Proof of Impact

Matthew Ayres runs one of Minneapolis's oldest and smallest food shelves — two staff, three hundred volunteers, a 110-year-old Victorian house in Uptown. Over the past year, Joyce Uptown has bounced from crisis to crisis, and in the thick of it raised and spent its entire annual budget twice over, becoming a lifeline not just for its own neighbors but for other organizations across the city.

In this conversation, host Elizabeth Kitzenberg talks with Matthew about what it means to spend everything when the moment demands it, why he refuses to save money for a rainy day when the rainy day is now, and why he's convinced a food shelf isn't really about food at all.

In this episode:

• "This was the rainy day" — the decision to spend down reserves instead of saving them
• Why a food shelf is really an income supplement, not a handout
• The honest struggle of measuring impact when all you can count is pounds and households
• Why frontline nonprofit work is skilled work — and what people get wrong about it
• Keeping your "powder dry" in a crisis, and who actually sticks around after the cameras leave
• Running a scrappy nonprofit that turns into a grant-maker overnight

A conversation about dignity, urgency, and doing the unglamorous work of showing up — long after the crisis stops trending.

🎙️ Proof of Impact is a production of Gleam Tower Media, recorded at Picnic Linden Hills in southwest Minneapolis.

📬 Connect with Elizabeth Kitzenberg on LinkedIn, or learn more about nonprofit consulting at thekitzenberggroup.com.

Most foundations are built to last forever. The Sauer Family Foundation decided to do the opposite.

Started in 1996 as a 30th-anniversary gift between Stephanie Sauer's parents, the foundation has spent nearly three decades strengthening the well-being of children and families across Minnesota. Now, rather than existing in perpetuity, the family has made the unusual and deliberate choice to spend down their resources and sunset the foundation — betting that a big impact now matters more than a smaller one stretched across forever.

In this conversation, host Elizabeth Kitzenberg talks with Stephanie about the thinking behind that decision, what it means to give from a place of trust, and why she wants more philanthropists to swing for the fences instead of playing it safe.

In this episode:

• Why the family chose to spend down and sunset rather than give 5% forever
• "To create a legacy is to plant a tree under which you will never sit" — giving for impact you may never see
• What trust-based giving actually looks like from the funder's side of the table
• Why paying for salaries and overhead isn't a compromise — it's the whole engine
• Growing up inside a family foundation, and the skills it gave her
• The proof of impact she's chasing next: mental health

A conversation about generosity, urgency, and the courage to give more than feels comfortable.

🎙️ Proof of Impact is a production of Gleam Tower Media, recorded at Picnic Linden Hills in southwest Minneapolis.

📬 Connect with Elizabeth Kitzenberg on LinkedIn, or learn more about nonprofit consulting at thekitzenberggroup.com.

Chanda Smith Baker leads the largest community foundation in Minnesota — nearly $2 billion in charitable assets, more than 9,000 grants a year — and she came to the role with a career's worth of hard-won wisdom about how change actually happens. Her answer, again and again: not by rushing.

In this conversation, host Elizabeth Kitzenberg talks with Chanda about the discipline of protecting time to think, what it means to lead a team through crisis without becoming reactive, and why the most important proof of impact is one you may never live to see.

In this episode:

• Why "urgency without being hurried" is the hardest and most necessary skill in the sector
• Protecting space to think — "balcony time," marking the calendar, refusing to let the day-to-day swallow the vision
• Leading a team through crisis while staying strategic instead of emotional and reactive
• Why she wants grantees to tell her what isn't working — and how she built the trust to hear it
• Rethinking proof of impact as generational: "Did I support the conditions that outlast me?"
• Staying proximate and staying curious as a leadership posture
• Why philanthropy has to know where it holds authority — and where it doesn't

A conversation about steadiness, humility, and leading for a future you won't be around to see.

🎙️ Proof of Impact is a production of Gleam Tower Media, recorded at Picnic Linden Hills in southwest Minneapolis.

📬 Connect with Elizabeth Kitzenberg on LinkedIn, or learn more about nonprofit consulting at thekitzenberggroup.com.

Steve Grove left a career in Silicon Valley to come home and take on one of the hardest jobs in American media: leading a nearly 160-year-old newspaper into a future it isn't guaranteed to have.

As CEO and publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune, Grove is trying to do what almost no one in the country has pulled off: transform a legacy newspaper into a thriving digital media company without losing the culture, the credibility, or the mission that made it matter. In this conversation, host Elizabeth Kitzenberg talks with him about the business of trust, the case for local news as essential civic infrastructure, and why the way most mission-driven organizations ask for support is exactly backwards.

In this episode:

• Why giving journalism away for free devalues it and how Grove thinks about what good work is worth
• The reframe at the heart of fundraising: you don't win by looking needy; you win by looking like a bet worth making
• The staggering decline of local news, and why it drives everything from polarization to voter turnout to charitable giving
• Making the hardest calls in leadership, and what it means to reinvent an institution without losing its soul
• The myth that a beloved institution's survival is somehow guaranteed
• Building a "swift, clear, and brave" culture through painful change

A conversation about ambition, reinvention, and treating the work you believe in like it's worth betting on.

🎙️ Proof of Impact is a production of Gleam Tower Media, recorded at Picnic Linden Hills in southwest Minneapolis.

📬 Connect with Elizabeth Kitzenberg on LinkedIn, or learn more about nonprofit consulting at thekitzenberggroup.com.

Maggiy Emery leads Protect Minnesota, the only statewide, independent gun violence prevention organization in the state. Her work sits at the intersection of the most contentious politics in America — and she approaches it with a clarity that's hard to look away from: this is a solvable problem.

In this conversation, host Elizabeth Kitzenberg talks with Maggiy about what most people get wrong about gun violence, why she doesn't spend her energy trying to change the minds of her fiercest opponents, and how she makes the case for funding work whose success is measured in lives that don't end.

They also talk honestly about the human cost of carrying this work — leading through the aftermath of tragedy, and what it takes to keep going when the stakes never let up.

In this episode:

• Why the story most people carry about gun violence misses the majority of it
• The strategy of organizing the 70% who already agree, instead of chasing the 5% who never will
• How gun violence intersects with nearly every other cause funders care about
• Why she refuses to charge for services that save lives — and how that shapes her funding model
• Being honest with donors about money, and refusing to apologize for the ask
• What it costs to lead through tragedy, and the question of resilience she's still working out

A conversation about clarity, agency, and refusing to accept that the way things are is the way they have to be.

🎙️ Proof of Impact is a production of Gleam Tower Media, recorded at Picnic Linden Hills in southwest Minneapolis.

📬 Connect with Elizabeth Kitzenberg on LinkedIn, or learn more about nonprofit consulting at thekitzenberggroup.com.

"All victories are temporary, and every defeat is permanent."

That's how Chris Knopf describes the fight to protect one of Minnesota's most beloved places. As executive director of Friends of the Boundary Waters, he leads the advocacy, education, and conservation work to keep the Boundary Waters clean, wild, and open to everyone. This is a fight his organization has waged, in one form or another, for 50 years.

In this episode, host Elizabeth Kitzenberg talks with Chris about what it takes to lead that fight without burning out: the entrepreneurial mindset he brings to nonprofit leadership, why he refuses to let his team embrace scarcity, and how meeting the moment turned a planned fundraiser into an overwhelming show of support.

In this episode:

• Why Chris runs a conservation nonprofit like an entrepreneur (and where that instinct came from)
• The decision to move a fundraiser up by a week to meet a political moment, and what happened when they did
• Why he'd "blow up" the way charities are judged on overhead
• The case for nonprofits embracing advocacy, lobbying, and politics rather than fearing those words
• Getting kids who live at the edge of the wilderness into it for the first time
• What it means to build a movement, not just an organization

A conversation about urgency, nerve, and refusing to sit on the sidelines when the stakes are permanent.

🎙️ Proof of Impact is a production of Gleam Tower Media, recorded at Picnic Linden Hills in southwest Minneapolis.

📬 Connect with Elizabeth Kitzenberg on LinkedIn, or learn more about nonprofit consulting at thekitzenberggroup.com.

Since posting, Jazz has stepped down as CEO of TurnSignl.

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Jazz Hampton has sat in every seat that shapes how a community solves its problems: as a nonprofit board member, a for-profit founder, and a candidate for public office. In this wide-ranging conversation, he and host Elizabeth Kitzenberg dig into what the nonprofit sector can learn from the way startups ask for money and why confidence, not scarcity, is the real fundraising strategy.

Jazz co-founded TurnSignl, an app that connects drivers to a live attorney in the moment they need one most, in the wake of George Floyd's murder. He built it as a for-profit on purpose. Along the way, he's served on the boards of Catholic Charities Twin Cities, the Minneapolis Foundation, and the Great North Innocence Project, helped exonerate a man wrongfully imprisoned for nearly two decades, and ran a campaign for mayor of Minneapolis.

In this episode:

• "Call your shot" — why asking for advice gets you money, and asking for money gets you advice
• The marathon-with-no-food problem: how "doing more with less" became a badge of honor that holds the sector back
• What people actually want from leaders in a crisis: a vision, not a ten-point plan
• Why the "Midas touch" leader's real job is to give it away and build an organization that outlasts them
• Why nonprofits hide failure when startups treat it as a badge of honor
• The myth Jazz wants to bust about who the "talented" people really are
• How a board should empower a leader and when to step back

A conversation about confidence, storytelling, and refusing to make the work smaller than it is.

🎙️ Proof of Impact is a production of Gleam Tower Media, recorded at Picnic Linden Hills in southwest Minneapolis.

📬 Connect with Elizabeth Kitzenberg on LinkedIn or learn more about nonprofit consulting at thekitzenberggroup.com.

When Operation Metro Surge swept the Twin Cities last winter, the restaurant industry was hit first and hardest, but they stayed quiet about it, because hospitality's whole job is to project joy even when the bottom is falling out.

Steph March and Tracy Dyer didn't wait for permission to respond. Within weeks, the two of them (outsiders to philanthropy, insiders to food and community) stood up the Salt Cure Fund, partnered with the Minneapolis Foundation, and started moving emergency grants to restaurants that couldn't afford to wait for a traditional funding cycle.

In this episode, host Elizabeth "E" Kitzenberg digs into how they did it, and what the rest of the sector can learn from two people who didn't know the rules well enough to be slowed down by them.

In this episode:

• Why restaurants are "third spaces," the community anchors where organizing happens, isolation breaks, and small businesses begin
• The case for radical transparency: why Salt Cure published exactly how much money they had, and how they decided who got it
• "Build the plane while you fly it," standing up a grantmaking operation in a week when you can't legally form a nonprofit that fast
• How a single trade-magazine article turned into a national Day of Giving and a $200K corporate match
• Why the biggest restaurant groups mostly declined the money (and what they did instead)
• What "proof of impact" looks like when the dollars raised will never match the scale of the loss

A conversation about speed, honesty, and the unglamorous infrastructure of showing up for each other.

🎙️ Proof of Impact is a production of Gleam Tower Media, recorded at Picnic Linden Hills in southwest Minneapolis.

📬 Connect with Elizabeth "E" Kitzenberg on LinkedIn, or learn more about nonprofit consulting at thekitzenberggroup.com.

Welcome to Proof of Impact. In this debut episode, host Elizabeth Kitzenberg lays out the case for why this show exists, and why the nonprofit sector is overdue for a different kind of conversation.

After 20 years working alongside cancer researchers, philanthropists, and nonprofit leaders, Elizabeth has watched brilliant people do world-changing work while being trained to make it sound smaller than it is. This episode is her thesis: that the sector has institutionalized scarcity, mistaken martyrdom for mission, and taught its best leaders to apologize for ambition and that it doesn't have to be this way.

In this episode:

• The fundraising legend who banned the word "charity" from her office and why
• The Harvard philanthropist's "loaded rifle" rule that changed how Elizabeth thinks about the big ask
• Why "donors are just generous" is the most damaging myth in the sector
• The Silicon Valley contrast: when a pitch deck raises $50M, and a working pilot can't get $500K
• A preview of the Minnesota leaders joining the season, including Steve Grove (Star Tribune), Maggie Emery (Protect Minnesota), Matthew Ayers (Joyce Uptown Foodshelf), and Steph March (Salt Cure Fund)

This is a show about nonprofit leaders who are done apologizing, done shrinking the ask, and done treating scarcity like a virtue.

🎙️ Recorded at Picnic Linden Hills in southwest Minneapolis.