Fund the People: A Podcast with Rusty Stahl

Welcome to a very special final episode of Season Four!

In this episode, you’ll learn how one foundation built the internal political will to make internal reforms so they can provide grants that better serve their grantees and their communities. Host Rusty Stahl sits down with Kenneth Jones, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Equity Officer of one of America’s major foundations, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. They discuss why and how MacArthur Foundation has increased the amount of money in their grants for “indirect costs” from 15% to 29%, nearly double and one of the highest rates we know about.

In this episode, you’ll get an insider’s view of The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s journey to contribute to the full costs of grantees in an adequate and equitable fashion. Our guest is Katie Tetrault, the Foundation’s Vice President of Finance and Grants Management. Tetrault manages all of the Foundation’s budgeting, accounting, financial, and grantmaking policies and operations. Katie shares how and why the Foundation’s recently changed from paying only 10% toward “indirect costs” on project and program grants, and why they created a three-tiered policy that now pays up to 25%.

In this episode, you’ll gain an understanding of how bias commonly plays out in the hiring process, and how organizations can better recruit and retain a powerful, diverse workforce that expands opportunity across lines of race and gender.

Our guests are Trina C. Olson and Alfonso T. Wenker, co-leaders of the consultancy Team Dynamics and co-authors of Hiring Revolution: A Guide to Disrupt Racism and Sexism in Hiring. In this conversation, they share powerful, practical approaches to the hiring process – from preparation through salary negotiation. They also share a plethora of resources that they make available at no cost to the field. Listeners gain ideas for interrupting bias and embedding equity in employment processes, including:

• Preparation for hiring

• Recruitment and search

• The hiring process itself

• Paying, supporting, and managing employees in today’s nonprofit environment

Alfonso and Trina bring extensive experience in nonprofits and philanthropy. Through their work at Team Dynamics, they’ve gained deep knowledge of how organizations and companies can address diversity and equity in the recruitment, hiring, and retention processes.

Over half of mid-level nonprofit staff in Western New York State don’t make enough to support themselves or their families. This number grows to 68% for those who work at nonprofits with budgets of less than a million dollars. This is one of many powerful findings in new research about the wellbeing of the nonprofit workforce. How does it relate to what’s happening in your nonprofit community?

In this episode, you’ll get important new data on the health of the nonprofit workforce. Drawn from the survey responses of over 700 local nonprofit workers, interviews, and focus groups in Western New York State, the research reinforces what many across the country already know - that the lack of investment in nonprofit compensation, HR, and other staff support systems is an existential and growing threat to the sector.

So many nonprofits right now are experiencing challenges with recruitment, burnout, retention, and internal conflict around issues of equity and compensation. Sometimes we don’t know where to start. Sometimes we don’t have a vision for where to go on these issues. So we’ve got an important, helpful, and mind-expanding conversation for you today.

The brilliant consultant and thought-leader Mala Nagarajan returns to our podcast to share six practices that nonprofits can use to de-link privilege (or, on the other side of the coin, marginalization) from salaries, and reconstruct compensation in a way that is more equitable than it has traditionally been in our sector.

These practices are drawn from the Compensation Scale Equity Process and Calculator™ developed by Vega Mala Consulting, of which our guest is Cofounder and Principal. We introduce this resource in the episode, and discuss how nonprofits and other consultants can utilize it. We also discuss what nonprofits can do right away even if they are unable to work with consultants to address equity in their compensation structure.

In this second installment of our series, Smashing the Overhead Myth Ones and For All, you’ll get an insider’s view of how things are changing inside the Ford Foundation, one of the largest private funders in the world, as their team seeks to provide more equitable and effective grants to the organizations they support in the U.S. and around the world.

Our guests today are the ones making challenging operational decisions, guiding changes to organizational policy, practice and culture, and executing important internal change management at the Ford Foundation.

Tiffanie De Gannes is Senior Manager of Operations at Ford Foundation. She serves as lead on complex projects and initiatives, as well as bridging the gap between operations and program teams to ensure alignment on organizational priorities.

Jim Gallagher is Director of Grants Management at the Foundation, where he oversees Ford’s grant managers in the US and around the world. Jim has 20+ years of nonprofit and philanthropic management experience and expertise in domestic and international grantmaking, organizational capacity building, financial planning, team building, and systems implementation. 

In this episode, we examine The Resilience Initiative, a model of foundation-initiated capacity-building work on behalf of grantee organizations that has sought to help progressive nonprofits tackle the mounting political, economic, and health crises that have impacted organizations in recent years. 

The Resilience Initiative has developed a highly-responsive approach that is increasingly focused on the well-being of nonprofit people and organizations. You’ll hear from the two top-notch consultants who have consecutively led this effort - Janet Nami McIntyre and her predecessor Paula Morris.

Welcome to the first installment of our special series, “Smashing the Overhead Myth – Once and For All.” 

In this episode, we hear the story of Funders for Real Costs, Real Change, a learning collaborative among a dozen funders who sought to better understand how they could do their part to end the nonprofit starvation cycle. These funders examined the realities of overhead and indirect costs in their grants and grantee organizations – and some are making major changes as a result.

Our guest is Rodney Christopher from BDO. With 30 years of consulting and grantmaking experience in the nonprofit and philanthropic community, Rodney was instrumental in facilitating the Funders for Real Costs, Real Change.

Our series, “Smashing the Overhead Myth – Once and For All” will profile major funders who are changing their priorities to enable grantees to cover their actual costs – including the real costs of supporting and developing a staff team. Throughout the series, we’ll explore the Practices of Talent-Investing related to Respect and Root Causes – respecting nonprofit workers, and addressing the root causes of the deficit of investment in the nonprofit workforce.

In this episode, we speak with Jan Masaoka, CEO of California Association of Nonprofits (CalNonprofits), and one of the most respected and outspoken organizers, advocates, authors, and capacity-builders in the nonprofit sector.

Jan recently announced her departure from CalNonprofits, and she shares sage wisdom (and rage!) on a range of issues including advocating for a better relationship between government and nonprofits, addressing the “overhead” myth, funding full costs, dealing with nonprofit student debt, the impact of government contracting on nonprofit compensation, and more.

The conversation touches on multiple practices of talent-investing, including:

• Practice 1: Lead with Respect
• Practice 3: Build People-Systems
• Practice 8: Share the Value

This episode is end-of-year inspiration – and it offers a bold new model for increasing investments in America’s nonprofit workforce.

In this episode, you’ll learn how a group of nonprofits showed elected leaders the essential value of the nonprofit human services workforce, and broke through malaise and noise to secure historic state and local government investments in nonprofit workers!

Host Rusty Stahl speaks with Michelle Jackson, Executive Director of Human Services Council of New York to get the story, the struggles, and important lessons-learned for funders, nonprofits, and associations.

We’ll hear the story of the #JustPay Campaign, which was initiated by the Human Services Council. Through this ongoing campaign, social workers and others have built solidarity with one another and flexed their collective power! It has gotten results. Successes include Cost of Living Adjustments (COLA) increases in government contracts and other major financial investments in the nonprofit human services workforce.

We are in the nonprofit sector’s season of giving, but we’re going counter-culture. This episode is all about nonprofit saving. Specifically, nonprofit workers saving for retirement.

In this episode, you'll learn why it's critical for funders, nonprofits, and nonprofit workers alike to invest in retirement savings. You’ll hear the surprising political history of nonprofit retirement; how retirement policies can bolster racial and class inclusion in nonprofit teams; and the four major gaps facing nonprofit retirement.

Rusty speaks with Chitra Aiyar, nonprofit tax expert, consultant, and author of a new report on nonprofit retirement. The report is a publication of Just Futures, a new initiative to provide an all-in-one 401(k) solution tailored for the social justice-minded nonprofit workforce.

This episode explores Talent-Investing Principle #5: Take a Supportive Stance. This principle is all about demonstrating the intention to enable organizations to invest in staff, not to punish them if they are unable to fully support and develop staff. 

In this episode, you’ll learn about developing a compensation philosophy on which you can build human resources and compensation systems that are in keeping with values of equity and justice. Consultant Mala Nagarajan sits down with host Rusty Stahl to talk about the ideas that undergird equitable salaries and benefits in social justice and social change workplaces.

Mala brings deep experience in nonprofit human resources through her work with Vega Mala Consulting and RoadMap Consulting. She is now developing resources specifically to help nonprofits establish compensation practices grounded in racial equity.

This is Season 3, Episode 9. Throughout this conversation, we explore several of the Principles of Talent-Investing:

• Principle 1: Nonprofit People Are Awesome
• Principle 2: Nonprofit People are the Bedrock of Organizational Effectiveness
• Principle 4: Talent Justice is Essential, and
• Principle 6: It Takes Significant Time and Money to Invest in the Nonprofit Workforce

With every election cycle and issue campaign, we are reminded of the critical role that community organizers play in supporting the civic participation of all Americans. In this episode, you'll learn from new research on the working conditions of community organizers in social justice nonprofits. You’ll hear how organizers, executive directors, and funders view the issue. You’ll get recommendations for change, and next steps the All Due Respect is pursuing to ensure that all due respect is given to organizers!

We speak with Kinzie Mabon and Kevin Simowitz from All Due Respect, an exciting project that seeks to set new labor standards and ensure fair wages for community organizers.

Burnout is a chronic condition in nonprofits. Right now, it’s at an acute level after the years of trauma we’ve been experiencing. And burnout has a compounding impact on people who are dealing with marginalization. Yet burnout is often something we suffer in isolation, in silence, and in an individual fashion – as if it's not an organizational or collective concern.

In this episode, you'll gain a first-hand perspective on burnout from Dany Sigwalt, the outgoing nonprofit executive director of Power Shift Network, and you’ll get tangible ideas for how to address the burnout crisis in our sector. Dany discusses her experience and ideas, and provides some fundamental suggestions for change.

Dany wrote a refreshing article published in YES Magazine called, “How to Prevent Burnout Among Black Movement Leaders.” It’s a vulnerable, first-person narrative of burnout, as well as an analysis of the current burnout crisis in terms of its organizational, racial, and philanthropic dimensions.

Nonprofit people create and sustain the organizational capacity of nonprofits. So there’s a natural connection between organizational “capacity-building” and what Fund the People calls “talent-investing” (intentionally deploying capital to support and develop nonprofit workers). In our continuous effort to capture the value that talent-investing offers to nonprofits and their funders, in this episode you'll hear the perspective of a funder who actualized this deep connection between a foundation’s capacity-building efforts and talent-investing.

Is student debt haunting your nonprofit career?
Is the specter of student loans looming over people in your organization, or your colleagues elsewhere?
Are you an HR person helping nonprofit workers navigate the harrowing nature of debt?

Luckily, you don’t need an exorcist to get rid of that debt! It can be wiped away through the federal government's Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Progam. Now through Halloween (October 31, 2022), they’re making the process (and likelihood of forgiveness) much easier by waiving unhelpful rules and bureaucracy that have dogged the program for years.

In this time-sensitive bonus episode, you’ll learn exactly what you or your colleagues need to do before the end of this month to wipe out your student debt. Rusty sits down with Aoife Delargy Lowe, an expert on the topic who provides staff leadership for the PSLF Coalition, an alliance of nonprofits that has been advocating for improvements to the program since 2017.

In addition to three specific steps you can take and specific websites you can use, you’ll also learn about the history of the coalition and what the future may hold for the PSLF program beyond this month.

Listen today and share this episode with your networks!

Learn why it's critical to invest in the diverse emerging workforce inside foundations, and how such investment helps organized philanthropy be responsive to nonprofits and those who are on the front lines doing the work.

Rusty sits down for a chat with Storme Gray, the inspiring Executive Director of Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy (EPIP), the national network of emerging foundation leaders who are elevating philanthropic practice in order to build a more just, equitable and sustainable world.

Storme discusses the challenges that face young people of color and others in the foundation field, and shares EPIP’s efforts to ensure that emerging grantmakers have an introduction to funding work that is grounded in equity, inclusion, and personal responsibility, regardless of positionality within philanthropic institutions. EPIP recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and Storme shares her vision for the years ahead. She is creating space for diverse emergent leaders to build their voice, sharpen their skills, and develop analysis and critique of the sector. EPIP continues to improve the way philanthropy works with nonprofits in service of communities.

In this episode, you'll learn about some easy actions you can take to help researchers address the lack of philanthropic investment in the nonprofit workforce, and the burnout that results from that deficit of investment. Host Rusty Stahl sits down with Betsy Leondar-Wright, Project Director of Staffing the Mission. Launched in 2019, Staffing the Mission works to make life better for diverse nonprofit employees, and is a program of Class Action, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that “inspires action to end classism and extreme inequality.” Staffing the Mission partners with Fund the People as we both seek to address poor working conditions in the nonprofit sector.

Staffing the Mission has a survey of funders in the field (in partnership with Fund the People) to understand the grantmaker perspective and role in nonprofit workforce issues. They also have an opportunity for nonprofit workers to candidly share their own burnout stories. Betsy discusses both of these important efforts in the episode.

In this episode, you'll get a rare glimpse into the inside story of two people who have, together, gone through the unique crucible that is an executive transition.

Jane McDonnell is the former Executive Director of the Online News Association and is now an independent consultant. Irving Washington is the current Executive Director of the Online News Association, and a longtime association professional in the journalism field. Jane and Irving went through an executive transition in a thoughtful, proactive, ethical, and effective fashion, with respect for one another, for their colleagues, for their funders, and their organization. We all know that executive transitions are critical inflection points for organizations, and too many funders are not yet proactively investing in healthy transitions, and not supporting outgoing and incoming executive directors to succeed in the transition.

This episode is Part 2 of our mini-series on supporting new executive directors. It’s the companion to Episode 2, the previous episode, which was a conversation with Bipasha Ray and Joey Lee, former and current staff at Open Society Foundations. In that episode, we discussed OSF’s New Executives Fund, a program that supports new executive directors in nonprofits around the world, especially “historic firsts” in their organizations. (Irving participated in the OSF New Executives Fund. A few months after we recorded this interview, Irving announced that 2022 would be his last year with ONA, after six years as CEO and 11 years total of service to the organization.)

In this episode, you'll gain valuable insights from a major funding institution about why they believe it’s important to invest in the nonprofit workforce by supporting new executive directors. We speak with Joey Lee and Bipasha Ray of Open Society Foundations (OSF). You'll hear about important research on the value of investing in new executives from a new OSF report that draws upon the experiences and voices of hundreds of new E.D.s. This is a resource that you can use with your funders, your board, and others.

The issue of healthy executive transitions was important before 2020, and it's even more important now, as diverse new executives are hired into challenging pandemic workplaces. Executive transitions are a crucial inflection point for new managers, organizations, staff teams, board members, and supporters involved in the process. And, perhaps most importantly, they also impact the communities who rely upon organizations for services.

As more organizations hire “historic firsts” – women, people of color, LGBTQ people – as their top executives, too many of these leaders are unintentionally being "set up to fail", rather than supported to succeed. Funder practices can be part of the solution, or part of the problem. So having a major funder like OSF become part of the solution in a very public way is important progress, and it’s something you can leverage in your own talent-investing efforts!

It’s the season finale and the end of 2021! To wrap up our season 2 exploration of talent-investing, Rusty shares his top three takeaways from these 16 episodes. He also shares a cool new feature of our show: Podcast Collections. And we welcome back friend-of-the-show Monisha Kapila for some holiday schmoozing and reflection on the Talent Matters Remix, the special three-part series that was a prominent part of this season.

Today’s social justice nonprofit leaders are fighting for communities that have been impacted by trauma, even as the nonprofit leaders are experiencing or organizational and personal trauma themselves. Racial equity and social justice require talent-investing. In this episode, Rusty talks with Sidney Hargro, the inaugural Executive Director at The LeadersTrust, a new multi-funder grantmaking initiative that offers an effective, evaluated approach to talent-investing that has been tested for 20 years with over 120 nonprofits and more than $30 million in investments.

To help advance transformation in the sector, The LeadersTrust was recently created by the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund and other foundations. The LeadersTrust offers the Flexible Leadership Awards, a sophisticated talent-investing model initially developed by Haas Jr. Fund as a strategy to invest in nonprofit staff in order to expand program impact and financial sustainability. Topics discussed include:

• Sidney’s journey into and through philanthropy, including a recent stint as the head of Philanthropy Network Greater Philadelphia, and his studies in engineering and divinity.
• The foundations that have come together to form The LeadersTrust.
• The core components of the Flexible Leadership Awards.
• The importance of talent-investing layered on top of general operating support.
• Responding to three common “pushbacks” on talent-investing.

Auberle is a sprawling Pittsburgh-area social service nonprofit that has been named “Top Workplace” nine times by The Pittsburgh Business Times, and is described by employees as flexible, supportive, comfortable, and safe. In this episode, Rusty speaks with Abby Wolensky and Ashley Pesi, Director and Program Manager (respectively) in Auberle’s workforce development program, about the various ways the organization supports and develops its staff.

Our guests explain how the organization is devoted to breaking cycles of poverty and socio-economic distress not only for their clients but also their staff. To do so, they have continuously raised the floor on wages (without outside incentives or specific external funding for this purpose); hire from internships; offer numerous professional development opportunities; build their strategic plans from within teams; and more. Other topics discussed include:

• Working through the pandemic and added hazard pay.
• The Rising Star Academy: an internal training initiative to promote professional growth, crossed-departmental learning, and bottom-up thinking.
• Auberle’s unique strategic planning process.
• “Challenging Conversations for Change” and other equity and inclusion efforts.
• Organizational culture and employee-employer loyalty at Auberle.

Independent Sector (“IS”) is a national organization that represents the nonprofit sector in Washington. In this episode, Rusty speaks with Jeffrey Moore, its Chief Strategy Officer, about the importance of having a seat at the table with the federal government.

The nonprofit sector is the trusted infrastructure in communities, and also 10% of the private workforce in the country. To raise our visibility, and make sure that our government understands and partners with the nonprofit sector, IS has been working on a number of different fronts including NIIAG (Nonprofit Infrastructure Investment Advocacy Groups), and a campaign to create an ‘Office on the Nonprofit Sector’ within the White House. 

Other topics discussed:

• Update on legislative bills: the Build Back Better Package and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Roads and Bridges Package.
• Raising the need to include the nonprofit workforce data in the Bureau of Labor Statistics report on a quarterly basis.
• Health of the Nonprofit Sector Report: a four part diagnostic of the sector.

Movement Talent was launched in 2020 to introduce a new way of finding, supporting, and maximizing talent for social justice organizations in the U.S. In this episode, Rusty speaks with its founder, Linda Nguyen, about the ways they have been working towards a more collaborative, equitable, holistic, and efficient approach to talent in progressive social movements.

The conversation covers Movement Talent’s role as a support system at the organizational level, and at the individual level as well. Also, and probably most importantly, they discuss the new effort’s work as a “membrane”, which looks to promote cross-learning on talent-related issues amongst organizations with the belief that they can fortify one another as an ecosystem. 

Other topics discussed:

• The needs Movement Talent seeks to address.
• Benefits of investing in “people-systems” internally within organizations and externally in the ecosystem in which organizations operate.
• Movement Talent’s accountability to social, racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice.

Government contracts are a crucial revenue stream for large swaths of the nonprofit sector. In many organizations, employee wages and other compensation factors are based on the terms of government contracts. So there’s a close connection between government contracting practices and nonprofit workforce issues. In this episode, Rusty talks with Jennifer Geiling from the NYC Mayor’s Office about the City's efforts to create a more equitable, accessible, transparent, and standard process for nonprofits who deliver services to New Yorkers on behalf of the City government.

The reforms they’ve made recently include: a base-lined 25% advance on Human Services contracts and an Indirect Cost Rate Funding initiative to make sure that more money is allocated to the overall costs nonprofits have beyond specific service-related items. 

Other topics discussed:

• A Nonprofit Resiliency Committee that has brought together government and nonprofit representatives during the Administration and through the pandemic.
• “PASSPort” a centralized, digital procurement and sourcing portal for nonprofits, and Citywide contractors, working with agencies across the City government.
• The City's “Cost Manual,” a new tool that defines nonprofit direct and indirect costs in human services government contracts.
• The City's work to support nonprofits during the pandemic and the Covid-19 Human Service Recovery Task Force

In this episode, we speak with Roger Nozaki, Vice President at the Barr Foundation. You’ll get the rare opportunity to hear a foundation executive thinking through their work supporting nonprofit sector effectiveness.

Roger shares his evolving ideas along the continuum from investing at the level of individuals - in particular executive directors - toward investing in “people-systems”, and a regional talent ecosystem for nonprofits. We discuss how racial equity can be bolstered through such efforts, and Roger shares how the Barr Fellowship exemplifies the connections between nonprofit organizational capacity, leadership development, and workforce development.

This is the third and final episode of Talent Matters Remix, our special summer series in partnership with ProInspire, co-hosted by Monisha Kapila and Rusty Stahl.

In this episode, Monisha and Rusty talk with Michele Booth Cole, Executive Director of Safe Shores - The DC Children’s Advocacy Center, about why and how to build a nonprofit organizational culture that supports and develops employees. Michele reflects on her article, “A Culture of Care, Without Compromise,” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) Talent Matters blog series. She discusses how her experience and thinking has evolved since the piece was published in April 2015.

We also discuss Michele’s 25-year journey as a Black woman executive director in the nonprofit sector, including her years as a volunteer in different organizations, her first experience as an E.D. with Mentors, Inc., and finally her work with Safe Shores -- The DC Children's Advocacy Center. 

Other topics discussed:

• How to lead nonprofits with a sense of abundance, accountability, and fearlessness.
• The importance of feedback, and learning to hear people, see people and invest in people who are aligned with the values of our organizations.
• How to deal with systemic racism and biases as a Black woman leader.
• A message to funders on racial equity and justice.
• Policies, rituals, and traditions created and led with and by Safe Shores staff to forge a culture of care.
  

This is the second episode of Talent Matters Remix, our three-episode series in partnership with ProInspire, co-hosted by Monisha Kapila and Rusty Stahl.

In this episode, Monisha and Rusty talk with Stephen Bauer about supporting a diverse and inclusive next generation for the nonprofit workforce. Steve reflects on the article he wrote about developing leaders who are both value-based and results-driven, which was part of the Talent Matters series on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog. He discusses how his experience and thinking has evolved in the seven years since the piece was published in summer 2014.

We also discuss Steve's extensive journey through the nonprofit sector, including his experience as an AmeriCorps alum, his impactful work at the Nonprofit Leadership Alliance (and specifically the Nonprofit Workforce Coalition), and, finally his decade long career at Public Allies, where he now serves as Chief of Staff. Other topics discussed:

• Public Allies Program, its values-based curriculum and impact on organizations.
• Asset-Based Community Development and how it helps build up the capacity of any community to lead itself.
• Changing and influencing the nonprofit organizational culture by hiring people from the communities that they work for.
• The need for a common set of values in the sector.
• Navigating the racial reckoning and pandemic as a white man.
• How Public Allies managed to go virtual and thrive during the pandemic.
• His experience as a Chief of Staff and why two Chief of Staff jobs are not the same.
• Possible impact of the CORPS Act on AmeriCorps.
• Lessons learned as Interim CEO and making decisions based on values.
• What would be Stephen’s “encore career”.
  

This is the first episode of Talent Matters Remix, our three-episode series in partnership with ProInspire, co-hosted by Monisha Kapila and Rusty Stahl.