What if the resource, connection, or opening your organization has been searching for is already sitting in someone else’s line of sight?
That question has been stuck in my head ever since Greater Good Greenville’s Katy Smith shared a story about a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park.
Katy had one goal: see a moose. She researched where they had been spotted, chose promising trails, watched the treeline, and kept looking. Nothing.
Then, on a last-minute drive back through the park, she and her husband passed a car pulled onto the shoulder. The family standing beside it turned toward them, grinned, pointed toward the meadow, and mouthed one word: "Moose."
Katy found what she had been searching for, but not because she perfected the search. Somebody else saw it first and pointed her toward it. And when another car came along, Katy and her husband did the same for them.
That sounds a lot like nonprofit work to me.
We Spend a Lot of Time Searching
At Carolina Family Services, I work in HR and operations, which means what I’m searching for can change several times before lunch. Some days it’s a new employee, a community partner, a funding source, a vendor who understands nonprofit budgets, or a resource for one family.
Across Greenville, organizations are being asked to solve complicated problems with limited time, staff, and resources. None of us can realistically discover every partner, resource, idea, or opening on our own.
For a long time, though, I misunderstood what networking was supposed to solve. I pictured it as transactional: attend the right events, collect the right contacts, and eventually one of those relationships might become useful.
I’ve started seeing it differently. Community isn’t just a list of contacts. Community is memory. It is knowing enough about the people and organizations around us that when something crosses our path, somebody comes to mind.
Here’s What That Looked Like for Us
Earlier this year, Hannah Harris, Groups & Youth Manager at BlocHaven, reached out to Carolina Family Services about participating in BlocBender 2026, the climbing gym’s two-day bouldering competition and community event taking place October 10–11.
She knew the event would draw families and young people from across the Upstate. She also knew what CFS does. That was the connection. One conversation turned into a plan. BlocHaven offered CFS a no-cost resource table, putting us where families were already gathering instead of waiting for them to find us.
We decided early that we did not want to just put brochures on a table. Our goal is to have real conversations with parents and community members about behavioral health resources, what seeking help looks like, and how families can connect with services.
That opening exists because someone looked at what was happening in her world and thought of an organization outside of it. She knew where the moose was, and she waved us over.
The Mistake I Was Making
My mistake was treating information like an organizational filter. Is this grant for us? Is this event for us? Is this resource useful to us? If the answer was no, it was easy to move on. What I wasn’t consistently asking was: Who needs to know about this?
That question changes networking from collecting relationships into using relationships well. If I want people to think of CFS when something relevant crosses their desk, I have a responsibility to do the same for the organizations around me.
A funding announcement that doesn’t fit us may fit someone else perfectly. The candidate who isn’t right for our opening may be exactly who another organization needs. A training, introduction, event, or resource can still have value even when that value does not flow back to us.
That was my lightbulb moment. A strong network is not just something you benefit from. It is something you participate in.
Three Things We Can Do Tomorrow Morning
None of this requires another strategic plan. It can begin with a few habits:
- Know more than the mission statement. Ask other organizations what they are working on, where they are struggling, and what kinds of connections would actually help.
- Share without keeping score. If a grant, training, candidate, partner, or resource makes you think of another organization, send it.
- Make the introduction now. If two people should know each other, connect them while you are thinking about it. Good intentions disappear into inboxes.
Maybe you are invited into a room where another organization should also have a seat. Wave them over. Maybe you finally find the accountant, consultant, vendor, volunteer, or community partner someone else has been searching for. Tell them where the moose is.
The Infrastructure We Don’t Put on a Balance Sheet
We tend to think about community infrastructure as roads, buildings, systems, and institutions. But communities also run on infrastructure we cannot easily measure: trust, familiarity, shared knowledge, introductions, and people willing to say, “I know someone you should talk to.”
No nonprofit can build all of that alone. That is part of what makes spaces like Greater Good Greenville valuable. When nonprofit leaders, funders, community partners, and volunteers actually know one another, we begin recognizing openings on each other’s behalf.
Eventually, someone walks into a room, notices something valuable, and thinks of an organization that isn’t even there. That may be a better measure of a network than the number of contacts in our phones.
How many people would think of your organization when you aren’t in the room? And maybe the more important question: How many organizations do you think about when they aren’t in yours?
Katy searched across Rocky Mountain National Park for a moose. In the end, somebody else pointed. Then she turned around and pointed for the next car.
Someone in Greenville may already know where the thing you have been searching for is standing. Our job is to know one another well enough, and care about one another enough, to wave each other over when we see it.