#380: Relationships Shape Everything: What Leaders Must Know to Build Community (David “Dae-Lee” Arrington)

Episode Summary

Many nonprofit leaders believe they've built real community and trust within their organizations — but David “Dae-Lee” Arrington argues that what looks like connection is often just proximity, and that gap is costing leaders more than they realize. Founder and CEO of Bridge Builder Leadership in Charlotte, NC, Dae-Lee shares how his own journey - from a Black, working-class neighborhood in Norfolk, Virginia to a mostly white, affluent Charlotte suburb at age nineteen - sparked a career spent helping leaders move from transactional relationships to transformational ones. He introduces the idea that “growth can hide fragmentation,” explains why psychological safety and trust function as an under-built layer of leadership infrastructure, and walks through the three-question framework: Who Am I? Who Are They? Who Are We?  that grounds his Bridge Builder cohorts. Listeners will walk away with a concrete first step for building trust across difference, and a challenge to examine whether their own relationships are truly authentic or simply convenient.

About Dae-Lee

David “Dae-Lee” Arrington is the Founder and CEO of Bridge Builder Leadership, a Charlotte, NC-based organization that builds relational capacity and trust infrastructure among leaders across sectors, race, and generation. Raised in the Huntersville neighborhood of Norfolk, Virginia, he moved to Charlotte at nineteen in 2001, an experience that reshaped how he thought about community and connection across difference. He studied multimedia web design at the Art Institute of Charlotte and spent his early career split between the tech and entertainment worlds, working as a producer and recording artist while using music to bring people together in Charlotte's faith community and later as part of the Creative Mornings leadership team. Prompted by conversations with fellow leaders following the death of Keith Lamont Scott in 2016 and the events of 2020, Dae-Lee launched Bridge Builder Leadership to help leaders build the relational foundation - self-awareness, trust, and authentic connection - that he believes is missing from most leadership development. Over the past five years, he has led ten cohorts of leaders through that work, and describes himself, fittingly, as “an introverted lover of people.”

Resources

• Dae-Lee's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daeleebridgebuilder/
• Bridge Builder Leadership website: https://www.webridgebuild.com
• “Growth Can Hide Fragmentation” (read and add your voice!): https://www.webridgebuild.com/growth-can-hide-fragmentation
• Book recommendation: The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
• Learn more about the leadership resources at Armstrong McGuire

379: How to Treat Every Donor Like a Major Donor (Derric Bakker) 

Episode Summary

Nonprofit leaders and fundraisers are exhausted, and the instinct when results slip is to simply work harder. In this episode of Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership, Derric Bakker, Founder & CEO of DickersonBakker, argues that today’s struggle is not a down cycle teams can out-hustle but a structural shift in how people give, driven by demographics, the widening wealth gap, fraying community and religious ties, and donors who now expect the personalized experience every consumer brand delivers. Returning after his 2022 conversation (Episode #181), Derric makes the provocative case behind his new book: the relational behaviors long reserved for the top 1 percent of major donors, listening first, personalizing every touchpoint, stewarding consistently, and protecting trust, can become the operating system for fundraising at every level. He explains where AI makes that possible at scale, where it must never replace the human on the other end, and what a practical first step looks like, from rethinking donor survey data to reimagining portfolio size and gratitude. Listeners come away with a clear-eyed diagnosis of why the old model broke and a hopeful sense of the leadership and board decisions that move an organization toward a better way.

About Derric

Derric Bakker is the Founder & CEO of DickersonBakker, a fundraising consulting and agency firm that helps nonprofit organizations grow, thrive, and make a bigger impact, with a team of more than 50 working with over 100 clients a year. Across more than three decades in the sector, Derric moved through three chapters, roughly a decade as a frontline practitioner, a decade in consulting, and leadership of the firm he launched in 2010 that later merged to become DickersonBakker, and he is now entering a fourth focused on writing, teaching, and thought leadership as Andrew Olson takes the helm as president. Mentored early in his career by the legendary Jerry Panas, Derric built his expertise on relationship-based major gift fundraising, the foundation of his new book. Reflecting on the pace of change, he often points out that nearly everything about the work has been transformed by technology since he started, yet many of fundraising’s core assumptions have stubbornly stayed the same.

Resources

• Connect with Derric Bakker on LinkedIn and learn more about DickersonBakker
• Derric’s book: A Better Way to Fundraise: Treat Every Donor Like a Major Donor — explore the book and discussion guides at betterwaychampions.org
• Recommended reading: Nonprofit AI by Nathan Chappell (who, with Brian Crimmins, was a past guest on Episode #211, Is Philanthropy in a State of Crisis?)
• Registration is open for Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy - Learn more at institutepl.org
• Learn more about Inperium, a nonprofit that helps health and human services organizations grow without sacrificing their mission: Inperium.org
• Learn more about the leadership resources at Armstrong McGuire: ArmstrongMcGuire.com

378: The Money Myths Holding Your Nonprofit Back (Sean Hale)

Episode Summary

Too many nonprofit leaders quietly avoid their own finances, trusting that a clean audit or a capable CPA means everything is handled, and that blind spot can put a mission at real risk. In this episode, Patton talks with Sean Hale, founder of Nonprofit CFOs, who busts five money myths that hold organizations back: that the audit has them covered, that finance is the CPA’s job, that nonprofits aren’t supposed to make a profit, that confusing financial reports are just part of the territory, and that you say yes to whatever a funder asks. Drawing on more than two decades inside the sector and a contrarian, plain-English style, Sean explains what a standard audit actually does and doesn’t catch, why a whistleblower policy and strong internal controls protect an organization far more than people realize, how an executive director can engage with the numbers in twenty minutes a month without becoming a bookkeeper, and why building a modest annual surplus is one of the smartest things a board can do. Listeners will walk away with practical, doable steps to raise financial literacy across their whole organization and the confidence to push back when a grant simply isn’t worth the cost.

About Sean

Sean Hale is the founder of Nonprofit CFOs, a team of finance and accounting professionals who provide nonprofits across the country with bookkeeping, fractional and interim CFO support, and special projects such as grant due diligence. His path into the sector started early: his mother led a nonprofit for thirty years, and his first job there involved pushing a broom for minimum wage. As an adult, Sean has worked in the sector since 1999, wearing nearly every hat across four different nonprofits over twenty-one years before launching his own practice. He found that he could make the biggest difference in the finance and administrative side of the work, helping organizations get their operations buttoned up so they can focus on mission. Known on LinkedIn for his sassy, contrarian, and occasionally grumpy take on nonprofit finance, Sean is on a mission to help leaders ditch the jargon, ask better questions, and stop accepting the pain.

Resources

• Connect with Sean on LinkedIn; Nonprofit CFOs
• Get Sean’s Financial Dashboard Starter Kit, free with code PATTON2026 at nonprofitcfos.com
• The Thief in Your Company by Tiffany Couch
• Learn more about Inperium, a nonprofit that helps health and human services organizations grow without sacrificing their mission: Inperium.org
• Follow Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership at www.armstrongmcguire.com/podcasts
• Find more leadership resources at ArmstrongMcGuire.com

377: Stop Pushing Harder: How Great Nonprofits Build Momentum (Suzanne Smith)

Episode Summary

Nonprofit leaders are exhausted, pushing harder and still feeling stuck. Suzanne Smith, Founder and CEO of Social Impact Architects, offers a different path. Drawing on sixteen years of consulting and her forthcoming book, The Nonprofit Flywheel, she reframes Jim Collins’s flywheel for the social sector: translate business practices, don’t transplant them. Suzanne walks through the six elements, impact, brand, revenue, and operations, held together by culture and governance, and explains why momentum builds only when all six align. She shares proof from the TACA arts accelerator in Dallas, where participating organizations saw average budgets rise roughly 40 percent and foundation support climb 77 percent, then challenges leaders to rethink old norms through what she calls Nonprofit 2.0. Listeners walk away with a practical diagnostic for finding the friction in their own organizations and a reminder that lasting impact comes from working smarter, not harder.

About Suzanne

Suzanne Smith is the Founder and CEO of Social Impact Architects, a social change agency in Dallas, Texas, that helps nonprofits, government agencies, and cross-sector systems move from stuck to strategic. Describing herself as “trilingual” in nonprofit, government, and business, Suzanne began her career as a lobbyist after earning a government degree from the University of Texas, then went on to complete her MBA at Duke, where she studied social entrepreneurship under pioneer Greg Dees. Over the past sixteen years she has founded nonprofits, served as a board chair, and taught the next generation of social entrepreneurs as an educator and consultant. She writes the Social TrendSpotter newsletter, a top nonprofit publication on Substack, and her TEDx talk, Everyone Is a Changemaker, reflects her belief that anyone can make a difference. She calls herself half therapist, half mechanic, a nod to her therapist mother and her love of finding the right tools to get unstuck.

Resources

• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn; Social Impact Architects; MeetSuzanne.com
• Social TrendSpotter - Suzanne’s weekly newsletter on the future of the social sector
• TEDx talk: Everyone Is a Changemaker
• The Nonprofit Flywheel: A Playbook for Sustainable Growth, Smarter Strategy, and Lasting Impact by Suzanne Smith, launching October 1, 2026, with a free digital edition and companion resources
• The Power of TED (The Empowerment Dynamic) by David Emerald
• Learn more about Inperium, a nonprofit that helps health and human services organizations grow without sacrificing their mission: Inperium.org
• Follow Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership at www.armstrongmcguire.com/podcasts
• Find more leadership resources at ArmstrongMcGuire.com

Episode 376: Who Should Be Part of Your Strategic Planning Process? (Renee Rubin Ross)

Episode Summary

Too many strategic plans end up gathering dust on a shelf, or worse, frustrating the very people who were left out of building them. In this episode, Renee Rubin Ross, Ph.D., Founder of The Ross Collective and author of the new book Inclusive Strategic Planning, makes the case that who you involve in planning matters just as much as the plan itself. Drawing on more than twenty planning processes, she walks through her five-step spiral, kickoff, discovery, prioritization, planning, and implementation, and introduces a simple framework for deciding who belongs in the room: deciders, builders, and sharers. Renee explains how to know whether your organization is even ready to plan, how to scale the work up or down when capacity and funding feel shaky, and how to keep a plan alive through consistent communication and disciplined implementation. Nonprofit leaders will come away with a practical, inclusive approach that turns planning into a source of energy, alignment, and focus rather than another document destined for the shelf.

About Renee

Dr. Renee Rubin Ross is a recognized leader in board and organizational development and strategy, and the founder of The Ross Collective, a consulting firm that designs and leads inclusive, participatory processes for social sector boards and staff. Committed to racial equity in the nonprofit sector, she guides leaders and organizations through strategic plans and governance processes that deepen social change, racial justice, engagement, and community strength. Renee is the author of Inclusive Strategic Planning: A Five-Step Process to Expand Energy, Alignment, and Opportunity. She also directs the Nonprofit Management Certificate program at Cal State University East Bay, where she teaches strategic planning and board development. A past board member of the Alliance for Nonprofit Management and a member of the Technology of Participation facilitators’ network, she earned her doctorate in education and Jewish studies from New York University, where her research explored parent participation in schools. She lives in Northern California.

Resources

• Listen to the episode: www.armstrongmcguire.com/podcasts
• Connect with Renee on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/reneerubinross
• The Ross Collective: therosscollective.com
• Inclusive Strategic Planning: A Five-Step Process to Expand Energy, Alignment, and Opportunity
• Book recommendation: My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem
• Cal State University East Bay Nonprofit Management Certificate program
• Follow Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership, and please leave a review! 
• Learn more about the leadership resources at ArmstrongMcGuire.com

375: Outrageous Kindness: A Framework for Unlocking Philanthropic Potential (Kristina Joy Carlson)

Episode Summary

When disruption hits, many nonprofit leaders go quiet and wait for conditions to settle before they act, and that pause quietly signals to donors and communities that the mission can wait too. In Episode 375, Kristina Joy Carlson, CFRE, Founder and CEO of Outrageous Kindness, makes the case that perfect is never coming, and that the leaders who keep moving are the ones who build the strongest relationships. Drawing on decades in global philanthropy and a personal season of loss and recovery, she walks Patton through her KIND Method: Know More (challenge the assumptions that quietly kill donor relationships), Impact (reconnect to your own why so authentic passion does the persuading), Navigate (communicate honestly and bring a plan when funding shifts), and Deliver (do what you said, then circle back so people know their gift mattered). Along the way she offers a simple impact audit any leader can run today, a reframe of asking as a muscle you strengthen with use, and a reminder that asking a good question and truly listening may be the most outrageous kindness of all. Listeners will leave with a practical roadmap for leading with generosity when the conditions are anything but ideal.

About Kristina

Kristina Joy Carlson, CFRE, is the Founder and CEO of Outrageous Kindness, a mindset, method, and movement she built to help nonprofit organizations create stronger relationships, healthier cultures, and greater impact. She has spent most of her career in global philanthropy, helping organizations connect with people, engage donors, and grow the resources that fuel their missions, work that took her into campaigns, leadership transitions, and seasons of significant disruption. The daughter of a fundraiser and minister, she learned early that generosity changes the giver, the people around them, and the community, a conviction that now anchors her writing, speaking, and consulting. She is the author of Outrageous Kindness and will keynote the North Carolina Philanthropy Conference on September 3 with a talk titled “Perfect Isn’t Coming.” Based in Oxford, Mississippi, she leads through hard seasons with the same belief she teaches: your circumstances do not define you.

Resources

• Kristina Joy Carlson on LinkedIn
• Outrageous Kindness
• The Seven Faces of Philanthropy by Russ Alan Prince and Karen Maru File
• An American Life by Ronald Reagan
• Follow Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership — and please leave a review!
• Leadership resources at Armstrong McGuire: ArmstrongMcGuire.com

Episode 374: A Roadmap to Nonprofit Excellence: What Most Leaders Miss (Lauren Deiorio)

Episode Summary

Most nonprofit leaders don’t fail because of mission. They get stuck running one part of the operation well while neglecting the rest, often because they rose through programming and never learned the business of running an organization. In this episode, Lauren Deiorio, President & CEO of the Community Foundation for Ocala/Marion County, shares the Roadmap to Success, a practical tool she helped build that breaks nonprofit excellence into nine “destinations”: governance, HR, financial management, fundraising, communications, technology, strategic collaborations, community empowerment, and grant strategy. Drawing on a finance and public accounting background and nine years leading her foundation, Lauren explains why treating your nonprofit like a business, with engaged boards, strong internal controls, diversified revenue, and clear communications, is what earns donor confidence. She offers a concrete way to put the roadmap to work as a self-assessment, pairing a staff member with a board member on each destination throughout the year. Listeners will walk away with a mental checklist for diagnosing where their organization is strong, where it’s vulnerable, and exactly where to start.

About Lauren

Lauren Deiorio is President & CEO of the Community Foundation for Ocala/Marion County, where she leads a nonprofit resource center dedicated to helping local organizations grow stronger and run more like a business. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, Lauren earned a degree in finance and spent years in public accounting before moving into the philanthropic sector, first as the fund development director for her local school district and then, for the past nine years, at the helm of the Community Foundation. A self-described numbers person who joined her local public relations association to sharpen her communications skills, she co-created the foundation’s Roadmap to Success, now in its second edition with an accompanying workbook nonprofits across the region use as a self-study guide. Based near Orlando, she’s a fan of common-sense customer service, and has led her own staff through a book study on the subject.

Resources

• Connect with Lauren: LinkedIn | [email protected]
• Community Foundation for Ocala/Marion County: ocalafoundation.org
• Roadmap to Success: the nine-destination nonprofit handbook and workbook (order at ocalafoundation.org)
• Book recommendation: The Customer Rules by Lee Cockrell
• Also mentioned: Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller
• Follow Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership, and please leave a review!
• Learn more about the leadership resources at Armstrong McGuire: ArmstrongMcGuire.com

#373: Turning Leadership Transitions into Organizational Breakthroughs (Jeffrey R. Wilcox, CFRE)

Episode Summary

Most nonprofits treat leadership change as an emergency to survive rather than a future to plan for — and the cost of that blind spot is mounting. In this episode, Jeffrey R. Wilcox, CFRE (ret), CEO of Third Sector Company and founder of the Interim Executives Academy, names the “perfect storm” that has left the sector unprepared: taboo conversations about people, resource development defined only as money, a scarcity mindset that turns pipelines into pipe dreams, an unmanaged generational shift, and boards and staff running on separate tracks. Drawing on a career that began at United Way and 25 years building the field of interim leadership, Wilcox reframes succession planning as the stewardship of a purpose rather than the replacement of a person, and makes the case for the professionally trained interim executive as a catalyst — not a stopgap — for organizations bridging their proudest past and their hoped-for future. Listeners will come away with a practical, five-part view of what real succession planning requires, a sharper sense of when an interim is the right call, and a renewed conviction that the sector’s most valuable asset has always been its people.

About Jeffrey

Jeffrey R. Wilcox, CFRE (ret), is CEO of Third Sector Company and founder of its Interim Executives Academy and Interim Development Directors BootCamp, and a nationally recognized pioneer in leadership succession solutions for community-impact organizations. An author, columnist, and popular speaker, he advises nonprofits, trade and professional associations, and congregations on succession planning, talent development and retention, and strategic interim executive solutions. His early career was spent at United Way, including as Senior Vice President of Community Development for the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, where he watched countless organizations treat leadership change as a surprise, a project, and an interruption — an experience that became the impetus for the firm he founded in 2002. Since then, Third Sector Company has served more than 900 organizations across the West Coast, Southwest, Pacific Northwest, and Western Canada, and was named a “Top 10” Interim Executive Services firm by Manage HR Magazine in 2023 and 2024; its Academy is the oldest and longest-running certificate program of its kind in the U.S. and Canada. The former nonprofit columnist for the Long Beach Business Journal, Wilcox authored The Nonprofit Leader of the New Decade in 2010 and remains a tireless advocate for returning nonprofit leadership to its cause-based, movement-focused, activist-driven roots.

Resources

• Jeffrey R. Wilcox on LinkedIn
• Third Sector Company — thirdsectorcompany.com
• Interim Executives Academy — interimexecutivesacademy.com
• Brains on Fire: Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements by Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, Geno Church, and Spike Jones (Wiley, 2010) — Jeffrey’s book recommendation
• Follow Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership — and please leave a review!
• Learn more about the leadership resources at Armstrong McGuire — ArmstrongMcGuire.com

Episode 372: The Culture Work No One Warns You About in a Nonprofit Merger (Marcia Beckner)

Episode Summary

Too many nonprofit leaders treat a merger as a last resort, proof that something failed, when it can be the boldest strategic move they make. In this episode, Marcia Beckner, Founder and CEO of Culture CARES® Global, reframes merger as a path to greater impact, drawing on her own experience founding MyLifeLine Cancer Foundation and merging it into the Cancer Support Community. She covers how to know when a merger is right, why ego is so often the real obstacle, and why culture, not finances or strategy, is where mergers quietly succeed or fail. Marcia shares her CARES® framework (Commitment, Appreciation, Respect, Engagement, Safety) as both a diagnostic and a roadmap for integrating two teams into one healthy, psychologically safe organization. Listeners will walk away seeing partnership not as surrender, but as a way to better fulfill their mission alongside others.

About Marcia

Marcia Beckner is the Founder and CEO of Culture CARES® Global, where she coaches nonprofit CEOs and executive directors to build healthy, inclusive workplaces and reduce sector burnout. She is the architect of the Culture CARES® Framework, a proven process for measuring and co-creating organizational culture. In 2007 she founded MyLifeLine Cancer Foundation, a digital community born from her own stage 3 ovarian cancer diagnosis in her twenties, which she led for nearly a decade before merging it into the global Cancer Support Community in 2018, where she went on to serve as VP of Digital Strategy and Chief Culture Officer. She holds a degree in Organizational Psychology, is a certified Dream Manager® and Talent Insights Analyst, and is the author of You Are Meant for Great Things. Based in Denver with her husband and four nearly-launched kids, she’s an avid reader and traveler.

Resources

• Marcia Beckner on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marciabeckner
• Culture CARES® Global: CultureCares.com
• The Culture CARES® Framework & Assessment: a culture diagnostic and roadmap built on five pillars (Commitment, Appreciation, Respect, Engagement, Safety), with psychological safety as the foundation
• DISC + Driving Forces (Talent Insights): assessments Marcia uses to surface leadership styles and inner motivators in team-building
• Book: You Are Meant for Great Things by Marcia (Donziger) Beckner, her memoir of turning setbacks into stepping stones (culturecares.com/book)
• Book: The Nonprofit Mergers Workbook by David La Piana, a step-by-step guide through the merger process

371: Stop Scaling, Start Listening: Building Nonprofits That Actually Work (jacob adams) 

Episode Summary

Too many nonprofits have become experts at performing impact - hitting metrics, writing polished reports, scaling programs - without ever stopping to ask whether they’re actually changing the lives of the people they serve. In this episode, Patton sits down with jacob adams, Founder and Executive Director of Inner Spark Learning Lab in Los Angeles, to explore what it looks like when a nonprofit is genuinely built around the community it exists to serve. jacob traces his journey from Teach For America to founding STEM to the Future in 2017 to rebranding as Inner Spark Learning Lab, a shift that happened when he realized STEM was never really the point. He introduces the Human Learning Systems framework and walks through Inner Spark’s Listen→Try→Reflect→Adapt→Share cycle: a living approach to program design that treats service work as ongoing experiment rather than fixed delivery. He talks candidly about what real community listening looks like in practice, what it costs to stop a program that isn’t working, and why he shares the messy middle publicly - even when funders want a more polished story. Leaders who feel the tension between accountability and authenticity will find both challenge and permission in this conversation.

About jacob

jacob adams is the Founder and Executive Director of Inner Spark Learning Lab, a community-centered education nonprofit based in Los Angeles, California. jacob launched the organization in 2017 as STEM to the Future before rebranding to reflect a deeper commitment to what actually drives young people’s growth: curiosity, relationships, and genuine responsiveness to what communities say they need. His work is grounded in the Human Learning Systems framework, and he is known in the sector for practicing — and publicly modeling — the kind of reflective, adaptive leadership he believes the nonprofit sector urgently needs more of. Before founding Inner Spark, jacob served with Teach For America, an experience that shaped his conviction that proximity to community is not a program feature but a leadership discipline.

Resources

• Connect with jacob on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Inner Spark Learning Lab
• Human Learning Systems (created by Toby Lowe) humanlearning.systems 
• How We See Us: Young People Imagining a Path to Their Futures by Michaela Leslie-Rule
• Envisioning Real Utopias by Erik Olin Wright
• Follow Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership, and please leave a review!
• Learn more about the leadership resources at Armstrong McGuire — ArmstrongMcGuire.com