Disruptions, large and small, have defined 2025. For American associations, they have often circled around actions taken by the Trump Administration—from frozen federal science funding, tariff and DEI policy shifts, agency cutbacks, and beyond, few member and trade groups have been unaffected.

That puts association staff and volunteer leaders in a bind: They’re duty-bound to think strategically about their organization’s futures, but must also find ways to react to sudden headwinds. Earlier this year, ASAE’s Association Governance Institute launched its Governance + Strategy Forum, and though it wasn’t explicitly designed to respond to White House moves, it’s intended to equip CEOs and boards for the kind of turbulence 2025 will be remembered for.

Jon Hockman, FASAE, Chief Practice Officer at McKinley Advisors and one of the content leaders for the Forum, says one of its goals is to speak to the strategic needs of associations beyond the basics. “It’s more about the complexities, navigating this whitewater, uncertain environment, and how the combination of board leadership and the chief staff officer can best partner to navigate that kind of complexity and challenge at scale,” he says.

To that end, a substantial part of Forum’s focus is on risk—assessing it, discussing your association’s tolerance for it, and making decisions around it. Two executives who’ve participated in a pilot for the Forum, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association CEO Vicki Deal-Williams, CAE, and American Industrial Hygiene Association CEO Lawrence Sloan, FASAE, CAE, shared a few of their current challenges, and how risk assessment and high-level strategy has helped them adapt.

1. Shift the mindset. One point Deal-Williams tries to emphasize with her board members, who often come from administrative roles, is that they’re not there to manage people; they’re there to be good stewards of the organization. That change in perspective can help prepare board members think about broader challenges. “Most [board members] are not prepared to do that on a regular basis, and my job is helping them understand that this is a stewardship role,” she says. “I think we need to switch to training arou
   
2. Think long- and short-term. Organizations are sometimes cautioned not to be reactive, but some policy changes do require immediate responses. Earlier this year, the Trump Administration announced that it would eliminate around 90 percent of the staffing for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), an agency under the Health and Human Services umbrella. The move impacts a sizable number of AIHA’s members, and Sloan said it has ramped up its advocacy efforts in response. “We’re getting our members less uncomfortable, if you will, with doing advocacy,” he says. “We’ve developed talking points and documents to help them set up their meetings with their members of Congress in their home districts. This is a whole paradigm shift for our membership.”
   
   But while that activity continues, it’s also thinking long-term, making plans to expand AIHA’s education foundation into a robust effort to replace training previously done by NIOSH. AIHA is planning a capital campaign, based on the realization that there are risks—it may fail—but is fit for the association’s mission. “We’re not going to replace that amount of funding, but we can start chipping away at it,” Sloan says.
   
3. Accept that some won’t walk away happy. The White House’s efforts to eliminate programs connected to DEI are a particular pain point for ASHA, which has been focused on diversity matters in the field for decades. Deal-Williams said the association anticipated some of the White House’s moves and discussed them with the board, looking for ways to stay on solid legal footing while still preserving its values. That means accepting the risk that some members will push back. “We’ve had some rebellious contingencies within our membership who want to stay the course and keep everything the same, and others who are on the opposite end of the continuum who are ready to report us to the [Trump] administration,” she says. “We are undaunted in pursuing our values, but we are evolving the way that we describe what we’re doing. So the way we do it might change, but we’re not changing who we are.”