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, the CEO and founder of Encore.org shares what it was like to get a grant from MacKenzie Scott, and about leadership in the sector. Today we’re joined by Marc Freedman. Someone I know you’ve known for a long time, Trent.

Trent Stamp:

I’ve known Marc for several years and Encore.org has been a grantee of ours in the past and is still a grantee of ours at The Eisner Foundation. We also gave our Eisner Prize for Intergenerational Excellence to Marc Freedman and Encore.org for their efforts to bring about intergenerational solutions, not only in Los Angeles, but around the world.

Julie Lacouture:

I think of encore.org as thought leaders, but they do so many things. How would you sum up Encore?

Trent Stamp:

At its essence, they are a thought leader, but they’re also an educator, an advocator. They do run some programs themselves. But it’s a great example of a really complicated organization that has a lot of different tentacles out there, but they’re all organized around one principle. Which is trying to figure out what to do with this resource that we have with aging Americans, of people who can be warehoused or can be put to work for the betterment of not only society, but children as a whole.

Trent Stamp:

So, everything they do seems to me to be aligned with their general mission, which is, what do we do with this asset of older Americans as they age in our society? They’ve recognized that doesn’t just take one shape. It isn’t just advocacy. It isn’t just education. It isn’t just direct service. It can be all those things as long as you have one consistent message that guides all of your work.

Julie Lacouture:

Why did you want to invite Marc to be a guest?

Trent Stamp:

I wanted to talk to Marc about what it’s like to run a big complicated organization like that and to try to stay focused despite the fact that sometimes the work is a little hard to wrap your hands around. And how do you motivate a younger workforce to carry out the vision when it’s not as obvious as it is when you’re providing meals for people or providing counseling or any of those types of things. Encore’s complicated and I wanted to hear how Marc describes it and how he advocates for it and what his elevator speech is for getting others excited into their work.

Julie Lacouture:

I think before listening to this episode, people should go check out Encore.org to see a really good example of an organization that’s acting like an advocate, but then has a lot of activities and actions that all roll up into that idea and that advocacy. They’re walking the walk. They’re talking the talk. It’s not just articles. They do a lot of different things.

Trent Stamp:

Marc’s also one of those people that has received significant acclaim and accolades in the nonprofit world and yet, he’s one of the most modest and humble people that I’ve ever met. I think that’s illustrated best when we talk about how he was able to secure a grant from MacKenzie Scott. But Marc doesn’t try to convince anybody that it was because he’s a genius who found the secret way to get to the pot of gold.

Julie Lacouture:

I can’t wait to take a listen to this one.

Trent Stamp:

It’s a fun talk.

 

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Marc Freedman:

I’m Marc Freedman. I’m the founder and CEO of Encore.org.

Trent Stamp:

Thank you very much for joining us, Marc. It is a legitimate pleasure. Can you tell us a little bit about Encore.org?

Marc Freedman:

We’re a 20-year-old organization and our focus is on bringing the generations together, older and younger people, to solve problems, to bridge divides and together to create a better future for all generations.

Trent Stamp:

So what’s that look like specifically? What types of programs do you have?

Marc Freedman:

We started with a national service program, Experience Corps, which was designed to be a City Year for seniors. A way of including older people in the momentum for national service. As Experience Corps and Eisner prize winner, now run by AARP, it’s in about 25 cities around the country and mobilizes older people to help kids read by the third grade. That’s very much in the DNA of the organization. It led to a decade-long chapter in which we took one aspect of the Experience Corps experience, which is that older people never left. Unlike people in Teach For America, I know you’re a TFA alum or City Year, who our young people are passing through for a year or two. Experience Corps members stayed a decade or longer and essentially formed a second career. What we ended up calling an Encore career focused on personal meaning, but even more on service to younger generations.

Marc Freedman:

So we decided we were going to run with this Encore career idea. We spent a decade focusing on the idea of second acts for the greater good and elevate the idea through the Purpose Prize, a 10 year prize, now also run by AARP for social entrepreneurs over the age of 60 and through a program called Encore Fellows, essentially an internship for grownups who wanted to have an Encore career. But all throughout that interest in intergenerational connect was persistent. A few years ago we decided that the next chapter of our organization is going to focus entirely on bringing older and younger people together. Not only in ways that are mutually beneficial where older people are helping younger people, vice versa, but also where they can come together to help other people to bring the unique assets of the generations together in ways that created this idea of a better future.

Trent Stamp:

I should divulge at this point in the interest of transparency that Encore.org is, of course, an Eisner Foundation grantee and somebody that we have partnered with and commended and celebrated as a true intergenerational organization. One of the great leaders in the field and an organization that we bestowed our Eisner Prize on relatively recently.

Trent Stamp:

Marc, you and I have been doing this for a long time and we’ve seen the trends come and go in the sector. And you can remember that 20 years ago every board member told every staff member to have a golf tournament, because golf tournaments were going to be the way that we were all going to make money. Then maybe, five, 10 years ago, every board member told every executive director that they needed a social media person, because once we built a robust social media presence all the money would come flying in the door.

Trent Stamp:

I know today that manifest itself through everybody on every board tells every CEO, “Why don’t you go get one of those MacKenzie Scott grants?” But, you know, “Just go down there and knock on her door and get your MacKenzie Scott money and then everything will be great.” You and I both know that’s ridiculous, but Encore.org did get a MacKenzie Scott grant. Tell us how that came about.

Marc Freedman:

The true answer is, I have no idea. I got a call one day from folks at Bridgespan asking if we’d be willing to have a conversation with them because they had a donor who was looking into various organizations and, of course, I was happy to have that conversation. I had no idea whether it would lead to anything and truth be told, we periodically, maybe every few months, every six months, get requests for these kinds of conversations and they never lead to anything or maybe you get $500. So I had thought no further about it and then three weeks later I got an email from someone who said that they were following up on that initial inquiry. We talked the next day and she told us that MacKenzie Bezos, she was still MacKenzie Bezos at that point, had a long interest in the organization and had decided to give us a gift. I was in shock. She told us the amount of the gift, and I was in further shock.

Marc Freedman:

I have to admit, and I haven’t actually said this publicly before, this happened on Friday. I spent all weekend not feeling joy so much as anxiety, because it did seem too good to be true. Now we’ve heard reports that there have been people out there who’ve been impersonating MacKenzie Scott. But this turned out to be true and it’s been one of the greatest things that’s happened to the organization. But again, in the spirit of being fully forthcoming, in some ways it changed nothing for us because we had just lost a grant of exactly the same size from a family foundation where there was a divorce and their grant making ended. So, in that way, if you just looked at the numbers, it didn’t make a transformational difference.

Marc Freedman:

Yet, at the same time it changed everything. I have a hard time putting my finger on what it is, but I think partly it’s a vote of confidence. We both know that in philanthropy, it’s been an uphill battle to get donors to see the importance of the work that The Eisner Foundation is so committed to and we are as well. I think we decided it was a time to really go for it, not knowing whether there’d ever be another grant along these lines. I think it injected a sense of, that we didn’t want to think of this as a way to have security so much as impetus for moving into our next chapter as an organization and really taking more risk.

Marc Freedman:

So it’s funny, because if the auditors came in and they just looked at the balance sheet it didn’t change the size of our budget at all. But it had a cultural and motivational impact on the organization and I think for those of us on the team, it really felt like a shot in the arm.

Trent Stamp:

Yeah. I’ve heard about those MacKenzie Scott impersonators. There’s a special level in hell for people who like to create false hope for people toiling in the sector. That’s just reprehensible. I’m glad that yours was real. I’m glad that it was able to fill some of the gaps in your funding and to liberate you as an organization moving forward. But it does seem that the lesson for the young executive director out there from your story is, there’s not a whole lot you can do to get such a grant other than cross your fingers, but you didn’t actively seek it out in any way.

Marc Freedman:

I’ll tell you a story. I mentioned earlier the Purpose Prize, which was probably the biggest project in terms of size in the history of the organization. We were trying to do a very small prize along the same lines to try to celebrate this growing cadre of older social entrepreneurs and we went to one foundation for a grant of about $250,000 to do that prize and they turned us down. They told us, very nicely and respectfully, but they didn’t think there was a there there, that there weren’t older people who were creative in this way.

Marc Freedman:

I got that email while changing planes at Washington Dulles Airport and before I got onto my plane, I got a call from one of my colleagues at the Templeton Foundation who told us that Atlantic and Templeton had decided to give us $10 million to do the exact same thing that we just got turned down to do for $250,000. I think it’s a kind of good news, bad news story. Throughout the history of the organization there’ve been a whole series of these idiosyncratic investments, for which we’re enormously grateful. But it doesn’t give you confidence it’s going to ever happen again because there’s really no market for the work that we’re doing. So, one of the things that we’ve been really keen on doing is to try to build up that market so it’s not an idiosyncratic call out of the blue. Because I got to say, that’s no way to live as a nonprofit organization.

Trent Stamp:

No, that’s a great point and we really appreciate that. As a funder in the intergenerational world, I feel like some of the work that you have done have opened up doors for smaller organizations who want to do similar work and they can go tell the tale that’s already been told by you and they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. So, there is strength in numbers and that’s a testament to your leadership here and we appreciate it. So the name of this podcast is, How We Run. So let’s talk a little bit about how Encore.org runs. What do you think makes it run well?

Marc Freedman:

I think the key ingredient is that I never wanted to be a CEO. It’s led to a shared leadership model in the organization and over time, fitfully, I don’t want to make it sound like there was some grand perfectly executed plan, we developed a cadre of essentially partners in the organization who have complimentary skills. There’re some things that I do well and a lot that I don’t. This group, and I never really reflected much on this, this has happened in almost kind of an intuitive way. There are really strong relationships among us and relationships of trust and people have a lot of latitude to maneuver and use their creativity.

Marc Freedman:

For example, one of my colleagues, Eunice Nichols, won the Irvine Foundation’s Leadership Award a few years ago, which is almost entirely something that’s gone to CEOs of organizations. We’ve just really tried to give people the chance to flourish. A lot of it also is that there’s a strong group of people in the organization who came out of Experience or who were forged in working at the direct service level in their program. I think the insights that came out of it had such an effect on all of us. It was a way we were on the same page.

Marc Freedman:

I really feel like we’re well-positioned for the pandemic in that way. We didn’t have a command and control leadership model, but I also think I see other organizations going in this direction too. We started out talking about Bridgespan because of the MacKenzie Scott donation, but I just saw that Bridgespan has decided to rotate managing directors every four years and the managing directors go back to being leaders in the organization. I see that as an evolving direction for the nonprofit sector. That’s basically how we run.

Trent Stamp:

So having an empowered staff like that with great leadership and the ability to do good things, it seems to me it requires some humility and some willingness to let go among the CEO. Have you always been that way or is this something that has come with age and wisdom? Could you have let the leadership go, let the empowerment begin when you were 30-years-old?

Marc Freedman:

I think I could have. Again, because I felt like I was a reluctant CEO to begin with and also I’ve ended up, like you, being labeled a social entrepreneur. I felt like I was a reluctant social entrepreneur as well. But I think the key ingredient, and I’ve only really felt this so deeply in the last maybe five, six, seven years, is just how much I trust the people around me and just recognize that they do a lot of things better. There are a few things that I do well and I try to focus on those areas. So it is like a consulting firm or a law firm where there are a lot of senior partners and you have somebody who has to make the final decision. But I do think it’s more about trust than maturity. That said, our friend Chip Conley, who started the Modern Elder Academy, says that, “One of the hallmarks of becoming a modern elder is going from can do it to conduit.”

Marc Freedman:

Just prompted by your question. I think that this shift, the can do it to conduit shift, is not only playing out in the leadership of our organization, but in the work we’re doing as well. We started out creating Experience Corps with other partners, but now we’re much more interested in being a catalyst for other innovators and a platform for other innovators to do that kind of work out of the recognition that we come up with good ideas too infrequently to bring about the big changes that are needed. But if we could build up a portfolio of talented leaders of all ages that that might be a more sustainable way of getting the work done. So, I think we’re going all in on the conduit model.

Trent Stamp:

Love it. Obviously, the world has changed dramatically in the last two years. In many ways in which we don’t need to enumerate. But I’m just curious, what’s something that you’ve done internally at Encore.org, or externally, but what is something you’ve done to adapt to the changing environment?

Marc Freedman:

There’s been so many changes and they’ve been overlapping. I think at the most organizational level we fully became a virtual organization. We were already going in that direction and it relates to your previous question. I think we decided it was more important to get the right talent in the organization over the last number of years than it was to have those people in one place. So we had already started to move in a virtual direction. We had people in a bunch of different parts of the country. The pandemic forced us to do that. It had a deep impact on that approach to work. We’ve always been an organization that’s focused on face-to-face connection between older and younger people. Going again, back to Experience Corps, there we learned to try and take advantage of a combination, a hybrid model, of face-to-face and virtual connection in the programming.

Marc Freedman:

I would say the biggest impact, most enduring one of the past year has really been to increase focus on bridging differences. It’s become so clear that that’s one of the most profound challenges facing society. We’re interested not only bridging the differences between older and younger people and building bonds there, but doing it in ways that also cross race and culture. A major new initiative that came out of the past year is around national service. One of the things that struck me, and this is something that’s come out of our conversations, is that the radical age segregation in society isn’t just in housing. It’s not just in education. It even as deeply ingrained in service. So we’ve got the AmeriCorps program, which is 95% young people and we’ve got AmeriCorps Seniors, formerly the Senior Corps, 100% older people. They’re not only coming out the same agency, they’re serving in the same community, frequently in the same buildings without ever meeting.

Marc Freedman:

I remember back in the early days of Experience Corps that we had young AmeriCorps VISTAs who became involved in the program and the bonds that formed between the older Experience Corps member and these VISTAs. One of whom was Mary O’Donnell, who’s the CEO of the RRF Foundation for Aging. We thought that there was an opportunity for systems change in national service in ways that bridge age and also oftentimes race. So, we’re launching a major initiative to bring those streams of service together in ways to bring complimentary talents of older and younger people in alignment, but also create the opportunity for deep relationships to form.

Trent Stamp:

I love it. One of the reasons that I like working with Encore.org and with you is that you and I, despite what people think, are still optimists. We still think that we can figure this sucker out and bring people together. Let’s keep it going. So I’m just curious, from your relatively successful career in the sector, can you tell us about a mistake that you or your organization made at some point and what you learned from it?

Marc Freedman:

Yeah. I would say it’s a mistake that I made at just every juncture and maybe it’s part of the optimistic inclination that you described. I think I have radically underestimated the power of inertia and of ingrained systems. Again, I’m sorry for all the going back to Experience Corps, but it did have a deep impact on me in some negative ways as well. So, the idea for Experience Corps originally was to put national service for older people on the same plane City Year and Teach For America had done for young people. We did the first five pilots in existing Senior Corps programs and they were highly successful. The research came out great. And instead of the rest of those systems embracing the Experience Corps approach, they banded together and killed all future funding. Somebody told me, “The great enemy of reform is the last generation of reform.”

Marc Freedman:

At another juncture, we started a project to try to get colleges and universities to create opportunities for older people to come back and transition from what’s less to what’s next. We felt one of the great opportunities were reunions, college reunions, people go back 30, 40 years. They’re in a reflective posture. They’re with peers. They remember when they had big dreams. What a great place to do this. So, we started a project with a bunch of alumni associations. It turns out alumni associations are really only interested in one thing, which is raising money. That project went nowhere as well.

Marc Freedman:

So, if this is a two hour podcast, I could regale you with additional cases of optimism gone awry. But I haven’t given up on either of those particular models and so maybe there’s something to be said for persistence as well.

Trent Stamp:

I love that. That’s great. I’ve asked that question of people before, and they sort of told me, “I would never change a thing.” My response, “What are you insane?” I would change 25 things I did this morning if I could, but that’s not the way we live our lives. But the idea that you would live an unexamined life where you wouldn’t change anything, I wish the best to those people because that’s just not the way the world works. So one of the questions we ask of everybody on this show is, what’s your big idea for moving forward? And how do you get there?

Marc Freedman:

As we’ve talked about many times, as anybody who’s picked up a newspaper knows, we’re in the middle of the demographic revolution which tends to get talked about in terms of people living longer. But just as powerful is that we’re moving into a much more multi-generational society. Four or five generations living, working together at the same time. Already more people over 60 than under 18. We’re spectacularly ill-prepared, not only to blunt the problems that come with that, but to take advantage of the massive opportunity that it represents. At Encore, I’m really keen on avoiding the sort of de-generation that a lot of people see. The zero-sum conflict. Okay, boomer. Okay, millennial. My obsession is this idea of co-generation. Which I know is not the most elegant word, but the idea of the generations co-creating the future, I think, is the future.

Marc Freedman:

I think there are huge opportunities for people to find a real sense of meaning and connection and generativity through that. In a way, it goes right back to the beginning of our history as an organization. I started the organization while I was in my late 20s, early 30s. I did it with an 80-year-old by the name of John Gardner, who was at the tail end of a storied career. It was through working together with John that we were able to pull this off. I would’ve never been able to do it myself. I think John was at a point in his life, he’d already implemented Medicare. He created the White House Fellows Program. Founded Common Cause. Run the Carnegie Corporation. Won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Been Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Created Independent Sector. He wasn’t going to start something new, but by coming together, we were able to create this work. So, I’m a believer from personal experience. That’s a promising way forward.

Marc Freedman:

The two problems that are standing in the way of realizing this future is a failure of imagination. Walt Disney famously said, “If you can’t dream it, you can’t do it.” So we’ve got to be able to think in different ways and then we also need to make it possible for those people who want to move in this direction to go from aspiration to action. We have a crisis of innovation in this area too. We’ve been much more creative in keeping people of different ages apart than bringing them together. I see our work going forward is to help make this idea credible and doable and that all in service of shifting the norm in society from one that’s around generations apart to generations together.

Trent Stamp:

For the younger leader’s out there, go look up John Gardner’s resume and accomplishments because it sounds like it’s a joke, right? It sounds like you just lumped in about seven different people’s career achievements into one human being. I know he would be so proud of your work as a mentee for him and I know that you pay it forward by mentoring so many other people. Touching off of that, what’s your number one tip for a young or younger CEO of a nonprofit organization?

Marc Freedman:

I’m going to go right back to John Gardner, because it’s the one piece of advice from all the years we worked together that’s stayed in my mind almost on a daily basis. He told me at one point that it’s much more important to be interested than to be interesting, and that he had spent the whole first half of his career, storied in the way you were describing, being real interesting, and he was. But he learned how to listen. I remember talking to Doc Howe, who was the Commissioner of Education, led the desegregation efforts when John was HEW Secretary and he remembered going into John’s office and John would say, “What’s on your mind?” And he really meant it. I think this practice of listening is such an incredible base for growth, for being a good mentor, and for being a good leader.

Trent Stamp:

That sounds remarkably similar to today’s best role model, Ted Lasso, who has said, “Be curious, not judgemental.” I think it’s basically the same concept.

Marc Freedman:

I’ve spent my whole life soaking up the wisdom and support of wonderful elders and now I’m realizing that the time to turn and play that elder role has come. So I’m working really hard to implement all those lessons that I learned from people like John Gardner in working with young leaders.

Trent Stamp:

Which I know is one of the great theses of your fabulous book, How to Live Forever. Which is not to actually chase living forever, but to create a legacy by passing it to the next group. I’m amazed by your optimism, by your ambition, by your relentless positivity. Thank you so much for being here.

Marc Freedman:

Thanks so much. It’s an honor. You’ve made my entire week.

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. 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. And so we will see you in a week.

Trent Stamp:

Can’t wait.