Inspired Nonprofit Leadership

Episode Description

Imagine a burning building with three people trapped in three rooms. You run to the first and free them halfway, then the second, then the third, then back to the first. You spend all your time running and never fully free anyone. That image is what split focus actually costs an organization, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

In this solo episode, Sarah walks through how to prioritize when everything feels urgent, drawing on her years as an executive director and her work coaching organizations through it.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

• Why context switching keeps you running from fire to fire without ever fully solving one

• The shortcut to prioritizing: you don't need to understand every problem before you pick the one to solve first

• Why team and money are the two problems that jump the line, and how to decide which comes first when you have both

• Where programs, technology, space, and vision fit in the order of operations, and why visioning rarely comes first

• The fire bucket, and the leadership habit of asking "is there a fire?" instead of "oh no, a fire"

Who This Episode Is For

• Executive directors who inherited a hard situation and feel pulled in five directions at once

• Leaders meeting department by department, problem by problem, without a single clear priority

• Anyone whose days feel like running room to room in a burning building

More on the subject

• Pick one priority, singular, and address it to the point that it no longer needs your focus before moving on

• If you have wrong-fit team members and a money problem, look at the people problem first, since it often frees the resources to fix the money

• Before you treat something as a fire, stop and ask whether it is actually a fire, or something you can let time and space resolve

About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri

Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human…

Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth.She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results.

Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them.

A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life.

Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey.

Links

Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri

Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated!

Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

$20 Million in Grants, Suddenly Gone: How One Nonprofit Survived

A year ago, a single nonprofit had $20 million in federal grants on the books. Three awards from three different agencies. By every conventional measure, the funding base looked strong. Then federal priorities shifted. All three grants were eliminated. The organization went from 30 staff to 18 in a matter of months, but they are still standing. That nonprofit is From Prison Cells to PhD, and its founder, Dr. Stanley Andrisse, is the guest on this week's episode of Inspired Nonprofit Leadership. The story has stayed with me, and this article is where I want to go deeper on the part of it that most fundraising conversations skip.

The part most people focus on is the funding loss itself. That is the dramatic surface. The part that actually explains why this organization is still standing, and rebuilding faster than most would, sits one layer underneath. Their grant portfolio was huge, but every single dollar of it was aligned to their core mission. There was no program built to chase money that drifted from what they exist to do. When the grants disappeared, what was left was a smaller version of the same organization, not the wreckage of a stretched and confused one.

That is the lesson I want to draw out here. Diversified funding gets the headlines in nonprofit strategy conversations. Mission alignment gets less airtime. The truth is, neither one works without the other. An organization with five revenue streams and a sprawl of mission-drifted programs is just as fragile as an organization with one revenue stream and a tight mission. The combination matters, and the combination is what makes a nonprofit shock-resistant.

Mission Creep Is The Hidden Cost Of Grants

Most leaders I work with know about mission creep in the abstract. They have heard the warning. Where it actually shows up is in the language of a grant application. A funder wants outcomes the organization does not currently produce. A funder wants a population the organization does not currently serve. A funder wants a program design the organization does not currently run.

The grant is large. The deadline is short. The board is anxious. The cash flow is tight. The leader makes a small adjustment to fit the application. The grant lands. A program gets built around the requirements. Six months in, the staff is running a workstream that no one in the organization is particularly proud of, but the money is keeping the lights on, so it stays.

Multiply that pattern by three or four grants over five years, and the organization no longer looks like itself. The mission statement on the website has not changed, but the actual portfolio of work has drifted significantly. From the inside, leaders rarely notice. They are too close to it. The drift only becomes visible when something forces them to subtract.

This is the trap. Grants do not just bring in money. They bring in shape. Every restricted grant is a small set of constraints applied to the organization. A few of those constraints, aligned to the mission, sharpen the work. A lot of them, applied without discipline, distort the work into something else.

What Mission Alignment Actually Protects

When From Prison Cells to PhD lost $20 million in a single year, the organization did not face the second crisis that usually follows a funding crisis. The second crisis is the realization that half of what you have been doing was never really the work you wanted to do, and now you have to dismantle programs that staff and stakeholders are emotionally attached to in addition to surviving the revenue gap.

Because every grant had been mission-aligned, the response was straightforward. Smaller staff. Same work. Same scholars. Same outcomes at a smaller scale. The organization could be honest about what it was paring back without having to defend choices made to chase prior funders. There were no orphaned programs to wind down. There was no donor narrative to untangle. The proportional scale-back was clean.

This is what mission alignment actually protects. It protects the speed of your response in a crisis. It protects the morale of your team. It protects your credibility with the funders you still have, because the work that survives is recognizable as the work you have always done.

And it protects your ability to rebuild, because the case for support stays consistent. You are not selling a new version of yourself to new donors. You are inviting them into the version that has always been there.

Diversification Is The Other Half Of The Equation

A mission-aligned organization that has built only one funding pipeline is still fragile. When that pipeline cuts off, the response is still hard. The work stays clear, but the resources to do it disappear. This is where the funding cake framework comes in.

I use this language with clients all the time. Major donors are the base layer of the cake.

They give unrestricted. They stay for life. They refer their friends. They are insulated from political swings because their decision is personal, not policy-driven. Individual donors at lower giving levels are the next layer. Corporate sponsorships, where they fit, are another layer. Planned giving sits with the major donor layer. Grants are the icing.

Icing is wonderful in the right proportion. It is also the most exposed layer of the cake. It melts under the wrong heat. Organizations that treat grants as the foundation are running a cake made of icing, and the first political shift becomes an existential event. Organizations that treat grants as one accelerant among several can lose a major grant and stay upright.

From Prison Cells to PhD did not have only grants. They had foundation relationships. They had city and state partnerships. They had philanthropic supporters who had given before and gave again. The grants were significant, but they were one layer in a stack. When that layer disappeared, the stack got shorter, not flat.

Why The Two Pieces Have To Move Together

This is the part I want every nonprofit leader reading this to take away. Mission alignment without diversified funding is admirable but exposed. Diversified funding without mission alignment is broad but distorted. The combination is what produces an organization that can take a hit and keep going.

Picture the inverse of From Prison Cells to PhD's experience. Imagine an organization that took the same $20 million in grants, but each grant required a slight pivot, a new population, a new methodology, a new geography. When the grants disappear, that organization does not just lose revenue. It loses the programs the grants were funding, programs that were never quite the work the organization exists to do, programs that other funders will not back because they do not fit the brand of the organization either.

The rebuild from that position takes years. The rebuild from From Prison Cells to PhD's position takes months, because the foundation underneath was always intact.

Mentorship was another thread that came up in the conversation, and it deserves a mention here. Dr. Andrisse's own story turns on a mentor who saw a capacity in him that nothing in his environment was reinforcing. That same posture, applied at the program level, is part of what makes the organization's work effective. It is not separate from the funding story. The organizations that hold their mission tight enough to attract long-term funders tend to be the same organizations that hold their participants tight enough to produce real outcomes.

Identity discipline at the leader level shows up as program discipline at the participant level and as funding discipline at the development level. It is the same muscle.

What This Means For Your Next Grant Decision

The practical implication is uncomfortable, because it asks leaders to leave money on the table sometimes. When a grant application asks you to describe work you do not actually do, the right answer is usually no. When a grant requires a population shift or a methodology shift that pulls you off your core, the right answer is usually no. When a grant requires you to invent a program to fit the funder's interests, the right answer is almost always no.

The leaders who get this right tend to share a habit. Before applying for any significant grant, they ask one question. If this funder disappeared tomorrow, would this program still belong inside our organization? If the answer is yes, the grant is aligned. The work compounds. The grant lands and strengthens the organization. If the answer is no, the grant is a trap dressed up as a windfall. The work distorts. The grant lands and weakens the organization's center.

This discipline is hard in the moment. The deadline is short. The cash flow is tight. The board wants the win. The discipline is also what produces the From Prison Cells to PhD outcome instead of the cautionary tale outcome.

What Becomes Possible

When mission is the filter and funding is the stack, the leader stops running the organization in reactive mode. There is room to say no to grants that distort the program. There is room to build the slower, deeper donor relationships that produce unrestricted gifts. There is room to develop staff into leadership rather than burning them out chasing the next application. There is room to take a $20 million loss and still be standing, smaller, but recognizable, and ready to rebuild on the same foundation that has always been there.

The work is still hard. The mission is still complex. The world is still unpredictable. What changes is that the organization is no longer fragile. It can take a hit. It can take three hits. It can keep going.

This isn't about doing less work.

It's about doing work that compounds.

Nonprofits can survive losses that would close other organizations.

They can rebuild faster than seems possible.

They can stay recognizable to themselves through hard seasons.

Not by pushing harder, but by holding the mission steady and building the stack underneath it.

About the Guest

Dr. Stanley Andrisse is an endocrinologist, scientist and assistant professor at Howard

University College of Medicine is researching type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance.

Dr. Andrisse is a visiting faculty at Georgetown University Medical Center, held a visiting

faculty position at Imperial College London, and held an adjunct professorship at Johns

Hopkins Medicine after completing his postdoctoral training. Dr. Andrisse completed his PhD at Saint Louis University and his MBA and bachelor's degree at Lindenwood

University, where he played three years of collegiate football.

Dr. Andrisse's service commitments include: Executive Director and Founder of From

Prison Cells to PhD, Vice President of the board for the Formerly Incarcerated College

Graduates Network, board member on The Endocrine Society, past president of the

Johns Hopkins Postdoctoral Association, founder of the Diversity Postdoctoral Alliance,

member of several local and national committees, motivational speaker, and

community activist.

Connect with Stanley: Breaking Chains, Building Futures: Pathways to Redemption, Education, and Excellence — Amazon link

• Facebook: @Prof.Andrisse

• Instagram: @dr_andrisse

• LinkedIn: Dr. Stanley Andrisse

• X (Twitter): @Dr_Andrisse

From Prison Cells to PhD (P2P) Website: www.fromprisoncellstophd.org

• Facebook: @fromprisoncellstophd

• Instagram: @prison2pro

• LinkedIn: From Prison Cells to PhD

• X (Twitter): @prison2pro

• TikTok: @prison2pro

• YouTube: From Prison Cells to PhD

Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated!

Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

Episode Description

The right team is the thing nearly every organization comes back to, whatever else they're working on. Funding, scale, board questions, they all run through the people in the seats.

And the way to get the right people is to hire well.

In this episode, Sarah shares four tips for better hiring, drawn from her own process and the work she does with the organizations she coaches.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

• Why building a list of people you'd love to work with before you ever have an opening, and how a name you noted years ago can become your next great hire

• How to write a job post that reads like a love letter to your ideal candidate instead of a dull list of requirements

• Why the job post title works like a headline, and how to study other postings to make yours stand out

• How a 90-day trial period protects both you and the new hire

Who This Episode Is For

• Leaders who want a stronger, more intentional hiring process • Anyone who has held onto a hire that wasn't the right fit longer than they meant to • Anyone who thinks this episode doesn't apply because they aren't hiring right now

About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri

Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human…

Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth.She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results.

Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them.

A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life.

Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey.

Links

Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri

Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated!

Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

The Resource Problem Most Nonprofits Mistake for a Funding Problem

Ask any nonprofit leader what their organization needs most, and you will hear the same answer almost every time. More money. We need more funding. We need to hire. The whole nonprofit resource problem, in their telling, comes down to a number that is too small.

I have worked with hundreds of organizations, and I have stopped taking that answer at face value. Not because leaders are wrong about feeling stretched. They are absolutely stretched. But when you peel back the layers, the constraint is rarely the money itself.

It is the system nobody built. The process nobody owns. The skill gap nobody named. The tool the team already has and does not use.

When those things are missing, leaders do the most natural thing in the world. They compensate with effort. And then they reach for funding to buy their way out of a problem that money was never going to solve.

I've been thinking about this lately

I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Andrea Ortega, the founder of Palante Nonprofits, and it sharpened how I think about what actually holds organizations back.

Not because the idea was new to me, but because she named the mechanism so cleanly. When an organization says it needs more funds, what it usually needs is to look underneath that statement and find out what is really going on.

The funding answer is a symptom, not a diagnosis

Here is what happens inside most organizations. A program is overwhelmed. The work is piling up. Someone says we need to hire. To hire, we need more money. So the leader goes looking for grants.

But hiring is a solution to a specific problem, and that problem is usually not the one in front of you. The pile of work might exist because the process has no owner. It might exist because a system that should take thirty seconds is taking five hours by hand. It might exist because two people are doing the same task and neither knows it.

Throw money at that and you get a bigger version of the same mess. You have simply hired someone to keep doing the thing the system should be doing.

The clearest example I see is fundraising itself. An organization comes to me and says we have a fundraising problem. We do not bring in enough money. So I ask one question. Who is in charge of fundraising? And often the answer is no one. Nobody owns it. There is no fundraising system, no plan, no person accountable for making sure the money comes in. That is the core of the funding problem, and no grant is going to fix it.

When systems are unclear, people compensate with effort

This is the pattern underneath almost every "we need more money" conversation. When the system is clear, people follow it and the work flows. When the system is unclear, people fill the gap with their own time, energy, and heroics.

That works for a while. It is also the fastest route to burnout, because the organization is running on individual effort instead of designed structure. The more unclear the system, the harder everyone has to work just to stay in place. Leaders read that exhaustion as a sign they need more hands. Sometimes they do. More often they need the work to be designed so it does not eat people alive in the first place.

The reframe is simple to say and harder to live. Before you hire, look at your systems. Before you buy, look at your processes. Before you assume you need more, find out what you already have and whether it is working.

You already own more capacity than you think

One of the most useful things Andrea named is how much capacity organizations already have sitting unused. Most nonprofits qualify for free or deeply discounted versions of Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Inside those tools are project management features, internal sites, shared calendars, document collaboration, and automation that organizations pay other vendors hundreds of dollars a month to replicate.

The tool is already there. The license is already paid. What is missing is the knowledge of how to use it and the discipline to actually adopt it.

This is where the real cost of a tool hides. The sticker price is the smallest part. The expensive part is the time and energy it takes your team to adopt it. A platform that costs three hundred dollars a month and makes everyone's life harder is not a deal. A free tool nobody learns to use is not a deal either. The return on a tool is not in buying it. It is in adopting it well.

One line from that conversation has stayed with me:

"We tend to fix a lot of problems with people. And then it's always, we need more funds because we need to hire. But if you peel back the layers, it's your systems, it's your process, it's a skill gap with the people you currently have."

What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. The funding request is real, but it is pointing at the wrong target. When you trace the overwhelm back to its source, you almost always land on a design problem, and design is something you can fix without waiting for a single new dollar to arrive.

Adoption is the real work, not the purchase

Here is the part most organizations skip. Buying the tool feels like progress. Adopting the tool is the actual work, and it takes far longer than anyone budgets for.

Real adoption can take months. It means deciding the tool is essential for every person who touches it. It means training, and training again. It means watching where people get stuck and smoothing those spots. It means building the onboarding so the next hire learns the system instead of inventing their own workaround. Without that, you spend the money, see no return, and conclude the tool does not work. The tool was fine. The adoption never happened.

This is why the smart move with anything new is to pilot it. Pick one thing. Roll it out to a small group. Watch how people respond. See where the friction is. Offer the support that gets them over it. Once it clicks for one team, you have proof, and proof beats convincing every time. Then you can take on something harder.

Build the plumbing before you scale the bill

The thread running through all of this is sequencing. Organizations reach for the expensive, visible solution before they have built the quiet infrastructure that makes it work. They buy the platform before they have the process. They hire before they have the system. They chase the grant before anyone owns the function the grant is supposed to fund.

Build the plumbing first. Get the process clear. Make sure someone owns it. Use what you already have, fully, before you assume you need more. Then, when you do add money or tools or people, you are adding them to a structure that can actually hold them.

What this makes possible

When a leader sees this clearly, the panic around money settles. The question stops being how do we get more and becomes what do we already have that we are not using well. That is a question an organization can answer this week, without a single new dollar.

The work does not get smaller. It gets lighter, because effort stops leaking out of unclear systems and starts flowing through designed ones. People stop compensating with heroics. The organization stops running on exhaustion. And the money conversation, when it comes, lands on a foundation strong enough to make the money matter.

The bottom line

This is not about doing less.

It is about doing work that compounds.

Nonprofits can have enough. They can use what they already own. They can grow without buying their way out of every problem.

Not by chasing more before the foundation is built, but by making what they have work first.

About the Guest

Andrea Ortega, PhD, is the Founder and CEO of Palante Nonprofits, LLC, a consulting practice that strengthens systems, strategies, and leadership capacity for mission-driven organizations. She guides nonprofits through strategic planning, compliance, and sustainable growth, bringing both academic expertise and real-world experience to her work.

With a PhD in Public Affairs specializing in Nonprofit Management and Compliance. Dr. Ortega offers deep knowledge in nonprofit finance, governance, and capacity building. A Colombian-American and proud #Gator and #Knight, she is committed to making compliance and technology accessible so nonprofits of all sizes can thrive.

Connect with Dr. Andrea

• Website & Resources:https://linktr.ee/palantenonprofits

• Instagram: @palantenonprofits

• LinkedIn: Palante Nonprofits LLC

• Podcast on Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2345463/episodes

• Podcast on Apple: Listen on Apple Podcasts

Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated!

Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

Why Your Nonprofit Can't Afford to Outsource Its Own Capacity

There is a moment that arrives in almost every mission-driven organization. You build something that works. A program, a platform, a process. It depends on one person, one vendor, one funder, one system that only one set of hands understands. And for a while, that works just fine.

Then that one thing disappears. The developer leaves. The funder pulls out. The grant ends. The person who knew how everything fit together walks out the door. And suddenly the thing you built is not just struggling. It is locked. You cannot get in. You cannot fix it. You cannot move.

This is not a story about bad luck. When an organization's capacity lives entirely outside its own walls, a single disruption becomes an existential threat. That is a question of nonprofit technology capacity, and it is structural. When the systems your mission depends on are owned by someone else, you are not running an organization. You are renting one.

The Source of This Thinking

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Chris Conlee, and it sharpened how I think about what actually creates staying power in nonprofits. Not because the ideas were new, but because they explained why certain approaches hold up over time.

Outsourced Capacity Is a Structural Vulnerability

Here is the pattern I keep seeing. A heart-first leader has a real idea. They do not have the technical skill to build it, so they hire it out. They find a vendor, sign a contract, and hand over the keys. The thing gets built. It even works.

What they have actually done is create a dependency they cannot see. The code, the logins, the design files, the institutional knowledge of how it all connects, all of it lives somewhere else. As long as the relationship holds, nobody notices the risk. The risk is invisible right up until the moment it is the only thing that matters.

This framing adds risk because it hides the cost. You feel like you saved money by not building in-house. What you actually did was move the most fragile part of your organization outside your own control and hope nothing ever happened to it.

When the disruption comes, and it always comes eventually, the bill arrives all at once. You are locked out of your own work. You have already spent more than you raised. And you are facing a choice between starting over and shutting down.

Heart-First Is Not the Problem

Let me say something clearly, because heart-first leaders carry too much shame about this already. The nonprofit sector is full of people who led with their hearts and figured out the systems later. Very few of them woke up one day and decided to become a nonprofit CEO and then went to school for it. They saw a need. They moved toward it. The leadership skills and the systems came second.

There is nothing wrong with that order. The mission should come first. The trouble is what happens when the heart builds something real and then never circles back to build the foundation underneath it.

You cannot run a complex business model on heart alone forever. At some point the moving parts multiply, the dependencies stack up, and the gap between what you care about and what you can actually control becomes the thing that breaks you. The answer is not to care less. It is to build the plumbing first, so the thing you care about has something solid to stand on.

The Single Point of Failure Is Always a Design Choice

When you rely on one developer, one platform, one funder, you have made a design choice, whether you meant to or not. You have decided that the survival of your organization rests on something you do not control.

Most leaders never decide this consciously. It happens by default. You build the fastest way you can with the resources you have, and the fastest way almost always means leaning hard on a single source. Speed feels like progress. The hidden cost is concentration. The same logic shows up in budgets, which is why I think of underfunding as a design choice rather than an accident.

The work of leadership is to look around the corner before the corner arrives. Where is your organization dangerously concentrated right now? One major donor who covers half your budget. One staff member who is the only one who knows how payroll runs. One vendor who holds the keys to the system your whole program depends on. These are the questions that separate organizations that last from organizations that get one bad season and disappear.

The Mechanism, Named Plainly

One line from that conversation has stayed with me:

"It's not that you need to use AI to stay ahead, because it's now sort of expected. If you're not using AI, you're just by default behind."

What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. The ground has shifted. The tools that used to require a hired specialist and a five-figure budget are now within reach of a determined leader with the right guardrails. The barrier that justified outsourcing your capacity is mostly gone. When you keep outsourcing anyway, you are paying the old price for a problem that no longer requires it.

Owning Your Capacity Changes What You Can Survive

When Chris rebuilt his organization's app himself, the thing that changed was not the app. It was the relationship between the organization and its own infrastructure. A user reports a bug. He opens the logs. He fixes it in minutes, in-house, without waiting on anyone twelve time zones away.

That is what owning your capacity buys you. Not perfection. Things still break. Owning your capacity means that when something breaks, you can fix it. The difference between an organization that survives disruption and one that does not is rarely the size of the disruption. It is whether the organization can respond without being locked out of its own work.

This is true far beyond app development. The same logic applies to your donor data, your financial systems, your program delivery, your knowledge of how the whole thing runs. Wherever a single external dependency holds your mission hostage, you have found the place that will break you first.

What This Makes Possible

When a leader sees this clearly, the relationship to technology stops being a source of dread. The fear of the system breaking, of the vendor disappearing, of being locked out, that fear comes from not owning the thing your mission depends on. Build the capacity inside the organization and that weight lifts.

What you are left with is an organization that can absorb a bad season without collapsing.

One that fixes its own problems instead of waiting on someone else to find the time. One that can take the expertise it already holds and put it in front of the people who need it, at a scale that actually moves the needle. That is what staying power looks like. It is built, not hoped for.

Closing

This isn't about doing more.

It's about owning what your mission depends on.

Nonprofits can control their own systems. They can fix their own problems. They can scale the expertise they already have.

Not by hiring it all out and hoping it holds, but by building the capacity to stand on their own.

About the Guest

Chris Conlee is my guest for this episode.

Chris is an Army veteran and a long-time Hollywood film editor who traded the red carpet for the server room to build something that matters. After a series of "perfect storm" disasters—including a total industry shutdown and losing our lead developer—I spent six months teaching myself to code with AI to rebuild PIFster from the ground up.

My wife Shashana and I now run this community of micro-donors, where we prove every day that a bunch of people giving just $1 a month can collectively change the life of an "underdog" charity. When I'm not in the code, I'm likely at our home in East LA, which we've turned into a bit of a sanctuary for local street rescues.

Connect with Chris:

• Website: ChrisConlee.com (Personal)

• Website: imdb.com (Other)

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chris-conlee-editor

Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated!

Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

Most nonprofits are walking into 2026 making the same three fundraising mistakes that quietly sank them in 2025. None of the three look like mistakes from the inside. They look like prudence. They look like stewardship. They look like the responsible thing to do when reserves feel thin and the board is anxious. They are actually the most expensive habits in the sector.

In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down the three patterns that drain nonprofit fundraising power, why scarcity mindset masquerades as good financial management, the difference between spending money and investing it, and the three leadership moves that shift a whole organization into a culture of abundance. She uses the dam metaphor a client gave her, walks through what return on investment really means at the line-item level, and lands on what it takes from a leader to hold the line while the board and staff catch up.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

• What the scarcity mindset actually is, where it comes from, and why it is more common in nonprofits than anywhere else

• Why hoarded money loses value the longer it sits, and why flow matters more than balance

• The difference between spending money and investing it, and the one question to ask before every expense

• Why do stability mode and growth mode call for different financial postures

• The three specific moves that build a culture of abundance in your organization

• What to do when your board pulls everyone back toward scarcity, and how long the shift actually takes

Who This Episode Is For

• Executive directors sitting on reserves and wondering why the organization feels stuck • Nonprofit leaders heading into 2026 budget planning who want a different financial posture this year • Founders and CEOs trying to shift their team out of a culture of saving and into a culture of growing • Boards that are unintentionally reinforcing scarcity through their financial decisions

Practical takeaways:

• Before saying no to an expense, ask what the return on this investment would be, not what it costs • Audit one place this week where your organization is hoarding instead of investing • Lead with abundance language in your own spending first, then bring it into your leadership conversations • Hold the line when others slip back into scarcity, and expect to repeat yourself a lot before it sticks • Decide whether your organization is in stability mode or growth mode, and let that decision drive how you treat reserves

About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri

Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human…

Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth.She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results.

Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them.

A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life.

Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey.

Links

Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri

Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated!

Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

Strategic Planning as a Rhythm

Most nonprofits I talk to are not avoiding strategic planning because they don't believe in it. They're avoiding it because the process is heavy, the resulting document is long and hard to act on, and six months later it feels out of date.

So they wait. They wait until something forces the conversation. A new executive director. A board crisis. A funder asking for it. By the time planning starts, the stakes feel enormous, the calendar feels short, and the team feels exhausted before the first meeting. They waited so long, planning is an extra activity that requires planning to plan. The plan that comes out of that environment is almost always too rigid, too future-locked, and too disconnected from the work people are actually doing.

This is the structural pattern. Strategic planning for nonprofits gets framed as an event. A rare event. Rare things carry pressure. Pressure makes the process worse, which confirms everyone's belief that planning is painful, which makes the next planning cycle even longer to start.

The whole loop is fixable. The fix is not a better planning process but a better planning rhythm.

A recent podcast interview with Sophia Shaw left me thinking not just about how to do strategic planning well, but what actually creates staying power in a strategic plan.

A Plan as a Compass, Not a Roadmap

The mental model most nonprofits inherited for strategic planning is the roadmap. You start here. You end there. You draw the route. You follow it.

A roadmap is built for a destination that is completely knowable and a route that is predictable. But most nonprofits are can't follow a predictable route to well known destination. Most nonprofits are pioneering, forging a path to an imagined, but not fully knowable destination.

When pioneering, a compass is much more useful.

A compass is different. A compass tells you the direction. It does not tell you the exact route. When the terrain changes, you keep the direction and find or create a new path. The plan still works, because the plan was never about the path. It was about where you're trying to go.

In short:

• A roadmap locks in the route. A compass locks in the direction.

• Nonprofit terrain changes constantly. Your plan has to be built for that.

• The work of planning is choosing the direction clearly enough that you can re-route without losing it.

When the plan is a compass, leaders stop being afraid of being "wrong." They stop avoiding planning out of fear that they'll commit to something they regret. The plan becomes a tool, not a verdict.

Cadence Determines Whether the Plan Is Real

Here's the part most planning processes get wrong. They treat the plan as the product. The truth is, the cadence of revisiting the plan is the product. A beautiful 40-page plan that gets opened once a year does less work than a one-page plan that gets revisited every two months.

In my own work with organizations, I built a system where staff lead strategic planning every two months. Once a team has done it three or four times, "planning to plan" stops being a thing. The stakes are low. The plan is alive. Course corrections happen in real time, not in a year-end crisis.

Planning becomes a rhythm of re-orienting and re-confirming or refining the path and the destination.

This is what separates a plan that aligns the organization from a plan that sits on a shelf.

• The plan isn't the product. The cadence is.

• Short, frequent planning cycles lower the stakes and raise the quality.

• When planning is a habit, course correction is a small move, not a crisis.

The organizations that get value from strategic planning are not the ones with the best document. They're the ones with the shortest distance between "something changed" and "we updated the plan."

Short-Term Plans Are Healing for Teams in Crisis

There's a specific moment when a six-month or one-year plan does more work than a three-year one. That moment is when an organization is operating without sufficient resources.

When people are working in an underresourced environment, asking them to make a long term plan just adds load to an already-overloaded nervous system. A short-term plan does the opposite. It says: here is what we are doing in the next six months, here is what we are not doing, here is how we'll know we did it. That clarity stabilizes the team. The longer-horizon planning can come later, after the stabilization holds.

I think of it like getting off a tiki raft. If you're on a small raft in the open ocean, the first goal is not the destination. The first goal is getting on a bigger boat. Everything about reaching a destination feels different once you're on the bigger boat. A short-term plan focused on capacity building, is the plan to get on a bigger boat.

This is not a compromise. It is the right tool for the moment.

The Plan Is Also the Fundraising Story

A lot of nonprofits separate the planning conversation from the fundraising conversation. The planning team meets. The development team meets. The two outputs get stitched together later.

This is backwards. The plan is the fundraising story. Donors are not funding programs in the abstract. They're funding a direction. They're funding the answer to "where is this organization going and how will I know if you got there?" If the board chair on one end of the table and the executive director on the other end whisper different answers to that question, no amount of donor stewardship will close the gap.

I have watched organizations get major unrestricted gifts almost casually, after the leader simply got clear on the direction and started saying it out loud. One conversation about the vision, one week later, a letter for $100,000 a year for three years. That was not a fundraising win. That was an alignment win, with a check attached.

• Donors fund direction, not activity.

• Misalignment between the board and the executive director is a fundraising leak.

• Clarity at the plan level shows up as ease at the donor level.

When the plan is clear and the team is aligned, fundraising stops feeling like persuasion. It feels like an invitation.

Gathering the Data Should Not Be A Part of the Planning Process

One thing that makes frequent planning hard to imagine for many folks is that they have been told that in order to generate a great plan, they need to gather data from stakeholders: the community, the team, the board, etc. This makes the process of planning very laborious, but there's something even more important going on here, and this should have your alarms going off like crazy. The fact that this data collection needs to happen for strategic planning means that data collection is not happening as a regular part of identifying whether or not programs are running as well as they can. It means that conversations and other forms of data collection to understand what the community needs and what donors want to support and what makes them feel invested are not a routine part of operating. This is a problem in how many non-profits operate:

• collecting data about the impacts of your programs

• collecting data about the needs of the people you serve

• collecting data about how your donors are responding and how to communicate with them better

These should be part of daily operations, just like bookkeeping.

Yes, strategic planning is a time to review data and analyze trends to inform decision making, but if you don't already have this data being collected as a regular part of operating, then your plan should include increasing your capacity so that you begin doing that.

What Shifts When You Treat Planning as a Rhythm

When leaders stop seeing planning as an event and start running it as a rhythm, several things change at once.

What shifts:

• Planning stops being scary, because no single planning session is high-stakes.

• The plan stops being a document and starts being a tool the team actually uses.

• The board moves up to governance and out of operations.

• Fundraising gets easier, because the story is already clear.

• The executive director stops being the single point of strategic memory.

None of this requires a heavier process. It requires a lighter, more frequent one.

About the Guest

Sophia Shaw is my guest for this episode. Sophia is the co-founder of PlanPerfect, an expert-powered, AI-assisted software tool helping small- and mid-sized nonprofits create, review, implement, track, and report on strategic plans. With decades of experience as a successful nonprofit CEO, trustee, board president, donor, volunteer, consultant, and professor of social impact.

Sophia has a deep understanding of how to maximize the power of a nonprofit.

Connect with Sophia: Website - https://www.planperfect.co

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/planperfect/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/people/PlanPerfect/61571149295408/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/planperfect_strategy/

Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated!

Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

Episode Description

Most nonprofit leaders are running a calendar built out of obligations they accepted on autopilot. The board asks. The donor meeting. The standing call that has been on the schedule for so long nobody can remember why. The week fills up, and the week after that, and the work that actually energizes the leader gets squeezed into whatever is left. Which is usually nothing.

Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through how to design a schedule around energy and alignment, drawing on the way she has run her own organization on roughly sixteen hours a week for a decade.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

• Why every yes on the calendar is also a no to something else, even when nobody names it out loud

• The exercise of designing your week, starting from what energizes you, not from what is already on the calendar

• Why blocking the time you actually want is step one, and figuring out how to make it work is only step two

• What happens to output when leaders move into the work that fits, and why energy is a multiplier on time

• The line between obligation and alignment, and how to tell which one is driving a given commitment

Who This Episode Is For

This episode is especially helpful for:

• Executive directors whose calendars are full but whose mission is not advancing at the pace they want

• Nonprofit leaders heading into a new quarter or year and ready to set the rhythm differently

• Leaders running on willpower instead of structure, who suspect the schedule itself is the problem

• Anyone who has ever said yes to a recurring commitment and then resented it every time it landed on the calendar

About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri

Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human…

Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth.She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results.

Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them.

A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life.

Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey.

Links

Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri

Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated!

Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

The Underfunding You Accept Is a Design Choice, Not a Destiny

There is a belief running quietly through most of the nonprofit sector. It says that being underfunded is just part of the deal. That if you chose this work, you also chose to do it with too little money, too few people, and salaries that would never fly in the for-profit world.

That belief feels like realism. It is actually a design choice.

When the rules that govern your funding are unclear, unfair, or built by people who have never done your work, the organizations living inside those rules compensate. They compensate with effort. They compensate with unpaid hours. They compensate by paying staff so little that the staff themselves would qualify for the services the organization provides. Nonprofit financial sustainability does not fail because leaders aren't trying hard enough. It fails because the systems shaping the money were built badly, and most leaders treat those systems as fixed.

They are not fixed. They were designed. And anything that was designed can be redesigned.

The Conversation That Sharpened This

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Charity Fain, and it sharpened how I think about what actually creates staying power in nonprofits. Not because the ideas were new, but because they explained why certain approaches hold up over time while others quietly collapse.

Underfunding Is Downstream of Rules Someone Else Wrote

Here is the part most leaders miss. The reporting requirements, the admin caps, the grant structures that make no sense on the ground, none of those are facts of nature. They are decisions. Someone sat in a room and decided that 10% of a grant could go to admin, and then defined admin so broadly that it swallowed the actual cost of the work.

That decision becomes your reality. You receive the grant, you read the rules, and you think, whoever designed this has no clue what it takes to do this work.

You're right. They usually don't.

The mistake is stopping at frustration. The structural move is recognizing that the people writing those rules are reachable. They are sitting in committees, rulemaking processes, and advisory groups, and most of those rooms are starving for the exact knowledge your organization holds. They need what you know, even when they don't know it yet.

When you treat funding rules as weather, you adapt to them. When you treat them as decisions, you start influencing them.

Get In The Room Before The Rule Is Written

The leaders who change their funding landscape do one thing differently. They stop waiting for the grant to show up and start shaping the grant before it exists.

That means putting yourself and your staff on every committee you can find. It means sitting in rooms where you are not the technical expert, saying plainly, I don't know this part yet, and I will learn it, and you don't know what low-income households actually need, so we are going to teach each other. It means being willing to be a beginner in someone else's domain in order to be the expert in your own.

This is slower than writing another grant application. It is also the only thing that changes what the applications ask for in the first place. Influence happens before the rule is written, not after the grant is awarded, and the payoff is structural. You change what future funding looks like, not just what you receive this cycle.

Charity put it more bluntly than I would have. As she described getting her staff onto policy committees, she said:

"I just really wanted us to be sitting in those groups that were making decisions so that people had to listen to us."

What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. Visibility inside decision-making rooms is not networking. It is infrastructure. When your organization is consistently present where the rules get made, your reality becomes part of the design input, and the rules start to fit the work instead of fighting it.

Your Staff Are Part Of The Community You Serve

There is a second belief that quietly drains nonprofits, and it is even more damaging than the first. It says that because you are a nonprofit, you shouldn't make money, and neither should the people who work for you.

The truth is, you cannot uplift a community while keeping the people who serve it in poverty. Your staff are not separate from your mission. They are inside it.

When a leader decides to pay well, the usual fear is that expenses are now permanently higher with nothing to show for it. That fear is loud, and it is wrong. Paying people properly reduces turnover. It attracts more qualified people. It keeps the talented person who would otherwise do the math and leave for a sector that pays. Over time, it pays for itself, and then some.

This is not a soft, feel-good position. It is an operational one. A well-paid, stable team is a more resilient organization. Resilience is what you draw on when the hard times come, and they come for everyone eventually.

Nonprofits Are Businesses, And Harder Ones

SSomewhere along the way, the sector absorbed the idea that nonprofits are not real businesses. That if you worry about making payroll, you're doing something wrong. That you should never have to manage cash flow month to month.

Anyone who has run a nonprofit knows this is fantasy. You do worry about payroll. You do manage cash flow. And you do it inside a model that is more complex than the for-profit version, not simpler. I've written before about the things nonprofits can learn from for-profits, and the core point is this. A nonprofit is two businesses in one, a fundraising business and an impact business, each with its own audience and its own demands.

That complexity creates a specific danger. In a for-profit, if you deliver something nobody wants, the bank account drops fast and the signal is unmistakable. In a nonprofit, the signals are weak. You can run excellent programs and still struggle to raise money. You can raise plenty of money and still fail to make an impact. The feedback that tells a business something is wrong arrives late and muddy. The problems have to be hunted proactively, because they will not announce themselves.

So you have to go looking. You cannot wait for the system to tell you something is broken, because by the time it does, the damage is already done. Proactive leaders build the habit of checking their own plumbing before anything floods.

Build The Team That Outlasts The Crisis

When I ask seasoned executive directors what makes everything else easier, the answers vary. But underneath the good ones is almost always the same move. They stopped trying to be the expert in everything.

You cannot do it all yourself. You were never supposed to. The job is to build a team good enough that you can trust the finance person to know more than you about finance, and the program staff to know more than you about the program. That is the point of hiring them.

New leaders often get caught believing they have to know everything and do everything. That belief is a fast track to burnout, and burnout at the top harms the entire organization, not just the person carrying it. I've talked about this at length in why one person should never carry it all.

A real team is what gives an organization resilience. When the hard season arrives, and it always does, the organizations that hold are the ones where the load was already shared.

What Becomes Possible

When you see underfunding as a design problem instead of a fixed condition, something shifts. The frustration stops being a dead end and becomes a starting point. You stop adapting to bad rules and start influencing the rooms where they are made. Paying your people well stops feeling like a risk and starts looking like the obvious operational choice.

The weight of carrying everything alone lifts, because the team is built to carry it together.

None of this makes the work easy. It makes the work hold.

The Work That Holds

This isn't about doing less work.

It's about doing work that holds up.

Nonprofits can have enough money. They can pay people well. They can stop accepting rules that were never built for them.

Not by suffering more quietly, but by getting into the rooms, building the team, and designing the systems that make it possible.

About the Guest

Charity Fain has over 25 years of experience building stronger, more resilient communities in the US and around the world. As the Executive Director, she is responsible for overall leadership and management, ensuring financial stability and growth, setting policy positions, and advancing strategic direction with the Board.

Prior to CEP, Charity worked as Executive Director at the City Club of Portland, keeping Oregonians informed about pressing public issues. Before moving to Portland, Charity also served as the Country Director for Internews Network in Kyrgyzstan, directing a program to build stronger journalists, radio stations and public interest television. Charity has a BA in International Relations from The American University in Washington, DC and also speaks Russian.

Connect with Charity: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charity-fain-8003234/

Website: https://www.communityenergyproject.org/

Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated!

Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

Most leaders trying to scale their organization start by doing more. Longer days. More meetings. One more push to get the next milestone over the line. The ceiling shows up anyway, because a founder cannot scale herself. Growth is more in, more out. Scale is more out per unit of effort, and that math only changes when the structure underneath the work changes.

Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through the role redesign that makes scaling possible, drawing on the Impact Method framework and a decade of running her own organization on it.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

• Why working harder ends in a ceiling and what to focus on instead when the goal is true scale

• The shift from "who's in charge of who" to "who's in charge of which outcomes" and what changes once it lands

• Heads roles versus hands roles, and the rule for when heads work has to take priority over hands work

• Why the visionary and the integrator should not be the same person past a certain size, and what an integrator actually owns

• The high-level outcomes blueprint most nonprofits need: vision, optimum speed and capacity, resource optimization, and service delivery

Who This Episode Is For

• Executive directors and nonprofit founders feeling the ceiling of what one person can carry

• Leaders whose org chart was built around control rather than outcomes

• CEOs holding both the visionary and the integrator roles and noticing it's costing the organization speed

• Anyone whose team is busy but the mission is not advancing at the rate the vision requires

Practical takeaways

• List the five or six key outcomes your organization actually needs owned. Notice how many of them currently sit with you.

• For one team member this week, redesign their role from a task list into an outcome they own.

• If you are wearing both the visionary and the integrator hats, name the integrator outcome out loud and identify who could grow into it.

• Audit your last leadership meeting. Were you controlling people or moving outcomes forward?

About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri

Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human…

Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth.She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results.

Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them.

A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life.

Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey.

Links

Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri

Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated!

Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.