Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast

This week, I'm sharing a recording from a really great panel discussion that I facilitated with four inspiring nonprofit leaders who each grew their organizations to $1M and beyond: 

• Jill Eisenhard, founder and former ED of the Redhook Initiative 
• Kemi Ilesanmi, ED of The Laundromat Project 
• Steve Choi, former ED of the Min Kwon Center and the NY Immigration Coalition 
• Suzy Myers-Jackson, former ED of Opening Act

This conversation goes behind the scenes of what it actually looks and feels like to grow an organization to $1M and beyond.  They each share some of the key lessons they learned - often surprising -  on their journey to both grow as leaders and grow their 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!

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• YouTube

Today I’m talking with Alexa Kasdan, Director of Policy and Research at Demos, here in NYC. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Alexa for almost two decades. We met in the early 2000s when she was working at an incredible organization called Community Voices Heard in NYC, and I joined the board as an Ally Member. It was through Alexa, and her policy work alongside the members of CVH, that I first came to understand what participatory research and policy worked looked like in practice. And I fell in love with the model. 

So often, we talk about impact in the nonprofit sector as being on behalf of people and communities. What I love about what Alexa and I talk about today is that it offers an important reframe - how do you practice social change work in a way that engages and centers impacted people as partners in the work, rather than as subjects of the work? 

This is a great and very actionable episode about how to do social change work in a way that is more truly inclusive and equitable - whether you’re doing policy work, organizing work, or provide critical community programs or social services, there’s real gold in here for you.

Resources Mentioned

Community Voices Heard:  www.cvhaction.org 

Register for my free training, Turn Your Social Change Vision Into A Nonprofit at richiebabbage.com/visiontolaunch

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

Very rarely have I met someone as naturally gifted at resource generation as Suzy Myers-Jackson. I say resource generation, rather than fundraising, because what Suzy has spent the past 18 years doing - first as the ED of Opening Act, and more recently as a strategic consultant and coach, has been more expansive than just raising money. Did she grow her organization from $25K to a multi-million dollar organization? Yes, Did she perfect her Power of 10 campaign strategy to raise over $175K in 10 days through micro-donations, yes?  And I’m excited that she shares strategies for how to do this. 

But at the core of her fundraising prowess is a true gift for thinking expansively about how to define resources - she understands that the relationships that she builds, and the community that she grows, is the resource, and that has translated into money, time, investments, volunteers, raving supporters, advisors, partners, and transformative impact for the youth that she was working on behalf of. 

In this conversation with Suzy, she breaks down her approach to resource generation, and offers tactical advice and tools -  actionable steps you can take to improve your own resource generation. She also provides insight into the way that she thinks about fundraising more deeply, and how that is actually what made her so effective. 

Another great combo of strategy and mindset.

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

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Toya and her organization, viBe Theater Experience, for over a year now. I’ve loved watching Toya in action, as she’s taken her organization to the next level. The tremendous increases in her budget, staff & programming over the past year have been so exciting to see, as has watching her continue to carefully cultivate an internal culture that centers wellness and trust. 

That’s what I wanted to talk with Toya about - the nuts and bolts of driving for programmatic and organizational excellence while also truly centering the humanity and wellness of her team. 

So often we talk about performance evaluation as - at best, an annual ritual that we go through but don’t really use, or worse, a necessary evil that creates stress and feels like a burden to everyone involved. 

Toya and I talk about how reimagining what it actually means to evaluate performance - how we define excellence, who decides which metrics to measure and how, what we reward and how we think about incentives - How that can actually transform the whole experience of an evaluation into a vehicle for fueling growth and deepening team members’ understandings of one another. 

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

This week I’m having a really fun conversation with my good friend, Steve Choi. Steve is a lawyer, activist, organizer, political strategist, and nonprofit leader. Most recently, he was the ED of the NY Immigration Coalition here in NYC.  In the decades that Steve and I have been friends, I’ve come to understand him as a truly gifted advocate and political systems thinker & strategist. In this episode, we talk about how important it is for nonprofits - especially small and emerging organizations - to understand how they fit into the political landscape of their community, how their mission can be served by a deeper partnership with elected officials, and to bring real intentionality to deciding which levers to pull to explore and build relationships with elected officials.

Ultimately, what is exciting to me about this conversation is that it reminded me that leading and building a nonprofit that has an incredible and transformative impact - whether you have a 5 million budget or a 50K budget - means looking at all of the impact levers available and strategically choosing which ones to pull and when. Steven offers insight into how to push through the fears that can come up around working with and fundraising from electeds, we talk about the inherent power that nonprofits have, and how to lean into that, and he provides a fabulous breakdown of how to get started building partnerships with government.

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

This is week two in my series on fundraising for early-stage organizations. During this brief series, I’m bringing back some of my favorite conversations from my Fundraising Virtual Summit last year  - these are interviews with incredible folks on topics ranging from how to think about building relationships with corporations to brandraising. 

As I’ve mentioned, when I started the podcast and called it the Mastermind, I had in mind the amazing group of women that I met with as my own mastermind for years when I was an ED. They were instrumental in my growth and success as a leader, and in the growth and success of my organization. This was largely because we talked about, workshopped, and shared information on everything from how to sustain ourselves in our work - which we’ve touched on in this podcast - to how to rethink benefits so that our financial decisions were reflective of our core organizational values.  I got information that fed my mind and information that was concrete and actionable - and that combination was powerful. 

So that’s what I’m excited to do here.  This short series is heavy on the concrete and actionable!

In today’s episode, I have a great conversation with George Suttles, one of the most gifted relationship-builders I’ve ever met. This conversation about how to build relationships that translate into in-kind organizational support is a fantastic one.  

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

In today’s episode, I have a great conversation Sarah Durham,  the CEO and founder of Big Duck.  

She founded Big Duck in 1994 to help nonprofits increase their visibility, raise money, and communicate more effectively. She is also the CEO of Advomatic, which builds and supports websites for nonprofits. 

Sarah and I do a deep dive into branding - what it means and the nuts and bolts of how small and early stage nonprofits can get on the radar of donors and funders, and how they can find and use their voice to create raving fans and ambassadors for their 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!

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• YouTube

This week’s guest is very very special to me - she’s a long-time leader in the education, youth development, and nonprofit space, and she’s also my sister.

Darcy Richie is the Senior Director of Programs and Impact for Generation Citizen. I invited her to join me to talk about something that lies at the core of almost any conversation about effective leadership - communication. More specifically, I wanted to talk about the how and the why of building teams. 

I’ve taken to calling Darcy the communication whisperer. Like one of those people who can be in any situation, with any group of people, and find her way to the heart of what they are trying to communicate. She has a unique way of making people feel truly seen and heard, which is really what communication is all about, and most critically for her work, she is able to help others do that for one another. 

She’s been building and sustaining high-impact teams her entire career, starting when she was the founding principal of a charter school at the age of 25. She’s built and managed national teams, and remote teams - small intimate teams, and sprawling layered…  At the root of it, she’s excellent at communicating, and at helping build the capacity of those around her to do so effectively as well.

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

This week’s guest is Reverand Dr. Emma Jordan Simpson. Emma is the Executive Pastor at the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, NY, a writer, a social justice activist, and the Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation USA.  She has practiced leadership in many roles and in many ways over the past few decades. She and I have a frank conversation about the different ways to hold power as a leader, and about what true sustainability feels like when you’re leading an organization that is fighting for tectonic changes in the laws and policies that undergird the inequities in our country. 

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

Rhea Wong is a recovering Executive Director who now coaches other nonprofit leaders to greater fundraising success.  She is passionate about helping leaders to attract resources to fund their work because the world needs so much.  When she's not talking about all things fundraising, she can be seen walking around downtown Brooklyn with Stevie Wonder-dog and possibly performing at a stand-up comedy open mic.  She's recruiting for her next cohort for her Fundraising Accelerator which you can find at rheawong.com.  The deadline to apply is April 30.

Rhea and I have been friends for close to 15 years - we met when we were baby EDs together, growing our organizations from the ground up, figuring things out as we went along! And now, we are accountability partners - we get to hang out every week - share goals, push each other, coach one another, advise each other on our work and businesses - we’re still figuring it all out as we go along and it’s both loads of fun and extremely helpful to me as a professional.   

As part of one of our conversations, we found ourselves reflecting on our past lives as founders and EDs, and the journey that we went on to grow our organizations and to become the people who could lead increasingly bigger, more impactful organizations. We wanted to share our insights and strategies with you. 

Resources Mentioned: 
Fundraising Accelerator: www.rheawong.com
E Myth Revisited
Miracle Equation 

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