The Business of Non-Profits

Athena, Holly Smithson - Sharing proven philosophies on how to lead a successful business entity

In this episode of The Business of Non-Profits, we speak with Holly Smithson, CEO of Athena, about approaching a non-profit as a business endeavor. She’ll speak candidly about what works for her and what sharing proven philosophies to lead a successful business entity.
 
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00:29Stacey Lund:
Hello and welcome back to the Business of nonprofits. With me today is Holly Smithson, the CEO of Athena. Athena is an organization with a mission to advance women in STEM leadership to 1 million strong by 2030. Holly is a voracious supporter of strong business skills within nonprofits, and we are so happy to speak with her today. Holly, thanks for joining us.
00:53Holly Smithson:
Well, thank you, Stacey. I'm excited to be here. And congratulations on the launch of your new podcast.
01:01Stacey Lund:
Thank you. Holly, you've had leadership roles like Athena is not your first rodeo, so talk to us a little bit about your leadership at other nonprofits and kind of the journey that you think nonprofit leadership takes. You've had an evolution, so talk a little bit about that.
01:15Holly Smithson:
Yeah, I've been really fortunate here in the great state of California, where there's a high volume of advocacy groups and sort of community groups that bond together in pursuit of a common agenda. And I have been fortunate enough to lead a couple of those in the space of life sciences, clean technology, and now women's leadership, specifically in the fields of STEM. And each of those organizations have a pretty successful track record. We know that on average, 90% of nonprofits will fail within their first few years, in large part because there's not a strategic plan or there's just some leadership deficiencies. So been really blessed and really fortunate to have these opportunities and these platforms to support these industry clusters.
02:03Stacey Lund:
That's amazing. So would you say and I mean, you're in an organization now that really is teaching leadership in a lot of ways, right? Harnessing your inner leadership skills is your evolution, or do you feel like nonprofit leadership and the focus on strategy and business skills, do you feel like that's kind of a tandem path to teaching women in STEM how to be better leaders? Is it the same trajectory that nonprofit leaders just don't really realize kind of what skills they need? Or what do you think the deficiency is?
02:38Holly Smithson:
I like your question, and here's why. Because we in the nonprofit industry for a long time had this false narrative that we want to show that we have spent very little of your donor money on overhead when all that does is perpetuate this race to the bottom mentality. And they know that it takes money to make money. So, the idea that you are going to communicate a business philosophy that you can spend the very least amount of money to drive an impact. When in fact, what you actually need to do is take some of the donor’s money and put it back into the mission. Into the organization. Into technology. Into talent development. Professional development. And so that's why you see these really nasty numbers where 90% of these nonprofits fail in the first few years. What donors really want is what is the impact based on your budget.
03:36Stacey Lund:
Talk a little bit more about that where you mentioned tools and technology. You're going to take your donor dollars and you're going to bolster your infrastructure. about the strategy behind that, and then about data, because I know you love data, and the way to show results is through measurement. And I think it's hard when you have a mission, and you love the mission to even kind of put KPIs in place for success.
04:00Holly Smithson:
For my mindset and because I professionally grew up working on Capitol Hill, working in public policy where accountability is scammed. And so, when I came out to California 15 years ago, my goal and my desire were to do the exact opposite of what they do in the federal government, I wanted to be a part of an organization that had an impact, that actually had outcomes that were measurable, and where everybody was on the same page, and everybody was rowing in the same direction. And we're guided by a set of data that informs us whether we're going in the right direction, whether we're going with the right people, and have the right tools in place to achieve success. And what I found was, obviously, the big data movement occurred within the last 20 years. So, if you in effect don't become a technology company, you will disappear. And the faster you understand and the faster that you're able to respond to those market dynamics, the more valuable you'll be. And that's something that's really been critical to my success, I believe, is being able to understand and see those market dynamics. You've got to have that constant excuse me, connectivity with your clients, right? Let me just give you an example. So, Athena, we've been around. We're celebrating our 25th anniversary next year. We now offer our 50 leadership development programs without boundaries. We were able to become a virtual organization. We need to understand being able to deploy a lot of the new technologies that would allow us to serve our community. We needed to hire in our very small and nimble team, those who have this new technology, proficiencies, and competencies so that we, in effect, can become a data company.  I need to see the data so that we can understand where our investment in our female leaders is leading us. And so being able to understand that that's where companies are today. If they're not investing in their female leaders, if they're not demonstrating that investment in material ways, then guess what? Those managers are going to be hit because of their performance evaluation, which is structured on how we are developing our talent. And so that's a cool opportunity for us to be able to generate the data, not just speak at it anecdotally, but come at it from a very clear dashboard that shows, here are the 50 women in your C suite or your management or your board that have come through our leadership programs. And then the conversation is just data-driven. The vision to be able to communicate using technology in a way that makes all the values and the impact so abundantly clear is where I believe Athena has been successful certainly in the last five years.
06:44Stacey Lund:
So, give me a little more on that. Athena, I know when you came in, right? You really focused. I'm going to call it on the customer success. The product, the data around it, and to show value. How did you do that?
06:58Holly Smithson:
What we did when we first when it first came on five years ago, the year was 2017, and that was the launch of the #metoo campaign. And so suddenly the board of directors at Athena is looking around and we're seeing this uprising and all these stories and all of these anecdotes of discrimination and harassment and biases that suddenly were not just one off. Because of, social media, we have this forever platform where these stories are compounded and become so pervasive that businesses everywhere it was hard to ignore.
And so, we saw as an opportunity, as the voice of women in STEM, to not just join the echo chamber, but actually drive the conversation with data and really level set the conversation in a way that could address what we found to be the perception gap. So, if we don't think that women should only have 20% of STEM jobs, then that's not how we see things. Until we bring data to say, hey, if you're okay with 80% of some of the highest wage salary positions in the STEM world going to men, then that's a different conversation.
And so, in that shift back in 2017, we started to have this Titanic shift at Athena. Where we wanted to get away from this sort of portfolio of programming on leadership, development, mentoring, networking, sort of the critical recipes for career advancement. When you come at the conversation with data, you're able to have a different conversation and you're able to arrive at more meaningful outcomes.
08:33Stacey Lund:
How much data did you gather yourself versus using studies that were already out? There was a combination. And did you have to bring in a data analyst or walk through that?
08:44Holly Smithson:
Well, so, at our 20th anniversary in 2018, we had our big annual STEM event of the year. And so we partnered with UC San Diego, which birthed Athena 25 years ago, and said, hey, we want to go in and produce an index. We want to have a women and STEM workforce index. We'd like to see how we are doing as a global STEM hub here in Southern California, and then how do we stack against the rest of the nation. And so we basically worked with them. They curated the data. We did it across all STEM fields. And then we broke it down by women in life sciences, women in technology, women in engineering, and then women in leadership positions. So that enabled us to kind of get a handle on where we stood and then how far we needed to go. And with that index, we did that product launch.
And at that time we had also launched a partnership with the United Nations Global Compact. And the UN Global Compact is the world's largest corporate social responsibility initiative. And in that initiative, it has 17 global goals, and one of them is to achieve gender equality. And so throughout those two initiatives, that was part of our biggest strategic outreach, to become more of an advocate to elevate Athena and obviously our corporate partners in ways that said, we don't have all the answers. We do have shared values. We have the data that tells us we have a ways to go, but we actually want to make this world sustainable. And we understand that the role of gender equality will play in that endeavor. And so now you suddenly have this movement, you have a set of people that are humble, that are informed, and, quite frankly, care more about the outcomes, the long-term outcomes, than just looking at their short-term gain. Some data-driven methodologies that would enable them to modernize their workforce. To recruit more women. To retain more women. To invest in their leadership growth. And then to ultimately drive. You know. The bottom line and their customers and their customer base and their customer loyalty. And so that whole process was, I would say, that was going on from 2018 to 2020 until the Pandemic hit. And so that was a huge evolution for Athena. And now we're this global entity that is widely respected and regarded as somebody that's on the ground, on the boots ground, in a global hub that wants to drive action. And if you're going to drive action and you're going to be bold enough to say, we want to advance a million women in STEM by 2030, you better be able to tell the story to keep the industry accountable.
11:20Stacey Lund:
So let's use that same chutzpah and put it towards diversifying women in STEM. That's so interesting because you really took it on almost like a for-profit product launch, right? You did your market research, you looked at other things that were happening, like the UN Council and what you could grab and pull and sort of cross-checked it with your mission, and then you sort of repackaged it. It's been an evolution, but you really did apply product principles to almost like transforming your mission or bolstering your mission to take it the next step. How's that sort of post-pandemic? So, that was before, and during and now after. How does that feel? What kind of resonance is there? What do you see next?
12:00Holly Smithson:
Well, that's interesting. So for us, for most of our history, we are focusing on the individual women that make up our membership portfolio. And obviously, the companies would be investing in those high performers, in those high potentials. And that was really our go-to market approach. But that shift, as I mentioned through our collaboration with the United Nations, was why don't we spend our efforts and our resources and reallocate them to support our companies? Because our 50 corporate partners employ over a million people worldwide. So I'm a nonprofit organization. I don't have a budget to get the emails of all women in STEM. But what I do have is I have onramp with my 50 corporate partners who have satellite locations worldwide and we know their total employee population. So by us focusing on how we can encourage and support those efforts by our corporate partners, we're able to lift the entire employee population far exceeding our individual support groups. And so everything that we do and the success that we've had is largely in part because of our corporate partners. And so we also have to come at it and recognize that there's a high degree of humility on the ones that do. This is Pfizer. It's Oracle. It's Qualcomm. It's Marauder Therapeutics. It's aTyr Pharmaceuticals. And so we know that we've got to partner with people that have been at it for a while to make sure to keep us accountable and to make sure that we're doing this in a way that's data-driven and reduce a lot of the trial and error time and get more actionable strategies that we can deploy today and start reaping the rewards. Understanding where the pain points are and where there's cracks in the foundation of the corporate cultures, helps us design products, as you would say in the private sector, helps us come up with these customized curriculums and content to help offset the challenges. And just to kind of give you an example the soft skills is where a lot of these women were falling short on. And had they been able to actually articulate their value proposition, to be able to recruit and activate male allies on their part, to offer them up to lead a special project, to be able to really build their social capital, these are obviously the social skills they're not teaching you at Berkeley or Stanford or MIT or any university or community college, for all I know. And so we saw that as a gap, a skills gap that we could fill and that would help them retain the women so that they could advance their careers.  
14:36Stacey Lund:
Awesome. So if you were going to say, I'm going to summarize for a minute, it sounds like really from a recipe point of view for a successful nonprofit, understand your mission. And so many leaders do they feel it right? They wear it on their sleeve, and they really are champions of their mission. But they have to be able to distill it down to such a value prop that it's crisp and it's alive, but it's also quantifiable. And then you've got to be able to have data that supports wherever you came from that led you there and then wherever you're going. And you have to adjust that, right? And that can be tech. It could be Google Sheets. I don't care what you use, right? You could find some great kids at UCSD, whatever works for you.
15:25Holly Smithson:
If you don't embrace and leverage technology and don't have your finger on the market forces, that's a recipe for swift failure. 1.5 million nonprofits operate in this country today and very few of them operate under the million-dollar mark. We're talking the most highly funded are YMCA, Red Cross, United Way, and those are mission driven organizations that are bringing value to people and families and communities. And they obviously have a very rich history. They are very well funded. And when they are well managed, they're able to bring a lot of impact to the communities they serve. And when they are mismanaged, everybody knows. When you are trying to weather all of these different events, like, obviously we were mismanaged in our 20-year history. We were about to go under because we had a lot of volunteers who had really good intentions, but nobody had a line of sight on the budget, nobody had accountability, nobody ran a PNL. And so, you had a bunch of well-intended people trying to put together this big, huge turkey feast for Thanksgiving. And it was unfortunate. And so, I came in to do a turnaround, which is what I love to do and be able to reassess all of the disorganization, to reestablish the products, the value, the mission, reestablish the trust of our corporate partners, and then really to put a really bright spotlight on how important it is and how far we have to go and how far we come on our mission. And then we got the belt taken over a hiney by the Pandemic and all of that great work and the reestablishing and productizing and cleaning up our portfolio, cleaning up our database, really elevating our brand equity across through the UN collaboration. And then BAM. That was very sad and frustrating for everybody. But had we not reinforced our business model and reinforced the necessities to get this organization get back up and continue in its march, then we would have been taken out for good.
17:39Stacey Lund:
I had a CEO I worked for a million years ago named Alex Sun. He's phenomenal. He's with Enlight, and he used to talk about protecting the core. The first order of business is protect the core. And the first rule of that is you have to know what your core is, right? So it sounds like when the Pandemic hit, it could have crippled you, it could have killed you, and it didn't, because you were already taking your value proposition and streamlining it to the point where you could protect that core. Right, those volunteers, as well meaning as they were, and I've worked in lots of organizations where I'm one of them, right, where it's we're making Thanksgiving dinner, but we're really heavy on the turkey, and there's no mashed potatoes. You don't want to do that. You want a good balance, and you can't be out of balance, but you have to protect that core. And you've already taken that on, and now you're just taking that to the next level of what you know, now that we're out of it, and I don't need to be quite so pedantic about protection, what can I do now that we're out of it to get to the next level? Do you know what your stats are? Can you share those with us? Where are we in 2022?
18:40Holly Smithson:
So now that our program portfolio reaches, I think we have almost 99 different countries represented in our virtual programs. So now we have to double down on our investment in our technology and our capabilities to be able to track that data, upload it, and then be able to design it in a way that shows in real time to be able to bifurcate and extract the data insight, really get a normalization of our data, a cleansing of our data. Right now, we don't have that mastered. And we're on the precipice of being able to communicate the impact we're having in a much more compelling fashion than we are today. I would say we are halfway there to our mission, but our ability to do that in a much more disciplined manner is gonna require us to become a data analytics company.
19:35Stacey Lund:
Which makes total sense, right?
19:38Holly Smithson
I love the ability and the opportunity to actually bring all of the impact into a nice package that empowers our partners and positions our partners to demonstrate to their shareholders, to their customers, to their employees and all their stakeholders, their commitment by numbers. And so as we move into that, we obviously just recovered our financial from the Pandemic, and then we've got enough to support us. Now we're adjusting ourselves and we're going into hopefully clear skies. Now we got to double down into this data analytics phase that I want to take us into. And again, everybody is grappling with this. If you look at Accenture or PwC or HBR, everybody's talking about the need for companies to everywhere to upskill, right. Remote collaboration, technology, all of this. Everybody's turning this corner, like it or not. And so you've got to find the resources. I've got to find the resources to do this. It's not an option.
20:38Stacey Lund:
But it's there. And you know where to go. You know what you want the end result to sort of look like. And you know that it's possible. And I think that's important because, yes, it's a blue-sky exercise, but there's no need to be afraid. And I think 25 years, hey, a lot of orgs don't last that long, let alone nonprofits. Right? You've had a few transitions under your belt, so I'm sure you will get there, actually. And I can't wait to see it. It's going to be phenomenal.
Alright Holly if we want to find out more about your mission and about the results, where do we go? How do we find out?
21:10Holly Smithson:
Yes, you can find us on Athenastemwomen.org.
21:15Stacey Lund:
Thank you, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciated it on behalf of Samm and I. Samm is my editor and my producer. So thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. And thank you all for listening. I really appreciate it. If you like what you heard, please subscribe or leave a review we'd love to hear from you. Or if you would like to be a guest, please hit us up at podcast@tgrmanagementconsulting.com. We'll see you next time.
 

Clearity, Rachel Freeman - Scaling a non-profit to further their program reach

In this episode of The Business of Non-Profits, we speak with Rachel Freeman from The Clearity Foundation about scaling a Non-Profit to further their program reach. We’ll learn about the challenges they’ve surmounted along the way, how change has transformed the team, and where they are going next!
 
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Transcript:
00:30
Stacey Lund:
Hello. You're listening to the business of nonprofits.
With me today is Rachel Freeman from the Clearity foundation. Rachel is a seasoned human resources and operations professional. Today we're going to learn how Clearity scales to increase its program reach. We'll learn about the challenges they've surrounded along the way, how change has transformed the team and where they're going next.
Rachel, thanks so much for joining us. Why don't you take a few minutes and introduce yourself, your role at Clearity, and the impactful work the Clearity Foundation does?
01:03
Rachel Freeman:
Thanks, Stacey.
Hi, everyone. I'm Rachel Freeman.
I'm the director of HR and operations for the Clearity Foundation. I started working with Clearity in 2020, right at the beginning stages of the pandemic. I left the corporate scene just a few years before that and was consulting in human resources and project management. After helping the Clearity team for a few months, I was struck by the compassion and the passion that was displayed by each of the people that I worked with. To a person, concern, and thoughtfulness for the women they supported were at the core of every decision and conversation they had, and I just knew I had to be part of the team.
Clearity works to improve the survival and quality of life of women with ovarian cancer. It's one of the most difficult diagnoses to receive, especially since it's typically diagnosed in the late stages. We meet these women and their loved ones where they're at and walk through this journey with them on their terms. That might mean helping them understand the science behind their disease and treatment options, locating an appropriate clinical trial, or managing the stress and anxiety that can be overwhelming in their situation. All our services are free of charge. Our individual personalized support is driven by the needs of each of the teal women that come to us.
02:25
Stacey Lund:
It's such an amazing mission and in some cases, heartbreaking. So, I can't even imagine working in that environment and literally impacting lives. Every single participant you touch truly, truly has a change that you can see and measure just from your involvement in their lives. And that's so huge. So, thank you so much for the work you do.
Clearly, the Pandemic was a busy time. It was a busy time for everyone. But Clearity had some non-pandemic-related work that happened. You had a lot of things occur all at the same time while the Pandemic was happening. Tell us a little bit about that, about the landscape, kind of how you came in, the assessments you did, taking on another assimilating, another small startup like. How did that work? Tell me about that.
03:25
Rachel Freeman:
Most of the Clearity team was already working remotely and virtually prior to the pandemic, and so part of what I did was help them get set up to be as efficient virtually as they were in the office.
The biggest challenge that they were having at that point is they had reached the point in the growth of the organization where they weren't really a startup anymore, but they weren't big and stabilized. They were right at the beginning of a steep growth trajectory and the Pandemic just adds a layer of complexity to that for sure. But what we were looking at doing at that point was not only getting the team virtual for safety reasons but also looking for ways to find efficiencies and scalability in our processes and procedures so that we could handle the influx of participants that we were really expecting to see.
04:23
Stacey Lund:
Okay, so during the Pandemic you also it sounds like scaling was an issue and you had recognized that, but you were also acquiring and assimilating this another program. So, you had additional tech, you were also taking on board. Talk a little bit about that.
4:43
Rachel Freeman:
Just prior to the Pandemic, we had been working with a pilot program called Steps Through OC, which provided psychosocial support to women with ovarian cancer. And just before the Pandemic started, we brought them in as a full program of Clearity. And so, they had been operating on completely different technology platforms, and organizational structures, everything was separate because they had been operating as a separate organization prior to that point. And so quite a bit of the scalability that we needed to do was also finding the efficiencies and consistency in the way people are doing their work at Clearity.
05:29
Stacey Lund:
Absolutely. You're looking at the scale and you're looking at what you do internally and how they work, trying to come up with a happy medium. So how did you know? What was the trigger for you that something had to change? Was it something from the board? What happened?
05:52
Rachel Freeman:
It was a little bit of both. So, the acquisition brought in a number of new participants that have been looking for something different than our core services at that time were scientific support and education around the treatment decisions that women were focusing on. What we found was that adding this new service allowed us to give more holistic support to the women and their families, but it also increased the number of people that were being referred to our scientific program and vice versa. We knew that we needed to scale, and we needed to find these efficiencies because we were looking at such a steep growth in our projections for the participants that we were bringing in.
06:52
Stacey Lund:
Excellent. A lot of people will say getting started is the hardest part. So how did you start, what did you take on, and how did you parse the work? How did you approach this?
06:55
Rachel Freeman:
The biggest and most important pieces of these transitions is the change management and actually doing that prep work before you get started.
Because there were these distinct teams that had been operating independently from each other, it was really important to have the buy in of the leadership team and to make sure that not only was everyone accepting what needed to come up, but they really understood the benefits to it and they wanted this to happen. Because it's one thing to say, theoretically I'm on board, I want to grow this program by 500% in the next year. But when that means that now you've got to have a request that you put in for something that you just did quickly yourself, that gets hard very quickly. So it was really important that we had the why really established before we got started.
07:53
Stacey Lund:
Absolutely. And I think the more competent you are in your field, at your work, the harder it is to feel uncomfortable and sort of incompetent and make that shift. Nobody likes to feel like they're not good at what they do and this just compounded it over time, right?
Let's talk specifics about one of the improvements that you made and you did it fairly quickly, was centralizing sort of operational support. Talk about that specifically in terms of how did you get the buy in on that and how did you announce it, what did you do there?
08:35
Rachel Freeman:
So that was actually one of the simpler but most foundational pieces of what we did for the scalability and efficiency analysis was establishing this centralized operational support for the organization They were all operating independently. There wasn't any efficiencies between them. If two different departments were looking for similar support, they would have to be two different skill sets or two different people, or at least one person trained in two different processes. And so the buy-in was actually fairly simple. We're going to take some stuff off your plate. You guys are going to get to focus on the things that got you into this business to begin with.
It was the implementation of that that saw the challenges.
09:28
Stacey Lund:
Absolutely. I think that's a good segue into what were the challenges you saw and how did you work them out? Or maybe you didn't.
09:37
Rachel Freeman:
I think the biggest challenge is just that people have a different environment that they work in when they're working independently of each other. One department calls the women that we support participants and we have another one that might call them patients or that might call them teal women, or just the terminology all of the normal things that are just part of everyday work. And the challenge was really that they were all functioning well. There were no issues. And so we were really going in specifically to fix something that wasn't broken.
And so it's really important to bring it back to that big picture to remind of the why and just because you have to send in this request that you could do yourself in 30 minutes. If you send in a request and it takes somebody else 15 minutes and it saves somebody in a different department an hour, it's still worth it. And so really just kind of putting it into perspective and getting everybody to take a step back and look at that bigger picture and the benefits that will come out of it.
10:48
Stacey Lund:
I know data was a huge impetus both for some of your changes but also some of the discomfort. But in your case, every group knew their data like cold. You could ask someone specifically how many participants were at a certain stage or how many participants enrolled in. So, talk a little bit about the data challenge and the specifics of feeling of the loss of control of data. How did you try to partner with them to let them know it would be okay? And how did you work that?
11:27
Rachel Freeman:
The data is actually still in process. This is a transition that we're going through right now and it's a loss of control for the data. But I don't think that that's the motivation behind it. It's the lack of personalization that causes the frustration. So, you're right. We have a scientific team that's working with some medical records and then we have our psychosocial team that's working with people's mental health even though they're not providing therapy. They were always keeping their data very separate and private as they should as well. And then our development team has financial information from people and that's different but equal level of privacy. And so all three of them were very separate in their databases but had such a high touch and a connection to the people that they were working with that they didn't need a database. They could tell you each and every one. And so as wonderful as that is and as much as that contributes to the environment and to the level of support and connection we have with the people that we support, the scalability factor of that is a little tough because there's only a certain number of people that you can connect that deeply with.
The ability to let technology support the scalability of the data and the storage of the data and the efficiency of the data management, it's difficult because it feels like it's less personal. There's a lot of it that we're looking for ways to have that technology help and augment the personal connection so that it's not something that's taking away that control, it's something that's giving more control.
13:11
Stacey Lund:
I love that, right? Because the whole point of a business, any business, but especially a nonprofit, should be connection, it should be a really good customer experience. That's frictionless, right? It's all about the people we serve. So I love that it came from that heart of service, right. It's not just cost savings or even fundraising. It's truly, it's truly from a place of service. Talk a little bit about your successes. What were they and how did you communicate them to the team to get more support and get buy in that it's working?
13:49
Rachel Freeman:
in the last two years, we've increased the capacity for our emotional support sessions by 44% with the same counseling team. But being able to be that much more focused on supporting the women at the way that only they can and taking the things off of their plate that they don't need to be doing.
And then we've also cut our operating expenses by 28% in the last year. And that's even with the investment in technology that we've been making.
14:23
Stacey Lund:
Rachel, that's huge.
And I think one of the other interesting things, because I know a little bit about the inside of this organization, it's not just the numbers, right? You have that and I know the counselors feel it. They feel that they're doing more and they're reaching more people, which is so gratifying for them. And your C suite and your board probably love the cut and operational expenses in addition to that.
So if you had one nugget of advice, one little pearl of wisdom for somebody who was looking at I'm not even talking the same redesign that you've done, but just maybe a digital transformation or a tech project, what would your piece of advice be?
15:08
Rachel Freeman:
Start the change management early and spend more time on that than you do on the implementation. So make sure that you've got the buy in, the leadership all the way down, and that you have a very clearly articulated why behind the change. So that when it does get tough and frustrating, you have something to point back to, to say, this is why this is worth it.
15:31
Stacey Lund:
You had talked in our prep meeting about the team transformation. That along the way, as you do a digital transformation or a big change project, the team itself reacts differently. Talk to us a little bit about that because I think that's important.
15:51
Rachel Freeman:
At different stages of an organization's growth, there are different environments that you're working in, and people gravitate towards those environments. So some people really like to work with a startup organization. They're very entrepreneurial. They like the fast pace, the immediate impact. And some people like to work in a more fully grown, stable organization. They like the consistency. They like the structure, and there's pros and cons to both ways. And so when you start with the role, you are drawn to where that environment is when you're looking at the organization and you're looking at the job, and as the organization grows, the team may or may not transform along with it. So as we move into a growth phase and we're looking at building that structure and the stability, you have to have the right people in the right positions at the right time. And that, at the right time, is the piece that a lot of people forget.
16:55
 Stacey Lund:
Yeah. And it isn't personal on either side. Right. It truly is. It is a personality fit, and some people just recognize it right away. That's the remarkable thing. And I think that is big because I think a lot of organizations assume everyone is going to be along for the ride, right. And everyone is not. They're not
17:21
Rachel Freeman:
And the best thing that the organization can do for themselves and for their team is to acknowledge that and assist people in finding the role or the niche that's right for them
17:30
Stacey Lund:
Okay. So I want to give you a minute to talk about Teal Woman because you have these exciting once a year events for your participants and their families and to recognize people. So talk a little bit about that and then tell us how we can learn more.
17:35
Rachel Freeman:
Absolutely. So September is Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, and we have a number of different activities. We're out there. The Clearity team is out there. Our ambassadors are out there just making sure to raise awareness around ovarian cancer in our communities. And we've had a number of government buildings that have been light up in teal for us, which is just wonderful. We also have our flagship Gala in September, which is called Teal Woman. And we have just a wonderful program lined up. There's an in person local event at the Fairmont Grand del Mar that will allow for people to bid on live auctions. We have a speed painter who is always very popular. I just love watching her do her work. And then we also have a live broadcast on the 22nd that is nationwide. And there's an auction in there as well and a lot of just really wonderful speakers and just getting the community together to celebrate the successes and comfort each other's losses and really look towards the future of ovarian cancer support.
19:09
Stacey Lund:
Excellent. So for the rest of you listening, Clearity is at www.Clearity.org if you'd like to donate. And I can't stress again what an amazing organization this is that's Clearityfoundation.org/donate. Even if you don't know someone who's an ovarian cancer survivor, I really recommend if you know anyone who's been touched by cancer, check out Clearity's website. My mom had about a horrible bout with lung cancer and I really wish that I had found this discussion. There's a podcast that Clearity puts out that talks about all sorts of psychosocial things and as a caregiver, it would have been so gratifying and just so grounding to have some of those resources. So please, even if you're not ovarian cancer survivor or you don't know someone who is, but you've been touched by cancer, it's a great place to start. And I know if you're interested in ovarian cancer support, Clearity is a great resource. So please check them out.
Rachel, I can't say enough how awesome it is to work with you. Rachel is ferocious. So if you'd like to talk to her, you can also reach her through the Clearity.org website and find out more about their efforts.
Thank you so much. I can't say enough what a pleasure it is to work with you. And for the rest of you listening, please subscribe. If you like what you heard, review us. And if you'd like to be a guest, please go ahead and send us an email at podcast@TGRmanagementconsulting.com. We'll see you next time.

The Business of Non-Profits Trailer

Trailer for The Business of Non-Profits Podcast
 
In each episode, we will discuss how Non-profits are businesses at their core and have the same challenges and successes as other businesses, especially during the pandemic. Join Stacey Lund as she hosts monthly candid discussions with organizations from a variety of non-profit verticals about how they rose to the challenge and scaled, pivoted, and transformed in the past two years.
If you are looking for ideas or just plain transformation inspiration, this show is for you. 
 
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