The Nonprofit CEO Podcast

Heather Rice-Minus walked out of a board meeting without an important approval. She had presented a new mission and vision for Prison Fellowship, built over a year of listening in prisons and long work with her...

Barry Corey is starting his twentieth year as president of Biola University. He says he is on his third presidency at the same institution. Early on, he hired a senior leader he liked and respected. Years later the...

Kaitlyn Slate stepped into her first CEO role knowing she was very different from her predecessor. The board wanted her to diversify revenue. The staff wanted her to understand who they were. And the farmers who had...

Jews for Jesus had been sending staff to present to churches for 50 years, more than 1000/year. Pastors invited them in. Churches put them on the schedule. People started to give. Then the invitations started declining...

He got the largest gift in his organization's history. Then he left anyway. Nick Grono had been employee number one at the Freedom Fund since 2014, the only leader the anti-slavery organization had ever known, and he...

Carol Bremer-Bennett sensed there were meetings before the meeting and meetings after the meeting. The initiatives she was pushing kept stalling, and she couldn't get people to say what they really thought. So about...

Sami DiPasquale put three border properties under contract in the same week. Abara had received its 501c3 status the month before. He had no money, but he moved anyway. Abara is a nonprofit in El Paso that works on both...

World Hope had run a child sponsorship program for 30 years. Jenn Petersen was one year into her CEO tenure. The program was declining, the administrative lift was high, and it was no longer serving donors, field teams...

Dan Vogel spent months building a partnership with a large institutional funder. Flourish Fund was barely a year old, still in startup mode, without a stable base of funding. The money would have been meaningful, and...

Ann Graber Hershberger spent nearly four decades connected to Mennonite Central Committee before she led it: first as a worker in Nicaragua and El Salvador, then through years of board service, alongside a 33-year...

Ted Esler launched a partially self-funded health insurance program for the staff of Missio Nexus member organizations. It grew from zero to $22 million in about 18 months. Then COVID arrived. Claims went quiet while...

A member publicly demanded to know where the Alliance to End Hunger stood on the Gaza conflict. Half of Eric Mitchell's coalition supported one side. Half supported the other. Silence was its own answer. He held off as...

Michael Wear had a clear vision for the Center for Christianity and Public Life: deep formation work, deep investment in cohorts of twelve to sixteen fellows, commitments measured in years. Some potential funders kept...

<p>Joanna Taft proposed starting a charter high school out of the arts nonprofit she was leading. She had no background in education. <br/><br/>Her artists were leaving Indianapolis because nobody was buying their work...

<p>Myal Greene inherited an organization with a mission statement that everyone loved. World Relief had run on that mission statement for fifteen years. Internal staff admired it. External donors knew it. Myal knew it...