A real altitude-messaging coaching exchange. The skill's job: sort what you're saying by altitude, find the missing 30,000-foot purpose, and get you to a line a funder leans into. Trimmed for length; nothing added.
"HarvestBridge is a 9-state food rescue and distribution network. We operate 23 refrigerated trucks that run 47 Mobile Market routes twice a week, we partner with 615 pantries, and we have SNAP navigators and a workforce program. Last year we distributed over 27 million meals and rescued 20,000 tons of food. We're efficient — 94 cents of every dollar goes to programs. We're asking funders to help us grow." Coach me on my altitude — this lands as a list and funders aren't leaning in.
Here's your altitude sort, as-is:
The brain processes meaning before detail — a funder can't care about your 23 trucks until they care about why the trucks matter. The "94 cents" stat makes it worse: credentials support a message, they aren't the message.
→ If HarvestBridge fully succeeds, what's different about the world?
Hunger stops being a permanent condition of certain neighborhoods. Where you live decides whether your kids eat well — a family in a food desert drives 30 miles for fresh food while stores three zip codes over throw tons of it away. If we succeed, that connection is fixed.
Your unique insight: hunger in your region isn't a scarcity problem — it's a logistics failure. The food exists; it's being thrown away; the gap is distribution — and that makes hunger solvable. That's a completely different funder conversation than charity and generosity.
Draft 30,000-foot purpose statement:
Led with the POV, not the program. Made the geography visceral. The waste detail is the gut punch. The answer is clean — a funder knows exactly what you do. Then it pressure-tests two things with you: does "delivery failure" match how you actually talk, and will "Eastern Kentucky hollows" land for your specific funders?