Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast

This is the third installment of my short series revisiting some of the incredible conversations I’ve had with folks as part of my Next Normal series at the beginning of this year. As so many of us continue to grapple with the implications of COVID for how we work and how we lead,  I wanted to revisit the idea of leadership in this next normal that’s being created. 

I call it the next normal because what counts as normal is always changing and evolving, the work of social impact and social justice and leadership and even the structure of nonprofits is evolving and we’re creating the next version of “normal” - hopefully, one with deeper equity and more honesty about what is broken and still left to be fixed in our world. 

This week, I’m revisiting some of the most thought-provoking and inspiring conversations I had about leading in a sustainable way - what does it mean and look like to lead in a way that both fuels us and centers and honors our whole selves? 

These conversations are with Kishishana Palmer, Chitra Aiyar, and Reverand Dr. Emma Jordan Simpson.  We talk about the weight of leadership, the spectre of mental health, and how we can and should think about sustainability as a value rather than an outcome in our lives and in our organizations.  

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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This is the second installment of my short series revisiting some of the incredible conversations I’ve had with folks as part of my Next Normal series at the beginning of this year. As so many of us continue to grapple ith the implications of COVID for how we work and how we lead,  I wanted to revisit the idea of leadership in this next normal that’s being created. 

I call it the next normal because what counts as normal is always changing and evolving, the work of social impact and social justice and leadership and even the structure of nonprofits is evolving and we’re creating a next version of “normal” - hopefully one with deeper equity and more honesty about what is broken and still left to be fixed in our world. 

This week, I’m looking at a theme that came up a bunch in the conversations: what it looks and feels like to have an equitable relationship with funders. How has that been changed by COVID, and what are the hallmarks of a true partnership. 

These conversations are with Marcella Tillett, VP of Programs and Partnerships at the Brooklyn Community Foundation, Terri Davis-Marchant,Program Director of Housing and Homelessness  at Trinity Church Philanthropies, and Robyne Walker-Murphy, EDF of the Goundswell Mural Project. 

The themes that came up in all of the wonderful conversations were: 1 - power - what it looks like in a healthy funder/ grantee relationship and in a not so healthy one; 2- how to build true partnership, and a bit of behind the scenes of funder’s perspectives; and 3 - some best practices, from the perspective of both a grantee and two very different funders. 

So this week, and for the coming weeks, I’ll be revisiting and curating a few collections of fund conversations, all around themes of leadership. My hope is that the conversations will give you some food for thought for your own leadership. 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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In reflecting on some of the incredible conversations I’ve had with folks, I wanted to revisit the idea of leadership in the next normal; to dissect it and pull apart some of the themes that my guests have unearthed about what it will mean to be an effective and whole-self leader in the world that is being rebuilt in real time, as we head out of COVID.

This week, I’m looking at one question that I found myself sitting with is about the ways in which our traditional models of leadership can fail us as actual leaders.

First, in my conversation with Tene Howard and Zareta Ricks, we talk about how leadership should reflect—at its best—who we are. What moves  us. How we are fueled.  

In my conversation with Jill Eisenhard we explore how this so often isn’t the lived experiences of EDs, particularly founders, as they grow their organizations.  If this is true - if leadership should be an expression of your values/what moves you, then why as executive directors do we find ourselves working to keep the “doors open” without actually being engaged in what made us want to start or run the organization in the first place?

My conversation with Katy Rubin explores another, perhaps more pernicious, failure of traditional leadership: the myth of singular, solitary leader out in front innovating and pulling the organization along by the sheer power of will or personality.  If funding, and program success, and strategic partnerships rise and fall on the shoulders of an individual, it’s easier not to see the very real impact of race and gender and systemic, generational power imbalances and inequities on things like access to networks and how space is taken up in a board room. 

So this week, and for the coming weeks, I’ll be revisiting and curating a few collections of fund conversations, all around themes of leadership. My hope is that the conversations will give you some food for thought for your own leadership. 

I’m also including a short download with this episode:
You can get it at richiebabbage.com/nextnormalleadershiplessons  

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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In this week’s episode, I get to have a conversation with someone I’ve wanted to talk with for this podcast for some time: ​​Heather Vickery. Heather is a celebrated public speaker and success coach that inspires audiences and supports others with the tools they need to live empowered, bold, joy-filled, and successful lives. She’s a published author and the host of The Brave Files Podcast. 

I’ve wanted to talk with Heather because the core theme of her coaching and work is one that is so central to the conversations about leadership and social impact that I have with the leaders I work with: bravery. 

Heather and I have a really wonderful conversation. We talk about the universality of fear, especially in leadership, and how to take power back from our fears, and more importantly, what it means and looks like in practice to choose bravery in response to the myriad challenges that arise in our leadership, and in social change work more broadly. 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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This week, I’m joined by Rhea Wong, my long-time friend, and multi-time guest on the podcast. Rhea and I talk all the time about the work that we each do supporting and coaching small nonprofits in the areas of fundraising and strategy, and occasionally we hit on a topic that gets us really excited. 

This is one of those topics: the messy and complicated relationship between fundraising and founders. We found ourselves talking about the oh-so-common situation that many EDs who take over from founders find themselves in in the early months of their new tenure -- the “robust” funding base of donors and supporters that they believed they were receiving,  are not there. 

I work with a lot of founders, and so I was really excited to talk with Rhea about how a leader can avoid this situation - what someone can do LONG before it’s a problem - to be intentional about their fundraising base and build a strong infrastructure that won’t collapse when they leave. The process of intentional fundraising begins years before a founder leaves, and Rhea and I have a blast discussing, debating, and even sometimes commiserating in our memory of our ED days. 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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This week I'm talking with Emily May, the co-founder and Executive Director of Hollaback,  a global, people-powered movement to end harassment. 

Emily is an incredibly thoughtful steward of the Hollaback mission, as well as one of the most incredible strategic minds I’ve known.  

In this conversation, Emily pulls back the curtain on her strategic prowess. She talks about her growth as a leader against the backdrop of the astounding growth that Hollaback has experienced in the past year: How, as a leader,  to continue to set intentions that allow you to navigate organizational growth, and how to balance vision with responsiveness to a movement or constituency. 

She also shares her story of personal growth. She talks about how so much of preparing to scale is about how we as leaders move through the world, about how a readiness to “play bigger” and lead bigger is often so much more about mindset and our own growth edges than we think. 

Finally, Emily and I vibe about the deep stuff about leadership. We talk about our shared belief in abundance as a guiding principle, about the power of the law of attraction in leadership, and about our understanding of the special kind of resilience that it takes to lead an institution. 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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This week, I'm talking with two incredible and inspirational women - Donnie Belcher and Lauren Burke -  CEO and COO respectively,  of Camp Equity. These women have, multiple times in their lives, seen a deep social problem and jumped into action - as a teacher and lawyer, as a Skadden Fellow, as Echoing Green fellows, and now together, through Camp Equity. In this conversation, we talk about what it means and looks like to be both intentional and responsive to a critical moment. 

I loved this conversation, in large part because Donnie and Lauren have rooted their organization in the values and working principles of equity. We talk about how from the beginning of Camp Equity, as they mapped out everything from their working relationship to how they would hire to how they would structure funding partnerships, equity in practice has been at the core; Not an add-on, but THE frame for decision making.  We talk about what it actually looks like for a nonprofit to try to grow that way.  

Finally, we blend the big-picture, strategic and tactical. We talk about deep issues like racial equity and systemic change and mindset gremlins, and Donnie and Lauren share highly practical, concrete strategies and lessons about fundraising, early hiring, program design, and launching a nonprofit more generally. 

Ultimately, I just deeply admire these two women. This conversation sheds light on their world-changing organization, their amazing partnership, and some of the realities of launching, doing, and living social change work. 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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In this episode, I have a wonderful conversation with Charlie Vazquez.  Charlie Vazquez is a storytelling consultant, workshop facilitator, and Buddhist meditation instructor. He’s designed and facilitated multi-sensory storytelling and wellness programs for the NYC Department of Health, New York Public Library, Bronx Council on the Arts, and PEN America, serving LGBTQI youth-of-color, undocumented immigrants, low-income communities, and senior citizens. He uses story to create transformation and lives in The Bronx.

One of the things that I have wanted to talk with Charlie Vazquez about is the relationship between storytelling, social justice, and spirituality. In his work as an artist, and meditation practitioner, as well as as an organizational consultant, he blends these seemingly disparate elements into a single practice. 

Charlie and I talk about both the why - why storytelling as a tool for advancing social justice; why the linkage between storytelling and meditation - and the how - how can an organization that is doing high-impact work improve its own storytelling? 

The throughline in the conversation is Charlie’s focus on doing work - and helping others do work - that centers our humanity in the work. His storytelling is about centering the humanity of the people impacted by - and stewarding - the work; his multisensory practice is about helping us each connect to our own humanity as a way to move through often trauma and chaos of social justice work. 

Find Charlie at CharlieVazquez.com

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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I'm joined this week by one of my oldest and dearest friends, Terri Davis-Merchant. Terri works at the intersection of affordable housing development, homelessness, policy & philanthropy as a Program Officer at Trinity Church Wall Street Philanthropies. 

This is one of the most open and frank conversations I’ve had, and about a topic that is so often opaque: Philanthropy and the inner workings of foundations.   

Terri brings to her role as a grantmaker, both a unique depth of content expertise and the critical eye of a newcomer to the field of philanthropy.  We talk about it all: 

What could foundations do better? What is their proper role vis a vis the work of their grantees? What does partnership actually mean in practice?  There’s a lot of talk these days about the responsibility of philanthropic institutions to make their grants and then get out of the way of the groups doing work on the ground, but what does that mean in practice? And how do you start and build a relationship with a foundation that leads to that type of trust?

This is a juicy episode filled with honest insights, behind-the-scenes strategy tips, and a lot of laughter. 

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

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This week's guest, Rachel Mills,  is the Founder and CEO of Harmony Consulting, and has been on a mission since she was 16-years-old to help others, help others - a personal and professional mission that just really resonates with me. For over a decade now, Rachel's been working with and creating award-winning campaigns for world-changing nonprofits such as Big Brothers Big Sisters and the United Way, helping them harmonize their fundraising and marketing strategies to create content that really propels their missions forward. 

I was excited to talk with Rachel about the nuts and bolts of content strategy for small and emerging organizations - why it’s so important, how to think expansively about the kinds of content your organization can create, the relationship between content and thought leadership and fundraising…. The big picture and the strategy!  

And we definitely talked about all of that! Rachel is a master at blending the why with the how - actionable tips grounded in solid context about the reason any of this even matters. 

But one reason I love these podcast conversations is that there are multiple layers to most things we do in the social impact world - and what we actually wound up talking about was a deeper conversation about the underlying mindset shifts that come before a leader can really begin thinking about content strategy… we had a generative discussion about how everything that we do with nonprofits, at its core, is about relationships, and about the power of storytelling to build and strengthen meaningful relationships with the people with whom we’re working to create real change in the world.

Want to work together?

Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  

Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   

Connect with me!

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• YouTube