Episodes
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In our Season 6 finale episode, we mark Fund the People's 10th anniversary by launching our new initiative: the Funding that Works Academy. This new professional development platform equips funders, nonprofits, and intermediaries with the ideas and tools needed to provide effective funding solutions that advance good nonprofit jobs, and the wellbeing and sustainability of those working in nonprofits.
The Academy was designed to help grant makers and fundraisers move philanthropic money in a way that supports and develops nonprofit leaders and workers. With the Funding that Works Academy courses, you'll learn about the challenges facing our sector in a new way so that you can craft interventions that will address the real problem. Dive into the theory and practice of talent-investing, ensuring that grantmaking and fundraising efforts prioritize people and their pivotal role within the social sector.
Our inaugural course is designed for foundation professionals and other types of grantmakers. Future offerings will be tailored to foundation trustees, nonprofit professionals, board members, and individuals in intermediary roles like consultancies, higher education, and associations.
To learn about the Academy, visit fundingthatworks.org. To view current and future courses, and sign up to be notified when new courses are available, visit our Shop: bit.ly/fundingthatworksshop. You can also find our Academy, podcast, blog, toolkit, Staffing the Mission, and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org.
Season 6 was sponsored by Loftis Partners.
Thank you for your listenership and interest in Fund the People and the Funding that Works Academy. We will talk to you again in Season 7 starting in September 2024.
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In this brief episode, Rusty offers our loyal listeners a special sneak-peek into a new program offering being announced shortly from Fund the People! Don’t miss the inside scoop!
Rusty also wraps-up Season 6 by comparing and contrasting stories from some of our amazing guests this season, and offers two key “Aha! moments:”
First: when funders invest in the grantee workforce, it can be extremely big, complicated and costly, or it can be small, simple, and take modest dollars. Or something in between.
Second: If nonprofits have the political will and savvy to invest in their workers, they don’t have to wait for funders for other outside forces to give them permission or incentives.
Go to our website for a transcript of the episode and links to the resources discussed in the episode. While you’re there, browse our library of amazing guests and conversations from Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast. You can find the podcast, our blog, free tools, and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org.
Season 6 is sponsored by Loftis Partners. They've launched the Pay Equity Collective, a supportive community for nonprofits seeking pathways to pay equity. Visit payequitycollective.com to learn more! Loftis Partners – Empowering organizations and advancing equity, one collective step at a time!
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Episodes manquant?
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This episode makes clear the need for and value of talent-investing for community foundations and other place-focused funders. Our guest, Elizabeth Kidd of the Community Foundation of the Holland/Zeeland Area, demonstrates how even the most modest dollar amounts used in strategic, responsive talent-investing at key inflection points in the lifecycle of leaders and their institutions, can have exponentially positive impact for nonprofit executives, workers, organizations, and communities.
Listen to gain an understanding of…
Why and how talent-investing has become valuable to the board and staff of the Community Foundation.
How the Community Foundation has created and sustained value for grantees and the community through its grantmaking to strengthen the local nonprofit sector.
Why it’s important to invest in the nonprofit workforce at key moments of organizational change and across the life-cycle stages of individuals and organizations.
Go to our website for a transcript of the episode and links to the resources discussed in the episode. While you’re there, browse our library of amazing guests and conversations from Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast. You can find the podcast, our blog, free tools, and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org.
Season 6 is sponsored by Loftis Partners. They've launched the Pay Equity Collective, a supportive community for nonprofits seeking pathways to pay equity. Visit payequitycollective.com to learn more! Loftis Partners – Empowering organizations and advancing equity, one collective step at a time!
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In this episode, you’ll gain important insights into current issues in the nonprofit workforce, and how professional development is evolving in our sector, particularly but not exclusively as it relates to leaders and workers of color. Our guest is Yolanda Coentro of the Institute for Nonprofit Practice, one of the fastest-growing and most exciting professional development providers for nonprofits. Founded in 2007, the Institute now offers a portfolio of programs that serve nonprofit leaders from early-career all the way through the executive level.
Go to our website for a transcript of the episode and links to the resources discussed in the episode. While you’re there, browse our library of amazing guests and conversations from Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast. You can find the podcast, our blog, free tools, and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org.
Season 6 is sponsored by Loftis Partners. They've launched the Pay Equity Collective, a supportive community for nonprofits seeking pathways to pay equity. Visit payequitycollective.com to learn more! Loftis Partners – Empowering organizations and advancing equity, one collective step at a time!
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In today's episode, you'll learn strategies and practical tips for creating happy, healthy, nonprofit workers and workplaces. Our guest Beth Kanter is a leading expert on nonprofit technology and she is co-author of the book Happy, Healthy Nonprofit: Strategies for Impact Without Burnout. You'll learn about tangible tools for preventing burnout at the individual and organizational levels, and learn what is available in her book. We discuss why she wrote the book, how nonprofit wellbeing has changed over the six years since it was published, and what she would write differently if she were writing the book today. We discuss the question: Can better salaries make us less burnout? Beth offers her advice for how artificial intelligence can become part of wellness in nonprofits. And much more!
Go to our website for a transcript of the episode and links to the resources discussed in the episode. While you’re there, browse our library of amazing guests and conversations from Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast. You can find the podcast, our blog, free tools, and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org.
Season 6 is sponsored by Loftis Partners. They've launched the Pay Equity Collective, a supportive community for nonprofits seeking pathways to pay equity. Visit payequitycollective.com to learn more! Loftis Partners – Empowering organizations and advancing equity, one collective step at a time!
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Dr. Akilah Watkins is President and CEO of Independent Sector, one of the national organizations that pulls together our sector and represents it in Washington. Dr. Watkins has been on a national listening tour of the nonprofit sector since she took on this leadership role in January 2023. In this episode, she shares what she’s heard about the challenges facing the nonprofit workforce. She also shares how Independent Sector is working to improve the policy environment for nonprofits as employers.
Go to our website for a transcript of the episode and links to the resources discussed in the episode. While you’re there, browse our library of amazing guests and conversations from Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast. You can find the podcast, our blog, free tools, and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org.
Season 6 is sponsored by Loftis Partners. They've launched the Pay Equity Collective, a supportive community for nonprofits seeking pathways to pay equity. Visit payequitycollective.com to learn more! Loftis Partners – Empowering organizations and advancing equity, one collective step at a time!
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Have you ever thought that funder-sponsored organizational ‘capacity building’ may be detrimental to nonprofit workers and their communities? Today we talk about concrete ways we could improve the framing and practice of capacity building to better support the brilliance and resilience of diverse nonprofit workers and organizations.
Today's guests are Melissa DeShields and Marcus Littles from Frontline Solutions, a Black-owned and -led social change consulting firm. We discuss our guests recent Nonprofit Quarterly articles about why the term “capacity building” should be retired, and ways to improve the practice itself under whatever title it goes by.
How can funders think and act differently regarding grantee capacity?And how can nonprofit leaders respond to funders, and/or proactively design their own efforts? Learn more about these questions and more on today’s episode.
Go to our website for a transcript of the episode and links to the resources discussed in the episode. While you’re there, browse our library of amazing guests and conversations from Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast. You can find the podcast, our blog, free tools, and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org.
Season 6 is sponsored by Loftis Partners. They've launched the Pay Equity Collective, a supportive community for nonprofits seeking pathways to pay equity. Visit payequitycollective.com to learn more! Loftis Partners – Empowering organizations and advancing equity, one collective step at a time!
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This episode offers a powerful example of how funders and nonprofits can collaborate and advocate to reform government contracting, so that it works better for the nonprofit sector and the nonprofit workforce.
You’ll learn how Mercedes Elizalde (Board member of the Nonprofit Association of Oregon), Felicita Monteblanco (Northwest Health Foundation) and others teamed up to advocate for state contracting reform, and how that resulted in them serving as members of the Governor’s Modernizing Grant Funding and Contracting Task Force.
Our powerful guests will help you gain an understanding of:
How the nonprofit community can educate and influence our state governments; Advocacy strategies and tactics for influencing government; and Lessons-learned on the challenges and opportunities of legislative approaches to systems change.Go to the page for this episode on our website for a transcript, links to the resources discussed in the episode, and speaker bios. Check out our library of past episodes and amazing guests on the podcast page on our website. You can also find our blog, toolkit, and other resources on the fundthepeople.org website.
Season 6 is sponsored by Loftis Partners. They've launched the Pay Equity Collective, a peer-learning experience for nonprofits seeking pathways to pay equity. Visit payequitycollective.com to learn more!
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In this episode, you'll get concrete tips for ensuring that nonprofit workers have access to retirement savings from returning guest Chitra Aiyar of Just Futures. Chitra first joined us in Season 3 Episode 10 in December of 2022, when we discussed what's wrong with nonprofit retirement. Today we'll discuss what's right with retirement.
This episode is focused on practical approaches for nonprofit employers to establish or enhance retirement savings for their staff team. We also talk about some of the challenges of implementing retirement savings in nonprofits.
Go to our website for a transcript of this episode and links to the resources discussed in the episode. You can find all the episodes of this podcast plus our blog, toolkit and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org. And we invite you to learn from all the amazing past guests of Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast.
Season 6 is sponsored by Loftis Partners. They've launched the Pay Equity Collective, a peer learning experience that provides capacity building, strategic resources, and a supportive community for nonprofits seeking pathways to pay equity. Visit payequitycollective.com to learn more! Loftis Partners – Empowering organizations and advancing equity, one collective step at a time!
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In this episode, you’ll hear how a new nonprofit executive can start-up innovative investments in employees from scratch, even in a 60-year-old organization with 200 staff.
Shaheer Mustafa tells his story about his work at HopeWell, a major foster care nonprofit in Massachusetts. When he took management of the $25 million budget with hundreds of staff, there was no internal capacity that you would expect from an HR team. Since then, he has leveraged government and philanthropic investments to build-out a sophisticated set of investments in staff, and focused on increasing representation, leadership, and voice of people with lived experience in the foster care system throughout the organization. And he kept it going through the challenges of the pandemic.
Go to our website for a transcript of this episode and links to the resources discussed in the episode. You can find all the episodes of this podcast plus our blog, toolkit and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org. And we invite you to learn from all the amazing past guests of Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast.
Season 6 is sponsored by Loftis Partners. They've launched the Pay Equity Collective, a peer learning experience that provides capacity building, strategic resources, and a supportive community for nonprofits seeking pathways to pay equity. Visit payequitycollective.com to learn more! Loftis Partners – Empowering organizations and advancing equity, one collective step at a time!
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This episode spotlights how one foundation has made an ongoing commitment to supporting “healing justice” as part of its grantmaking. We're pleased to speak with Desiree Flores, Executive Director of the General Service Foundation.
As they say on the Foundation's website, "Social justice work can be affirming, invigorating, and nourishing. But for leaders in the struggle, the work can also be rife with conflict, overwork, isolation, trauma, and oppression...we have heard movement leaders struggling increasingly with burnout and exhaustion. At GSF, we’ve been exploring how we, as funders, can support movements in creating space to cultivate resilience, wholeness, and well-being among the individuals and organizations that comprise our movements."
Toward that end, since 2018 General Service Foundation has funded healing justice work in two ways:
Supporting organizations that offer healing and resilience services and trainings to social justice leaders and organizations, and Supporting the Foundation's grant partners (aka grantees) with healing justice stipends.This is the third in our three-episode series called "How Funders Can Support Nonprofit Workers in the Age of Burnout."
This episode and the series it's a part of are based on Fund the People's presentation at the Center for Effective Philanthropy Conference in Fall of 2023. Our session focused on how funders can support nonprofit workers in the age of burnout. Thanks again to CEP for including us in the conference.
Go to our website for a transcript of this episode and links to the resources discussed in the episode. You can find all the episodes of this podcast plus our blog, toolkit and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org. And we invite you to learn from all the amazing past guests of Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast.
Season 6 is sponsored by Loftis Partners. They've launched the Pay Equity Collective, a peer learning experience that provides capacity building, strategic resources, and a supportive community for nonprofits seeking pathways to pay equity. Visit payequitycollective.com to learn more! Loftis Partners – Empowering organizations and advancing equity, one collective step at a time!
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Today's episode offers a view into how foundation executives can integrate talent-investing deeply into their philanthropic approach and how they can work with grantees in a practical fashion to ensure that they are motivated, incentivized and have the funding they need to pay appropriate thriving wages. This is the second in our special three-part series based on Fund the People's presentation at the Center for Effective Philanthropy Conference in Fall of 2023. Our session focused on how funders can support nonprofit workers in the age of burnout.
Today, we're talking with Jennifer Roller of The Raymond John Wean Foundation. Each episode in the series documents a unique and important approach to talent-investing.
Go to our website for a transcript of this episode and links to the resources discussed in the episode. You can find all the episodes of this podcast plus our blog, toolkit and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org. And we invite you to learn from all the amazing past guests of Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast.
Season 6 is sponsored by Loftis Partners. They've launched the Pay Equity Collective, a peer learning experience that provides capacity building, strategic resources, and a supportive community for nonprofits seeking pathways to pay equity. Visit payequitycollective.com to learn more! Loftis Partners – Empowering organizations and advancing equity, one collective step at a time!
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We’re kicking-off Season 6 with a new 3-part special series, “How Funders Can Support Nonprofit Workers in the Age of Burnout.” It features speakers and topics from a panel discussion hosted by Fund the People at the Center for Effective Philanthropy conference in fall 2023.
In this first episode of the series, you'll learn from a foundation executive director who's leading an important new experiment in how funders invest in the workforce of grantee organizations. The Executive Director is Jamie Allison. The foundation is the Walter & Elise Haas Fund. And the experiment is the Endeavor Fund, which is a program of the Haas Fund.
Go to our website for a transcript of this episode and links to the resources discussed in the episode. You can find all the episodes of this podcast plus our blog, toolkit and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org. And we invite you to learn from all the amazing past guests of Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast.
Season 6 is sponsored by Loftis Partners. They've launched the Pay Equity Collective, a peer learning experience that provides capacity building, strategic resources, and a supportive community for nonprofits seeking pathways to pay equity. Visit payequitycollective.com to learn more! Loftis Partners – Empowering organizations and advancing equity, one collective step at a time!
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We don’t need Baby Boomers to get out of the way faster.
We don’t need Millennials or Generation Z to slow down their ambition for leadership.
And we certainly don't need to continually ignore Generation X.
Instead, we need to intentionally create a multi-generational, multiracial nonprofit workforce.
The more we push long-serving leaders to get out, the more resistance we get. The more we push emerging leaders to stay put, the less likely they'll be to stay in their organizations and in the sector. We need new ways to be together, to work together. Here are four suggestions for building a multigenerational, multiracial nonprofit workforce.
This episode wraps up Season 5 and this round of Rusty’s Rants and Reflections. You can hear the full Rants and Reflections series on this Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0bkiGBJqDkRwZzcw5qmdNs?si=b7fCU-56RPuhJdW9FdzeKQ&pi=u-jWbHl1hIT5mS.
Coming soon: Season 6 features tons of amazing resources and ideas from funders and nonprofit leaders!
Go to the episode page on our podcast page fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast to get a transcript of this episode.
We invite you to learn from all the amazing past guests and episodes of Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast.
You can also fund our blog, toolkit, sign up for our mailing list, and get other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org.
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This episode discusses key trends and emerging practices that are sweeping across the funding community. It highlights the glaring gap in these important ideas and practices, and how talent-investing could add value to these ideas.
Go to the episode page on our podcast page fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast to listen and get a transcript of this episode.
We invite you to learn from all the amazing past guests and episodes of Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast.
You can also fund our blog, toolkit, sign up for our mailing list, and get other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org.
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In this episode, I'm offering up another one of my Rants and Reflections. Today's topic: The Nonprofit Nutrition Cycle.
Let’s face it: many foundation grants are frozen solid. They are restricted by purpose, program, time, even by line items in the budget. To borrow language from George Overholser’s great article on buying, not building, frozen funds are great for “buying” programs, but are terrible for “building” the very organizations that run the programs.
In a just and effective system, every funder would, at minimum, contribute flexible funding and, at best, intentionally deploy resources to build strong organizations, rather than just selectively buying a piece of one specific program.
Go to our website for a transcript of this episode. You can find all the episodes of this podcast plus our blog, toolkit and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org. And we invite you to learn from all the amazing past guests of Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast.
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This episode exposes the insane double standard between how staff costs are treated in private foundation budgets, and how staff costs are treated in nonprofit budgets and the grants that support them.
If you want to understand why private foundations are expected to pay great salaries and benefits, while public charities are expected to compensate with poverty wages, this episode succinctly explains the legal underpinnings of this difference.
The double standard must be at the center of our conversations about “full costs,” the “overhead” myth, and “direct” versus “indirect” costs.
To start that conversation, I offer a radical proposal for how to address the double standard! Take a listen and let me know what you think.
This episode is part of our Rusty's Rants and Reflections series. The series offers Rusty's provocative reflections and ideas about investing in the nonprofit workforce.
Go to our website for a transcript of this episode. You can find all the episodes of this podcast plus our blog, toolkit and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org. And we invite you to learn from all the amazing past guests of Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast.
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In this episode, we offer a critique of a big idea that has led philanthropy and the nonprofit sector astray since 2006, and has negatively impacted our workforce. And I’m going to tell you how Fund the People has been challenging this idea and reframing the issue.
The Bridgespan Group is a major consulting firm serving foundations and nonprofits that was co-founded in 2000 by two Bain and Company executives. In the early days of 2006, Bridgespan caused a huge stir in the sector when they declared that there is a “deficit of leadership in the nonprofit sector.”
Their research suggested that when long-serving Baby Boomer executive directors retired, there would statistically not be enough Generation X to fill their seats. And, they said, with the number of nonprofits growing each year, the number of seats would keep getting bigger as the population to fill them got smaller.
The study was based on deficit thinking. And while it sought to encourage investment in nonprofit executives, it had all kinds of unintended consequences.
Resources:
Bridgespan Group’s 2006 report The Nonprofit Sector’s Leadership Deficit Bridgespan Group’s 2015 article The Leadership Development Deficit Building Movement Project’s article The New Lifecycle of WorkThis episode is part of our Rusty's Rants and Reflections series. The series offers Rusty's provocative reflections and ideas about investing in the nonprofit workforce.
Go to our website for a transcript of this episode. You can find all the episodes of this podcast plus our blog, toolkit and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org. And we invite you to learn from all the amazing past guests of Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast.
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We appreciate that numerous funders have been trying to support the personal well-being of nonprofit workers during recent years. However, in this episode you’ll hear Rusty’s reflection on why “mini-grants” for wellness is in no way an adequate response to the challenges confronted by the nonprofit workforce. And you’ll learn the concept of turning the funding formula upside down, so staffing issues are treated with the level of attention that they need and deserve.
Resources:
Flip the Funding Formula blog post State of Nonprofits 2023: What Funders Need to Know by Center for Effective Philanthropy Less Than We Thought report by Fund the People (must create a login for FTP Toolkit)This episode is part of our Rusty's Rants and Reflections series. The series offers Rusty's provocative reflections and ideas about investing in the nonprofit workforce.
Go to our website for a transcript of this episode and links to the resources discussed in the episode. You can find all the episodes of this podcast plus our blog, toolkit and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org. And we invite you to learn from all the amazing past guests of Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast.
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In this episode, Rusty discusses how fear freezes talent-investing, and how fear is a factor for both leaders in both nonprofits and foundations. For example, many nonprofits fear losing funding if they expose the challenges they face in supporting their staff. And many funders fear that their grantees may become too reliant on them for staffing costs. If and when we can alleviate these fears, we can unlock new momentum for talent-investing and talent justice.
This episode is part of our Rusty's Rants and Reflections series. The series offers Rusty's provocative reflections and ideas about investing in the nonprofit workforce.
Go to our website for a transcript of this episode and links to the resources discussed in the episode. You can find all the episodes of this podcast plus our blog, toolkit and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org. And we invite you to learn from all the amazing past guests of Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast.
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