invent new alternatives.

And yet, these two worlds are one and the same.

2025, annus horribilis—a particularly terrifying vintage of profound and dramatic shifts for our systems and ecosystems. It was the hour of predation, the return to fashion of brute force as both a language and a weapon of power. My outlook on what’s coming is quite bleak.

We must make 2026 a year of resistance and resilience. Now that the shock has passed, there is no longer any room for helpless or tearful fatalism. On every front—in our homes, our businesses, our communities, in the streets, and at the ballot box—we must act and awaken the power of the multitude.

The nefarious characters who populate our newsfeeds and dictate our fates are paper tigers. Every one of them has an Achilles’ heel that must be exploited. Our strategies of resistance must be as diverse and creative as those of our adversaries.

I wish you all a year of struggle and success.

Looking Back at 2025

2025 has been our craziest year thus far, and we are still mind-blown by the number and variety of projects we've been able to work on, with so many incredible nonprofits.Amongst these:

a geospatial intelligence hub and interactive impact tour for the Chinese-American Planning Council
a suitability analysis for new relief stands in New York City for the Independent Drivers Guild
a comprehensive interactive assets map for Boston Community Schools
a global impact tracker covering Ukraine, Ethiopia and Vietnam for Rise Alliance for Children
a streamlined community indicators dashboard developed in partnership with 3 orgs in New York, Connecticut, and Maine with the support of Finding Common Purpose
a community health dashboard focused on Lancaster and Chester Counties in rural South Carolina, that tracks progress over time, designed for The Arras Foundation
advocacy impact trackers for ERASE Racism and New York Appleseed
... and much more!

Value Aligned Banking*

*Not even a sponsored post :)

We’ve officially moved! North Arrow has transitioned all accounts from a traditional big bank to the Climate First Bank, a value-aligned, FDIC-insured institution.

As climate and social activists, we found it increasingly difficult to ignore the hidden impact of our banking. We didn't want our hard work (or our partners' investments) funding destructive industries. After extensive research, we chose Climate First Bank, a certified B-Corp that lends exclusively to mission-aligned projects. In 2024 alone, they directed over $210 million into rooftop solar, affordable housing, and small businesses.

Our capital is now working toward the same future we are.

Check out their new Non-Profit Program!!!