On election night, Amy Rowland and 250 others gathered to wait for results at Dumbo Loft, an old industrial building-turned-event space in Brooklyn. While some were focused on Senate and House races, Ms. Rowland was nervously awaiting numbers from Michigan’s state election.
Since February, she had been part of a group of 210 who were raising money to get enough Democrats elected to tip the balance of power in that state’s legislature. States are most directly responsible for...

On most weekday afternoons, Jason Franklin is frenetically busy in his crowded office on West 38th Street in Manhattan, fielding calls or pushing projects forward as the executive director of Bolder Giving, a nonprofit organization that promotes philanthropy.
But for several days in mid-August, Mr. Franklin, 32, decamped to a radically different environment, the bucolic Sundance Resort near Park City, Utah, where he happily unplugged to attend a biannual conference sponsored...