Leading with Confident Honesty

Leading with Confident Honesty

Season 5, Episode 4 of the How We Run podcast examines leading an organization after a global pandemic.

Our guest is Jessica Aronoff, the CEO of the Cayton Children’s Museum who shares with us how she’s leading her organization through reopening.

After only eight months in their new facilities, the Cayton Children’s Museum faced the pandemic and subsequent reopening. According to their CEO, Jessica Aronoff, “I really did think the challenging part was when we were shut down. And that’s not true. Sure, that was an existential challenge for us, for humanity. But from a business standpoint, the time since reopening has been the most challenging.” In this episode, Jessica, who has worked as a funder and a non-profit executive, shares tips for talking to funders and how she leads her organization with “confident honesty.”

Listen:

Transcript

 

 

Julie Lacouture:

Trent, I went to a board retreat about a month ago and everybody that looked at the agenda and everybody that helped plan it forgot one critical thing, which was the time it takes to move from room to room because we were so used to doing them all on Zoom.

Trent Stamp:

Oh wow. Yeah. I forgot that the logistics are now taking apart meetings left and right for people who thought they just had to turn their head to the left or to the right to move to a different room nowadays.

Julie Lacouture:

I know. I was like, I can’t just assign you all to a room and you just instantly appear in it. You have to walk there, it takes time.

Trent Stamp:

Oh, absolutely. And the funny thing about these virtual meetings is I’m a notorious sneaker-awayer in a regular in-person meeting, but in the virtual meetings it’s harder to sneak away because it’s so much more obvious. I’ve missed in-person meetings because I haven’t had the opportunity to sneak away from in-person meetings like-

Julie Lacouture:

A different perspective than most people. But an interesting take. Thank you.

Trent Stamp:

Yes. I’m here for you. I bring that unique funders’ perspective to this podcast.

Julie Lacouture:

What struck me about our guests today when you two spoke, and it was great to be a fly on the wall for this conversation because you both have worked as funders and you both have worked in the non-profit sector for a long time to hear you talk. But what struck me about what Jessica says when you talk to her is she says, Covid wasn’t the hard part. Coming back was.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah, I think Jessica brings such a unique perspective after having been on both sides of the aisle of the philanthropic situation and we all found ways to do things virtually. I was surprised that I was as effective a manager as I was during Covid. That was a testament to the fact that my staff was probably better than I gave them credit for being. I always thought you had to manage by being in the room, manage by walking around, and we all found a way to labor through.

But how do you labor through when you’re running a children’s museum? It is the ultimate in-person experience and from having kids in the facility and then try to just fold your staff back in in a scary time, in a precarious time and then go from zero to 60 in terms of kids back in the museum. Yeah, I was really interested in what she had to offer and I thought it was a good tale for other people because if she was able to have some level of success at the Cayton Children’s Museum after Covid, then the rest of us don’t have any excuses at all.

Julie Lacouture:

They have a really great mission and they also had just, when Covid had made a transition into a new building, they had only been in their new space for about eight months.

Trent Stamp:

It was all brand new. She was brand new and she was succeeding a longtime leader, and she was replacing a large percentage of her staff. You come in with a vision and a plan and then you get punched in the mouth by the biggest pandemic we’ve ever seen in our society. And then you have to hope you have a board that says, “We’re going to be there for you”. Not, “Hey, just keep going”. It seems like she had the support she needed and maybe that was a byproduct of her demanding the support she needed. I don’t know enough about the infrastructure of the organization, but she made a lot of big, bold changes in the middle of a difficult time and I was impressed with the fact that she was not content to just tread water in a tough time.

Julie Lacouture:

You and Jessica have a nice part in this conversation coming up where you talk about how as a nonprofit director you have to learn to talk to funders in a way that is understanding what they need. Can you shed some light on that?

Trent Stamp:

Yeah. I think that’s at the foundation that I have the privilege of running, I don’t hire anybody to serve on the philanthropic side who hasn’t been on the nonprofit side. You can’t give money away until you know what it’s like to be on the other side asking for the money and knowing what the reporting is like and knowing what the requirements are from that particular foundation. I think it’s imperative to be a good grant maker that you have been on the programmatic for development side of a nonprofit and now Jessica has the unique perspective of coming from the other direction, which was that she was a funder and now she’s running a nonprofit and she has I think, very good messaging to come to those of us on the foundation side of what exactly are you asking for and why? Is it just to wear me out or are you gathering something important from that information?

And I think all of us have an obligation to look in the mirror on the philanthropic side, on the funding side and saying, what are we asking of these non-profits? And is it bringing about a positive piece of information that will allow us make better, more just, more equitable decisions? Or are we jing them out because we can? And if that’s what we’re doing, I think that we violated the social compact here between non-profits and foundations and I think Jessica has a unique perspective having served on both sides to understand what’s necessary and what’s nice and what is just a giant pain in the butt that doesn’t serve anybody in any particular way.

Julie Lacouture:

All right. Let’s listen to your conversation with Jessica.

 

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Jessica Aronoff:

I’m Jessica Aronoff and I’m the CEO of the Cayton Children’s Museum in Santa Monica, and as is obvious from the name we’re a children’s museum, but we are a children’s museum that’s grounded in activating the power of play to enrich the lives of children and their families, build stronger and more connected communities and create a better world. So I like to refer to it as purposeful play, but we believe that all play is purpose.

Trent Stamp:

So Jessica, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is that you have made the very rare leap from working at a nonprofit to then working as a funder and then coming back to the nonprofit world. Can you talk a little bit about those moves?

Jessica Aronoff:

I started out my career in the nonprofit world working for a children’s advocacy organization, a policy organization, then went to law school and then worked in domestic violence prevention and intervention work with teens and young adults for 10 years. And when I left there I did a little bit of consulting and that’s when I made the leap to working at the wonderful company and running the philanthropy program there both for the company and the owners, Linda and Stewart Resnick. Once I was there and on the corporate side of things, I thought this is better. And I really did swear I was never going to come back to nonprofits. And it was only after I left the wonderful company, I did some consulting around leadership development and helping company build meaningful and impactful philanthropy programs and social responsibility programs.

But then this opportunity here at the Cayton just presented itself and I thought what could be more fun than working at a children’s museum? It just sounded this great mix of non-profit and purposeful work, mission driven work, which has always been essential to me, but also in a very business-like environment. We have a complex business and all of that needs to be run like a smart business. And so it felt like a nice marrying of all of my interests and I started here as Chief Operating Officer a little over two years ago and then was promoted to CEO about six months ago.

Trent Stamp:

When I hire people at the foundation level, I only want employees that have worked in the nonprofit sector. I think that you have to have worked for nonprofits to be good at the foundation side, to understand where they’re coming from, to understand the resources they’re working with, to understand the challenges they face. Going the other way, what kind of insights do you have as someone who used to run a foundation that helps you in your role running a nonprofit?

Jessica Aronoff:

So first I want to say I totally agree with you about hiring people who’ve worked in the nonprofit sector for a foundation. I felt the same way and also really felt that my experience running a nonprofit made me a much smarter, more strategic funder because there’s no shortage of good missions out there and good intentions. But really knowing whether a organization or a leader is going to be able to be successful and actually make happen what they are saying they intend to do. I think you need to have been on the side of doing the work in order to be able to detect that. What I think helps me on the non-profit side, having been on the funder side, is having more understanding of what it is funders need to hear in order to feel confident about the ability of the organization to do what it is that we’re saying we’re going to do.

I don’t mean faking it. I really mean speaking their language, that they just have different metrics and different measures for what’s going to satisfy their board, their stakeholders, their PR folks. There’s different motivators and I think it’s really important that nonprofits are able to speak that language, especially nowadays where so much of traditional funding is stretched thin and that we have to be very creative about where we can get our dollars, where we can get our support, including from corporate entities that really in all transparency are often not motivated by altruism. They have bottom lines that they need to meet. So I don’t think any of it’s really rocket science, but it’s just being able to look at the situation from a 360 degree angle and understand different ways of looking at it that aren’t so myopic. Yes, we have a great mission. Yes, we do good work, but we also need to be able to communicate how funders need to hear it.

Trent Stamp:

Absolutely. You’ve hit on one of my great pet peeves, which is they have a wonderful mission. I’ve been in the non-profit sector in some form for 30 years. There’s two groups that I’ve found that I didn’t like their mission. All the missions are good. It comes down to execution. It comes down to people. It comes down to delivery. It’s just not enough to say they have a good idea. I want to know what are they doing to make it happen. So now that you’re on the other side, what’s your advice for funders about our relationships to our non-profits? What should we know that we may have forgotten since we came over?

Jessica Aronoff:

I think one of the things that I would like funders to realize is that it’s not a good use of your resources. The money that you’re donating to ask for onerous reporting, onerous restrictions on what we’re doing. I feel very strongly and felt this way when I was on the funder side as well, is that once you identify a organization, a leader, because I do ultimately think that organizations, it’s about who’s leading the work. Once you find an organization and leadership that you trust and believe in, trust and believe in them. Give them the space to do their work and give them the flexibility. That does not mean no accountability. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think some restricted giving is reasonable. I think it’s very reasonable, but I think it’s about investing in the leadership and vision that you’ve decided to invest in and then giving them the space to do the

Trent Stamp:

Work. I agree a hundred percent. That’s obviously something we try very hard to do at the ICER Foundation. We wear you out on the front end. We fund about 6% of the people that ask for money, but then once I’ve given you money, it’s simply ridiculous for me to pretend that I now know how to run your organization better than you do. Come back and tell me how you spent the money and I’ll decide whether we want to invest in you again another year.

But trying to micromanage your day to day operations in any way whatsoever, it just seems counterproductive to your efforts. But it also just seems naively presumptuous that I would somehow or another know how to run a children’s Museum in Santa Monica. It’s better than the person who’s running the children’s Museum in Santa Monica. So I’m with you a hundred percent and I like to think that many other funders are on the same page and are getting to the point where they will give more general operating grants and then get out of the way because what you’re looking for is a partner and not a grantee.

Jessica Aronoff:

And by the way, I also would say that that same advice I would give to individual donors and board members. For board members, hire the right leadership and then trust them and support them.

Trent Stamp:

Do board things. Don’t do CEO things, do board things, just in the same way that you wouldn’t want the CEO showing up in trying to do board things. Stay a year late. We all have things that we’re good at and don’t try to do someone else’s job. I know that you’ve done a good deal of work at the Cayton on clarifying the mission, the vision, the values. Can you tell us a little bit about that and why it’s important to you?

Jessica Aronoff:

One of the blessings of being shut down for 17 months. 17 months of Covid was that we were able to step back and really reevaluate were we both articulating our mission, vision and values clearly, and were we actually living them out? And we went and spent a lot of time doing exercises around this and came up with new mission statements, clarity about our vision and a list of core values, which are in case you are wondering, play is essential. Kids come first. Diversity is powerful, collaboration is vital. Perfection is not our goal. That’s the one I struggle with the hardest. Hard conversations are necessary. I think that knowing what you’re about and why is absolutely essential to any organization, nonprofit, for profit or whatever for so many reasons. Not the least of which is so that your team knows what you’re working toward. I’m a big believer that employees are the most important thing to our success. And if they don’t know what success looks like, then we’re just all out there treading water out in the ocean.

Trent Stamp:

I love those value statements. I’m going to steal those from my own particular family. The name of this podcast is How We Run. So let’s talk for a second about how the Cayton Children’s Museum runs. What makes your organization run well?

Jessica Aronoff:

I think what makes us run well is a real commitment to communication. I’m not going to pretend that we always get it exactly right, but we’re committed to it. Every time we stumble, every time we struggle, I realize that it’s because of a glitch in communication. And one of the things I’m very proud of is that I’ve worked really hard to make sure that everyone feels valued and heard. That doesn’t mean we rule by consensus on everything. I think I came in at the right time. The Cayton had only been open in this location for about eight months before Covid. Prior to that, for 30 plus years, it was the Zimmer Children’s Museum in a different location, but a very different operation. Much smaller, much lower profile, much smaller space, lovely but very grassroots organization. And now where this complex operation and I was brought in right as the Museum was opening and one of the things I immediately did was build in more infrastructure and support to set our team up for success.

And I think that has made a huge difference in this time and it especially made a huge difference during Covid. Although of course like many organizations, we laid off a lot of people and we really cut down to bare bones operations to say the least. But we are back and as we grow back, our growing back with that same spirit of supporting our team, an inclusive environment and I try my best to set everyone up for success and to lead with transparency. That’s another thing. I have worked for some people over the course of my career who thought that their power was held in having all the information and hoarding it. Holding on tight to all the information, all the expertise, all the decision making. And I learned very quickly, at least for me, my power came in sharing that in transparency, in being honest and being real. Because what that did was build trust and having the trust of my team made me far more powerful than anything I could do on my own.

Trent Stamp:

Every time I talk to you, Jessica, it’s been way too long. I want to come work for you. I see hard conversations are necessary as your guiding principle. Nobody wants to have hard conversations, but you really do embody the hard conversations are necessary and it’s a remarkable thing for people to see. So one of the things that we like to do is we like to invite successful people on and then ask them to tell us about a mistake that they’ve made. So can you tell us about a mistake that you’ve made and then more importantly what you learned from it.

Jessica Aronoff:

Made a lot of mistakes.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah, we all have.

Jessica Aronoff:

I think some of my biggest mistakes have been not recognizing the writing on the wall quickly enough in various environments, whether it was when I was in a job that didn’t feel right anymore, but I wanted to fix it. I’m a fixer and I’m somebody who stubbornly believes that if I just put my mind to it and try hard enough and dig in deeper, I could fix just about anything. I am trying as I get older to recognize that’s not always my job. That sometimes things are the way they are and it’s not mine to fix that. Stubbornness is not necessarily a sign of strength and fortitude. Sometimes it’s just stubbornness and it’s not healthy for anyone. And I’ve had that experience with my own realization that I was not in the right place anymore. That a place that had been right was no longer.

And I’ve also very much had that with employees that I hired and I wanted so badly for it to be the right hire, recognizing sooner that it wasn’t the right fit probably would’ve been not only the right thing for the organization, but the kinder thing to the employee. Learning that there’s a distinction between being liked and being respected and that what I need to do as a leader is make sure that I am fair and earn the respect of my team. That doesn’t always mean they’re going to like what I’m doing or hopefully they like me as a person, but that’s not the goal. Sure. The goal is for them to respect my leadership and that was a long road it took me to really learn that.

Trent Stamp:

Like parenting, right?

Jessica Aronoff:

Oh my goodness, parent of a 16 year old. Yes. I can tell you for sure it is the same as parenting.

Trent Stamp:

The goal is not to be her best friend but to be her role model and the person that helps her get to where she needs to get. So what’s your big idea for moving forward and how are you going to get there?

Jessica Aronoff:

So my big idea for the Cayton came up during Covid, which was in the time of being closed and in recognizing that we were going to reopen to a really changed world, I didn’t actually realize how changed. I think it’s more changed than we knew and I could talk about that for hours, about how people are just behaving differently now. It’s a very strange time to be a public facing institution of any sort. But what became really clear was that especially young children really missed a critical part of their development during this time and play is a big part of that. And that it was essential that we be a place that plays a critical role in the healing of our community and the healing of families. Hopefully it’s not a crazy idea because we’re doing it, but this crazy idea that we needed to offer free admission to residents of LA County when we reopened.

And I got a lot of pushback with people saying you just lost all earned revenue for 17 months. Why on earth would you reopen and forego what was a big chunk of our revenue? And my answer was twofold. One was because I think it’s the right thing to do and I think that the right funders, whether its institutional funders or individual donors, will recognize that and want to join us in this. And so that whatever revenue we are losing in ticket sales, we will gain in the right kind of supporters joining us in our mission. When the Museum opened, partly because of our location and partly because we’re really a beautiful space, there’s a way in which people come here and don’t necessarily realize that we’re a nonprofit and a mission driven institution. And it was clear to me that we needed to speak more loudly about that and to make that more front and center about how we talk about ourselves.

And so we reopened offering a pay as you wish revenue model for admission for residents of LA County. We still are charging ticket price for tourists, but this was big, really big. And some people don’t get it, but those aren’t our people. The people who really understand our mission and are going to be with us for the long haul and going to ride this ride with us are going to understand why this commitment to play for all, to play equity and understanding that play is important for all children regardless of ability to pay, those people who understand that are people.

Trent Stamp:

I love it. That’s unbelievable. Did your board have any idea when they convinced you to be CEO that you were going to be leading the crusade for this type of movement?

Jessica Aronoff:

Well, I’m happy to say that when they decided to make me CEO, I had already convinced them or I’d convinced the ones who were convincible. It’s nervous making for everyone. Right now actually, it’s proving to be the smartest thing we could have done because we don’t panic every day counting the number of people walking in the door. We’re just not as worried about that. And so we’re able to just reopen with curiosity and because it is a curious time. Just some days we’re really crowded and some days nobody comes and it’s hard to know what’s going on with people. And

Trent Stamp:

I think there is another point there, which somewhere along the line, I think a lot of our arts institutions have forgot that they’re supposed to be providing a public benefit. And that’s not supposed to just be a free Wednesday for anybody over 50. You’re supposed to be providing equity and equality and access to culture and the arts for the masses, especially those who don’t necessarily have that opportunity. And you guys are walking the walk and I salute you completely. So what would be your number one tip for someone in your position?

Jessica Aronoff:

Tell the truth. I don’t mean bear your soul all the time, but I think it’s true with donors. I am not someone who believes in… Am I allowed to swear?

Trent Stamp:

Absolutely. Swear like crazy. Okay.

Jessica Aronoff:

But I’m not someone who believes in blowing smoke up the ass of funders. I think we should tell the truth about where our struggles are. I think that people want to help other people figure stuff out. Problem solving together is a really amazing bonding experience. And so whether it’s in fundraising or in management, being able to say to my team, I don’t know the answer to this. I don’t know. I’m struggling with this or I think this is what we should do, but it might be a mistake, that level of vulnerability and honesty, but with confidence. I was just saying to somebody recently, I will tell you when I don’t know something, but I’m going to say it was such confidence that it’s not going to scare you.

And I really think that level of confident honesty by so much trust, whether it’s from a donor or an employee, I think all of my employees would say that they know that I’m trying to do the right thing no matter what, even if they don’t like what I’m I’m doing. And so even with my board members with regard to this free admission, I didn’t say to them, “Oh we got it. No problem. This is going to be easy”. I said, “I don’t know if it’s going to work. But I think that it is critical to this institution at this time that we try”.

Trent Stamp:

And they decided to give it a run.

Jessica Aronoff:

They did. They’re watching closely though, they are watching closely for sure.

Trent Stamp:

As they should be, but now they don’t have to watch day to day ticket sales. They can watch overall public and private money and they can go figure out ways to help you get that while you serve a more diverse constituency. So I think it’s spectacular. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you about or anything that you wanted to talk about today?

Jessica Aronoff:

I think working in non-profits is really hard. I think there are a lot of people who think that this is heart driven work is therefore easier. One of the things having worked on both sides of the table so to speak, this is way harder. It’s hard to give away money strategically and it’s hard to give away money. Well and thoughtfully, but it’s not as hard as running a non-profit organization.

Trent Stamp:

If it was, we’d all be going back, but we came over to this side of the river and now we’re staying, the only one who dared to go back.

Jessica Aronoff:

It’s really hard work and it’s hard, especially right now in such a strange time in the employment world, in the job market, this whole great resignation that you’re hearing about, we’re experiencing a lot of weirdness in the employment market right now. And we don’t have unlimited resources to just throw at our employees to convince them to stay or to come. What we have is I think a fairly fun place to work. But of course it’s still work. It’s not going to be fun all the time. And we have a commitment to play and play for our team as well. But it’s hard. It’s a really hard job under the best of circumstances and right now it’s like strangely especially so. I thought the hard time was while we were closed, but it turned out reopen has been the really hard time.

Trent Stamp:

Whatever lies ahead will probably be even harder.

Jessica Aronoff:

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s a really long tunnel, like a really long tunnel.

Trent Stamp:

And the light is flickering every once in a while.

Jessica Aronoff:

And it might be a train coming.

Trent Stamp:

But if I know you, you’re going to wait out on the track and whatever happens. So I want thank you so much for being here today. I want to thank you for the thoughtful leadership you’re providing for the Cayton Children’s Museum, but I really enjoyed our conversation and I wish you the best.

 

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Julie Lacouture:

Hi listeners. We had a little delay between recording the interview for this episode and then putting it out. So we wanted to have Jessica back to talk about how some of the things she talked about in her interview went. We rarely get this opportunity. Jessica, thank you for coming back to us.

Jessica Aronoff:

I’m happy to be back.

Julie Lacouture:

You talk in your interview with Trent about making this big leap coming out of pandemic mode to make admission to the Museum free. How did that go?

Jessica Aronoff:

The answer to that is like the answer to many questions is nuanced and complicated. In most ways it went great. It did what we intended for it to do, which is bring more people to the Museum regardless of their ability to pay, help articulate and clarify our mission and the fact that play for all is essential, especially coming out of a global pandemic when kids were home and didn’t have socializing and didn’t have free purposeful play opportunities. And it made the Museum accessible to all children, all families, regardless of ability to pay. That said, and one other thing that it did that I should mention is it increased our foot traffic. And the fact is we were worried coming out of the pandemic that we’re a indoor space. We didn’t know how willing people were going to be to come back. And so lowering the barrier of cost was one way to incentivize returning to the Museum.

And so it worked in all of those ways. That said, it was very expensive to us. There was significant lost revenue because of it. As I mentioned, we implemented a pay as you wish model, which was donation-based and people did donate, but not everybody. And nowhere near at the level that it costs us. Our actual cost per person is higher than our ticket price ever was. And our hope that some generous, brilliant, insightful, wise philanthropists or two or 10 or 50 were going to get what we were doing and underwrite it fully just didn’t come through. Fundraising has not kept up. It’s a tough time for fundraising. We have done quite well. Thanks in large part of some of the Covid relief funding that was available and long time loyal donors and some people and foundations and corporations and institutions did come through for us, but just not enough to make it sustainable beyond the one year pilot time that we committed to.

Julie Lacouture:

So then what comes next?

Jessica Aronoff:

We actually are moving back to charging admission starting November 2nd. And so it will have been 15 months that we offered fully pay as you wish admission for LA County residents. Very proud of that. I still believe it was the right thing to do. I think it did all the things we wanted it to. It’s just that financially it’s not sustainable right now. And also cost of doing business has only increased in this time.

Julie Lacouture:

Do you think if it had more of a runway, if there was more time that would’ve made a difference in this kind of business model?

Jessica Aronoff:

Possibly. I think that if we had done this five years ago or even five years from now, we could generate the philanthropic support to make up the difference. I really do believe that. I think that the reason why this was so necessary at this point in time is also the reason why it was so challenging at this point in time, that the same forces that mean that people needed that financial support are the same forces that mean fundraising for something like this is challenging. Maybe we will be able to get back to it. In all of our communications around this we have said we have to go back to charging admission. But believe me, if anyone’s listening to this now and wants to call me and say I’ll underwrite it, it’s pretty expensive, but I would be happy to have that conversation. I would love to go back because I still believe that this is meaningful, significant and an important statement about what we are about as an institution. That hasn’t changed. It’s just that I always have to balance that with practical business realities about our long term financial sustainability.

Julie Lacouture:

Is there any halfway point between the model you’re returning to and it being totally free?

Jessica Aronoff:

Thank you for asking that question actually, because I do want to make the point that we are still offering free admission through something we’re calling the play for all pass for people who can demonstrate severe financial need. A number of museums do this where if you can demonstrate that your family is receiving public benefits, that then you can get free admission. The thing that we’re doing that I think takes us a step further is it’s basically going to be like a free annual membership so that a visitor only has to demonstrate financial need at the beginning of the year and then can come back, get the speedy entrance that all of our members do and get easy access without having to demonstrate poverty for lack of a better way of putting it every single time they come. Part of the reason why we had moved away from that model previously is that we didn’t want to create different classes of visitors.

We didn’t want to have to call out parent or guardians in front of their children that they had to demonstrate need, because we know that can be uncomfortable, but this way they only have to do that once and then they get an annual pass for their family to come to the Museum. And we are looking into and applying for funding opportunities to find ways to provide additional support to additional groups of families, whether that’s military families or families that are working class and can demonstrate a level of need, but not to the point of receiving medical or EBT benefits, that sort of thing.

Julie Lacouture:

Jessica, is there anything you would change in your approach?

Jessica Aronoff:

Sure. There’s always things that I would change. We resisted telling people a suggested donation amount because we didn’t want to put pressure on people who, for whom even what we would say was a suggested amount might make them uncomfortable, might be too much for them. But in retrospect, do think that saying pay as you wish without any guidance and we didn’t really do without any guidance, but we were saying to people, if you lived outside of the county, this would cost you $16. But it’s a lot of words. And I think that maybe there was a way to be able to say suggested donation is X and maybe that would’ve brought in more money, but I’ll be honest it, I just is seeing human behavior. But there’s a lot of interesting things. The first time people came, a lot of people donated, but we have a lot of, and I’m happy to say, a lot of repeat visitors and they were donating less and less each time that they came, understandably.

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah, that’s so interesting. It makes sense. Was there anything else that was unexpected or surprising?

Jessica Aronoff:

Yeah, talk about something that I didn’t anticipate in any way is that a lot of families were bringing older children with them to the Museum that they hadn’t been when we were charging per person because if they’re free, why not bring the whole family? So we’re a Museum that’s primarily focused on zero to eight, zero to 10 is still a reasonable age, but we started seeing more 12, 13 year old kids being brought into the space and 12, 13 year old kids, you got to love them, but they’re not exactly great playing right next to a two, three, four year old. And so we were having smart issues with kids making it less safe and secure for the youngest children. It just goes to show that there’s always complicated, unexpected consequences to any decision you make. I don’t know what we could have done differently, but it just was one of those funny changes to behavior in our space that we didn’t expect.

Julie Lacouture:

Amazing. Wow. You’re blindsided by that one. So when did you first start to notice these older kids?

Jessica Aronoff:

It was pretty fast. It was pretty fast. We had a lot of challenges when we first opened. We experienced a lot of the same challenges that you heard and continued to hear restaurants, customer service oriented. We continue to struggle with all of those same challenges that all of those businesses do with people being rude, are staff feeling really burnt out, recruitment and retention challenges. All those same things that your retail stores and restaurants and all of those similar businesses have experienced. And we are trying to build up a mission driven organization and programming. So it was doubly challenging and trying to raise money to support. I may have said this when I spoke to Trent, but I really did think the challenging part was when we were shut down and that’s not true. Sure. That was a challenging part and it was a existential challenge for us, for humanity. But from a business standpoint, the time since reopen has been the most challenging. Getting better, but definitely the most challenging.

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah. If you only knew then, right?

Jessica Aronoff:

Yeah. Although I’m really proud of the decisions that we made and even with this move to pay as you wish, we always knew it was a pilot. We knew it was an experiment. To me, bold leadership is about trying things out, not because you know they’re going to work, but to try them out when you don’t know if they’re going to work. And being able to be transparent and real and honest with my staff, with my board leadership, with the public about what worked, what we knew, what we know now, what we still don’t know. I’m really proud of this decision and again, I would absolutely go back to it under different economic circumstances.

Julie Lacouture:

I guess cheers to uphill battles. Thank you so much for coming back and sharing your story with us. I appreciate it.

Jessica Aronoff:

Thanks Julie. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Julie Lacouture:

We have a request for you, dear listeners.

Trent Stamp:

I’m hoping that if you enjoy How We Run that you’ll go and leave a review for us. Your review allows others to find us and that’s a good thing because the more people that listen, the more impact we can have on the sector and that we can bring about positive change for other non-profits that are out there. So if you like what you’re listening to, please leave us a review.

Julie Lacouture:

If you want to be a guest on the show, you think you have a good story and you want to share, you can email us at info@nullgoodwaysinc.com.

 

Big swings: Reinventing an Organization

Big swings: Reinventing an Organization

Season 5, Episode 3 of the How We Run podcast has an amazing leader that has built an amazing organization.

Our guest is Nichol Whiteman, the CEO of the Dodgers Foundation who shares with us how she led a turnaround to build an organization with a deep understanding of its mission and goals.

Nichol shares, “It was very important for us to focus first on youth and families who we know needed us most, who could truly help us drive programming moving forward. We created a grant making program. We knew that it was essential to be supporting nonprofits here on the ground in the Los Angeles community.”

Listen to how Nichol is thinking about her vision for the organization:

Listen:

Transcript 

Trent Stamp:

Welcome to How We Run, a podcast where we examine how nonprofits become successful. I’m Trent Stamp, CEO of The Eisner Foundation.

Julie Lacouture:

And I’m Julie Lacouture, founder of Good Ways Inc. On this episode, we’re joined by Nichol Whiteman, the CEO of the Dodgers Foundation. Nichol talks to us about reimagining and revisioning what an organization can be. It’s a really great story of a turnaround. She also shows the importance of having a big vision for your organization and keeping it simple.

                Hey, Trent. How’s it going?

Trent Stamp:

I’m doing okay, Julie. How are you?

Julie Lacouture:

I had some breakthrough COVID, and I’m getting back on my feet, and I don’t sound like Kathleen Turner anymore. So we’re good to record today.

Trent Stamp:

Kathleen Turner is one of the sexiest women alive. So if you had that-

Julie Lacouture:

I could do much worse.

Trent Stamp:

Well, I’m glad to hear that you’re feeling a little better. And yes, it does seem as if COVID has once again reared its ugly head, and I’m hopeful that we can get through summer in a slightly better manner than we have the last couple of years.

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah, that’s true. Speaking of summer, have you been to some baseball games already?

Trent Stamp:

I’ve been out there to see the Dodgers and to see the Angels. I am a lifelong Bay Area sports fan, and so I go primarily to root against the local teams here in Los Angeles, but it’s always a nice time out at the ballpark.

Julie Lacouture:

And I believe my hometown team, the Red Sox gave you quite a baseball moment last year.

Trent Stamp:

This is entirely true. I’ve probably been to a thousand baseball games in my life. I have never gotten close to a foul ball in the stadium, and I’ve sat in stadiums in Oakland, where there were 700 people there, and there were probably 50 foul balls, and one has never gotten anywhere near me. And last year, while at a Red Sox game by myself, I left early in the seventh inning to walk back to my hotel and a ball flew out of the stadium, landed on the street, took one bounce and landed literally in my hand without I having to break stride at any one point. Yes, that was a nice memory. Thank you, Red Sox.

Julie Lacouture:

The reason we’re talking about baseball is today’s guest is Nichol Whiteman, the CEO of the Dodgers Foundation.

Trent Stamp:

Nichol is a hundred percent a rockstar in the field, both within corporate philanthropy and traditional philanthropy and community development, and I’m very jealous that you had the opportunity to talk to her. Why did you want to talk to Nichol?

Julie Lacouture:

I keep a mental list of leaders that I keep an eye on people who, when they do something, I know that it’s intentional and strategic and they’re good leaders, and Nichol is one of those leaders. When the Dodgers Foundation does something, they have a really good strategy behind it. So I tend to watch what they do. And also, she’s a tremendous people manager and is just a great person all around. I had a chance to meet her a couple years ago, and I thought we have to have her as a guest. Plus, I also love baseball and I pay attention to it. So I feel like I’ve gotten familiarized with how the different MLB team foundations work, and they all do something different, and they all do it in a different way. So it’s been interesting to watch the Dodgers Foundation.

Trent Stamp:

Historically, I have been relatively unimpressed with most sports philanthropy programs and most corporate social responsibility programs that are run through professional sports teams. And I have to say, even as a lifelong Giants fan, the Dodgers are not that way, and certainly not under Nichol’s leadership.

                What do you see that the Dodgers Foundation is doing that’s special, that’s different, that is unlike all of those other corporate philanthropy programs run by sports teams?

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah. I mean, it’s exactly that, right? So it’s this commitment to making the programs that they run impactful. Like most MLB teams, they have some kind of youth baseball connection. The Dodgers Foundation goes so far as to evaluate those and then add services onto it through partners. It’s tremendous how much it surrounds the community. It’s not a matter of just going in and throwing down four bases and saying, “This looks nice now. Congratulations, you have a baseball field.” But it’s that commitment to going that extra mile to prove it, and I think that’s really special about what they do because they both act as an organization that runs programs, but also as an organization that funds other programs, but they’re intentional about making those work together.

Trent Stamp:

I get the feeling that you’re right in the use of the word intentional. In my viewing of their work from afar, it seems very intentional, very transformational and really outcome-based, which I don’t think is what we’ve seen from a lot of sports teams in the past.

Julie Lacouture:

When Nichol took over, the organization had some reputation problems, and it was suffering, and I think that they were very intentional in bringing her on so that it could go the other way. She inherited a turnaround situation. It’s great to see how they’ve grown in the last couple of years. She came on and she had, I think, one employee. So it’s definitely something that her team has built.

Trent Stamp:

We do have to give some credit to Dodger ownership there also. They had a vision, and they wanted this to be real. Not a lot of people, when they’re evaluating your ownership of professional sports team, are going to ask how good is your charitable programming in the community. But those folks hired somebody who I don’t think that she would’ve been satisfied with a kind of job where she would’ve just been running those silent auctions and making Dodgers seat and ticket holders feel good. She’s trying to do community development and trying to do it in a city that desperately needs it. And so I think everyone deserves credit for that. Jealous that I wasn’t there for this particular conversation, but what should we listen for in this conversation?

Julie Lacouture:

You got a free ball at Fenway Park. So I think that you should just keep your jealousy to yourself. In this conversation, I think the perception of the Dodgers Foundation is that you’ve got all these athletes and everyone knows the Dodgers, so it must be a really easy job. And so there’s a point where I ask her about using celebrities, or how can organizations or causes use celebrities to their best advantage. And I think, listen to her answer, because her answer goes back to building a quality program. She’s like, this celebrity aspect of it does nothing for you, if you don’t have a quality program. And you need to build that first, and then find people in the public eye for whom that resonates. And I think that might come as a surprise to people, but she’s really smart about that.

                The other thing I think to listen for is just how clear of a sense of where she wanted to land she had, before she even had the ability to even get there. Right? So taking over an organization, having one employee and saying, “Here are the things that I think are important. We’ll figure out how to get there.”

Trent Stamp:

Yeah. I mean, those are themes that we’ve talked about for four seasons now, right? I mean, a celebrity doesn’t solve everything, and you have to have a vision of where you want to go, and then people will join you. But if you ask people where you should go, I think you end up in a ditch most of the time.

Julie Lacouture:

Oh, you get a hundred different answers.

Trent Stamp:

You got to be the one that slaps the sign on the front of the bus and say, “This is where I’m going. Hopefully, you want to come.”

Julie Lacouture:

Can you extend that analogy to board of directors stuff? I feel like I’ve seen a couple of organizations where they’re waiting for the board to set the direction.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah. I mean, the analogy would be that’s driving your bus and waiting for three rich people to get on the bus, and hopefully, they tell you where to go. I think that we, as staff, have an obligation to tell our board and our bus riders, “This is where we’re headed, and I need your help to pay for gas and to navigate, but this is my vision and this is where I’m planning on going. So please come along for the ride and help me in the event that there’s trouble.” But waiting for a board to tell you where to go, it’s a lifetime of frustration.

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah. There’s very few boards that can do that, I think. And then when I talk to board members, they say that probably they think their best place in that is to say, “We would love to weigh in on the vision and help shape it, but we don’t want to have it be top-down. It needs to be a collaboration.”

Trent Stamp:

A thousand percent. Don’t ignore the value that your board brings. Just try to keep them in the lane for where do they bring the most value.

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah. That’s a good way to put it.

Trent Stamp:

So lastly, with Nichol, I mean, what she does is relatively eclectic in the sense that she runs a large corporate philanthropy program for one of the great brands in America, but what can our listeners gather from her lessons? What can they learn from her that’s applicable, even if you’re not running a CSR program or a community development program for one of the most iconic franchises in the history of sports?

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah. I think it’s to listen to how she thinks of the organization and a relentless focus on making it simple to explain. And I think that’s a real key to the success that they had, is it wasn’t trying to be too complicated. They do so many different things, but it’s really clear about why they do it, and that comes from her, and I think that’s a really important lesson.

Trent Stamp:

That’s terrific. I can’t wait. Let’s dive in.

Julie Lacouture:

All right. Let’s listen to my conversation with Nichol.

Nichol Whiteman:

Hi, I’m Nichol Whiteman, chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation.

Julie Lacouture:

Nichol, thank you so much for being here. We’ve been wanting to have you on for a while, so I’m glad we could find time to make this happen.

                So Nichol, let’s jump right in and talk about the Dodgers Foundation. What do you all do day to day? What’s the mission?

Nichol Whiteman:

The Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation is the official charity of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and our mission is to tackle LA’s most pressing problems that we believe to be homelessness, education, healthcare, and social justice. We actually both run and we fund programs through a social justice lens that really get at building self-confidence in Angelenos and giving them all an opportunity to thrive.

Julie Lacouture:

Can you tell me what’s the biggest misperception about the Dodgers Foundation?

Nichol Whiteman:

The biggest misperception is that we are not a 501(c)(3). We are a 501(c)(3). We are a mission, vision-driven organization, a community-driven organization. We essentially do things very much like your standard nonprofit or foundation. We are focused on the communities that we serve, those that we believe live in the shadows of Dodger Stadium, those that we believe need support the most. And we believe that if we use this Dodger brand to truly amplify the voices of those who don’t have access and opportunity, that we can create significant change.

Julie Lacouture:

That’s perfect. That’s a little different than other MLB teams foundations, yes?

Nichol Whiteman:

Yeah. I think we’re actually all structured differently. I think we all have different missions and visions, and I think a lot of that has to do with the city that you’re in. Los Angeles is a very unique place, and I can’t imagine we wouldn’t be set up the way that we are to really be a part of the fabric of this community, a real way to use the brand to make sure that those who are able to come to Dodger games all the time and those who are not are truly taken care of.

Julie Lacouture:

Now, the foundation wasn’t always like this. Can you talk about, when you first took the helm in 2013, what situation you inherited?

Nichol Whiteman:

Yeah. So I came on board in 2013. I inherited a organization that had just newly been renamed the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation with the new logo. Unfortunately, under the former ownership group, we actually witnessed a bit of reputation kill. There was some occurrences that happened that were mismanagement of the Dodgers Foundation. Formerly, it was the Dodgers Dream Foundation. And this ownership group really came on board, said, “Hey, we want to have a really strong philanthropic edge here in Los Angeles. We want to bring on a strong leader and a strong team to do that, and we’re going to push this thing forward in a different manner.” And so the last nine years have really been about a new Dodgers Foundation and really a deep mission, a broad mission, and again, one that really is here to serve communities that need us most.

Julie Lacouture:

Do you consider that a turnaround situation?

Nichol Whiteman:

Yeah. I would say it’s a turnaround, and sometimes, I always say to people, we started a business. We started a new nonprofit. We built something. We created something. In many instances, in a weird way, I feel like a founder, which is really special. And so we recreated programs. We defined, redefined our mission. We made it certain that clarity was provided for Dodger fans and for the broader Los Angeles community on who we are and what we’re doing and why we’re doing these things, which was just so very important.

Julie Lacouture:

It seems to me, you had a lot to handle at that point. There was reputation management. There was branding. There was communication. It was, how do we tell our story? Where do we want to go? What did you tackle first?

Nichol Whiteman:

Yeah. So very first, we launched a community-driven program. It was for… It’s formerly Dodgers RBI, actually just rebranded Dodgers Dreamteam. Very important for us to focus first on those on the ground. Youth and families who we know needed us most, who I knew at that moment in time could truly help us drive programming moving forward.

                We created a grant-making program. We knew that it was essential to be supporting nonprofits here on the ground, in the Los Angeles community. And we made sure that we started to build a team. I inherited one full-time staff person. I’m really proud to say today that there are 14 full-time staff people working specifically for the Dodgers Foundation and a slew of part-time staff for various reasons. It was important for us to build, as we figured out what programs we wanted, as we figured out what grant-making we wanted to do. As we came to understand the fundraising that was going to be needed for that and the operation, it was like being an entrepreneur and essentially saying, what are the pieces that we need to pull together very strategically.

Julie Lacouture:

When we talk to other organizations that are in that turnaround situation, one of the things that they talk about is just the need to bring in resources really quickly at the beginning. Did you find that to be true?

Nichol Whiteman:

Yeah. I did find that it was really important to move pretty quickly. The interesting part is we were able, within the span of maybe six to nine months, to hire three full-time individuals, which was really important. We never hired anyone who we didn’t know what they were going to be doing. And obviously at the beginning, everyone was somewhat hands on. And from there, I will say that we grew in this place where we started to then hire people specifically as we built out for a strategic purpose or a specific department or a specific responsibility.

                But it was really important initially to understand who were our board members, what were new board members that we could acquire because the resources and the networks were a clear part of that immediate infusion, right? Who supports this foundation? Does the ownership group truly understand what we’re doing? The Dodgers senior leadership, are they here for us, and are they going to partner with us? So it was a lot of pulling together the networks of people who we consider partners of the Dodgers Foundation.

Julie Lacouture:

Did you go with where the enthusiasm and trust already was? Or did you have to build back some of that?

Nichol Whiteman:

Yeah. You know what? We spent a lot of time building back trust. We spent a lot of time with audiences who honestly questioned the prior iteration of the Dodgers Foundation. We spent a lot of time with folks who wanted to know where does the money go, and folks who wanted to know why do you exist, and if you’ve got this billion-dollar ownership group, why do you even do this work? So we spent a lot of time clarifying for those audiences, frankly, who were questioning the Dodgers Foundation, who wanted to know why. That was really important.

Julie Lacouture:

So for an organization who’s listening to this right now and saying, “Yes, that’s exactly what I need to do,” what format did that take? Is that one-on-one meetings? Is that just being at events? How do you do that?

Nichol Whiteman:

It’s a combination of a lot of different things. Yes, there can be some one-on-one meetings, but because we have this massive platform that is the Dodgers and that is Dodger Stadium, we had an opportunity to do it on the big stage. And so we took advantage of increasing our visibility. Literally, we made sure that the messaging was what we wanted people to hear in any way, any how, any time we could get that messaging out. We were flooding people with it.

                It was really important for us to increase our social media presence and, frankly, launch Dodgers Foundation platform separate of the Los Angeles Dodgers. It was really important for people to start to see the brand do our own things separate of the club, separate of the for-profit, for people to understand that clearly we were not here for players kissing babies and shaking hands, and then we take photos and say, “This is the Dodgers Foundation.”

                We had to be really clear in developing a strategic plan, messaging, and creating visibility, and that came in the form of events, sometimes fundraising events, sometimes fundraisers. So that came in the form of various marketing partnerships with many corporate entities, foundations and others that folks saw display throughout Dodger Stadium. That came in our partnerships with our grantee partners, and we support about a hundred different organizations a year. And I always say they became the reason why so many folks truly understood who we are and what we do. And community buy-in, right? Really being on the ground with youth and families in our flagship program, essentially making sure that people, they saw us, they felt us, they understood that we wanted to be out there with them and that we were here to support them. So definitely, a myriad of ways in which we did it in a short period of time.

Julie Lacouture:

Can you tell me some of the stuff that was in that first strategic plan? Because I think for a foundation, you probably want to be reactive, and so sometimes, that can work against having a strategic plan. But how did you define your strategy initially?

Nichol Whiteman:

Yeah. Yeah. Initially, it was creating. It was really around creating. It was what is missing, and it was about filling those void. And so when we think about what we were known for back in 2012, if you asked [inaudible 00:17:42] Dodgers Foundation, some folks would immediately say Dodgers Dreamfield. And the fields are very visible locations. We have 58 Dodgers Dreamfields throughout the greater Los Angeles community, and they were the thing that people would say because they were the tangible thing that people could feel, the thing that people could see, the thing that many people drove by in various neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles.

                And so it was time to not move exactly away from that, but it was to say, first of all, why do we even have Dodgers Dreamfield? Why are we doing this? And then secondly, what else is it that we really want to do as an extension of this mission? What else do we feel are the activities, the inputs that get us to our short-term goals, our midterm goals and our long-term goals? And so we set some goals for ourselves, and we really said, at the end of the day, we could use sport to really transform lives in many different ways, and that doesn’t mean building major league baseball players. That means building major league citizens and what are the areas that we need to be focused on.

                And we quickly focused on the fact that education, that health and that sports could be three really broad buckets for us, and how do we then create some really succinct programming and partnerships in those three buckets so that people are getting a clear indication of who we are and what we do and we’re beginning to make an impact. So I would definitely say that first strategic plan, it was about building. It was about creating. It was about making sure the right donors, the right board, the right funders were in place. It was also about making sure that there was that community buy-in. That, for me, was ultimately important from the beginning, that families throughout Los Angeles, who were living in really challenged situations, felt like, “Wow, the Dodgers Foundation is here for me.” So what programs and what grant-making to what nonprofits, what supports those families was most important.

Julie Lacouture:

It also sounds like something within that plan is the desire to be very succinct about what you’re doing so that when I hear you talk about getting that message everywhere and anywhere, you can do it because your message is so succinct.

Nichol Whiteman:

Yes. The messaging is so important that it’d be consistent, that it’d be impactful, that it’d be clear, that it doesn’t leave or beg for 5 million questions. And I think that our former iteration, it did, it just did. And so this idea that we moved into this next phase that was about clarity, transparency, was very-

Julie Lacouture:

Something that doesn’t beg 500 questions is really meaningful. I have a client that says, if you’re explaining, you’re losing, especially for fundraising.

Nichol Whiteman:

You can’t talk in circles. We have to get to the point exactly why. We always talk about how there’s specific statistics that are unfortunately dire statistics throughout Los Angeles, in many communities that guide the work that we do. And we ask ourselves the so-what every single day. So what? Why do we do this? So what? And if we can’t answer that for ourselves internally, we don’t do it. And so I have a director of evaluation and impact on our staff full-time because of that. We have a senior manager of marketing communications because of that. It’s their job to work in partnership to make sure that the messaging is clear, but that the impact is tied to the messaging. And if those things don’t add up for whether it be programs, initiatives, activities, grant-making, we just don’t do it.

Julie Lacouture:

And to me, it sounds like it’s related to what you were talking about with the Dreamfields. The reason it was resonant to people is because they could see and feel whatever they thought the impact of them, but having the evaluation on your staff allows you to take control of that story.

Nichol Whiteman:

Exactly. And we backtracked. We said, “Hey, we’ve got X amount of fields.” I can’t remember exactly how many we had back in 2013, but we said, we have this many, and we know we want to keep doing this, but in order to keep doing this, what we’re going to do is make sure that there’s a strong impact framework, so we understand where we’re going, why we’re going, what is the criteria for every single field, what needs to be the key ingredients that exist in partnerships with boots on the ground to make sure that they work, and then we move forward in that manner. So it’s nice to take a little bit of a step back and recalibrate because the partnerships on the Dreamfields have been clearly just so much more success.

Julie Lacouture:

You can’t just build something and then hope it’s successful. You got to continuously invest in it.

Nichol Whiteman:

There’s a lot there.

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah. Let’s switch gears a little bit because I think that one of the things that maybe people might misunderstand, or something I hear from a lot of organizations actually is, can we just get a celebrity onboard? Can we get someone that has a big social media following? And then the fundraising will just happen. In your experience, Nichol, you’re laughing, is that true?

Nichol Whiteman:

I would beg to differ and say no. I actually feel like it’s the other way around. I think you need to build a really strong base, a really strong foundation, a strong body work that, to the point we were just talking about, has real value, real mission, a real vision, some real impactful outcomes. We live in Hollywood. You can’t ever forget that. And having a celebrity, whether that be athlete or actor, actress, et cetera, tied to the work can never be a bad thing, but I think people see right through it when it’s just because you want a celebrity involved. But I think if you’ve got something really strong and something that’s substantive, and then you attract a celebrity because maybe they have a shared interest or they have lived that experience of the beneficiaries or the constituents that you serve, it can be even more impactful.

                So I think it’s about amplifying the existing mission and model. It’s a way I think about the Dodgers Foundation. We are literally getting to use this big Dodger brand, think of that as your celebrity, to help people who don’t have all of that celebrity and all of that power and all of that. It’s that brand, it’s that celebrity, it’s that athlete that can put that icing on the top, if that makes sense, but they, I don’t think, are at the foundation of it. They’re not at the creation of it. They’re not with you on the strategic visionary piece of it, but I certainly feel like they can add a lot to it if they come as a supporter.

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah. It sounds like you’re saying it’s a tool that, if used properly, it can be very successful.

Nichol Whiteman:

Absolutely.

Julie Lacouture:

So thinking about you and your team of 14 now, what do you think makes your team run well?

Nichol Whiteman:

We are very clear on internal buy-in. And one of the things that I will say very first and foremost is we lead the way that we serve. Internally, we essentially really embody the same values that we have. When we came together a couple of years ago and said, “Hey, we want to really put to paper our values,” we were like, “Are these for us? Are these for the people we serve?” It’s for both. We are a culture of partnership, a culture of collaboration, and we see ourselves that way every single day, and we know that’s why we are where we are today. Folks that know me know that I will say partnership is the secret sauce, at least 10 times a week, because I strongly do believe that.

                But when I think about our values, I’m thinking about opportunity, access, equity. We are leaders. It’s impact for us. It’s excellence for us. Those things are the things that, yes, we are forcing ourselves to really make sure a part of our day-to-day, but they’re also the same things we’re trying to impart upon the people that we serve. And so I think that the way in which we lead, the way in which we do the work, it’s very collaboratively. It’s a partnership internally. It’s a partnership externally. We want to make sure that everyone internally is bought in. We have an amazing team of passionate, diverse individuals who come from all walks of life, who are here for all different reasons, but everyone is waking up every day really excited to do this work, and that just changes the game.

Julie Lacouture:

I can see in your leadership that you really leave space for people to grow and achieve and you set a really high bar and your team goes for it.

Nichol Whiteman:

Yeah. I believe in professional development. I’m a product person, and I’m definitely a bull in the China shop who’s “We can do it.” I have the crazy ideas. I’m certainly the one who was like, “Yeah, we can do that.” Like-

Julie Lacouture:

They’re visionary ideas.

Nichol Whiteman:

Yeah. But I have an amazing group of people behind me who I think they trust that I’m not going to lead them. They’re loyal to the mission of the foundation, and I think that’s most important. I think there’s a lot of leaders who get that wrong, right? It’s loyalty to you. It’s not loyalty to me. I want them to love the mission and want to do this work as much as I want to do this work. And I want them to feel invested and bought in, and I want to it to be mutually beneficial. It should be a rewarding experience. I always say anyone who’s doing any work within a nonprofit space, if it isn’t rewarding, get out because that just doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t lead to the greatest productivity. And I definitely feel like for me, I’m leading with this sense of, I want you to grow. I want professional development to be at the forefront of what we do.

                And we learn by activity that is the Dodgers Foundation activity. We supplement that with additional learning opportunities for our team. We encourage our team to go seek additional learning opportunities. Everybody on our team should have a mentor. Everybody on our team should have a sponsor. Everyone on our team should feel like they can go talk to someone. My style is mentor manager, but I even say I shouldn’t be the person that you’re coming to all the time. You should have multiple outlets and multiple people who support you.

Julie Lacouture:

So what’s something that you’ve done to adapt in the last couple of years?

Nichol Whiteman:

In March of 2020, when we went home, like many, obviously, we thought we were just going home for a little bit of time. And so that immediate pivot was really challenging for myself and for the team at large, but I will say that I think the majority of us really do believe that the last two years has made us strong. The reality is I think that while we were at home and we couldn’t serve our youth and families in person and we couldn’t move forward with fundraising in a typical baseball season, it forced us, frankly, to think differently, to act differently, to innovate, to create differently, to actually think about us ourselves in a very different dynamic way.

                And we continued to show up for the community. We continued to fundraise, and we did that because we had built such a strong foundation prior to that, that I really believed that we were poised in that moment, together with so many of our part, to really just move forward. And yes, we had to move forward in a different way. A lot of Zoom, a lot of remote, a lot of different, when we were out and about in the community, everybody masked up and gloves, and at some points, you felt like even you were putting your own life and health at risk, but we doubled down. We really said, “Hey, now is the time to show up for Los Angeles in a bigger way than we had even done before.

                The last two years also consisted of a lot of racial unrest. And so because of that reckoning, we were also very intentional with folks about the fact that we’ve been doing this work through a social justice lens, predominantly serving the black and brown community here in Los Angeles, but we even decided to be even more intentional about it, to serve as a leader in the space, to show people that this work was important to us and we understood that there were many communities experience inequities, which is frankly why we do the work that we do.

                And so it’s been a challenge. If I reflect back, what I would say is that I think we gained a real sense of empathy for each other, which has actually made us stronger, which is actually helping us to have more impact. We understand even more now the communities that we serve. We understand each other as a team even more. I understand myself. I hope people are saying that after what we’ve all gone through. I understand myself as a leader even more, and I know what skills I need to pull on in really challenging times, and I know what skills I can develop during really challenging times because of the last two years. And it’s forced us to lead a little bit different.

Julie Lacouture:

I don’t think it’s a humongous percentage of your budget, but you do the in-game raffles, right? That’s a foundation activity. And-

Nichol Whiteman:

We’re about a third in-stadium fundraising, which includes the 50/50 raffle. We’re about a third fundraising events, which includes our annual Gala. And then-

Julie Lacouture:

And for folks that are not from Los Angeles, Dodger Stadium was a 50… What is it? 57,000 seats [inaudible 00:29:46]?

Nichol Whiteman:

56,000 seats.

Julie Lacouture:

56.

Nichol Whiteman:

And we were doing close to 4 million annually on the raffle in 2019.

Julie Lacouture:

People buy tickets, and it’s just fun at the park.

Nichol Whiteman:

Exactly. One great winner goes home per game with 50% of the pot and the other 50% goes to do really good work. So not having that, not having our big Gala, there was a major hit. I’m laughing at it now, but we actually created a fan cutout program, where we had watched it happen. I think we watched it happen in London, and we were like, “We think we can do that.” And because fans couldn’t physically be in this stadium in 2020, we gave fans an opportunity to buy images of themselves or their loved ones in cardboard cutout fashion, and they were in the seats. While the players were able to be there playing safely, fans were in the seat. Then we used that as a fundraiser. That was somewhat the way in which we thought about replacing the 50/50 raffle and really giving fans this continued connection to the team and to the stadium.

                Certainly wasn’t the same, but just one example of a way in which we have to pivot. We did drive through distributions that we either donated to or that we were physically present for throughout this pandemic, really because we wanted to be on the ground, addressing food insecurity for the youth and families that we might have been doing softball clinics for before the pandemic. We might have been at schools doing certain education, literacy events, reading story times, all the above. We changed those into what do people need. We actually issued two assessments immediately once we had all gone home, one to the organizations that we serve and one to the families that we serve. And we said, what do you need? And we had that inform and drive the activities that we did, and have been doing frankly consistently right now.

Julie Lacouture:

What is a mistake you’ve made? And what did you learn from it?

Nichol Whiteman:

Thinking that I could do it all by myself. We talked about how I came onboard in 2013. I have somewhat founder’s syndrome, where there’s a lot of history in my head. There’s a lot of creation in my head. There were just days I woke up and I think we should do this. There were days I woke up and said, I think that we move in this direction. It made sense. And that becomes really hard as you engage additional people and you engage additional partners. I’m glad that because of mentorship and because of so many things that have happened over the last couple of years, we’ve grown so rapidly, I quickly came to learn that we’re not experts in everything. I’m not an expert in everything, and that it’s really essential for us to bring to the table the right people and the right voices who need to lead in the spaces in which they’re experts. It’s really important for us to continually look in the mirror and say, “This is not about us. This is about the community that we serve.” If we’re really doing mission-driven work, it’s really about those individuals.

                And so I think early on, when you’re building something, you tend to be a little insular. You tend to really think about how that benefits the organization and the reputation of the organization. I realize quickly that those things get taken care of, if you start to really think about the fact that you are not the expert, and if you really are okay with being vulnerable and open to people who really are living through some of the experiences that you claim to be tackling or some of the problems that you claim to be tackling. You almost let them… And I think that’s been really important for me, for the team, for this iteration of the foundation, and it’s going to take us a long way moving forward.

Julie Lacouture:

Do you have an example of a time where you put yourself in that place where you’re like, “I’m not the expert. I’m vulnerable here,” and it changed the outcome maybe that you were thinking about?

Nichol Whiteman:

I think that in the beginning, there was this idea that if we create a flagship program, Dodgers RBI, and we have all of these young boys and girls running around Los Angeles with Dodger logos all over them at various park, that this is what is ultimately going to bring them joy, and that this Dodger brand in itself does bring families joy. But when you really listen to people and you really start to evaluate and survey and have focus groups and things of that nature, and people start to tell you their real challenges and what they gain by being a part of Dodgers RBI, now Dodgers Dreamteam, we quickly realize they’re the drivers. They are the community that is benefiting from this. They’re the community that should be specifically talking to us about what it is that they want.

                So instead of in the office, us creating program elements, asking them what they want, asking them what they need, asking them what they fear, asking them what could be important to them. We were a little surfaced in the beginning, and quickly, our families showed us that mental health is important. Our families showed us that many of them, like myself, were first-generation college. And unfortunately, while some information may be available to them, if the Dodgers Foundation presented to me, I might consume it differently. Many immigrant families, I’m not going to build a certain medical facilities for health, dental, and vision screening. So if the Dodgers Foundation presents that to me, I’m probably going to consume that differently as well.

                And so we quickly came to understand our place in the partnership was there’s a trust in our brand. There’s a trust in our partnership. And so if you could use that to provide us with access and opportunity, in addition to the sports of baseball and softball, so we get to participate and benefit from the amazingness that sport can provide our children, that holistic wraparound approach is what we need. It is what we need. The families really led us to this wraparound approach, which I don’t think we were bucketing in that way.

Julie Lacouture:

It sounds like just from a business plan point of view, it was from being organization-centric to being customer-centric. It’s just a little bit of a shift, but you tilt a little bit and then walk five miles, you’re going to be far apart from where you landed.

Nichol Whiteman:

Yes. And you feel better for it, and you see it in partnerships just exuding. It’s so helpful.

Julie Lacouture:

And then in terms of fundraising, how do you bring the donors along in that story?

Nichol Whiteman:

I always tell people that when you think about the Dodger brand, okay, yes, everybody wants to be tied to the Dodger brand, but take the Dodger brand and now add philanthropic community edge to it, and it’s 10 times over. And so donors really give us a chance to amplify, to add volume, to do even more, to have much more significant impact. And so really working with corporations, working with foundations, working with individuals, we get to bring to light a lot of the challenges that our communities face. We get to actually storytell in a way, sometimes, that we all would not be storytelling, if we were doing this in our own individuals silos.

                I strongly believe that, yes, the funding is so important because it means that we get to serve more youth and families. We get to train more coaches. We get to educate more teachers, and I could go on and on, but the opportunity to do it with partners in a way in which the message is amplified and the leadership voices are amplified is tremendously amazing. Folks don’t understand sometimes the merging of brands can be such a major impact on one community.

Julie Lacouture:

And I think it goes back to what you were talking about before with partnerships. So what’s your big idea for moving forward, and how are you going to get there?

Nichol Whiteman:

Wow. You know what, I’m in a very much a bucket of building capacity right now. On the heels of this pandemic, I just really feel like so much crisis was exasperated. There were so many communities that were struggling before, and they continue to struggle. Recovery’s going to be really hard for so many, but capacity building in the areas that need us most is really the focus at this point. It’s about how do we send ourselves up internally to be the sponsor, to be the big partner, to be the resource, to be the guide for those on the ground so that they can continue to sustain what it is that they do. So if that’s adding an additional person or funding an additional person for a partner, if that’s making sure that families have food distributions as a consistent part of our programming, that’s really important.

                How now do we really help people in programmatic ways, but also in unrestricted ways? It’s really hard, I know, for many of us to see ourselves giving folks dollars for them to go do what they need to do with it. But we now are thinking in the framework of how does this contribution serve you best? How does this partnership serve you best? What’s going to make it better for you on that end? And so capacity building, frankly, for the communities that we serve is just so important now.

                Impact and scale is really important. It’s hard to be the leader of something that is the Dodgers Foundation, because yes, people want you to be all things to all people in all places all the time, but now, the tricky part is I do believe that we can scale some things and we can have some impact in the manner which we’re able to touch even more people in very creative ways. We all figured out this Zoom situation throughout the pandemic, and we know that virtually, fortunately, was a way in which we reached a lot of people who would not show up in person for various reasons. And so how do we take the lessons from some of these things that we’ve learned the last two years into this sort of capacity building, scaling model? And so that’s the next iteration of the Dodgers Foundation. So I think folks are going to see us get bigger and get better because we want to serve more people.

Julie Lacouture:

Oh, I’m so excited to watch that happen. Nichol, what’s your number one tip for someone who’s in your position? And maybe it’s someone coming into a turnaround position, or maybe it’s somebody that’s looking to impact and scale.

Nichol Whiteman:

Number one, always think about the why. And I say, always think about the why, because the why is the rationale that’s going to guide you every single day. If you lead with the why, people will know that you’re leading with the why. People will know what’s the team’s why, which all filters right into that mission, filters right into that. I think that is very important to ask yourself on a consistent basis, why? We all know the last two years, the why has changed, the why pivots. And so I think it’s really important for us to consistently ask ourselves the why, so that we know if we need to improve upon something, if we know that we’re doing really well at something, but we need to pivot, so we know that maybe we’ve accomplished something and we need to do something else. But I think asking ourselves the why so that we don’t become complacent.

Julie Lacouture:

I’ve heard that talked about as the true north, but I think it gives you that flexibility to say our situation changed, but our why has not. So how do we meet it in this new situation?

Nichol Whiteman:

Absolutely.

Julie Lacouture:

That’s terrific advice. Thank you so much for being here. It was so great to talk to you.

Nichol Whiteman:

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Julie Lacouture:

We have a request for you, dear listeners.

Trent Stamp:

I’m hoping that if you enjoy How We Run that you’ll go and leave a review for us. Your review allows others to find us, and that’s a good thing because the more people that listen, the more impact we can have on the sector, and then we can bring about positive change for other nonprofits that are out there. So if you like what you’re listening to, please leave us a review.

Julie Lacouture:

If you want to be a guest on the show, you think you have a good story and you want to share, you can email us at info@nullgoodwaysinc.com.

 

Your Last-Minute Giving Tuesday Guide

Your Last-Minute Giving Tuesday Guide

If you’re reading this, chances are you are feeling the pressure of doing something, anything, for Giving Tuesday. So we’ll cut to the chase with some last-minute things you can do to make Giving Tuesday work for you. (And next year you can make it even better!)

 

Set a goal

Remember that donors count on us to ask for what we need. Setting a goal can inspire your community to help you do big things. Goals are also handy for campaign messaging because they give you a reason to update your community (We are halfway there! Ten more donations needed!)

Pick one goal for Giving Tuesday:

  • Number of donors or number of donations
  • Dollars raised
  • People helped

 

Connect  donations to a “big idea”

For Giving Tuesday it might be tempting to say, “give because it’s a giving day” but the most successful campaigns go beyond that and show donors how their support is important. 

The best campaigns have a unifying theme that resonates and excites your community. A “big idea” can be a few sentences that make the case for why someone should give to you and why they should give today. 

Your campaign should put impact at the center of your message. Remember, people give when they understand what their gift will achieve.

Get your message everywhere

Promote through every channel you have, from social media to email, and (gasp!) even using offline communication like the phone.

Think about where your audience might look if they hear about the giving day but miss an email from you. That might mean using pop-ups on your website, putting a call to action in your social media bios, and updating your google ads. 

 

Repeat your message

One social media post or one email is not enough to break through and reach everyone. You’ll only reach a small percentage of your potential donors this way. 

Here are some tips to keep your messaging front and center without being annoying or redundant: 

  • Send emails prior to Giving Tuesday, inviting people to give early
  • In each message, give a different reason to give 
  • Use a combination of short messages and stories
  • Change the sender name for your emails
  • Use the short time frame to your advantage – focus on hitting your goals and crossing that finish line, don’t forget the excitement of “time is running out” messaging.
  • Resend messages with a different subject line to non-openers

Make it fun

Sure, your impact and missions are serious, but to really break through and reach your audience, think of innovative fun ways to get attention: 

  • Maybe your Executive Director will dye their hair pink or get a pie in the face when you reach your goals. 
  • Maybe you could live stream performances all day in support of your campaign.
  • Maybe you could encourage your supporters to play a virtual game of tag and tag their friends in posts. 
  • Maybe you could do a scavenger hunt in the community.

Think of the “fun” as a way to break through and call attention to your campaign.  

 

Be specific in your asks

Asking for a specific amount can help guide your donors to different gift sizes through an “anchoring” effect. Asking for higher amounts might yield fewer donors, but more revenue, while asking for lower amounts might give your more donors, but less revenue. This article by Five Maples shows an anchoring effect on donation amounts. 

It’s always great to tie your asks back to your big idea by relating suggested donation amounts to your work: $25 feeds a family of four for a day, etc.

Find partners

Giving Tuesday can be a way to involve your whole community, even your funding partners. If you start planning far enough in advance, you might be able to recruit small businesses, foundations, corporations, or other organizations as outreach partners. Talk to your current funders and major donors about offering matching funds for donors who give to the campaign. 

 

Recruit ambassadors 

The most powerful part of Giving Tuesday is that they provide an easy reason for your supporters to ask their friends to give.

Before Giving Tuesday, see if you can recruit campaign ambassadors from your community and get their commitment in advance for helping spread the word about your campaign.

Those connected with a social media community can be very helpful, as well as board members and major donors. 

 

Learn more:

Season Four Highlights

Season Four Highlights

Looking back on all the fantastic guests we’ve had on Season 4 of the How We Run podcast and share what we’ve learned from them. Featuring: Leslie Ito of Armory Center for the Arts, Tony Brown from HOLA, Johng Ho Song from KYCC, Roger Castle from the LA Regional Food Bank, Sarah Walzer from ParentChild+, Alexis Madrid from The Painted Turtle, David Diaz from Active SGV, Marc Freedman of Encore.org, and Mollie Marsh-Heine from Earthjustice. 

Transcript 

 

Trent Stamp:

Welcome to How We Run, a podcast where we examine how non-profits become successful. I’m Trent Stamp, CEO of the Eisner Foundation.

Julie Lacouture :

And I’m Julie Lacouture, founder of Good Ways Inc.

Julie Lacouture:

Trent, Happy Thanksgiving.

 

Trent Stamp:

Happy Thanksgiving to you, Julie. And I hope you have a wonderful time.

Julie Lacouture :

Do you have family coming in or are you going to spend it with your kid?

Trent Stamp:

No, sadly, my daughter, who is a sophomore in college in Maine is not coming home, so it’s going to be our first Thanksgiving ever without her. But we will have my son and we have a lot of high school basketball on the agenda, because he plays and that’s a week when they like to play high school basketball.

Julie Lacouture :

Oh, well you have a sad Thanksgiving a little bit, because we won’t have your daughter. Well, let’s fill that void with some clips from podcasts then, how about?

Trent Stamp:

That is simply the worst transition I’ve ever heard in my entire life. But I hope people out there on the road are saying, “Yes, absolutely.”

Julie Lacouture :

What better way to take a break than to just really get into the nuts and bolts of how to run a 501(c)(3). We’ve done a lot of episodes this fall, and the people that we’ve gotten to talk to are so great. And I’ve learned something from every single episode, but I want to know maybe some of your highlights.

Trent Stamp:

I mean, I think one of the things I’ve just been blown away by, and it just sounds so stupid, but it’s just how modest all of these leaders have been. We invite these people on because they’re really good at their jobs. And every time we try to tell them that they’re really good at their jobs, they decline it, they defer it, and they give all of the credit to their staff. So we’ve just seen that over and over again from Tony Brown, to Mark Friedman, Johng Ho Song, obviously Leslie Ito, recently, who just refuses to take any credit for anything, under any circumstances.

Julie Lacouture :

Leslie was adamant that she didn’t have a big vision for her organization, yet would lay out visionary statements. Here’s Leslie Ito from season four, episode nine.

Leslie Ito:

Yeah, I just recently read an article about how museum directors are hired and expected to come in with this big vision, and share this big vision with everybody. And actually, I wouldn’t say I don’t have a big vision, but I think the way that I deliver that big vision is maybe not what the field expects. My big vision is to create sustainable organizations, and how we get there are very small, incremental, strategic, and intentional steps. That’s the big vision. If you’re a board member sitting and waiting for a big vision, you may miss it, because it’s happening on a day-to-day level and it’s both operational and strategic. Yes, it would be much easier to lead an organization that just did studio teaching. But I love all of the inner connections that we can make. I’ve been thinking about the big idea, but all I can think about are these tiny little incremental steps.

Leslie Ito:

So I think that’s my big idea. And some of the tiny steps are definitely around cultural equity, is what is really on my mind in terms of training staff and board, creating space for really honest and courageous conversations. The work, the journey that we’re on to create cultural equity within our organization is not the work of one person or one committee, but it needs to be the work of each one of us on staff and board, and each person committing to what they can do within their own little universe to create a more welcoming, more accessible, more relevant art experience for all of the people that come into contact with us, and the people that we are anticipating and want to connect with.

Julie Lacouture :

She said it best when she sang strategy and a vision to me, the series of small incremental steps. But yes, agreed. Everyone is so humble.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah, but if Leslie or the others were in the for-profit sector, they would write a book about their 10 management techniques for saving the world or something, and take all the credit and pat themselves on the back. But yet, these exceptional leaders are trying to convince us on our show about non-profit leadership, that they’re not really leaders. And it’s mildly refreshing and slightly insane, because these are great leaders doing great things under, as we know, the worst circumstances that this country has seen in a really long time, and they’ve steered their organizations to good success and they refuse to take any credit.

Julie Lacouture :

I saw that the most when you were talking to Tony Brown, and he was talking about leading like a coach.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah, Tony he’s an old coach. He’s an old sports coach, and he is running a multimillion dollar organization and he’s acting like he just has to get his players in the right places so that they can succeed.

Julie Lacouture :

And here’s Tony Brown, from season four, episode two.

Tony Brown:

My staff were starting to feel burnt out. They were starting to feel supported morally, but not supported practically. And we were growing rapidly. And I was asking for more and more and I was adding more and more people, and I wasn’t able to really go deep with any one of them. And that was a problem, because then what ended up happening was that anytime big decisions needed to be made, they were always coming back to me to make the big decision. And I realized, oh my goodness, I didn’t create enough opportunity for them to [inaudible 00:06:11] to where they had the confidence to make those decisions. They didn’t have clear policies and guidelines by which to measure making the best decision possible that they could make. And in a way, as much as I was trying to advance us further, faster, I actually probably stunted a little bit of the quality of growth that we could have.

Trent Stamp:

You and I are both former ball coaches, to just have to give the kid the ball and tell him to go pitch. You can wrap your arm around him in the dugout all day long, but sometimes you just have to give him the ball and send him out to the mounds.

Tony Brown:

That’s right. And then what they would tell me back is that athlete would say, “Hey, look. You got to show me the mechanics of how to pitch. You’ve got to spend some time, but give me the fundamentals.” And I was missing that part, I think, as we grew rapidly, right? There weren’t enough trainers to help these guys and gals be game-ready. And so it’s been neat to build out that infrastructure in more recent times.

Trent Stamp:

That’s terrific.

Tony Brown:

And I’ve seen some really great results.

Julie Lacouture :

I thought that was so telling.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah. Sometimes you have to put them out there and let them miss a shot, because when you really need them, they’re going to have that experience. So, that was terrific.

Julie Lacouture :

You’ve come back to that theme of being humble. One thing that I’ve noticed from a lot of different guests is just maybe because of necessity, I’m starting to notice a trend of less planning and more doing, adapting. We’ve talked to a couple of organizations as you’ve pointed out that have gotten into food distribution, because of the pandemic, and they’ve all said something to the effect of that’s just what our community needed. We just had to do that. And I think that there is some planning there. I don’t mean to say wake up in the morning, have an idea, and go get it done. You can have a good idea of where you’re going, but just try it.

Trent Stamp:

It’s more difficult than it sounds though, right? I know at the philanthropy side, on the foundation side, we’re always railing against mission creed. We’re always telling organizations, “Stay in your lane. Do what you do, and don’t go over there, because that’s not what you do.” And yet, we’ve heard from several good leaders who have said, “We had an obligation to do something different, and we did not have the ability to sit around and put together a strategic plan or some sort of 10-point blueprint for how we’re going to do this.” They’d had to trust their gut and they had to just implement programs on the fly. And we heard that from Johng Ho, at KYCC.

Julie Lacouture :

Let’s take a listen to Johng Ho Song from season four, episode five.

Johng Ho Song:

When everything stopped, our leadership group got together and we were thinking, what can we do right now for us to support the community? And I think we had a general consensus that we wanted to help the seniors, because they’re the one who was suffering the most at that time. They couldn’t go out. They didn’t have the transportation. And we didn’t have the capacity to serve whole Korea town. But we thought that it was a good opportunity for us to serve the seniors from our low income housing programs that we have. We have close to over 200 families that we’re serving right now, eight low income senior housing, so we wanted to target our senior housing families and we could deliver essential items and meal for the next four month or so. So that program started in April and then they close to last September or so, but that was about close to 12,000 meals and essential items. And we had an opportunity to get even closer to our clients during that time.

Trent Stamp:

We heard it, obviously, with some of the fundraisers, with Roger Castle and Alexis Madrid, where they just had to throw out the playbook of, we have to figure out ways to keep these donors in house, we have to figure out ways to do virtual events, and we have to do things differently. And you’re going to have to trust us that we know what we’re doing, and that we’ve been around for a little while, and not just that we’re doing something because it sounds good, and we saw it at a seminar somewhere. There is great value in this experience, and I think that’s one of the things that we’ve gained from many of our guests is that their experience prepared them for when things got difficult.

Julie Lacouture :

Yeah. I think the Alexis and Roger are really good examples of organizations that saw a moment in time and said, if not now, when? Let’s go try something. So with Alexis at The Painted Turtle, just really saying, we’ve got to do a virtual event, we have no other options right now. And when you hear her talk about what they did, she just started having the conversations with people and saying, “Here’s, I think what we’re going to end up doing, would you be into this?” And it was almost building the plan along with the supporters. And then with Roger, talking about how much storytelling his small staff is able to do with just elbow grease and iPhone and getting the stories of the people they serve out there, and how much that’s paid off. Here’s Roger Castle from season four, episode three.

Roger Castle:

Good luck is when preparation meets opportunity, and that’s really what happened with the pandemic. We already had increased our fundraising over the past four years, about 35%. During the pandemic, of course, with all the awareness from the emergency drive to distributions, we acquired more donors than we had required in the last eight years. But so our strategy is content, so we try to capitalize on great stories, impact stories, and then also getting that free media, which we did well before the pandemic. People will say, “Well, how do you get stories about people getting food?” Well, we go to distributions. It’s not easy. You have to walk up to people and ask them to tell their story about being food insecure. You get a lot of interviews that don’t work out. So it’s really rolling up your sleeves and going to these distributions and getting stories.

Roger Castle:

And we just are very nimble about getting these things out. One of the things one of my teammates said the other day was the team was a little spoiled, because we got approvals through so quickly. And so I don’t want to be a block in the process for the content. I’ve seen other organizations where one direct mail letter at the end of the year takes four months, because you have nine people that have to weigh in on it. And so being nimble and responsive, that’s really one of the great ways that we keep the process moving. The other thing I’ll say is things are cheaper nowadays. We have lots of videos we do. We probably do five or six a month. You can do these on your phone. And even the other day, our marketing managers, he was like, “I don’t need the camera. I got my phone.” And nowadays, that’s good enough, especially if you’re just doing social media videos or YouTube videos, and not doing it for broadcast.

Julie Lacouture :

That’s a great example of just start doing it, just start trying it, and see what works.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah. And it’s dangerous. It’s hard. In the hands of a lesser leader that goes awry and we’ve all seen that. But some of these leaders that we’ve talked to this year, they were well positioned. And I think we can all be thankful that they were in the positions they were in for the people that they-

Julie Lacouture :

Yeah, absolutely. On the programmatics side, we heard that from Sarah Walzer as well, at ParentChild+, when they took their whole program virtual. And because they have this great network and because they have a communication structure in place and have very well-trained partners, they were able to make a quick pivot to virtual programming. And then, she drops this information, when she was talking about it, about how much better it’s made their program, and how many more families they’re able to serve, and how many more families in different languages they’re able to serve. And I feel like it really opened up a whole world for them. Here’s Sarah Walzer talking about that in season four, episode six.

Sarah Walzer:

Now, if you had asked to me, even in January of 2020, could this model, this evidence-based model that’s all about relationship building between staff and parents and between parents and children, could this be done 100% virtually, I would’ve told you no way. We can’t build those kinds of relationships. We didn’t even think it was worth testing at that point. And then yes, in mid-March of 2020, our hand got completely forced, but it came out of the learning that, oh, this actually could work virtually, but then that there were families we were just missing, because we weren’t offering this as an alternative method of participating in the program.

Sarah Walzer:

And part of what we are doing now is, with an outside evaluator, really trying to dig into the question of what about virtual visits worked for families? What about it worked for staff? But even more importantly, who were the families it worked so well for and why, and how do we make sure we are offering multiple ways for families to engage with the program? One of the really exciting things for us is so we currently work in 40 different languages across the country, but we’re only able, in any given community, to support families in the language that we’ve been able to hire staff in that community. But this may mean that the Bengali family in Madison, Wisconsin, can get a visit from a Bengali home visitor in San Jose, California, because they can do it virtually. That opens a whole world now.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah, I guess that’s the other factor here, right is that these people are recognizing that the world has changed and they’re not in a hurry to just go back to the way things were before. This is such a thoughtful group of leaders and they’re evaluating in the process as they go by as, is this now a better way, whatever it means. We heard from Mark Friedman, who his whole office went virtual, and I don’t think they’re coming back. And he just said, “We’re actually better this way. And we’re supporting our people, and we’re getting things done.” And Mark’s a long-time leader in the sector, been a leader in the non-profit world for 30 years, at least. And he just said, “We’re going to adapt to this, and we’re going to be better as a result of this.” And I thought that was really interesting.

Julie Lacouture :

There’s a story that I heard in business school, I think it’s about Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon.

Trent Stamp:

Oh, go-

Julie Lacouture :

Yeah, pull up a chair to this fireplace.

Trent Stamp:

I’m here for the Cornelius story. Let’s go.

Julie Lacouture :

He made tons of money as a railroad baron and was asked to invest in this early technology called airplanes and declined, and said, “I’m not in the airplane business, I’m in the railroad business.” And then that industry grew, while the railroads went away as a business. Because, he didn’t think big enough about what his organization did. He didn’t think he was in the transportation industry. And I think that one of the things I’m starting to hear from a lot of leaders that we’re talking to, like David Diaz and Mollie Marsh-Heine, is really about thinking bigger about the work that you do and the intersectionality of it. And how, for David Diaz, thinking about how transportation is a social justice issue and what that means for work opportunities and economic opportunities for a community. And that is, I think, a really exciting development in the industry.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah, we heard that from a lot of people, that justice, the anti-racism work, that that kind of thing of providing not just equity, but equality, it runs through everything that they’re trying to do. And if you can’t imbue it into your regular programming, no matter what you do, you’re not going to be successful. And so I think that’s another thing that the non-profit world is embracing much quicker than the for-profit world is doing. But they’re both analyzing it from a justice factor, but also from a cost-effectiveness, cost benefit analysis of do we need to put this into our work, to do better work, to provide more options, more access, more opportunity for people?

Julie Lacouture :

And here’s Mollie Marsh-Heine from season four, episode eight.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Most importantly, you’ve got to begin and to do it. I really don’t think any organization has an excuse. I don’t care if you’re the professional golf association or what. Everybody who has an incorporated non-profit in the United States of America, their lives are touched by racism, and need to be finding a way to center their work in racial and social equity.

Trent Stamp:

I think that all of the leaders that we talked to were very thoughtful on that, and incorporating how the world has changed and how some people are just not getting the right bite at the apple in any way whatsoever. And it’s really an inspiring group of people. I wish I could be more like them.

Julie Lacouture :

I know. I want to be all our guests when I grow up.

Trent Stamp:

They’re just good people. And they’re not good people in the way that we think of do-gooders. These are people running multimillion dollar organizations who are cutthroat when it comes to making business decisions. They’re strategic, they’re smart, they’ve done all the reading and all the talking and all the thinking. They’re inspirational. But they’re doing it for the right reasons,, and they understand the systemic causes that are making their work hard. And they’re trying to change not only the people that they serve, but those causes that are influencing not only their work, but the rest of our lives. So I’ve been so inspired by the people we’ve talked to.

Julie Lacouture :

It’s a hard industry to work in. You have fewer resources than any other industry, and you have way more to do than any other. They should all be commended and the stuff that they get done is exceptional.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah. And they got pain-in-the-butt foundations telling them how to better run their organizations, as if we have any idea we’re talking about.

Julie Lacouture :

And then you have us trying to be like, “Can you explain to us exactly how you do your job? Thanks. We’re going to edit it down.”

Trent Stamp:

Yes. Quick boil down your 30-year career into one soundbite for me, please. But most of them do it.

Julie Lacouture :

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. We are thankful for you for listening. Trent, I’m thankful for being part of this and doing such great interviews, and just lending your expertise at every turn. And we look forward to doing more.

Trent Stamp:

I, too, am thankful for this partnership with you. And I’m also thankful for the amazing people in the sector who are doing great work and are willing to give us the time to talk about that work. Here’s to a nice holiday season, and a better 2022.

 

Transcript to come

 

Trent Stamp:

Welcome to How We Run, a podcast where we examine how non-profits become successful. I’m Trent Stamp, CEO of the Eisner Foundation.

Julie Lacouture :

And I’m Julie Lacouture, founder of Good Ways.

Julie Lacouture:

Inc. Trent, Happy Thanksgiving.

Trent Stamp:

Happy Thanksgiving to you, Julie. And I hope you have a wonderful time.

Julie Lacouture :

Do you have family coming in or are you going to spend it with your kid?

Trent Stamp:

No, sadly, my daughter, who is a sophomore in college in Maine is not coming home, so it’s going to be our first Thanksgiving ever without her. But we will have my son and we have a lot of high school basketball on the agenda, because he plays and that’s a week when they like to play high school basketball.

Julie Lacouture :

Oh, well you have a sad Thanksgiving a little bit, because we won’t have your daughter. Well, let’s fill that void with some clips from podcasts then, how about?

Trent Stamp:

That is simply the worst transition I’ve ever heard in my entire life. But I hope people out there on the road are saying, “Yes, absolutely.”

Julie Lacouture :

What better way to take a break than to just really get into the nuts and bolts of how to run a 501(c)(3). We’ve done a lot of episodes this fall, and the people that we’ve gotten to talk to are so great. And I’ve learned something from every single episode, but I want to know maybe some of your highlights.

Trent Stamp:

I mean, I think one of the things I’ve just been blown away by, and it just sounds so stupid, but it’s just how modest all of these leaders have been. We invite these people on because they’re really good at their jobs. And every time we try to tell them that they’re really good at their jobs, they decline it, they defer it, and they give all of the credit to their staff. So we’ve just seen that over and over again from Tony Brown, to Mark Friedman, Johng Ho Song, obviously Leslie Ito, recently, who just refuses to take any credit for anything, under any circumstances.

Julie Lacouture :

Leslie was adamant that she didn’t have a big vision for her organization, yet would lay out visionary statements. Here’s Leslie Ito from season four, episode nine.

Leslie Ito:

Yeah, I just recently read an article about how museum directors are hired and expected to come in with this big vision, and share this big vision with everybody. And actually, I wouldn’t say I don’t have a big vision, but I think the way that I deliver that big vision is maybe not what the field expects. My big vision is to create sustainable organizations, and how we get there are very small, incremental, strategic, and intentional steps. That’s the big vision. If you’re a board member sitting and waiting for a big vision, you may miss it, because it’s happening on a day-to-day level and it’s both operational and strategic. Yes, it would be much easier to lead an organization that just did studio teaching. But I love all of the inner connections that we can make. I’ve been thinking about the big idea, but all I can think about are these tiny little incremental steps.

Leslie Ito:

So I think that’s my big idea. And some of the tiny steps are definitely around cultural equity, is what is really on my mind in terms of training staff and board, creating space for really honest and courageous conversations. The work, the journey that we’re on to create cultural equity within our organization is not the work of one person or one committee, but it needs to be the work of each one of us on staff and board, and each person committing to what they can do within their own little universe to create a more welcoming, more accessible, more relevant art experience for all of the people that come into contact with us, and the people that we are anticipating and want to connect with.

Julie Lacouture :

She said it best when she sang strategy and a vision to me, the series of small incremental steps. But yes, agreed. Everyone is so humble.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah, but if Leslie or the others were in the for-profit sector, they would write a book about their 10 management techniques for saving the world or something, and take all the credit and pat themselves on the back. But yet, these exceptional leaders are trying to convince us on our show about non-profit leadership, that they’re not really leaders. And it’s mildly refreshing and slightly insane, because these are great leaders doing great things under, as we know, the worst circumstances that this country has seen in a really long time, and they’ve steered their organizations to good success and they refuse to take any credit.

Julie Lacouture :

I saw that the most when you were talking to Tony Brown, and he was talking about leading like a coach.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah, Tony he’s an old coach. He’s an old sports coach, and he is running a multimillion dollar organization and he’s acting like he just has to get his players in the right places so that they can succeed.

Julie Lacouture :

And here’s Tony Brown, from season four, episode two.

Tony Brown:

My staff were starting to feel burnt out. They were starting to feel supported morally, but not supported practically. And we were growing rapidly. And I was asking for more and more and I was adding more and more people, and I wasn’t able to really go deep with any one of them. And that was a problem, because then what ended up happening was that anytime big decisions needed to be made, they were always coming back to me to make the big decision. And I realized, oh my goodness, I didn’t create enough opportunity for them to [inaudible 00:06:11] to where they had the confidence to make those decisions. They didn’t have clear policies and guidelines by which to measure making the best decision possible that they could make. And in a way, as much as I was trying to advance us further, faster, I actually probably stunted a little bit of the quality of growth that we could have.

Trent Stamp:

You and I are both former ball coaches, to just have to give the kid the ball and tell him to go pitch. You can wrap your arm around him in the dugout all day long, but sometimes you just have to give him the ball and send him out to the mounds.

Tony Brown:

That’s right. And then what they would tell me back is that athlete would say, “Hey, look. You got to show me the mechanics of how to pitch. You’ve got to spend some time, but give me the fundamentals.” And I was missing that part, I think, as we grew rapidly, right? There weren’t enough trainers to help these guys and gals be game-ready. And so it’s been neat to build out that infrastructure in more recent times.

Trent Stamp:

That’s terrific.

Tony Brown:

And I’ve seen some really great results.

Julie Lacouture :

I thought that was so telling.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah. Sometimes you have to put them out there and let them miss a shot, because when you really need them, they’re going to have that experience. So, that was terrific.

Julie Lacouture :

You’ve come back to that theme of being humble. One thing that I’ve noticed from a lot of different guests is just maybe because of necessity, I’m starting to notice a trend of less planning and more doing, adapting. We’ve talked to a couple of organizations as you’ve pointed out that have gotten into food distribution, because of the pandemic, and they’ve all said something to the effect of that’s just what our community needed. We just had to do that. And I think that there is some planning there. I don’t mean to say wake up in the morning, have an idea, and go get it done. You can have a good idea of where you’re going, but just try it.

Trent Stamp:

It’s more difficult than it sounds though, right? I know at the philanthropy side, on the foundation side, we’re always railing against mission creed. We’re always telling organizations, “Stay in your lane. Do what you do, and don’t go over there, because that’s not what you do.” And yet, we’ve heard from several good leaders who have said, “We had an obligation to do something different, and we did not have the ability to sit around and put together a strategic plan or some sort of 10-point blueprint for how we’re going to do this.” They’d had to trust their gut and they had to just implement programs on the fly. And we heard that from Johng Ho, at KYCC.

Julie Lacouture :

Let’s take a listen to Johng Ho Song from season four, episode five.

Johng Ho Song:

When everything stopped, our leadership group got together and we were thinking, what can we do right now for us to support the community? And I think we had a general consensus that we wanted to help the seniors, because they’re the one who was suffering the most at that time. They couldn’t go out. They didn’t have the transportation. And we didn’t have the capacity to serve whole Korea town. But we thought that it was a good opportunity for us to serve the seniors from our low income housing programs that we have. We have close to over 200 families that we’re serving right now, eight low income senior housing, so we wanted to target our senior housing families and we could deliver essential items and meal for the next four month or so. So that program started in April and then they close to last September or so, but that was about close to 12,000 meals and essential items. And we had an opportunity to get even closer to our clients during that time.

Trent Stamp:

We heard it, obviously, with some of the fundraisers, with Roger Castle and Alexis Madrid, where they just had to throw out the playbook of, we have to figure out ways to keep these donors in house, we have to figure out ways to do virtual events, and we have to do things differently. And you’re going to have to trust us that we know what we’re doing, and that we’ve been around for a little while, and not just that we’re doing something because it sounds good, and we saw it at a seminar somewhere. There is great value in this experience, and I think that’s one of the things that we’ve gained from many of our guests is that their experience prepared them for when things got difficult.

Julie Lacouture :

Yeah. I think the Alexis and Roger are really good examples of organizations that saw a moment in time and said, if not now, when? Let’s go try something. So with Alexis at The Painted Turtle, just really saying, we’ve got to do a virtual event, we have no other options right now. And when you hear her talk about what they did, she just started having the conversations with people and saying, “Here’s, I think what we’re going to end up doing, would you be into this?” And it was almost building the plan along with the supporters. And then with Roger, talking about how much storytelling his small staff is able to do with just elbow grease and iPhone and getting the stories of the people they serve out there, and how much that’s paid off. Here’s Roger Castle from season four, episode three.

Roger Castle:

Good luck is when preparation meets opportunity, and that’s really what happened with the pandemic. We already had increased our fundraising over the past four years, about 35%. During the pandemic, of course, with all the awareness from the emergency drive to distributions, we acquired more donors than we had required in the last eight years. But so our strategy is content, so we try to capitalize on great stories, impact stories, and then also getting that free media, which we did well before the pandemic. People will say, “Well, how do you get stories about people getting food?” Well, we go to distributions. It’s not easy. You have to walk up to people and ask them to tell their story about being food insecure. You get a lot of interviews that don’t work out. So it’s really rolling up your sleeves and going to these distributions and getting stories.

Roger Castle:

And we just are very nimble about getting these things out. One of the things one of my teammates said the other day was the team was a little spoiled, because we got approvals through so quickly. And so I don’t want to be a block in the process for the content. I’ve seen other organizations where one direct mail letter at the end of the year takes four months, because you have nine people that have to weigh in on it. And so being nimble and responsive, that’s really one of the great ways that we keep the process moving. The other thing I’ll say is things are cheaper nowadays. We have lots of videos we do. We probably do five or six a month. You can do these on your phone. And even the other day, our marketing managers, he was like, “I don’t need the camera. I got my phone.” And nowadays, that’s good enough, especially if you’re just doing social media videos or YouTube videos, and not doing it for broadcast.

Julie Lacouture :

That’s a great example of just start doing it, just start trying it, and see what works.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah. And it’s dangerous. It’s hard. In the hands of a lesser leader that goes awry and we’ve all seen that. But some of these leaders that we’ve talked to this year, they were well positioned. And I think we can all be thankful that they were in the positions they were in for the people that they-

Julie Lacouture :

Yeah, absolutely. On the programmatics side, we heard that from Sarah Walzer as well, at ParentChild+, when they took their whole program virtual. And because they have this great network and because they have a communication structure in place and have very well-trained partners, they were able to make a quick pivot to virtual programming. And then, she drops this information, when she was talking about it, about how much better it’s made their program, and how many more families they’re able to serve, and how many more families in different languages they’re able to serve. And I feel like it really opened up a whole world for them. Here’s Sarah Walzer talking about that in season four, episode six.

Sarah Walzer:

Now, if you had asked to me, even in January of 2020, could this model, this evidence-based model that’s all about relationship building between staff and parents and between parents and children, could this be done 100% virtually, I would’ve told you no way. We can’t build those kinds of relationships. We didn’t even think it was worth testing at that point. And then yes, in mid-March of 2020, our hand got completely forced, but it came out of the learning that, oh, this actually could work virtually, but then that there were families we were just missing, because we weren’t offering this as an alternative method of participating in the program.

Sarah Walzer:

And part of what we are doing now is, with an outside evaluator, really trying to dig into the question of what about virtual visits worked for families? What about it worked for staff? But even more importantly, who were the families it worked so well for and why, and how do we make sure we are offering multiple ways for families to engage with the program? One of the really exciting things for us is so we currently work in 40 different languages across the country, but we’re only able, in any given community, to support families in the language that we’ve been able to hire staff in that community. But this may mean that the Bengali family in Madison, Wisconsin, can get a visit from a Bengali home visitor in San Jose, California, because they can do it virtually. That opens a whole world now.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah, I guess that’s the other factor here, right is that these people are recognizing that the world has changed and they’re not in a hurry to just go back to the way things were before. This is such a thoughtful group of leaders and they’re evaluating in the process as they go by as, is this now a better way, whatever it means. We heard from Mark Friedman, who his whole office went virtual, and I don’t think they’re coming back. And he just said, “We’re actually better this way. And we’re supporting our people, and we’re getting things done.” And Mark’s a long-time leader in the sector, been a leader in the non-profit world for 30 years, at least. And he just said, “We’re going to adapt to this, and we’re going to be better as a result of this.” And I thought that was really interesting.

Julie Lacouture :

There’s a story that I heard in business school, I think it’s about Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon.

Trent Stamp:

Oh, go-

Julie Lacouture :

Yeah, pull up a chair to this fireplace.

Trent Stamp:

I’m here for the Cornelius story. Let’s go.

Julie Lacouture :

He made tons of money as a railroad baron and was asked to invest in this early technology called airplanes and declined, and said, “I’m not in the airplane business, I’m in the railroad business.” And then that industry grew, while the railroads went away as a business. Because, he didn’t think big enough about what his organization did. He didn’t think he was in the transportation industry. And I think that one of the things I’m starting to hear from a lot of leaders that we’re talking to, like David Diaz and Mollie Marsh-Heine, is really about thinking bigger about the work that you do and the intersectionality of it. And how, for David Diaz, thinking about how transportation is a social justice issue and what that means for work opportunities and economic opportunities for a community. And that is, I think, a really exciting development in the industry.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah, we heard that from a lot of people, that justice, the anti-racism work, that that kind of thing of providing not just equity, but equality, it runs through everything that they’re trying to do. And if you can’t imbue it into your regular programming, no matter what you do, you’re not going to be successful. And so I think that’s another thing that the non-profit world is embracing much quicker than the for-profit world is doing. But they’re both analyzing it from a justice factor, but also from a cost-effectiveness, cost benefit analysis of do we need to put this into our work, to do better work, to provide more options, more access, more opportunity for people?

Julie Lacouture :

And here’s Mollie Marsh-Heine from season four, episode eight.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Most importantly, you’ve got to begin and to do it. I really don’t think any organization has an excuse. I don’t care if you’re the professional golf association or what. Everybody who has an incorporated non-profit in the United States of America, their lives are touched by racism, and need to be finding a way to center their work in racial and social equity.

Trent Stamp:

I think that all of the leaders that we talked to were very thoughtful on that, and incorporating how the world has changed and how some people are just not getting the right bite at the apple in any way whatsoever. And it’s really an inspiring group of people. I wish I could be more like them.

Julie Lacouture :

I know. I want to be all our guests when I grow up.

Trent Stamp:

They’re just good people. And they’re not good people in the way that we think of do-gooders. These are people running multimillion dollar organizations who are cutthroat when it comes to making business decisions. They’re strategic, they’re smart, they’ve done all the reading and all the talking and all the thinking. They’re inspirational. But they’re doing it for the right reasons,, and they understand the systemic causes that are making their work hard. And they’re trying to change not only the people that they serve, but those causes that are influencing not only their work, but the rest of our lives. So I’ve been so inspired by the people we’ve talked to.

Julie Lacouture :

It’s a hard industry to work in. You have fewer resources than any other industry, and you have way more to do than any other. They should all be commended and the stuff that they get done is exceptional.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah. And they got pain-in-the-butt foundations telling them how to better run their organizations, as if we have any idea we’re talking about.

Julie Lacouture :

And then you have us trying to be like, “Can you explain to us exactly how you do your job? Thanks. We’re going to edit it down.”

Trent Stamp:

Yes. Quick boil down your 30-year career into one soundbite for me, please. But most of them do it.

Julie Lacouture :

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. We are thankful for you for listening. Trent, I’m thankful for being part of this and doing such great interviews, and just lending your expertise at every turn. And we look forward to doing more.

Trent Stamp:

I, too, am thankful for this partnership with you. And I’m also thankful for the amazing people in the sector who are doing great work and are willing to give us the time to talk about that work. Here’s to a nice holiday season, and a better 2022.

 

Leading Through Crisis

Leading Through Crisis

Season 4, Episode 9

Before Leslie Ito was the Executive Director of Armory Center for the Arts, she assumed the leadership at an organization that was struggling. Leslie shares with us how she approached that turnaround and what she learned about leading during a crisis (something that may have come in handy in 2020). Leslie shares with us what she prioritized, how she led the organization to be sustainable, and how she sees her big vision as a series of tiny steps.

Transcript:

 

Trent Stamp:

Welcome to How We Run, a podcast where we examine how nonprofits become successful. I’m Trent Stamp, CEO of the Eisner Foundation.

Julie Lacouture:

And I’m Julie Lacouture, founder of Good Ways, Inc. On this episode, we have Leslie Ito of the Armory Art Center in Pasadena talking about organizational turnarounds and leadership during crisis.

Julie Lacouture:

Okay, Trent, at the beginning of this season I said one of the things I really wanted to do was find somebody that had been through an organization turnaround. Do you remember that?

Trent Stamp:

Of course. I remember. I remember everything you tell me.

Julie Lacouture:

And then you told me I was searching for a feel good sports movie.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah. CBS After School Special, the down on their outs organization that is going to go under because of the horrible big bad corporate landlord, and if they just hold enough car watches, they can save the organization.

Julie Lacouture:

You got it.

Trent Stamp:

It doesn’t happen very much in real life. Usually when an organization is going under, there are reasons for it, and it doesn’t come back.

Julie Lacouture:

Well, cue the feel good sports music, because I talked to Leslie Ito, who today runs Armory Arts in Pasadena, but it was about her previous experience at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. She took over from a failed leadership transition and took over an organization that was having trouble financially. And she talked me through how they got through that time. And now that’s an organization that is, I would say, thriving.

Trent Stamp:

I know Leslie a little bit, and I suspect that she probably told you that they got through the organization with nothing having to do with her exceptional leadership. And I can guarantee you, that’s utter nonsense. She’s a relatively unassuming leader, but she’s a powerful leader who made some important decisions and ran that organization with great conviction and confidence to turn it around. And now she’s moved on to a different organization where I’m sure she’ll create more positive impacts, but she’s another one of these humble leaders that we’ve encountered this season on How We Run, who tries to give all the credit to someone other than themselves, but clearly deserves a fair share of it, at least.

Julie Lacouture:

When you’ve seen organizations be able to make that turnaround, what have you seen the leaders do?

Trent Stamp:

I think they’ve done a couple of things, but the first one being that they have identified what exactly does that organization do? Because I think a lot of times those types of organizations that are struggling have had some mission creep, have kind of lost their focus, or maybe they are doing the one thing that they’re really good at. So I think a lot of times the leader comes in and looks around and says, what is it that we do, and how do we do it well? I think that they have to have a vision, because usually when you look at their balance sheet, it’s not where you want it to be as a funder. So you’re going to need some assurance that the balance sheet’s going to get where it needs to get. And so there’s a true vision there.

Trent Stamp:

And then I do think that there is kind of a collaborative leadership that seems to be common in this type of situation where they look around and sometimes they have to let some people go because the organization may be in trouble financially, but they identify what are the skills and assets that each of their employees are bringing, and how do they best utilize those skills and assets so they can turn around what is a boat that may be going the wrong direction. Usually there’s a board chair who’s willing to roll up his or her sleeves and get in there and do the hard work. And oftentimes that requires a little bit of humility, because they may have been there when the organization started to go off the tracks a little bit.

Julie Lacouture:

For leaders that might be seeing the turnaround before everyone else sees that it’s a turnaround situation, I feel like you have to find that internal champion or that person with some power who can say yes, I agree. This is exactly what needs to happen. I feel like you outlined sections of a book that you could write on this.

Trent Stamp:

Well, I bet Leslie could write it better than I can, because I observed it from afar, but she actually implemented it.

Julie Lacouture:

We should go back to every single guest we’ve had on and say, here’s the outline of your book. Now we need you to go write your book.

Trent Stamp:

Or we could just steal their best ideas and put it in our book.

Julie Lacouture:

Well, while you work on your book, let’s hear from Leslie.

Trent Stamp:

I look forward.

Leslie Ito:

Hi, I’m Leslie Ito. I’m the Executive Director of the Armory Center for the Arts. We’re based in Pasadena, and we’re a community based arts education and exhibition organization. We work with students from two and a half years old all the way up through older adults. And we teach art in all different kinds of contexts from our onsite studio program, which includes ceramics lab, a letterpress program, both digital and wet lab photography, to taking our arts education programs out into the world to community centers, park and rec centers, schools, we work with incarcerated youth and formerly systems impacted youth.

Leslie Ito:

I love food analogies. So one of the things that I’m aspiring to is for the Armory to be like Philippe’s Original French Dip sandwiches, where everybody, all people from all walks of life are rubbing elbows with each other and eating the same delicious French Dip sandwich. And so that’s kind of the feel that I’m going for at the Armory, is creating a welcoming space where everybody can learn together and really imagine your world together.

Julie Lacouture:

For those of you not in the LA area, Philippe’s is an LA institution. So I think Leslie, you need to throw some sawdust on the floor and have a 5 cent cup of coffee, and you’re almost there.

Leslie Ito:

I mean, we’ve been talking a lot about how to create a welcoming space, and we’re in an actual armory built I think in the 20s. So to warm up a space that was built essentially as a fortress is tough, but I think is a really interesting challenge for us.

Julie Lacouture:

Leslie, one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you is that I heard that you led an amazing turnaround in your prior job at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Leslie Ito:

Yeah. I joined the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center the JACCC, at a really pivotal time in that organization’s history. It had just experienced failed leadership transition. The staff morale was really deflated, and they were essentially about to close their doors and were contemplating a sale of the building. It’s almost a three acre campus with 880 seat performing arts center, a Japanese garden, and a five story office building an Isamu Noguchi sculpture and plaza in the middle of downtown. And when I stepped in, it was essentially a company that was holding real estate and renting out spaces. And so really one of the first steps that I did was to take a look and see how we could bring back programming. I think an investment in programming and really a return to mission was that first step.

Julie Lacouture:

So it seems like it was an organization that was just based on being a space that they would let anybody use, like you said, but there was no bigger purpose behind it.

Leslie Ito:

Yeah, very little. And part of that was because the organization had been in a state of really challenging financial times. So part of that turnaround was bringing back the programs and why the organization existed. And then the other part of it was fortunately the organization had a very diversified revenue base at that time. And so when I looked at the financials, it seemed that if we could raise the income in all of those different areas just slightly, it would get us to a place where we would be in better financial state. So everything from the office rentals to investing in grant writing and getting our foundation dollars back on track to selling tickets in the theater.

Leslie Ito:

And so to incrementally bump up just a little bit each of those areas really helped to stabilize the organization. And then the board members at JCC were really committed, trusted my leadership, and really helped us get through those difficult times.

Julie Lacouture:

So the situation when you got there, it seems like a little bit triage, right? So what did you do first?

Leslie Ito:

Actually we used that term, triage, and we initially started with strategic planning. And then we realized that we had to put that on hold, because we were in triage mode we had to think in much smaller time increments, because we needed to stabilize.

Leslie Ito:

The other thing that I did that was really important was I very intentionally in the first year was out. I never turned down any invitations to appear in public, because I really had to work hard at building back the trust for the organization with the community, and listen and be present. The physical presence was really important to building back that trust with the community. And I tried to be in as many places and talking to as many people as I could, because I needed to make sure that people knew that I was listening to the concerns and the needs of the community. And that they could trust that the organization was in good hands, and that we had a plan and we weren’t going anywhere, and we were there to serve the community.

Julie Lacouture:

I can imagine some people, myself included, having the urge to say, let me just get all the ducks in a row and then we’ll be more public. But the optics of that might be that you just are not there.

Leslie Ito:

Yeah, I just recently read an article about how museum directors are hired and expected to come in with this big vision and share this big vision with everybody. And actually, I wouldn’t say I don’t have a big vision, but I think the way that I deliver that big vision is maybe not what the field expects. My big vision is to create sustainable organizations, and how we get there are very small, incremental, strategic, and intentional steps. That’s the big vision.

Leslie Ito:

If you’re a board member sitting and waiting for a big vision, you may miss it because it’s happening on a day to day level, and it’s both operational and strategic, and the organizations that I’ve led have mostly been in crisis. And so I think that steady hand of being very intentional and being very present and listening is really important in times of crisis.

Julie Lacouture:

It’s the philosophy of eroding stone not by chipping away at it, but by letting water run over it until it becomes smooth and wears away gradually.

Leslie Ito:

I’ve also been thinking of the analogy. We tend to think about this on the side of challenges and things that are difficult, but thinking about the thousand paper cuts on the negative side, just thinking about bite size pieces and how all of these things can start to lead to change. Change isn’t going to come overnight. I’m able to have a, a long vision. One of the things that I had proposed at the JACCCC was to create a Culinary Center, and we completed most of the fundraising before I left. And then the team that picked up after I left brought it to completion. So I’m really excited that the Culinary Center at the JACCC opened. It opened originally in January of 2020, and then it was just starting to start programming and booking.

Julie Lacouture:

Tell us some of the other bite size things you did at JACCC that stabilized and then get them in a position where they could be doing these new projects.

Leslie Ito:

Part of it was PR and outreach, and bringing a new face and being present, as I mentioned. I think the other thing was about building out the team and really making sure that I had the right people in place in terms of people that had the expertise to say, run a theater. And people that were there with expertise that I didn’t necessarily have. It’s absolutely right that the best way to hire is to hire somebody that’s smarter than you, and that has a different complimentary set of skills to bring to the table. So that was definitely part of the process.

Leslie Ito:

And then just looking at how we could build partnerships and build bridges, both within the Asian American community and also with other communities of color, and really seeing ourselves as an asset, and being able to share the wonderful spaces that we have to gather and convene and make art together and showcase art was really important as partnerships. And then eventually we were building partnerships in Japan as well, and that’s really how the Culinary Center came into being.

Julie Lacouture:

So what were the results of all of these small steps done all at once? What was the result of your triage effort?

Leslie Ito:

Well, the result was a vibrant cultural center that was relevant. We listened to the community, we built programs that connected to the Latino and African American communities. That was part of the success, was that connection and relevance to community.

Julie Lacouture:

So let’s talk about your current work. Let’s talk about Armory Center for the Arts. What do you think makes your team run well?

Leslie Ito:

I was thinking about this question. I think what makes our team run well is the passion that everybody shares, and that vision for the power of the arts to affect, impact, and transform lives. We all share a belief in the idea that the arts are not just a frivolous, extra, supplemental thing, but that the arts play a really key and center role in everybody’s lives.

Leslie Ito:

And I think that the pandemic really, really shined a light on this idea, especially the deeper and deeper we got into the pandemic, it’s clear that it’s not over yet, but that everybody’s mental health is really important, and that the arts can play a role in that healing process and the grieving and also to find a new path towards joy and whimsy.

Julie Lacouture:

So what’s the thing you’ve done at the Armory to adapt to the changing environment?

Leslie Ito:

We’ve done all of the things that that most organizations have, which is shift our teaching to Zoom. We taught schools on Zoom. We taught systems impacted youth that are in probations on Zoom. We started teaching art by phone with older adults because we needed to catch them up on the technology. And once we caught them up on technology, we were able to transfer from teaching by phone to teaching on Zoom.

Leslie Ito:

So we’ve really learned through the pandemic to meet people where they’re at, and then start to nurture and help them along on whatever that trajectory might be. One story that I love about the older adults that started by phone is they were so invested in our art program that we had one student who had technical issues at home, lost connection and wasn’t able to get back on. So he jumped in his car and went to best buy and finished his art class in the middle of the store. And to me, that was so heartwarming. It showed that our classes are really making an impact, and the creative thinking goes way beyond just the art project, but really how do we solve life’s problems and our daily challenges with creative thinking?

Julie Lacouture:

I’m sure other people will have this question. Tell us more about art by phone. Are you talking about a conference call where there’s art instruction, or?

Leslie Ito:

Yeah, yeah. That’s exactly what we were doing. So we were teaching in an older living complex, and we delivered the supplies. All of the students had supplies, and they called in. And we were doing instruction by phone because that was the safest way, and that was the communication tool that they had access to and that they were comfortable using. And then little by little, we transitioned them to their computers and learning how to use Zoom. But I think it’s a great example of how we adjusted to meeting people where they’re at.

Leslie Ito:

And similarly with our work in the schools, there was a lot of listening that happened first, because we wanted to be helpful to the teachers and principals, be a thought partner. Because each classroom and each teacher was at a different place in terms of how they adopted technology, we really had to listen and work with them and meet them where they were at. So we’re trying to be good partners, and I think that really starts with the listening aspect.

Leslie Ito:

The other thing that I think is worth mentioning is after George Floyd’s murder and a local police brutality issue that happened in Pasadena, I had been building relationships with the National Day Labor Organizing Network, NDLON, and the NAACP Pasadena, and had just started to get to know some of their leadership and getting to understand the programming and what their goals were as organizations. So they hosted a car caravan after George Floyd was murdered, and so I called them up and I said, Hey, we have art supplies. We have teaching artists. We have people that are willing to help out. Tell us how we can be helpful. Art is so much a part of voicing our concerns and telling our stories that oftentimes go unheard. And so we were able to participate in the car caravans. We passed out, distributed art materials so people could make signs for their cars. And that has led to deepening relationships with both of these organizations, which I feel really good about.

Leslie Ito:

So we are just about to embark on a new project with them, and we’re part of a collaboration of eight organizations in LA County that will have artists and residents in collaboration with community based organizations. So we will, together with NDLON and NAACP, we’re in the process of selecting two artists that will be hired full time with benefits and will be embedded in each of those community organizations to work alongside the community. And the Armory will help support the arts side of it. But we’re really excited to be able to do this. It’s a program that started in Western Massachusetts, and LA County is the next iteration of that. And it’s modeled after the WPA and their program in the thirties.

Julie Lacouture:

You’re painting a picture of an organization that thinks broadly about being an arts organization, not siloing yourself, and really being part of the community first in an arts organization second.

Leslie Ito:

Yeah, absolutely. I think. And it’s a really nice pairing, I think. It’s something that I feel comfortable in all of the shades of gray. Yes, it would be much easier to lead an organization that just did studio teaching, but I love all of the inner connections that we can make right now.

Leslie Ito:

We have Alison Saar’s exhibition in our gallery space, and we’ve had really great attention on the show. And it’s really been a wonderful way to invite community groups in. A lot, it’s the first time seeing each other in person, and it’s their first time seeing art in 18 plus months. And it’s a really thoughtful, quiet show that allows for incredible dialogue and community building, and we’re so excited to have that be a part of our community building and as a space for learning.

Julie Lacouture:

So with all of the stuff that you’ve achieved, and all the places you’ve taken at the Armory, can you tell us about a mistake you’ve made, and what you learned?

Leslie Ito:

Yeah, I was thinking about the mistake, and it has to do with me as a leader. And I think the mistake that I made was at the JACCC, and my correction and learning application is here at the Armory. And that was because we were so much in triage mode at the JACCC, I gave 150% of myself. And I think that that was a mistake. My board members and my mentors were warning me against burnout, but I saw no other way to save organization except to give 150% of myself.

Leslie Ito:

So when I moved to the Armory, it was a chance for me to recalibrate. It was a chance for me to say, okay, I’m going to put boundaries down for myself. And that’s been a really tough thing to do. I’m admittedly a workaholic. I love my work, the balance of spending time with my family and supporting my partner and being part of a family that has four generations. I’m living in our family, those are all things that I don’t want to miss, and I need to slow down on and create those boundaries.

Leslie Ito:

And I’m also so focused on getting things done that I have to work hard at the celebration piece of it. By nature I’m always, okay, what’s the next thing? What’s the next thing that needs to be solved or created? But I do need to carve out that time and space for celebrating and finding joy. I’m also working on that aspect.

Leslie Ito:

But I think for so many of us in the nonprofit sector, our jobs are our passion. There’s no dividing line between what we’re passionate about. We also need to find time to rest and carve out time to just sit and be quiet and take care of ourselves. And I think that the pandemic has really provided a time, especially when we weren’t allowed to leave our houses, and that really helped ground me and helped me to adopt a different kind of pace.

Julie Lacouture:

How do you set boundaries in your position? We all know that we should, but then sometimes a board member is only available on a Saturday morning, or we’ve got to take the call after dinner, but how do you do that?

Leslie Ito:

Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, I did talk about setting boundaries. I think the flip side to that, and what we’re experiencing from working from home, is that there’s also fluidity, right? So I love that I can switch laundry from the washer to the dryer in between meetings because I’m working from home, or set my Instant Pot on to cook dinner in between meetings. So that actually has helped me achieve balance.

Leslie Ito:

Maybe I retract my statement on setting boundaries, because maybe that’s an old school way of thinking. Maybe there is a different approach. I mean, I definitely feel like while I’m living a life that has less boundaries, I actually feel like this is more sustainable for me, that I’m able to manage the ebbs and flows of life as a mom of two teenagers and as an executive director and a leader in my community. That I don’t know, the balance feels better right now than it ever has. And maybe it isn’t boundaries. I don’t know. What do we [crosstalk 00:26:03]

Julie Lacouture:

Well, it sounds like it’s just not time based boundaries.

Leslie Ito:

Yeah, that’s true. I’m also, I guess, allowing for my body, my aging body to set those boundaries for me. I can’t work till 2:00 in the morning like I used to 20 years ago. There is a point where I have to stop and call it a night. And I’m also learning to listen to my body and my shifting sleep schedule. I think very intentionally when my best hours to check email or write a grant proposal or a donor letter or a public piece, those are the morning hours for me now, when it’s quiet and my thoughts are fresh. So I’m trying to listen to my body and the seasonality of the world, and kind of also incorporate that into my personal practice and how I approach my work.

Julie Lacouture:

Leslie, what’s your big idea for the future, and how will you get there?

Leslie Ito:

I’ve been thinking about the big idea, but all I can think about are these tiny little incremental steps. I think that’s my big idea. And some of these tiny steps are definitely around cultural equity, is what is really on my mind in terms of training staff and board, creating space for really honest and courageous conversations. The work, the journey that we’re on to create cultural equity within our organization is not the work of one person or one committee, but it needs to be the work of each one of us on staff and board. And each person committing to what they can do within their own little universe to create a more welcoming, more accessible, more relevant art experience for all of the people that come into contact with us, and the people that we are anticipating and want to connect with.

Julie Lacouture:

I don’t know. I think that you gave a true north to, and a big idea of wanting to be the version of Philippe. That feels like a big road to be on.

Leslie Ito:

I’m thinking about hosting a staff meeting, and/or a board meeting there, just as a real point of observation. And so that everyone can kind of get a taste and a feel.

Julie Lacouture:

It’s so good. It’s so special. So, Leslie, what’s your number one tip for someone in your position?

Leslie Ito:

When I worked at the California Community Foundation, I was part of a mid-career program called Career Pathways that was a national program hosted by the Council on Foundations. And one of the most helpful things that I learned in that program was called PCC. Pause, consider, choose. And it’s something that I refer back to quite often, particularly when I’m hit with a big issue or a big problem, or a challenge or a barrier. So pause, sit with the issue, the problem or the challenge, consider all of the viewpoints or consider all of the facts and feelings, and then choose. Take a position and decide what that action is going to be.

Leslie Ito:

I find that with each situation we pause, consider and choose differently. We spend time in each of those areas differently, depending on the situation, but it’s really important to spend time in each of those three areas before getting to the final conclusion. And I think it’s interesting to reflect individually on, okay, naturally, where do I find myself spending the most time? Where, as a leader, do I feel most comfortable in the pause, the consider and the choose? And then knowing that there are these three stages, how do you counterbalance yourself? So if you’re a person that jumps immediately to consider without the first two steps, or you’re a person that lingers too long in one area or the other, how do you consciously and very intentionally recalibrate that balance?

Julie Lacouture:

That’s much better advice than count to 10 before you say anything, right? Because I feel like with the count to 10 you’re just waiting, but that’s a very lovely framework. Leslie, thank you so much for being here today. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Leslie Ito:

I enjoyed it too. Thank you so much, Julie, for inviting me.

Julie Lacouture:

We have a request for you, dear listeners.

Trent Stamp:

I’m open that if you enjoy How We Run, that you will go and leave a review for us. Your review allows others to find us, and that’s a good thing because the more people that listen, the more impact we can have on the sector, and then we can bring about positive change for other non-profits that are out there. So if you like what you’re listening to, please leave us a review.

Julie Lacouture:

If you want to be a guest on the show, you think you have a good story and you want to share, you can email us at info@nullgoodwaysinc.com.

 

Embracing Community Centric Fundraising

Embracing Community Centric Fundraising

Season 4, Episode 8 of the How We Run podcast looks at community-centric fundraising.

Mollie Marsh-Heine joins us to talk about how and why the fundraising department at Earthjustice has embraced the principles of Community-Centric Fundraising. From conversations on race, inequality, and historic injustice with donors, to examining the ways they work together as a team, Mollie’s team has taken a thorough and methodical approach. Although they acknowledge this work will take time, they have seen very positive results from donors, staff, and partners. 

(Before you listen, be sure to check out the resources at communitycentricfundraising.org)

 

Listen to how Mollie Marsh-Heine is embracing community-centric fundraising:

Listen:

Transcript

 

Trent Stamp:

Welcome to How We Run, a podcast where we examine how nonprofits become successful. I’m Trent Stamp, CEO of the Eisner Foundation.

Julie Lacouture:

And I’m Julie Lacouture, Founder of Good Ways Inc. On this episode, we’re talking about community centric fundraising with Mollie Marsh-Heine, the Senior Vice President of Development at Earthjustice. Mollie shares with us, how her staff has been super intentional about embracing community centric fundraising principles. It’s a great conversation.

                All right Trent, today we’re talking about community centric fundraising, which people in fundraising have been having a lot of conversations around this in the last year or so. Is it something that you have started to touch at your organization?

Trent Stamp:

We’re talking about it because I think it’s very important development. And I think that we need to figure out ways on the funding side to be more reflective of the community and to recognize the impacts that we have with our funding, and who we fund, and who we don’t fund and what that looks like. But I’m not going to pretend that we’re experts. Thankfully, we have a guest who certainly knows the topic inside and out. But it’s certainly something that we’re starting to try to understand a little bit better. Yeah.

Julie Lacouture:

So you run a family foundation and as such, your board is entirely made up of people from that family, yeah. So that when we think about diverse perspectives and you think about your board being all one family, how do you bring in conversations and diversity and learnings from outside of the family?

Trent Stamp:

We like to bring in grantees, perspective grantees and community experts. We like to introduce readings about the topic, because I think that the family that’s involved with our foundation is extremely thoughtful and contemplative and in it for the right reason. And we fund primarily in Los Angeles County and they’ve been residents of this community for over 50 years. And so they know it really well, but it’d be crazy for any of us to pretend that they’re particularly diverse group or that they have experiences that are reflective of most of the people that we serve. So I do think it’s important to bring other voices to the table and I think every foundation should do it, not just those that are family foundations and have one family on the name of the door.

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah. And I’ve heard that from other foundations. I know the Disney Family Foundation does that fairly often where they’ll bring in grantees and say, how can we make our process easier for you? Where is it cumbersome?

Trent Stamp:

I think more conversations is a good thing. Just talking, identifying some sort of collective vision is surely going to advance our efforts in this area. And looking at each other as partners and not just as funders and grantees is a really positive step.

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah. And that reflects one of the community centered fundraising principles of nonprofits should be generous with and mutually supportive of one another. So it’s not just about one nonprofit’s mission or dominance in a community. It’s really about the community first. I know that in your work, you encourage nonprofits to work with each other to serve similar communities.

Trent Stamp:

It’s important to recognize that in many cases, those nonprofits are competing with other nonprofits for limited resources. When we come in and tell them to collaborate, a lot of times, their initial reaction is are you going to collaborate with other funders to support us when we collaborate with other service delivery organizations? We just have to do a better job of getting on the same page with each other, whether it’s funders and other funders, or funders and nonprofits, or nonprofits and other nonprofits. We all made this decision to enter this sector because we wanted to make things better in some form or another. And if any of your behavior, whether you’re a funder or a nonprofit is detrimental to that goal, then you have to ask yourself what you’re really trying to do. And that’s one of the things that we do at the foundation is we ask ourselves all the time, are we helping? Are we really helping? Is everything we do helping? And if it’s not, who should we go talk to so we can get better at it?

Julie Lacouture:

That’s a great way to put it. So we have Mollie Marsh-Heine from Earthjustice here with us today. And she’s talking about how her organization is actually changing their fundraising mission to be more community centric. And so she takes us through all the things that the fundraising department at Earthjustice has done to be more community centric in their fundraising.

Trent Stamp:

That’s terrific.

Julie Lacouture:

What impressed me about their work was that they’re really taking on the principles one at a time and deliberately discussing them and saying, how does our work benefit from embracing this principle? So I think what they’ve found is that it has really improved their fundraising top to bottom, it’s improved their function as a staff, and they’ve seen great benefits all around. I’m really glad to share this conversation.

Trent Stamp:

And they show that if they can do it then just about any organization can and probably should be doing it.

Julie Lacouture:

 

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So we will hear from Mollie.

 

 

 

—–

 

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

My name is Mollie Marsh-Heine and I’m the Senior Vice President of Development at Earthjustice. And Earthjustice is the world’s premier public interest law firm for the environment. Some people know us by our tagline, which is Earthjustice because the Earth needs a good lawyer. And sometimes to keep it simple, I will say we’re basically the ACLU for the environment.

Julie Lacouture:

Mollie, one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you is that I know that you’ve made it a strategy to be more community centric in your fundraising. And can you tell us what that means to you?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Environmental movement in particular has long had struggles with racism, just like many other NGOs. And particularly the environmental movement has been very white centered and white led. As part of our effort to be an anti-racist organization and to really uplift the movement, to create more authenticity and really a stronger movement overall, it can’t be a white movement for it to be successful. We have been looking at all of our practices and it’s been everything from who is Earthjustice And how do we look as a staff, making sure that we are diversifying our staff? What is our culture and how does our culture support everyone regardless of race, ethnicity or background, to bring their full selves, to work, to thrive and nurture and have a vibrant career? What does our board look like? And then what are our practices?

                Sometimes organizations can diversify how they look in terms of racial makeup or demographic, but haven’t changed their culture at all. And if you don’t have a culture that is welcoming and a supportive, safe place for staff of color, then they just leave and you’re right back where you started from and really not being self-reflective. So there’s been a concerted effort around culture building. And I want to caveat that Earthjustice certainly hasn’t arrived and figured it out. We’re on a journey just like everyone else is. But how that comes down to the development department then, my area of expertise, we’ve had to do our own work around both how do we support the organization’s effort and the movement’s effort to be anti-racist?

                And what does it mean to be raising money in an economic system that really encourages and fosters wealth disparity? How can we be part of the solution? How can we be funding our partners, helping both in wealth redistribution, as well as skills capacity training and uplifting and being partners, putting our partners stories first, all within this really interesting bubble of capitalism, where you really do need to raise the money. You’re not really outside of the system, you’re in the system. So what can you do to change it from within to create a more level playing field, to kind of rewrite how we interact with individuals of wealth, power, and influence?

And it’s living our value system.

 

So we don’t always get it right. And I think there’s a lot of challenges in it, but we’re really committed to the practice. And I certainly can’t take credit for community centric fundraising. I do want to point your listeners to a website called communitycentricfundraising.org.

Julie Lacouture:

It’s so great.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Yeah. So maybe you’ve already seen it. One thing I really appreciate about CCF and the consultants there who really built the CCF model and the 10 principles of community centric fundraising is that they said this is a work in progress. I believe they started off seven principles and then built on that over time.

Julie Lacouture:

I think there’s 10 now.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Yeah, there are 10 and it looks really different. There are organizations that have a million dollar operating budget or smaller, and then you have some really big organizations that have a lot of infrastructure, a lot of machine that needs to get revisited, looked at and retooled. And we are working really hard on examining, where are we in alignment with the CCF principles? Where are we not in alignment? Where might we either disagree or say, I don’t know if we can really be there yet? But more importantly, be in dialogue. We’ve actually embraced this as a goal for the department to work on collectively and within functional teams. So at our department meetings, every month we devote 45 minutes solely to a CCF principle and we present the principle, we share any learnings that we might have gleaned from podcasts and blogs that they have. There also is women of color in fundraising. I am an allied member of WOC, but not an actual member. You need to be a fundraising professional, who is a woman of color to be in that group.

                But many of Earthjustice’s development department are members of that group. And so we share information. We post that on Teams channels, and then we just get into dialogue with each other. And sometimes ways that we are in alignment will lift up and say, oh, we need to do more of that. And less of that. Or there might be a brand new idea in particular, and that goes back to my development leadership team, which is a group of directors that oversee the different specialty areas within development. And then we will look at items in there that we can lean into further. So like one example, funding our partners, is we have a whole working group that has worked specifically on how do we raise more money to get it out and to the clients that we serve. We can’t directly fund clients as a law practice, but there are some funding umbrellas and consortiums that allow Earthjustice to send money there. And then our clients and other environmental justice partners can seek funding from those entities. But that’s just one example.

Julie Lacouture:

To be honest, I’m really tempted to go through all of CCF’s 10 principles, which yes, everyone listening should definitely check out and say, how are you doing this one? But maybe we can just pick a couple.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Yeah.

Julie Lacouture:

… Monthly, you talk about one of the principles. So recently, what is one of the ones that you’ve talked about?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Yeah, we’re in principle six now.

Julie Lacouture:

So principle six says we treat donors as partners and this means that we are transparent and occasionally have difficult conversations. So tell me what that means at Earthjustice?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

So Earthjustice’s programmatic areas touch a bunch of different pieces of environmental protection. And they range from climate and clean energy work to what’s in our food and pesticides, toxic chemicals and straight up wildlife protection like wolves and bears. And then a bunch of work that we do that we still call healthy communities work. But a lot of that is intersections of health issues and the environment. And they have a clear connection to environmental racism. And an example could be Cancer Alley, our work in fighting the petrochemical industry in Louisiana. We represent the St. James parish and another community coalition down there. They’ve been fighting this work for decades saying don’t give it here. Don’t put it here. Those petrochemical plants don’t get built in white communities. They get built in black and brown communities. It isn’t just an accident. It’s deliberate and it’s targeted. And telling the story of that work, it can sound really clear. Oh, that’s environmental racism and you’re working to fight that and connect those issues. And here’s where I’m going to get to principle number six.

                It would be easy to separate out the older environmental movement did this to say, oh, don’t talk to that donor who loves wolves about how this touches environmental racism. Don’t touch that. That donor just cares about wolves. That’s not what they’re interested in. And in fact, if you talk to them about that, they may say that you are in mission drift or that this is a social issue or a race issue and that’s not what Earthjustice is. And we’ve had to learn to dialogue and to respectfully engage our donors in conversation to actually be proactive, because you could be theoretically in the face of a donor who’s saying, oh great work, but just talk to me about wolves.

                And what we try to do is show that just about every aspect of our work is centered with a client. We do not represent ourselves. We are a true law practice in that regard. And every piece of wildlife litigation that we do has a tribal client at its core. Most, I don’t want to say all, but many nations that we work with have sacred and spiritual value to the habitat of these charismatic species and they are critically important to their culture, both historically and ongoing. And our ability to litigate is because we are representing historic injustice that has happened to these tribal nations. And yes, it’s wonderful that we protect a wolf at the same time, but it’s not the whole story to say it’s just about the wolves.

                And that’s part of white erasure that happens to say, oh, these issues aren’t connected. No, they are connected, all of the intact habitat and lands that our national parks are on. Many of those have negative stories at the core of indigenous peoples that were forcibly removed off of those lands. So we want to tell the whole story. We want to center our client in those stories and we believe we could also share beautiful successes and compelling information about the species themselves. They don’t have to be exclusive.

Julie Lacouture:

Let me ask you something about that. I hear you loud and clear, wanting to move your donors beyond their point of interest. And I think that happens a lot of places where the initial reason somebody gives is just one tiny aspect of the organization. And so let’s talk tactically about how you as a relationship manager, bring that person in and push them to grow really? Because I think that most donors will say one of the most rewarding parts of being a philanthropist is that it changes you. You get to affect change, but then you also change yourself. So can you talk me through how you are actually tactically approaching that?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

A lot of it has been practice and talking points. We’re not trying to move a donor off of loving wolves or grizzlies. It’s great that they love these animals. We’re trying to be inclusive in our language around the intersectionality of all of the work, that race and social justice isn’t a set aside from biodiversity and that’s the piece that we’ve had to work on in our language.

                So another example of this narrative is telling the story of the Standing Rock Sioux and the Dakota access pipeline. One of our more famous cases. There is definitely a story that galvanized the world around indigenous rights and pipelines that go across native lands and historic injustices that have been visited time and time again on native peoples. We started telling that story when we first became involved in the case with narrative and also a lot about the pipeline, and the broken process of citing pipelines in the country, the subsidy of oil and gas industry, climate change, environmental harm. What we didn’t tell all the story of, but what we tell the story of now is that in Bismark, North Dakota, there was a white community that, that was where it was first proposed and they didn’t want it. And they were able to successfully block it and say, not here.

                And where did that pipeline go? It went right to where pipelines always go. And it’s where coal ash plants go, it’s where big warehouse and transportation infrastructure goes, it’s where trash incinerators go. And that is into black, brown, Asian communities in this country. And that is historic environmental racism. And you can’t tell the story of the Dakota access pipeline without telling the story of racism and harm. And that’s the full picture. And of course, definitely not saying it as well as one of our attorneys might say it as well as the Standing Rock Sioux would certainly say themselves. But it’s, to me, another embodiment of the principle of who are we centering? Are we centering Earthjustice, or are we centering the Standing Rock Sioux? And what is the full story and how that educates a donor about the history of this country and racism and harms that we do to people and to the planet. So I know that’s a long narrative, but I think it’s an important example.

Julie Lacouture:

I remember working for an organization a long time ago. And before going into a donor meeting, having my boss say, “We’re going to stay away from some of these topics. We’re not going to go there.” And it sounds like what you’re saying at the simplest, at the heart of what you’re saying is we’re going to go there. We’re going to have the full conversation. With community centric fundraising, I think sometimes people think it’s limiting, but it sounds like what you’re finding is that it’s expansive.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Oh, absolutely. It makes it that much more of a moral imperative to support the work and you can come at it. And everyone wants to believe they’re about changing hearts and minds. And if someone is saying, this is really what is my philanthropic juice, this is what blows my hair back, it’s sharks and diving and whatever that is, that’s fine. They could still be excited about that and fund that. But we need to be in integrity with what the message is and our drive and the importance of our journey as an anti-racist organization. And really to be in authentic relationship with our environmental justice partners. And it’s a lot about doing right by the movement and doing right by Earthjustice ourselves.

Julie Lacouture:

Mollie, if you’ll end to be on some of these other community centric fundraising principles. What about number five? Time is valued equally as money.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

When we think about the way donors contribute, we know we all need money. We have to keep the lights on. And there’s a whole plethora of ways organizations do that. And giving of time is truly valuable. You could have a board member that had tremendous expertise and wisdom to offer, and yet is not your biggest donor. How we value that and how our language values that or our actions needs to be acknowledged. And one of the examples I can give is a very simple one in a way that we are changing our annual report this year. Annual reports often have donor lists and they could be big in print, there are some donors that like to see their name there. Mostly it comes from a place of recognition to say thank you. And we are going to acknowledge and print what your gift meant to us.

                And we’ve moved ours actually electronically now on our website, instead of including it in our paper handout, primarily because we found that most people didn’t ask for the donor booklet anyway. But we still have it as we analyzed, time is valued equally as money. How could we change our annual report to reflect that principle? And so this year, and it’s our 50th anniversary. So it actually works really well. We are organizing our donor list by how long someone has been with the organization and their commitment over time versus the amount of money they’ve given. We have donors that have been with us for 30 years, who give us a check for $25 a year, and that’s significant for them and we want to value that. And their longevity with us means everything. So I think that that’s a simple lift that any organization can do that does an annual report or any sort of public facing document.

Julie Lacouture:

That’s very nice. I’ve seen a couple other organizations also include volunteers on those lists.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Yep.

Julie Lacouture:

They’ve actually done a calculation of what is the value of a volunteer hour. And then they’ve looked and they’ve said, wow, some of our volunteers are giving as much as some of our major donors because they give us so much time. And the annual report is a really lovely place to show that value. How have these conversations changed your fundraising team and how do you think it’ll alter what you do in the future?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

It’s made our team, our whole department closer and more connected. We’ve had to have some balance in conversations. Sometimes we’ve had some fundraisers that just didn’t click. And what we try to acknowledge and work with is how can we support the fundraiser in this? What are the teachable moments without saying that we’re going to kick that donor to the curb? So just like anything when you’re learning something new, there has been some tensions in some instances. Those are few. We’ve really had to direct feedback. We’ve actually taken many courses in that. How do you talk about hard stuff? We’ve spent time on restorative justice, learning about how to acknowledge our impact. I would say that is … And by our, I want to call out myself as a white woman like that, we worked a lot with our white fundraisers and how they interact with their colleagues of color and being aware of implicit bias and microaggressions.

                But overall it’s totally a net positive. So we’re really trying to hire for culture and see where people are on their diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice journey. And sometimes they’re super skilled and we want them to Earthjustice, and they’re not quite where we are at, and then you need to bring them back up to speed. And in COVID in particular, when everyone is on Zoom and you can’t be in person, we’ve hired probably 15 staff that we’d never met in person. How you bring them along in this deep culture work that we did initially with the department and continue to do and help them find their way in the journey but also get the foundational pieces that they need to have. That’s a challenge. And we’re still working on getting that right.

Julie Lacouture:

Can you share how you might evaluate in an interview, if someone is in the same place on their diversity, equity and inclusion journey as you?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Ask people what they do outside of work to stay educated and engaged. We also ask for how they would contribute in a fundraising capacity to the work. And we have a pretty clear set of rules. People within their first six months of hire have to go through foundational anti-racist training. And that is an organization-wide mandate. It doesn’t matter “how woke you are.” You have to do Earthjustice training, and that helps everybody have the same language. We have required microaggression training. We have policies on microaggressions and on anti-bullying, all supervisors have coaching sessions that they do that are specifically geared towards diversity, equity and inclusion work.

Julie Lacouture:

Can you tell me about a mistake you’ve made and what you’ve learned from it?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Oh, sure. My gosh, so many different mistakes. I think anytime there’s a mistake that you can look at as a teachable moment, it helps me find a place of self forgiveness when I hold up, and I just am like dang it, didn’t get that right. We had a case statement for support that we did for our current campaign, which is called Never Rest. And if anyone wants to check out the collateral, they can find the Never Rest campaign on our website and see some of our materials. So Earthjustice had never done a comprehensive campaign before. We’re halfway through this one, it’s 825 million we’re trying to raise over 5 years. And it was a big deal. Like we’re going to come out with a polished, professional, outside marketing firm, branded name, trademark, and this case statement, which lays out what we want to accomplish in the world for a donor to invest in us. And we had lots of eyes on it. We got through all the different stages. It was beautiful. And everybody that was looking at it was at an age where they don’t need reading glasses for the most part.

                And our outside marketing firm said, I really think it should be not a big book, but something that’s a little smaller and precious in that way. And it will stand out more and be modern. And we were like, yeah, let’s do that. And talk about tunnel vision and showing it only to yourselves. Members of our board who are participating in that process had seen pieces of it, but blown up on slides. And we talked about it and they’d seen visuals. But anyway, the whole thing arrives, we’ve got a stack of 750 of them, expensive printing, and I could barely read them. It was in the tiniest font and it was like a $10,000 mistake, which is not much in the face of the whole number we’re trying to raise, but a waste. And we still try to use them, but it became clear we mailed them out. And I remember thinking this is pretty small and pretty much to a T, any donor over the age of 55 was like I cannot read this. Full stop.

Julie Lacouture:

What you said there was so important of just showing it to ourselves.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Yeah. And not showing like the final proofs. And the audience, who was the audience this is for? It’s for a lot of people across the age spectrum. But a lot of our donors are over the age of 60 and they are really important audience. And we should have thought about having someone in that age group and demographic look at this print and font. And in what’s funny or ironic, we were focused on making sure that we were centering equity in the piece and our anti-racist values and our clients, and that our imagery was positive and affirming of our clients versus anything stereotypical. Anyway, and then we just missed the mark on the font. Oh my God, really? Yeah.

Julie Lacouture:

Thinking about being in the middle of a pandemic, how has that changed how you connect with some of your donors? What have you done differently to adapt?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

The very beginning, so much fear. What’s this going to do to the economy? Is the zombie apocalypse happening? I remember telling someone I didn’t sign up to live in end times. I’ve been trying to prevent end times and like, oh my gosh, like we just didn’t know what we were working with. I can say the directors that I work with on our development leadership team were amazing. We just got into a huddle and what felt like a mind meld and A, what needs to happen first and how do we pivot? And met regularly to put that in action. I spent a lot of time with my network of other chief development officers talking with them about what they were seeing and their trends, and just trying to get support and ideas from each other.

                We pivoted immediately to online events and teleconferences. We had already started to do some of those, and we just did more of those. We went right into Zoom, donor discovery calls, cultivation and solicitations. I think one month into shutdown, I did a 15 million ask that was successful. We started doing virtual reality trips. I’m proud to say that we’ve won two awards for innovation and successfully launching online events during COVID that were really well attended.

Julie Lacouture:

And so it’s almost like a virtual tour, or it’s a virtual …

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

You send it to their house. We’re like, I know we canceled our trip to Alaska, but do you still want to come along? And we had drone technology that was filmed up our work with our tribal partners and in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, and up by the Arctic Circle. We had that put into a virtual reality format and then people get a kit in the mail if they’ve signed on for the experience. And they get to log in at a few times during the course of a week, it’s not every single day. They get time with our per program partners, with our actual clients, and then they could put on their goggles and they go on this experience, [crosstalk 00:29:12] virtual reality goggles that works with their iPhone. And it really is amazing, where you’re like, I am like flying over the Arctic right now.

                So we’ve gotten great reviews on folks that have participated in that experience. I often laugh like fundraiser’s phones never ring. Like when a donor calls you back, you’re like, oh my gosh. And this is amazing. It made my day. Everybody was picking up the phone during COVID. They were bored.

Julie Lacouture:

Oh, sure. Yeah. I’ll answer those unknown numbers.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Bored, available, people who wouldn’t have taken the time to meet for a lunch in Manhattan, now were like, I’d be happy to spend 20 minutes on a Zoom with you. So some of those tools we are using actively to reduce our carbon footprint, to not travel more. We are not fully in person. We won’t be until January 1st at Earthjustice, but there’s voluntary travel happening. I’ve started traveling again, but I still meet with donors now regularly over Zoom. It’s become a tool and I think it will stay there and it’s imploring us to ask the question of, do we, and should we be traveling? And ways to reduce carbon footprint. Once you are back in person with someone, you really see, oh yeah, it’s a much more preferred form of communication and connection with someone. And seeing someone’s face on Zoom and having a relationship, you can build a relationship this way too.

Julie Lacouture:

Can you give folks who are fundraisers a tip on how to build connections on Zoom?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

I don’t think it’s very different. In fact, usually we offer Zoom first now, and I’ve just started to say, if I’m in the area traveling, I’ll be meeting with some donors in November on my way to our board meeting in New York. And I’ve said, we can meet by Zoom. I’m also happy to meet outside in a way that’s COVID safe. I’m required to be vaccinated. And I will wear a mask the whole thing but wherever you are, I can meet that comfort level. And some will say, let’s start with a Zoom. And many times, if I know I can’t travel to see someone I’ll just offer the Zoom right away, because it can make things faster. It used to be that you had to wait till the stars aligned so that you could make that lunch meeting work. And now it’s really about calendaring and a Zoom and it can have happen. Most Zooms, it’s rare that I have an hour long Zoom with a donor. I’d say you get right down to it and they end up being 30 minutes to 45 minutes long.

                I keep my door closed. I have a dog that’s somewhere over here, but in general, I don’t have the dogs around, especially if it’s a solicitation. I try to just go into shut down mode or set expectations with the donor. Hey, I have my dog or my children are still doing online education. I just want you to be aware that there could be an eight year old, like running in here or something like that. I think that’s a helpful tool and visuals can work, but I’d be cautious about them. Sometimes when a power point comes on, you now are not seeing your donor’s face and you still need to read body language as much as you can and check in and they can easily tune out. People multitask a lot when they’re on screen. And so if you are going to use slides, it helps to really be strategic. And I think to be minimal in the use of them, just from my experience of …

Julie Lacouture:

Mollie, that’s such a good point, because I think that changes the connection from a conversation to a presentation. So it’s not let’s talk together. It’s let me talk at you.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Yeah, that’s right. And you’re …

Julie Lacouture:

And if that’s not what you’re doing, that’s what it’s signaling.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Yeah. And we do use online presentations a lot, but it tends to be with folks who are already known to us, a current donor or board members, board meetings, those often have presentations. But when I’m first meeting someone, I rarely have a PowerPoint presentation I’m going to put in there with them. And certainly even a solicitation. I don’t think I’ve ever used a PowerPoint with a solicitation either. I have done a lot of snail mail packaging during COVID where I want them to like get something tangible at their house. And I’ll say here’s our case statement. Would love for you to review that in advance of our meeting and just breeze through it and tell us what you think.

Julie Lacouture:

A great place to start a meeting.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Yep. Yeah.

Julie Lacouture:

Very smart. What’s your number one tip for someone who’s at an organization who says, yes, we need to be more community centric in our fundraising. Where should they start?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Well, I think it’s great to start with CCF and going to the website and getting onto any of their archived podcasts and webinars. I know that when I was exploring that, they were very busy and I relied on my attending of webinars and pulling down of material. But that doesn’t mean that they might not be able to engage someone that way. There are really talented consultants in that group. And so that’s certainly an option. You’ve got to just start somewhere and figure out where you can begin. The principles are a great way to do that. We’re not trying to get through all of the principles all at once. It’s a multi-year effort for us. You could easily spend a year on principle number one. That might be what your organization could take on.

                The important point is that you’re starting someplace and doing that work and see how it can be adaptive for you. Those little changes, the beginnings of conversations, I would say lean into mistakes, because you’ll make them. I have fumbled many times and I’m really grateful for the loving, kind colleagues who have helped correct me. I so appreciate that. Have humility in it. If you’re a white person, do your work for sure in your place, in the privilege that you have. Be a beginner, be a learner too, don’t be afraid to say what you don’t know. And I think most importantly, you’ve got to begin and to do it. I really don’t think any organization has an excuse. I don’t care if you’re the Professional Golf Association or what. Everybody who has an incorporated nonprofit in the United States of America, their lives are touched by racism and need to be finding a way to center their work in racial and social equity.

Julie Lacouture:

Very well said. I always love to hear a fundraising tip. So do you want to leave our listeners with a fundraising tip?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

I think a fundraising tip, especially in COVID times is to keep momentum and to be persistent. I used to work with just one of the most talented fundraisers ever. I used to work for The Nature Conservancy, Julia [Fascian 00:35:39], and she’s retired now and she just never gave up on some folks that she knew had the capacity to give. And I would be impatient and say, I don’t know. I don’t think they’re ever going to give more. And she’s, I don’t know. And she just kept doing these methodical little touches and just give a little bit the focus of her time to this individual. And that individual ended up making a $5 million gift and has been giving millions and millions to the work ever since.

                And it was another one of those learning lessons around how you stay persistent. And didn’t mean she gave all of her time to that donor. She couldn’t. She had a big portfolio, but she just every now and then was like, I’m going to push this one article. Or I’m just going to see if they’ll do this one meeting or attend that event. And it had great results and it’s because she was so committed to the long game versus the short game.

Julie Lacouture:

I’m going to underline something you said there. I think you said persistent, but you didn’t say relentless.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

Oh no. Yeah.

Julie Lacouture:

I think sometimes when people hear the advice to be persistent, it’s no. These are tiny touches, these are open invitations, these are, was thinking of you.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:

By persistent, it could maybe at most have been a quarterly touch. Like just here’s something. Like I’m thinking of you and it paid off over time.

Julie Lacouture:

Excellent. Thank you so much for your time Mollie. Thank you so much for being here.

 

Building a Collaborative Culture

Building a Collaborative Culture

David Diaz is the Executive Director of Active San Gabriel Valley who has recently transitioned his organization from fiscal sponsorship to being an independent 501c3. He details how and why his organization made the leap. For him, it’s a matter of building the collaborative culture that best serves his community and his staff. “We really try to mirror the approach that we want to see in our communities, that we want to see by government, that we want to see from other places or institutions, and so we really take a collaborative approach to how we do the work.” From 32 hour work weeks, flexibility in schedules, and sharing power, learn how Active SGV runs.

Listen:

Transcript

 

 

Trent Stamp:

Welcome to How we run a podcast where we examine how non-profits become successful. I’m Trent Stamp CEO of The Eisner Foundation.

Julie Lacouture:

And I’m Julie Lacouture, founder of Good Ways Inc. This episode features David Diaz, the Executive Director of Active San Gabriel Valley. He speaks with us about transitioning his organization from a fiscal sponsor to an independent 501(c)3 and all the work he’s doing on collaborative decision making and culture to retain and support his staff. Trent, do you all fund organizations that are with fiscal sponsors?

Trent Stamp:

I’ll tell you the honest truth, Julie, we try not to. Just because it adds another layer. Usually there’s a cut that has to come through. That goes to someone other than the organization we’re funding. I know in some cases, and we have had some grantees where it’s necessary, small organizations, fledgling organizations, I prefer that organizations bring as much in-house as they possibly can. It sets up a level of accountability and transparency that we’re usually more comfortable with, if we know that when we want to support an organization, we write a check to that particular organization. It’s not perfect, but generally we stay away from organizations with fiscal sponsor.

Julie Lacouture:

I genuinely didn’t know that and I feel bad about not knowing it, because I’ve talked to you for like 25 hours on this podcast. So-

Trent Stamp:

It’s not a hard and fast rule. We’re a family foundation and we change based on if we really trust the person or if there’s a compelling reason for it. But I will say that when it comes to evaluation time, it generally is a strike against you when you’re being evaluated by the Eisner Foundation. Not any other foundation, just us.

Julie Lacouture:

And I’m curious, can you elaborate on that? What’s the difference between an organization that’s fiscally sponsored and one that’s not?

Trent Stamp:

It just introduces another organization into the dynamic that I haven’t evaluated, because when I go to make a gift to an organization, I know who’s on their board. I know who their accountant is. I know their CFO, their COO, I know who their staff is. I know who their constituents are. If I’m going to make a gift to an organization with a fiscal sponsor, do I now have to evaluate that level of the organization also? Do I have to now run the board of the fiscal sponsor through our metrics? It’s just another level of evaluation, another level of that reduces my transparency and my accountability with the organization. Again, they’re perfectly normal reasons for it, but it’s just something that I’m not as comfortable with it as many of the foundations are.

Julie Lacouture:

I know from my point of view, what I usually see with organizations that are fiscally sponsored is that with donor relations, it can be harder to get the information faster about who donated and when did the letter go out. It can make it just a little bit of a slower reporting system in terms of donor lists and stuff like that.

Trent Stamp:

I just like to know if I have a question or a concern, who do I call? And sometimes that gets a little confusing. If I can keep it simple I prefer to.

Julie Lacouture:

Right. So I got a chance to talk to David Diaz who runs Active San Gabriel, which is a tremendous organization in that, the thing that they’re trying to do is so complicated. And he mentioned that they are transitioning from a fiscal sponsor to be their own independent 501(c)3. There I think they’re four months into it. And so we started talking about one thing and then I think that we really got some details on making that transition and was fascinating to hear about all the due diligence he’s done as the leader of that organization to make that possible. It really is a big change.

Trent Stamp:

It is. I think it’s a natural evolution for most organizations. If you think of your larger, more corporately kind of non-profits, very few of them have fiscal sponsors, right? It’s for fledgling organizations, it’s for grassroots organizations who don’t necessarily want to have that kind of back office on staff, who haven’t really put those kind of processes in place for the kinds of things that they’re trying to do. But I don’t know a ton of organizations that are 10, 15, 20 years old, who still have a fiscal sponsor.

Julie Lacouture:

It is a great tool though, for some of the new organizations and some of the more grassroots organizations, as you said, the other thing he’s talking about as a small organization, how hard he works to take care of his people there, to prevent burnout. And I know that you and I have talked a couple of times about what it’s like from a funder point of view when you’re getting high turnover at an organization. So it was really interesting to hear him talk about what he’s doing to retain staff and how he’s taking care of his people.

Trent Stamp:

It’s hard in normal circumstances, right? I mean, generally in the non-profit world, you’re going to make a little less money than you might have made in a different sector. But if you get to the point where you’re working just as hard, if not harder for not enough money, in a difficult challenging environment where you’re not as appreciated, it’s just human nature, but it’s part of this great reservation.

Trent Stamp:

So I really commend CEOs, Executive Directors for finding ways to support their staff. We always talk about it when we make a grant that the foundation, which is what are you doing to keep your good people? What are you doing to retain your people? What are you doing to support them? I think it’s perfectly fine to talk about how you have a good leave policy. You’ve done things for people, some team building around the office. If that’s what people are interested in, make sure you have good coffee, make sure you do what you can to get people good parking spots and leave them alone on the weekends. If that’s not part of their job, but don’t send people texts and emails at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon or 10 o’clock on Thursday night, let them have a life and support them, because you need them in your field.

Julie Lacouture:

That’s so good to hear you’re using that as part of the evaluation.

Trent Stamp:

Oh absolutely. Because so many of these non-profits are just personnel heavy, right? The product that they provide is hard to differentiate from that of their peers and when organizations are great, it’s usually because they have great people. So hopefully you’ll get what you can to retain or support those people. Because if you lose your good folks, you’re destined for failure in the sector.

Julie Lacouture:

I think that’s the thing to listen to in this interview with David, he has some really great tactical things he’s doing. So let’s take a listen.

 

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David Diaz:

My name is David Diaz, Executive Director of Active San Gabriel Valley. Our mission is to create a more sustainable, equitable and livable San Gabriel Valley.

Julie Lacouture:

You know the first reason I wanted to talk to you, is because I know you’re a Fellow in the John W. Mack Movement Building program. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

David Diaz:

Yes. So I am a Fellow currently, it’s an opportunity for myself and other leaders from in and around the LA area and other places as well, to have an opportunity to connect with one another as folks that are in leadership positions. Sometimes being in a leadership role does feel relatively lonely at times. And so this is the opportunity for folks in leadership positions or Executive Directors to learn and talk amongst each other, to learn from each other, to learn from others, to be able to continue doing the movement, building work in the respective communities.

Julie Lacouture:

That’s wonderful. What have you learned from your peers? Because I think you’re right. It is lonely at the top and sometimes you want to bounce ideas off of someone else that understands. So what have you learned?

David Diaz:

One thing from talking to someone at another organization that I learned and have adopted into our organization, which is the 40 hour rule. Essentially you give folks 40 hours, right? So that could be five business days or five days to be able to uplift a concern or something that folks may have had issue with, that may affect the interpersonal relationship amongst colleagues. And so I think one of the things that I appreciate a lot individually and professionally is the ability to be able to have conflict resolution. Because if it’s not resolved  miscommunication and things you wouldn’t want to see come up in your organization. Interpersonal conflict is one of the things that comes up a lot. We created a standard operating procedure around how to call people in, how to adjust it, along with the framework for folks to follow.

Julie Lacouture:

When do you use the 40 hour rule? Tell me how you present it to staff.

David Diaz:

For example, let’s say that you felt that I called you out, indirectly or directly during a meeting for something, right? And that didn’t sit well with me. The impact of what you said didn’t sit well with me. And we’ve developed a process where the 40 hour rule, where we want folks to be able to have conflict resolution with each other. And so this process basically means that either you resolve it within those 40 hours, if you don’t resolve it, or if you don’t bring people in or you don’t talk about it, then let it go because we don’t want that to build over time.

Julie Lacouture:

Got it.

David Diaz:

So you can’t two years later say: “I remember this one time at this meeting, you said this led to that.” Right? It’s a way for people to be able to resolve a conflict that may come up. And this could happen in smaller, big ways. It doesn’t include things like major things like sexual harassment, bullying, other more serious things. Those are all good to go to human resources, things that may have had an impact on folks negatively that they could resolve amongst each other.

Julie Lacouture:

I think what that does and where I see that being very effective is that one is I think sometimes things interpersonally at work can eat at you and then you think: “Oh, I should have addressed it in the moment, but I lost that opportunity.” So you said five days, you have a choice, it’s still open to talk about, but you have a timeline there. And if you can’t bring it up in five days, then you should move on. So it’s for those littler interpersonal conflicts. Am I understanding that right?

David Diaz:

Yeah, that’s correct. And folks also have an opportunity to bring in someone like their Project Manager or the Executive Director. If they feel more comfortable having that conversation with someone there or if they can resolve it themselves, they can do so. There’s different opportunities for them to do that.

Julie Lacouture:

That’s great. And you learn that in the fellows program, you got that from another leader. I don’t want to give folks the impression that y’all are fighting a lot over there. Tell us little bit about Active San Gabriel Valley.

David Diaz:

Yeah. Our mission is to create a more sustainable, equitable liable San Gabriel Valley. If you’re not from LA or the LA region, we focus on Eastern Los Angeles county, which is comprised of 31 cities and four large unincorporated areas, roughly about 2 million people. It’s a very diverse set of neighborhoods. And so we really want to create a participatory, equitable process for public funding to address the multiple needs in our area around active transportation, climate, as well as other sustainability or climate related things in the area. We’ve been around for 10 years, we’re going on 11 years, we recently transitioned from a fiscally sponsored project. So we are formally fiscally sponsored as of last fiscal year. So as of this fiscal year, we’re now our own independent 501(c)3. So we’re coming up on almost four months of being in our own independent 501(c)3.

Julie Lacouture:

Oh, excellent. Congratulations.

David Diaz:

Yeah. Thank you. It’s not a process that I advise folks to go through, especially when you have multiple contracts to transfer from your fiscally sponsored to your organization. It was just a tremendous undertaking. So I definitely don’t recommend anyone to do that.

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah. Well let’s talk about that. So you were fiscally sponsored and what made you decide to go out on your own? Because fiscal sponsorship can sometimes last an organization decades.

David Diaz:

Correct. I think for us the biggest thing was the growth that we had experienced as an organization. We were formally known as the Westside Gabriel Bike Coalition, that’s actually how this organization started. A group of concerned residents in the San Gabriel Valley, organized a Facebook page and called it the West San Gabriel Valley Coalition of Bicyclists, through a participatory internal planning process, we found that the name Bike San Gabriel Valley didn’t really match or reflect the work that we were doing. It was to focused on bikes, where really our work was at the intersectionality of the climate crisis. In 2018 we rebranded and expanded our mission to be Active San Gabriel Valley to really reflect all the work that we do.

Julie Lacouture:

For folks that aren’t from LA. It might be hard to understand how biking is intersectional. So can you go into that a little bit about what it is to have access to transportation and how that intersects with biking? It sounds to me like a very logical move, but maybe you could go into that.

David Diaz:

Yeah. I’m a big proponent of systems change in looking at root causes. And just to provide a little bit more context background around the communities are in the San Gabriel Valley. We have a large immigrant population or foreign born population. We have over 50% of folks who are foreign born. The number of folks who like to work is about 1%, which rivals the city of LA. However, 35% of our sidewalk network is missing. There’s what would say poor transit access in the area. And we have little to no infrastructure support people walking, biking to and from popular destinations that include economic workforce opportunities. When we looked at what it means for an individual to have economic opportunities, usually reliant on how much access you have to a car, right? If you apply to a job, what’s one of the first things to ask you for? A driver’s license, insurance, can you get to and from this location, right? What do you need in order to buy a car or have access to a car?

David Diaz:

You need to have capital, right? If you’re taking out a loan, you need to qualify for the loan. Sometimes those terms aren’t doable. And so really creating these car centric, car culture communities in LA that we have right now, really limits economic opportunity for folks, because the transit isn’t reliable. You can’t walk there safely. You can’t bike there safely. And so it really limits people’s economic opportunities, especially in areas like the cities in El Monte and South El Monte, where you don’t have that much economic opportunity. So people have to travel far distances to get to where they work. So for example, my dad lives in South El Monte and for the last 20 something years, he’s have to commute all the way to Huntington Beach every day.

Julie Lacouture:

Wow.

David Diaz:

Every day. And I can’t tell you the impact that it’s had on his life in terms of the things that he’s missed out on because of all the times that he spends commuting.

David Diaz:

However, my dad doesn’t have another opportunity locally to be able to do the same type of work or get paid the same that he does at this company that he currently works at. And that’s a similar case for a lot of folks. And so for us, people who bike are just trying to get to a place of economic opportunity, trying to get to a library, trying to take their kids to school, trying to get to a community center, trying to access resources. And so when we don’t have the infrastructure, the public infrastructure to support them doing so, we’re directly impacting their quality of life.

David Diaz:

And we really see this all connected. But some of us choose the bike because it’s good for the environment. Some of us have no right privilege of choosing: “I want to bike because I want to keep my greenhouse gas emissions down.” But some people don’t have that option. Then when you look at how many workforce opportunities are there in your community, what type of housing is available in your community? Is it affordable? How close is it to a park? How close to your kid’s school? Do you have healthy food nearby? All those things are connected, right? And they directly affect people’s wellbeing and quality of life. We are all products of our environment.

Julie Lacouture:

That’s wonderful. Thank you so much. So you start off as a bike coalition basically. You expand into all of these other areas because it matters so much and you can see the intersectionality there. Let’s talk about how you begin to prepare to be independent of your physical sponsor. What do you do?

David Diaz:

So I have a checklist of a hundred things that you need to do in order to do that. As the assessment of your current contracts and how amenable your funders will be for you to make that transition. A lot of their funding, that you may be awarded, comes with certain contractual obligations that you’ll need to meet, regardless of whether your with your fiscal sponsor or your new 501(c)3. So we had to do an assessment of our funders and amenable they would be for us to make the transition from community partners, which was our fiscal sponsor to our own 501(c)3. And so that’s the first step, do an assessment.

Julie Lacouture:

So as an assessment, a conversation with the funder or review of the contract, all of the above, what happens in the assessment?

David Diaz:

Correct. Multiple conversations with each individual or funder around what are the requisites for them to feel comfortable to contractually move the contract from your fiscal sponsor over to your new 501(c)3. And so they each came with a different set of obligations. Some could be as simple as, as long as you meet the insurance requirements of their own 501(c)3 and you have your articles in corporation and all your 501(c)3 documentation, that’s fine. That’s enough for us to be able to move over the contract. Others, Valley County in particular was a little bit more onerous . So they had a set of different requirements for… So those got a little bit more detail than intricate that required County Council to get involved. So each individual funder came with its own set of requirements for us to be able to move over from being fiscally sponsored, to becoming our own 501(C)3.

Julie Lacouture:

I am not surprised to hear that different funders wanted different things. That’s not news, I think.

David Diaz:

Yeah.

Julie Lacouture:

How did you make the go or no-go call on this. Because I can imagine that when you got to the assessment part, you were probably 80% of the way to that decision.

David Diaz:

Yeah. I think after talking to all the funders, we then set out a realistic timeline for when we would transition, when it made most sense for the organization. And so we review things like, when do contracts end, when do contracts start, the beginning and end of the fiscal year, the term of the contracts that we had in place, how easy or difficult it would be to move contracts, what contracts needed different types of amendments? So we put that all together and then ultimately we set out a 10 month timeline, from the time that we just had these conversations with the funders, to then move over to our new 501(c)3. So we gave folks plenty of notice. And so it wasn’t like we sprung it on them like: “Hey, in three months we’re making this transition.” I think the thing that was challenging or difficult was building out the infrastructure for the new organization, as you’re ending infrastructure or some of the components for the fiscally sponsorship agreement. So essentially it’s like you’re closing up business and you’re opening one at the same time.

Julie Lacouture:

Can you talk to me about the pros and cons of being out on your own?

David Diaz:

So far, it’s only approaching four months and I love it. I love having that. It defends, I think it signals maturity to the funders. That’s one of the things that we heard for foundations that it signals maturity from the organization after being fiscally sponsored for so many years, to be in a place where now you can become your own 501(c)3. I like the autonomy of that. We’re still building the infrastructure for the organization in particular, the admin infrastructure for the organization. And in the meantime, that burden or that load of work falls on me. I’ve learned how to process payrolls. I hope not to be doing that anymore.

Julie Lacouture:

I hope you don’t have to do anymore too. Did you lose anyone in the process?

David Diaz:

In the transition we did not lose anyone in the process. One of the things about Active SGV, is that we do have this participatory decision making process, where we take input and feedback from folks into account for our decision making. And so folks overwhelmingly were very supportive of making this transition. Everyone that was there with us as a fiscally sponsored project, moved over to the new 501(c)3.

Julie Lacouture:

I assume you had to raise some more funds in order to make this transition from a fiscal sponsor to your own independent 501(c)3. How did you do that?

David Diaz:

Luckily, all the funders that we had were amenable to making the transition from our fiscal sponsor over to our new 501(c)3. So we transfer existing contracts over to the new 501(c)3. And then most recently we received support from the Winegart Foundation for unrestricted operating support for us to build our reserves and then also be able to implement our DI work, as well as take on anything else for the new 501(c)3.

David Diaz:

That’s really helpful. So I think securing the existing funding was enough for us to be able to make that transition. And some of the work around, having to certified public accountant, help facility things that came out of our unrestricted funds. So we didn’t necessarily have to raise new funds for it. Now one of the things with the fiscal sponsor is that they had a 50% admin fee. That was then for them taking to account, to pay for the backend infrastructure that included rent, utilities, insurance, all that operating costs, essentially in effect, we’re saving more money because the fiscal sponsors no longer taking that 50% admin fee than using it for the backend stuff that we typically don’t see.

Julie Lacouture:

So it sounds like then, and this is a great lesson, I think for other organizations, it really wasn’t about, can we raise the funds to do this transition? It was looking at: “Okay, we have general operating support already. We will save 15%. So that goes into to help us with our additional costs. Plus we know that all of our funders will move with us.” Those three things, all working together, you knew you could support.

David Diaz:

That’s correct. And I think it’s really important to have the conversations with the funders. That’ll give you a pulse of where they’re at, because it hasn’t been… I think our experience is our experience. It won’t be the same experience for everyone. Our experience is our experience and our funders really amenable to making the transition. Whereas some project, their funders may not be as comfortable with that. It may go the other way where the funder isn’t comfortable with them making the transition to a 501(c)3 independent of the fiscal sponsors. So really it’s important to have that conversation with your existing funding sources to make sure that they’re in agreement with you, because if they’re not, then you have to weigh the consequence of life. We may lose this funding and are we okay with forward without it? Will we be okay?

Julie Lacouture:

It sounds like you’ve also done a really good job when you budget and you fundraise around that budget of saying there needs to be funds to make the organization go. It’s not just project based fundraising. And then you’re left with an unfunded administration team.

David Diaz:

Yeah that’s correct. With the admin team, making sure that we have multiyear projections around our budgeting and our staff plans and what projects are upcoming. We keep a close eye on the request for proposals, making sure that we have a good sense of what’s out there. Our thing is that we work in a specific geography. We work in east and Los Angeles County. And so we have a very good understanding of what opportunities are upcoming at the state level, what good opportunities at the regional level, what good opportunities there are at the local level. And we work closely with cities to be able to submit proposals at times on behalf, and collaboration with cities. And so we have a good understanding of what’s coming up, what’s on the docket and how to best budget for future work and what our staffing needs are going to be.

Julie Lacouture:

So let’s talk a little bit about how your organization runs. What do you think makes your team run well?

David Diaz:

Yeah, one of the things that I think makes our team run really well is that again, we are a non-profit report of the city of El Monte, who is comprised of folks from the San Gabriel Valley. And so I think at the root of it, there’s a big affinity for the place that we all grew up in and love for the mission, right? To be able to be of service to others and to tackle the climate crisis, which we feel was the biggest threat to us all right? And I think it’s really special Julie that most of us, including myself, started off as a volunteer intern. So I’ve started from a volunteer in 2014 to full-time staff in 2018 to later that year, December 2018, becoming the Executive Director.

Julie Lacouture:

So be careful what you volunteer for.

David Diaz:

Yeah. It may become your life’s work. Most of us have graduated from volunteer intern to full-time staff. And so I think that makes us truly unique. We have about 21 folks right now and of those folks most have started on as a volunteer or intern. So I think that really helps. And then in addition some of the systems that have been set up for us is that we really try to mirror the approach that we want to see in our communities, that we want to see by government, that we want to see in other places or institutions. So we really take a collaborative approach to how we do the work. I mentioned earlier about our decision making, having input and feedback from folks. Some of those things play out. For example, in meetings we have an agenda, that’s structured for folks. We switch minute takers and facilitators.

David Diaz:

So sharing a power and delegation of who’s doing what, and it’s also good for professional development. We have a conversation around whose best suited for tasks. And so people are able to discuss now in this meeting, who’s the best person suited for this depending on their workload or their week and what things they have going on. You have autonomy over schedules. No one’s handed a schedule on Sunday evening or Monday morning. Here’s what you’re working. We have enough trust in the folks that work at Active SGV to give them autonomy over their schedules. We use Google calendar and they’ll mark on Google calendar, what times and days they’re working and at what times. And then we also provide people… Even before the pandemic, before COVID 19, we offered folks the opportunity for remote work or telecommute because we knew it was good for people’s wellbeing, as well as for the environment to keep their vehicle miles traveled down and all that.

David Diaz:

So even before COVID 19, we already provided autonomy over schedules, remote work. And then the other two things that I’ll mention, is that in terms of the culture, I think we’ve done a lot of work around building a good work culture, healthy positive work culture. For us one of the things that we’ve implemented is Brené Brown’s BRAVING. BRAVING just, each letter stands for something, right? So B for boundaries, R for responsibilities, A for accountability, vault is V, integrity and non-judgemental and generosity. And we in our retreat and our conversations, have had really frank discussions around what this means for us as a collective and matter what this means for us as individuals. Similar to like in community settings, right? Our community meetings. We want to have shared agreements around how we work with each other, how we resolve conflict, how we do the work. We’ve adopted these agreements, according to us.

David Diaz:

So some of the things haven’t played out the way that we want to. So I’ll give you an example, G right, G is for generosity. Brené Brown says: “Always assume good intentions.” And we found that even if you always assume… Julie, if you say something mean to me and I didn’t really like what you said to me, but going to make me feel a certain type of way. And so there’s still that impact that landed on me. And so this idea of intent versus impact right. Is really important to us. And so we’ve adopted and modified that, right? Yeah.

David Diaz:

Assume good intentions. However, let’s focus on impact-

Julie Lacouture:

But however mean comment is still a mean comment.

David Diaz:

Yeah. Impact versus intent, right? And so we’ve made it work for Active SGV. And so we’ve done that as a collective that is individuals sharing so that everyone knows these are our group agreements. And all of this I would say is done in collaboration. So really the other thing is analyzing and setting up these systems and concert with your colleagues is really important, because if it was just David saying: “Hey, y’all, this is what we’re doing now, everybody, BRAVING is it.” Right? And everyone’s looking at other, what is a BRAVING? Really taking this approach of building these systems together with folks as much as possible.

Julie Lacouture:

David, I think what’s so significant about what you’re doing and what you’re saying and all of these things, is that you are really taking care of your team as a resource. Though I think sometimes especially in non-profits that are doing movement building and are doing really close to the ground stuff, vs let’s say like an academic institution or a hospital or some of the bigger non-profits we have in the sector is that the burnout is a real risk to your business. Is that where some of this comes from?

David Diaz:

Absolutely. I think absolutely. I’m a big supporter of mental health and wellbeing. I think that if we’re going to have any legitimacy, we need to also model the behavior that we want to see. And I believe that’s particularly important of someone in a leadership position.

David Diaz:

I know it’s cliche, but the people at Active SGV make what Active SGV be what it is right. Without them what do we really have? And so that’s really important to me. Self care is important to me, avoiding burnout is really important to me. Professional development, building next pipeline of leaders in or around this region is really important to me. Being able to do this type of work is… Again be of service to folks is important to me. One of the things that’s probably really frustrating to everyone is non-profit, industrial complex. And this sentiment of you should work out of the goodness of your heart, not get [crosstalk 00:27:54] wow. You should just be grateful for what you have. I think that non-profits and people who work in public service provide tremendous value to society, to our communities. I just don’t think that’s caught up yet. Products have a lot of value, right? There’s a lot of value placed on products. I don’t think that same assessment or that same sentiment is placed on non-profits and the type of work that we do.

Julie Lacouture:

Well, you’re building up value, even if society’s not there yet. Is there something you’ve done to adapt in the last 18 months to the changing environment? It sounds like you all were pretty set up to adapt to a global pandemic.

David Diaz:

Yeah. We had the remote or the telecommuting systems put in place before, but I think for us, one of the things that we traditionally have focused on is direct engagements because we recognize we needed to meet people where they were. It’s during COVID 19 lockdown, right? How do you meet people where they are, if you’re not supposed to meet people at all, how do you engage with folks in the… Again, our approach is multilingual, multicultural. And so we traditionally focused on direct engagement. I’m going to go to your house, I’m going to meet you at a community event. So now we utilize text banking, we’re sending more emails, we’re phone banking. We’re calling people as much as people don’t like to be called, right? We’re sending out multilingual mailers, we’re doing pod casts, we’re continue to do social media. We have webinars or virtual community meetings.

David Diaz:

We still do the door to door. We have community canvassing, community sites. We do pop-ups all physically distant and secure. All of our team is vaccinated. And in addition to the direct service or some of the tactics, we also participate in food bank distributions. We do High School education and repair for folks. For us the adaptation has been some around our community engagement and how we do it. Now we do all those things combined. We do all those things to really get the word out and do some participatory planning and engagement with community members.

David Diaz:

And some of that is yielded good results. We hosted a number of focus groups, did some pop-ups, did door-to-door, mailers, surveys, phone banking, text banking, around the development of an aquatic center, in the San Gabriel Valley. And fortunately it looks like we’re on our way to receiving full funding. We’re about, I would say 80% or 85% of the way there, it’s in collaboration with LA County Department of Recreation, parts and rec, as well as a Los Angeles Unified School District. Then we want to make sure that it continues to be community driven, equitable participator, planning and input process to get infrastructure that’s going to meet their needs of this climate crisis.

Julie Lacouture:

Can you tell us about a mistake you’ve made or what you learned from?

David Diaz:

I would say one of the biggest mistakes that I’ve made, is just taking on too much. We want to model the behavior that we want to see. And I think that there’s been times where you just take on too much. And so I think that’s really affected my ability to focus on big picture things or donor relations or whatever it that may mean. And so I think that’s been one of the mistakes that I’ve made. And I think for me, what I’ve learned about it is that we need to make that investment in those resources. It’s not just me having to take on all this additional work, whereas I could have hired someone else or hired some type of support to be able to get that done. And so that’s a learning that I think it is ongoing with the job, right? Like things come up, you get new funding, you have to react. Sometimes there’s a literally short deadline on it. And so I think it’s just a process of knowing how much work is feasible.

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah. That comes with experience right. Where you know how long something’s going to take, that’s hard to get down. So what’s the big idea moving forward and how do you think you’ll get there?

David Diaz:

I think the big idea for us is a 32 hour work week. And I want to be very specific about-

Julie Lacouture:

Yeah. Tell us about this.

David Diaz:

It’s not the four day work week, right? There’s a four day work week and then it’s a 32 hour work week. So again, folks at Active SGV have autonomy over their schedules and the ability to do work remotely or at the office. And so for us as of October 2021, we’re implementing the 32 hour work week. And this is directly in response to the learnings from the pandemic. I feel to me it’s outlandish or just beyond me to think that we’ve all gone through this tremendous trauma of seeing others be ill, die, be near death, get sick, have to worry about that. And then to come back to something, that’s how we used to operate. It’s just beyond me. And, and I think we cannot continue to operate in the same fashion that we were before. We have to learn, because what do we see in that pandemic? Food insecurity was rampant.

David Diaz:

The ability for us to be able to deploy vaccines to everyone, regardless of insurance status. I love universal healthcare. Why don’t we have that? And so I think for me really, it’s that focus on mental health and wellbeing, the gender of quality, and also it’s good for the environment, for us to have a 32 hour work week.

David Diaz:

As a new dad I really cherish and appreciate all the time that I get to spend with my kid. And I think for everyone else, I recognize that our lives are much more than the work that we do. I love the work that we do. I’m super passionate about it. However, there’s a consequence of working 60, 70 hours or commuting five hours a day. That’s taking away from your interest, your own personal health and well being and how sustainable that is.

Julie Lacouture:

The staff likes it so far?

David Diaz:

Yes. Haven’t heard otherwise.

Julie Lacouture:

They have five days to tell you.

David Diaz:

Yeah. And then this week, yesterday we recognize indigenous people’s day and they will work a total of 24 hours.

Julie Lacouture:

Right. David, I’m going to ask you to give a tip for someone who might be at a non-profit who wants to have more government relationships to start working with cities more or improve those relationships.

David Diaz:

I would say, get to know city agencies and staff. That’s one of the first things, right? Elected decision makers, but ultimately it’s like staff that makes things happen. So get to know those folks, I would say organize in and around your community. So if you’re interested in working in a respective community, please get to know the community. We do not advertise or like what people from other communities come in and try to do work without really knowing the community or having a better understanding. So as a place based organization, the San Gabriel Valley is a place where we all have a lot of affinity towards. Get to know agency staff, get to know the community. I get familiar with the needs. And that’s one way to be able to work with government.

Julie Lacouture:

I want to give you a chance to give a general tip for someone in your position.

David Diaz:

Yes. My tip for someone in my position would be to develop standard operating procedures. When I became Executive Director, I was about 30 years old. So I consider myself a pretty young Executive Director. And for me looking for learning toward other folks that I admire and I’ve worked with Rudy Spinoza, Dr. Forza was at the Social Justice Learning Institute. This is one of his big tips is to create standard operating procedures. And I can’t tell you how much of a difference that makes just because when I started there was about five or six of us at the organization. And so now it’s about 21 of us. So having to explain how we do things to each incoming person, as you’re growing a team, becomes quite time consuming. We’ve developed a menu of standard operating procedures in terms of how we do community engagement, how we do text banking, how we do social media, how we request that off.

David Diaz:

It’s just, it runs a list of how we, we do things. And so it’s important for people and for the organization to write down how we do our work, because then it makes it easier for folks to follow, provides clarity, I think it provides professional development for folks that are incoming that may not have that skill set or been exposed to that type of work in the past. And it provides autonomy. But then also for us, we do provide, or both check-ins for folks to be able to ask questions if somethings lot clear on the standard operating procedure. And it’s not just me writing it again. It’s a collective process of different folks writing these standard operating procedures. So I would say that figure out how to make sure that each position is able to clearly define or describe the tasks that they’re conducting.

David Diaz:

So you can then easily translate that to other folks, right? Because then you’re going to be inundated. How do I do this? Where do I get that? How do I log in here? Was this right? And so that’s really important. And then the other tip, Julie, I’ll just say really quick, is continue to read. I think that’s one of the first things that… Not the first things, but that I just kept doing it and I actually did more as a new Executive Director is just reading everything I get hands on. Seven habits of affected leadership, Surprising science of meetings, some book called Power, How to do nothing. The body keeps a score. Just continue to read, I think is really important. Now with the 16th month old, I don’t get to read as much as I’d like to, but I definitely recommend to continue reading.

Julie Lacouture:

Excellent. We’ll get some book recommendation and put them up on the website when this comes out. And David, thank you so much for your time. It was really great to talk to you and exciting to learn from you.

David Diaz:

Thank you, Julie. I really appreciate it.

Julie Lacouture:

We have a request for you dear listeners.

Trent Stamp:

I’m hoping that if you enjoy how we run, that you will go and leave a review for us. Your review allows others to find us. And that’s a good thing because the more people that listen, the more impact we can have on the sector and that we can bring about positive change for other non-profits that are out there. So if you like what you’re listening to, please leave us a review.

Julie Lacouture:

If you want to be a guest on the show, you think you have a good story and you want to share, you can email us at info@nullgoodwaysinc.com.

 

How to make the most of “Giving Days”

How to make the most of “Giving Days”

We love a certain kind of giving day around here because they inject fundraising campaigns with some urgency (time literally runs out) and social proof (“everyone is doing it”). It’s an exciting and fantastic opportunity for your non-profit.

Sure there’s Giving Tuesday, but the ones we LOVE are the ones that are led locally by a community foundation, non-profit, or a higher education institution. Check out some of our favorites:  Amplify Austin, The Big Give in South Central Texas, and Long Beach Gives

If you’re lucky enough to get to participate in a local giving day, here are some tips to make your campaign successful: 

 

Set giving day goals

Remember that donors count on us to ask for what we need. Setting a goal can inspire your community to help you do big things. 

A goal can also be helpful in planning. Once you have a goal you can use it to determine how many people would have to give to be successful. 

Pick a “big idea” for your campaign

For Giving Days it might be tempting to say, “give because it’s a giving day” but the most successful campaigns go beyond that and show donors how their support is important. 

The best campaigns have a unifying theme that resonates and excites your community. A “big idea” can be a few sentences that make the case for why someone should give to you and why they should give today. 

Your campaign should put impact at the center of your message. Remember, people give when they understand what their gift will achieve.

Take your audience on a journey

Giving Days get the best results when you can take your audience on a journey where they’re excited to help, rooting for you the whole way, and sharing with their friends. Use this campaign roll-out calendar to help craft that journey: 

  • Drumroll period – lead up to your campaign where you build awareness and excitement
  • Announcement period – where you boldly announce your campaign and goals
  • Follow up and heighten the story – continue to promote your campaign and remind your audience 
  • Finish strong – focus on hitting your goals and crossing that finish line, don’t forget the excitement of “time is running out” messaging.
  • Thank and show impact – don’t forget to follow up and show impact to your giving day donors, this is the first step to an enduring relationship!

Find partners

Giving Days can be a way to involve your whole community, even your funding partners. If you start planning far enough in advance, you might be able to recruit small businesses, foundations, corporations, or other organizations as outreach partners. Talk to your current funders and major donors about offering matching funds for donors who give to the campaign. 

 

Recruit ambassadors 

The most powerful part of Giving Days is that they provide an easy reason for your supporters to ask their friends to give. 

Well before the Giving Day, see if you can recruit campaign ambassadors from your community and get their commitment in advance for helping spread the word about your campaign. 

Those connected with a social media community can be very helpful, as well as board members and major donors. 

 

Get your message everywhere

Promote through every channel you have, from social media to email, and (gasp!) even using offline communication like the phone, flyers, and events.

Think about where your audience might look if they hear about the giving day but miss an email from you. That might mean using pop-ups on your website, putting a call to action in your social media bios, and updating your google ads. 

 

Make it fun

Sure, your impact and missions are serious, but to really break through and reach your audience, think of innovative fun ways to get attention: 

  • Maybe your Executive Director will dye their hair pink or get a pie in the face when you reach your goals. 
  • Maybe you could live stream performances all day in support of your campaign.
  • Maybe you could encourage your supporters to play a virtual game of tag and tag their friends in posts. 
  • Maybe you could do a scavenger hunt in the community.

Think of the “fun” as a way to break through and call attention to your campaign.  

 

Be specific in your aks

Asking for a specific amount can help guide your donors to different gift sizes through an “anchoring” effect. Asking for higher amounts might yield fewer donors, but more revenue, while asking for lower amounts might give your more donors, but less revenue. This article by Five Maples shows an anchoring effect on donation amounts. 

It’s always great to tie your asks back to your big idea by relating suggested donation amounts to your work: $25 feeds a family of four for a day, etc.

Learn more:

An Unexpected Leap to Virtual Programs

An Unexpected Leap to Virtual Programs

Necessity is the mother of invention in Season 4, episode 6. 

Never in a million years did Sarah Walzer believe that virtual visits with parents and families would ever yield the same high-quality results at ParentChild+. But in March 2020, the organization was forced to go virtual anyway. Sarah was pleasantly surprised and she shares the organization’s secret to success in this interview.  

Listen to how Sarah learned to embrace virtual programming:

Listen:

Transcript

 

Trent Stamp:

Welcome to How We Run, a podcast where we examine how nonprofits become successful. I’m Trent Stamp, CEO of The Eisner Foundation.

Julie Lacouture:

And I’m Julie Lacouture, founder of Good Ways Inc. In this episode, we talk to the CEO of ParentChild+, Sarah Walzer, who takes us through how our organization pivoted to an all virtual program. Trent, today we’re talking about pivoting to virtual services, which is something I think that everyone basically had at least a taste of. Are you doing virtual site visits at the foundation?

Trent Stamp:

Yes. We’ve had to shift our operations to evaluate those organizations that we funded virtually for all the reasons that you could possibly imagine. Most of it being that the organizations that we invest in are delivering their services virtually. So there’s nothing for us really to go see, unless we just want to be a burden on that particular organization. So we’ve tried to observe some of their online programming and their virtual programming, but we’ve done it virtually ourselves.

Julie Lacouture:

And what are you looking for in a virtual site visit? Has it changed? Or is it still the same kind of guidelines that you would have in the past?

Trent Stamp:

It’s been frustrating to me to do virtual site visits. As much as we rely on data, as much as we rely on now the kind of metrics that we originally were doing way back at Charity Navigator 20 years ago, there’s just something special when you walk into a good nonprofit and you see it in person and you see the integrity and the authenticity of that organization. You see the way they treat their volunteers. You see the way they treat their staff. You see the way they treat the recipients of their services. There’s an honor and a dignity that it doesn’t matter what that particular organization does or where they do it. When you see it, you can feel it. It’s real. It’s tangible, and it’s something that you want to invest in. And that’s just so hard to measure when you’re evaluating organization virtually. Some organizations do virtual site visits better than others.

Julie Lacouture:

Tell me when you say someone’s better at it than someone else, what does that-

Trent Stamp:

Yeah. It’s no different than a good in-person site visit in the sense that they sat down and they planned it out. They thought about what this is going to look like. What’s the hour going to be like? Who are you going to hear from? What’s it going to look like when you look at the executive director? Do they have a background in place that represents the organization? That just goes back to the caring and the thoughtfulness and allowing enough time for different voices to be heard from. You used to have a board member and a recipient of your services at an in-person site visit. You should arrange to have them at a virtual site visit. Too many organizations, just treat it like we’re having a phone call when that’s not what it is. In our case, oftentimes a couple of hundred thousand dollars on the line. And so those organizations that are thoughtful with their best foot forward to try to represent their organization in some way or another really goes a long way.

Julie Lacouture:

Those are some hot tips. Thank you. One thing you said is something that I read in the Chronicle of Philanthropy and get us to this week’s guest. You said there’s something that you get on the in-person that you think is not replicable virtually. And so I was reading Chronicle of Philanthropy and I saw an article about ParentChild+, and the CEO, Sarah Walzer said, “If you would ask me in January 2020 about shifting our in-person visits…” They send caseworkers out to visit with families and start the education process really early. She said, “If you had said, ‘Can you shift to all virtual?’ I would say, this is not replicable virtually. What we have in person is special.” And three months later, her entire organization was using WhatsApp, Zoom, FaceTime just to get these visits with families. And that really forced her hand.

Trent Stamp:

I’ve been blown away by the number of high quality nonprofits who would have told you the exact same thing that Sarah told you, that they cannot deliver their program virtually, who when we told them, “You don’t have any choice,” they went, “Okay, screw it. I will now deliver this virtually.” And it ranges from all kinds of crazy different things, whether it be the obvious one that we fund oftentimes, which is mentoring or tutoring or schoolwork through a volunteer or a tutor, but I’ve seen organizations be successful in cleaning up the environment or doing advocacy or providing meals to people who have done the vast majority of the front-end work virtually. And I’ve been really impressed, and I’d love to hear from Sarah about how she was able to pivot her organization completely to deliver the high quality services that they’re trying to deliver while not being able to be in the same room with those they’re serving.

Julie Lacouture:

The thing that struck me about our conversation was that they did it. They did it really fast because they had to, but they basically just said, reach out to however the family wants to be reached out to. If they have FaceTime, do a FaceTime. If it’s Zoom, do it by Zoom. And what struck me was that the lack of planning I feel like helped them be successful because they were going in knowing they had to be adaptable. Whereas I think if you told an organization we’ve done our strategic plan to do more virtual, there would have been so many decisions that got made before they even started about research on a platform, research on this. It would have been such a long process to get there that I think what I hear from Sarah on this conversation is a real joy about we started, we tested and we kept doing what was working and stopped doing what wasn’t. And I think that’s a really great way to think about operations.

Trent Stamp:

Of course, the cliche is true, right? That necessity is the motherhood of invention. We saw that in the last year. And so I’d just be curious with Sarah. I mean, this is my running theme for all of season four of How We Run, which is what do you feel she will keep moving forward and how much of it will go back to the way it always was stuck?

Julie Lacouture:

Stay tuned until the end, and it’s pretty amazing. So let’s hear from Sarah.

 

 

Sarah Walzer:

I am Sarah Walzer. I am the CEO of ParentChild+, which is a national early childhood family support nonprofit, and it works in 16 states in 6 countries.

Julie Lacouture:

Sarah, I’m so glad to have you here. I saw a great article about you in the Chronicle of Philanthropy about some pivots you made during this last year. So we’ll get to that, but I’m excited to have you on to hear about all the things you have to share about that learning experience.

Sarah Walzer:

Thank you. It has been quite now we have to say more than a year, right? Quite a 15 months.

Julie Lacouture:

So our first question always for everyone is what makes your team run well?

Sarah Walzer:

The number one thing that makes our team run well is that we have always really tried to live our name. So we are ParentChild+. We are all about supporting parents and children and families, and we make that a reality internally in the organization. And it becomes not about just supporting families because not everybody on our team has a family at the moment, but about the flexibility to make sure that people have the time and the space and the mind space to really dig into the work, but also to really live their lives and support their other passions, whether those are their children or going back to school or entering politics. All of those things happened on our team. But I think what makes the team so rich and vibrant, which is nobody feels like they’re either shutting out the other parts of their life when they come to work, but they also know that they’re going to have the space to live those parts of their lives. And we think that enriches everything they do.

Sarah Walzer:

I was about to say during the day at work, except I think one of the other things that’s part of being flexible and working in concert with the other parts of people’s lives is that we don’t expect that the work necessarily gets done every day from nine to five, because you might have something else really important you need to do at some point between nine and five. And I think that flexibility, both that sort of time-space flexibility and that flexibility to make sure were enabling people to engage the other parts of their lives and really [inaudible 00:08:23] our work with that is critical.

Julie Lacouture:

So let’s talk about the scope of your program.

Sarah Walzer:

We are one of those standard things in the nonprofit world, which is that we have this very lean national center staff that oversees and supports the work that’s happening around the country. That team is 16 people in our… Nobody’s in the office anymore, but in the New York area and six state directors who work in six states across the country. But they support a network of local partner agencies who are implementing our program across the country, and that network is currently 142 agencies around the country staffed by that 280 site coordinators. Those are the professionals folks who oversee the program in each of their communities and about 900 what we call early learning specialists who are the heart and soul of the program. They are the people who are going into the homes of over 9,000 families and family childcare providers in these 16 states and implementing the program, working with parents to prepare their children for school success through twice weekly home visits. So small national staff, bigger state and local staff and hundreds and thousands of home visits happening every year.

Julie Lacouture:

So you said two things, but in the last couple of minutes. So one is that you value putting family first. And one of the things you think makes your organization run well is that your staff has what sounds to me like agency to do their best work when they choose to. The other thing is that you’re geographically spread out. And so I know there’s a lot of managers out there who might be thinking, “Well, how do you make sure the work gets done? How do you make sure the work is done with high quality?”

Sarah Walzer:

The key thing, it’s quality and fidelity to the model because we are an evidence-based program. And what we promise funders, both public and private, is that they will get these outcomes if they fund the program in their community every year, because each of our partner agencies is implementing the model with fidelity. So again, it happens through a variety of layers and a lot of communication. So we are a turnkey training model, the national center staff train these site coordinators across the country to implement the model. And as part of that training to train and support their local early learning specialists. And we do that not just through this turnkey training, but through a lot of resources. So we have a very robust learning management system, which enables site staff from across the country to log in and learn more about every aspect of the program, whether it’s selecting books and materials that are representative of the families they are working with in their communities, to entering data in our web-based data system. All of that content is available for everyone to access on that system.

Sarah Walzer:

We also do a lot of small group conversations. So the site coordinators in each state meet regularly with their state director. The site coordinators in states that don’t yet have state directors meet regularly with a national center staff person. And then, then again, that trickles down. Each site coordinator meets every week with the early learning specialists that they support. And the national center, so I guess it trickles up to the national center staff every other week with all of the state directors. So that sort of feedback loop that’s starting with the folks on the front line and making sure it makes it across to the folks in the national center, and then vice verse, that any changes, new ideas, new materials we want sites to try are making their way from the national center out into the field.

Julie Lacouture:

I think what’s interesting about what you just said is you’re talking about a national team, and you always hear this from national teams, is communication is important, but sometimes to a national team, communication can mean, “We will give you announcements and you will receive our communication.” But what you are saying, I think, is that communication to you is not only frequent from you, transparent from you, accessible to everyone all the time, and to-

Sarah Walzer:

Right. That is absolutely critical, particularly because we have this small national team that’s trying to do a whole lot of things to support all this work around the country. And the only way for us to do it in a way that’s actually supportive is to get that regular, not just feedback on what we’re doing, innovation from the field. And I think there was nothing that highlighted that as the last year and a half.

Julie Lacouture:

Let’s talk about adapting to changing environments, because I think we’ve experienced with one or two of those in the last 18 months. What was March 2020 like for you? There was a quote from you saying you were resistant to doing virtual visits before, and then I think your hand got forced in March. Is that about right? So take us back.

Sarah Walzer:

Absolutely accurate. And in fact, our research director says all the time now, if you had asked me even in January of 2020 could this model, this evidence-based model, that’s all about relationship building between staff and parents and between parents and children, could this be done a hundred percent virtually, I would have told you no way. We can’t build those kinds of relationships. We didn’t even think it was worth testing at that point. And then yes, in mid-March of 2020, our hand got completely forced. It was such an interesting forcing, right? Because we did think it was temporary at the time, right? We all thought, “Okay, maybe this is two months. Certainly by the summer, we’ll be back to normal,” whatever we thought that was at that time. And we thought that both about our own work as a team and about the actual work of our program.

Sarah Walzer:

The one key thing we knew was that we did not want to lose touch with the families that we were in the midst of working with, and that as we were all living in as well, this was incredibly stressful. And that would be the absolute worst time to stop supporting families and particularly families with young children who were not getting any other kinds of support there. So we knew we couldn’t stop, but we did really think it was temporary. So in fact, when we did that initial pivot, it was okay, you’re going to stay in touch with families. And if that family has a cell phone or a tablet and the wifi or internet access such that you can do a virtual visit, whether it’s FaceTime or WhatsApp or Zoom, you should do that. But if they don’t, you can stay in touch by phone because we’re only doing this for a month or two, and you’ll continue that relationship. And then we’ll make up the visits with them as soon as we can get back to being in person.

Sarah Walzer:

We didn’t have guidance on that yet. We had some ideas, but what we immediately started to get from site staff was okay, we’ve tried this. This worked or didn’t work. And we’ve tried that, and this is working really well. And then they started to record those virtual visits for us and send them to us and say, “Look at this. This is something that’s really worked. See how engaged the child is. See what a good conversation I’m having with the parents.”

Julie Lacouture:

So it sounds like the first step was you let the caseworker who’s in touch with that family make the call about the best medium to reach that family.

Sarah Walzer:

Absolutely. And the other thing that happened is, so we are a program that every week we bring a gift of a book or a toy to the families we’re working with and that’s the curricular item for the week and it’s how we model reading conversation and play and support the parents in building those school-readiness skills. People got locked out of their offices. The staff, they didn’t have access to those books. And so the other thing was supporting them on, you know what, you’ve already brought books and toys into the home. You can have the family bring those out. They can use them again. Really what you need to be is there for support and a lot of what you need to be there for is information sharing.

Sarah Walzer:

So as information about COVID started to roll out, it was supporting families on what was safe, on what the risks were, on how to protect themselves. It was helping them figure out where to get masks. It became a whole lot of other things that superseded those books and toys. Parents started to lose their jobs because they worked in service industries that were shut down. They didn’t have access to food. They were starting to worry about being evicted if they couldn’t pay their rent. There were incredible diaper and formula shortages around the country. So very quickly though, for many of our field staff turned to, how are we just going to help families get through these months?

Julie Lacouture:

That was March, where it was like anybody used anything. Did you coalesce as an organization around a particular technology and style that worked to build the relationships in the same way that you could have pre-pandemic?

Sarah Walzer:

So what we call less around was that sort of gold star way of doing this was video visits. We pretty quickly also realize, “And a video visit on a tablet is better than a video visit on a phone, but at the very least, let’s get people stands for their phones so that the parent and child are sitting in front of it and not worried about holding it.” And so lots of little things like that. We’re focused on getting the best communication between the family and the early learning specialists. Anything you can do to keep those two visits a week, those two points of contact with the family, is critical in particular, because as you pointed out, things were changing so rapidly that you wanted to stay up with both what was going on with them, but also your ability to support and keeping them up with what was happening in the world.

Sarah Walzer:

Getting families materials also became I think a clear focal point for the staff. And it was more about parents really starting to stress about how to keep that two and three year old active, engaged, feeling some sense of social, emotional wellbeing and balance. And the materials were really helpful for doing that. And then they started to see that they worked, and the parents were reporting, or if they were all witnessing on the video, changes in the child, the parents were feeling supported and also like they were able to support their child. And that was what we wanted to see happen.

Julie Lacouture:

That’s amazing. I know with technology rollouts, we sometimes don’t get everybody to adopt right away. So I would imagine you had some families you had to track down or work harder with. Did you lose anybody?

Sarah Walzer:

So really interesting and the first part of the answer gets back to our earlier discussion about the two-way communication. So we did early, I guess we did in May a survey of the field, surveying families and staff about technology. And what we found was pretty consistent with the national data, which was that 20-30% of our families were challenged by lack of internet access, access to wifi and devices that worked and that could be connected to the internet. That was obviously important data, useful for going out to funders and saying, “There’s this gap here, and this is a lot of families, and we need dollars to buy devices.” It may be that someone has a smartphone, but they have no data plan and there is no wifi where they live. So whether it was buying hotspots or getting a data plan to really get funders to support with dollars for that, but also to get existing funders to support sites in reallocating budget dollars. So we’re no longer driving to every family twice a week for a visit. Let’s reallocate all those dollars to technology.

Sarah Walzer:

So that was part one. I think part two though was there were some families who just were not comfortable with the technology. Families were doubled and tripled up, particularly as the economic ripple effects of the pandemic move through communities. They didn’t want anybody to see the surroundings they were living in. We said then and we have continued to say that there will always be some families for whom a phone visit is their choice, and we’re never going to deny a family access to the program because of that. The other piece though was we had site staff for whom this technology was all new and who were not so comfortable with any of this technology. And that was really where trainings starting just to do staff meetings by Zoom and meetings with folks from the field on Zoom. So people started to get comfortable with the technology and using it.

Sarah Walzer:

Getting staff quality tech. I mean, the other thing that happened was we had a lot of our sites staff are parents. They were home. They had kids doing remote school at home. They did not have the bandwidth to be doing video visits with families while their kids were doing remote school. So it was really important also to make sure that at every site, folks were thinking about those issues. What does your staff need in order to do this comfortably? Just as I said, we pretty quickly realized if we could get families tablets, that was better than doing a visit on your phone. If we could get site staff laptops, that was better than doing all your work on a tablet.

Julie Lacouture:

Sarah, you’ve led this organization for a while, and I’m hoping you could share, because it was always reassuring for me to hear, a mistake you’ve made and what you’ve learned from it.

Sarah Walzer:

I’ve made lots of mistakes, but there are two that I think that pandemic really highlighted for me. And so the first one, that one that I think I had been making for a long time was this notion that a national team, a national board needed to all be basically in the same place. We’re based outside of New York, our offices on Long Island. And frankly, for years, we have had challenges around hiring because New York City and Long Island are very expensive places to live, and we’re a nonprofit, but also because even for people who live in New York City or in the Greater New York area, commuting out to Long Island on a daily basis, which is what in my ignorance used to think people needed to do with the idea that that was important to be in the office in order to interact with the other folks on your team and do all that brainstorming and idea-sharing and also see projects through the end that required some kind of regular touch point in an office.

Sarah Walzer:

I had started to learn it because we have these amazing state directors who are around the country and they were doing amazing work, but also that our folks in New York were able to work with them very well, even though they were in different places, but the pandemic has really highlighted that. And it’s changed our thinking about hiring. It’s incredibly freeing because it enables you to think I could hire somebody anywhere in the country. So that was definitely a mistake for a long time. I think it’s been a mistake on the board as well. We did have board members who were outside of New York, but they were few and we always worried about the ability to engage with them as well as with the board members who were in New York. We’ve now held six, seven board meetings virtually. We’ve gotten incredible attendance because it’s much easier for folks to attend a virtual meeting.

Sarah Walzer:

Really good engagement, I think everybody’s been really excited about what that interaction is like, and it pushed us to think, “Okay, how are we going to engage folks, particularly new board members who are coming on, in our work when we can’t bring them to a site or bring site staff to in-person to a meeting?” So we’ve brought state directors. We’ve brought site staff virtually to board meet, to talk with board members, and I think that’s been great and really rich. So I think that’s my big organizational mistake. I think the small mistake we made at the start of the pandemic is there is such a thing as too much communication and too many meetings, and-

Julie Lacouture:

Okay. Now there’s too many meetings. I know that one. Tell me what you mean by too much communication.

Sarah Walzer:

So when we first went into virtual mode, we were sending our site staff across the country these e-blasts every week, and they got longer and longer as we like put more and more things in that. And then we started to hear from our state directors, people aren’t reading those anymore. They’re too long. They come too frequently and you’re losing the impact of the content. So every other week, shortening them, developing some specialized ones. So we send now one once a month that’s just on our data system, updates on it, glitches, fixes of glitches, reporting. So people know that’s where to go for that information. And if that’s their part of the program, they don’t have to read the other stuff that comes back. And then we also did, and this worked for some folks and not for others, but we also started putting all of that information that would have been in those weekly things up on Slack.

Julie Lacouture:

So Sarah, what’s your number one tip for someone in your position?

Sarah Walzer:

I think we’ve sort of touched on it in a couple of the answers, is it’s going back to that really being flexible about, as I just alluded to, where your workforce lives, I mean really being flexible about who you can hire and where they are based and judging that based on their ability to do the work. But I think the really important thing about how you operate an office, people come to nonprofit work because they’re passionate about the work that the particular organization they’re working for is doing. But we also know that it’s not the best paid work and that it is stressful and challenging. And the way to keep good people is to be flexible, and to create an environment where people always know that they will pick up the slack for somebody if they need to flex out for a moment because something else is going on in their lives and somebody else is going to do the same for them. So flexibility, adaptability, that, for me, has been the piece that’s kept me going, but I think also is the reason why we’ve retained staff for a long, long time. It’s kind of longer than the traditional trajectory in the nonprofit sector.

Julie Lacouture:

That’s great to hear. I think something that I’m hearing from you also about is that in that flexibility also is a real laser focus on what your purpose is. You can be flexible because you know where you need to land.

Sarah Walzer:

Yes. I think that’s absolutely right. And I think that you can’t be flexible without that, right? The flexibility works because everybody knows where they’re headed and where the organization wants to be headed, but also where their particular work is headed. And then that gets us back to the fact, and if they do their best work in pointing us in that direction at hours when I’m asleep, that’s fine, as long as we’re all calling in the same direction and getting the work done that needs to be done.

Julie Lacouture:

So Sarah, you’re 24-hours-a-day nationwide organization because you’re flexible and you’re doing virtual visits. I would imagine that’s increased your capacity for the number of families you could serve. But you tell me what’s the big idea moving forward from where you are right now.

Sarah Walzer:

Well, you hit on the big idea. The big idea is virtual and hybrid, however that emerges, provides us in this opportunity to reach so many more families in more places, but warfare was in the communities in which we’re already in. Part of what’s driving our thinking about what comes next, whenever next is, was that we all started to hear from sites that there were families they had not been able to get to enroll pre-pandemic and families they were struggling to retain pre-pandemic, families who were having difficulty making the two visits a week, who once they could do this virtually were there for every visit, couldn’t wait to enroll in the program, were really enthusiastic. And those families, many of them have now successfully completed the program, making every visit, but came out of the learning that, “Oh, this actually could work virtually.” But then that there were families we were just missing because we weren’t offering this as an alternative method of participating in the program.

Sarah Walzer:

And part of what we’re doing now is, with an outside evaluator, really trying to dig into the question of what about virtual visits worked for families? What about it worked for staff? But even more importantly, who were the families it worked so well for and why? And how do we make sure that we are offering multiple ways for families to engage with the program? Because the ultimate goal is to give as many parents as possible support in getting their children ready to have a successful school. And one of the really exciting things for us is so we currently work in 40 different languages across the country, but we’re only able in any given community to support families in the language that we’ve been able to hire staff in that community. But this may mean that the Bengali family in Madison, Wisconsin can get a visit from a Bengali home visitor in San Jose, California, because they can do it virtually.

Sarah Walzer:

That opens a whole world. It also means that families we work with who are migrant workers can stay with the home visitor in whatever community they first began home visits as they move to other communities, because they’re going to be able to continue with that person virtually. And we know the value of that relationship, and now we know that that relationship can happen, but we still are able to prioritize that that relationship happens best when it’s a person who shares a linguistic or cultural background with you, when it’s a person who you have known, whether it’s the person that you started your visits with, you’re going to get to finish your visits with them. All of those other things that we knew were important about relationship building, we now realize we can do virtually and it opens, I think, lots of room for expansion. And you are right, that an early learning specialist can visit more families, if they’re visiting them virtually because they are not driving from place to place. We’re now going to be able to do some of that work virtually, and that’s going to extend our reach. And that is incredibly exciting.

Julie Lacouture:

That is so exciting, and I cannot wait to see which other doors open for you and which ones you walk through. So thank you so much for being here. It was a real joy to talk to you.

Sarah Walzer:

Thank you, Julie. This was wonderful.

Julie Lacouture:

We have a request for you, dear listeners.

Trent Stamp:

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Julie Lacouture:

If you want to be a guest on the show, you think you have a good story and you want to share, you can email us at info@nullgoodwaysinc.com.