The Charity Charge Show

In Episode 88 of the Charity Charge Show, Stephen talks to Nora Super, Executive Director of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging, whose mission is to help people build meaningful lives, in which they can experience health and well-being, pursue effective education and gainful employment, and access the resources required to create ever-expanding opportunities for themselves and their broader communities. Stephen and Nora Super talk about the importance of support for our aging population, being an effective leader through vulnerability, and creating policies aligned with the needs of those with lived experiences.

Nora Super is the executive director of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging. In this role, Super provides strategic direction for two primary focus areas: Healthy Longevity and Financial Wellness. In 2020, Super launched the Milken Institute Alliance to Improve Dementia Care, which seeks to transform and improve the complex health and long-term care systems that people at risk for and living with dementia must navigate. Super is a respected thought leader, frequent speaker, and prolific writer on healthy longevity and the economic and social impact of global population aging. From 2014 to 2016, Super served as the executive director of the White House Conference on Aging, where she received wide recognition for her nationwide efforts to improve the lives of older Americans. She has also held leadership roles at the US Department of Health and Human Services, AARP, Kaiser Permanente, and USAging.

Nora Super on the importance of involving those with lived experiences in policy creation:
It's important to us to always make sure that we have people with lived experience as part of all the policy decisions we have. We make many policy recommendations and we want to make sure in all those conversations that we have someone who's living with dementia themselves or a caregiver of someone who's living with dementia to give us their real experience and feedback. This input stress tests the policies because sometimes people in government or research institutions think a policy will work on the ground but the people who are living with this may see issues we didn't so they will tell us, this makes a difference to them, or no. We get a lot of good feedback about what's too complicated, what's helpful, what they wish they had known earlier and those comments help drive our work.

In episode 20 of The Charity Charge Show, Stephen Garten chats with Kathryn Engelhardt Cronk, Founder & CEO at MissionBox.

Kathryn has over 25 years in the nonprofit service arena. First, as a direct service provider with adults suffering from mental illness and later as an executive director of nonprofits in the areas of substance abuse treatment, child abuse prevention and grief and loss support. She has also served as VP of Community Impact for United Way and developed the first 211 for Central Texas.
After seeing a critical nonprofit need for service and impact reporting technology, Kathryn founded Community TechKnowledge (CTK). In that role as CEO and co-designer of CTK software and services, she worked to provide nonprofits with tools that build capacity, prove the impact of their efforts and support mission success.
In 2015, CTK was sold to Vista Equity Partners, which merged CTK with Social Solutions Global.

After CTK, Kathryn founded Mission Box.

MissionBox recognizes that nonprofit work is critical to the well-being of us all, everywhere around the globe. MissionBox founders, staff, board members and advisers have deep and long experience in working in, and serving, nonprofits of all types and sizes, over the last 30 years.

In Episode 99 of the Charity Charge Show, Stephen talks to Vicki Burkhart, CEO of The More Than Giving Co., whose mission is to give nonprofits with visionary leaders and compelling missions an affordable, on-demand staffing solution to supplement the bandwidth and skillsets of their volunteer force.

Stephen and Vicki Burkhart talk about More Than Giving's work with nonprofits to provide the staffing they need, the importance of a living strategic plan, and the four critical things for nonprofit success.

Vicki Burkhart is founder and CEO of the More Than Giving Company. She has 30+ years of experience in the nonprofit arena as an Executive Director, nonprofit executive and consultant.

After earning a B.A. and M.Ed. from Penn State, Vicki advanced to hold leadership positions in development and donor relations, including serving as the VP of Advancement at the MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine. At the same time, she was serving several nonprofits as their Executive Director.

Collectively, these roles gave her extensive, hands-on experience with major gift cultivation (including personally closing multimillion-dollar gifts), board development and strategic planning, membership development, organizational development, and volunteer management.

In 1999, Vicki founded More Than Giving with the goal of delivering innovative solutions to help more volunteer-driven nonprofits achieve sustainability and growth.

Vicki on the four critical things for nonprofit success

There are four things that I think are critical to a successful nonprofit:

1. A strategic plan - It's usually the first thing I ask for when I engage with a new client. All of the organizations that I lead, as an Executive Director have active strategic plans. By active I don't mean strategic plans that you do and put on the shelf and look at you know once a year. I mean, strategic plans that actually navigate the direction and path for the nonprofit, where you make decisions based on your plan, you look at revenue generation and leadership succession based on your plan. The strategic plan is a document that I think no matter how large or small the nonprofit is, is critical to that success.
2. Finding the right board - I intentionally use the word right because boards that I have worked with evolve, just like the nonprofit evolves. The founding board may be replaced by what I like to call the transition board a few years in, this transition board can then allow you to start separating operations from corporate responsibility. It defines the role of the board and the board's committees a little bit more and that of what staff does. Then the transition board shifts as the organization matures and starts to move into a more corporate board. It's important for nonprofit organizations to spend time finding the right people to sit on each of these boards. For the founders board looks very different than a corporate board.
3. Maintaining and building capacity - It's important that a nonprofit has the people and resources to support the growth of the organization. This gets back to, our paradigm shift in staffing and being able to have the right technology in the right infrastructure needed to support the growth of the organization.
4. Internal support - With the right internal support your professionals and your volunteers can focus on the work that they need to do. That's where you want someone who's sitting on your board making visits to prospective donors and you don't want them sitting in the office just doing light bookkeeping or sending out acknowledgement letters. Organizations really have to look at, if you get this much of volunteer time, how can that best be used?

In Episode 13 of the Charity Charge Show, Stephen Garten chats with Kate Williams, the CEO of One Percent for the Planet.

1% for the Planet is a global organization that connects dollars and doers to address the most pressing issues facing our planet. They are a network of 1,200 member companies and thousands of approved nonprofit partners located in more than 40 countries. Started in 2002 by Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, and Craig Mathews, former owner of Blue Ribbon Flies, members have given more than $150 million to environmental nonprofits to date. Learn more at onepercentfortheplanet.org.

Kate can be reached at: [email protected]

This weeks Testimonial Tuesday comes from Jill Zimmerman, the Chief Financial Officer at Villa Montessori School.

I wanted to drop you a quick note to say thank you so much for being able to set a new credit line with Charity Charge that will help our school meet our purchasing needs! For years, we have had credit cards through a large, national bank, that also acts as our school bond trustee. This bank wouldn’t give us a limit higher than $35,000, because we didn’t maintain a depository relationship with them. This made larger purchases during the summer months very difficult, as we had to pay the balance down weekly to free up availability. Our depository relationship is with another bank, and while that bank offered us a higher limit, their cards were continuously hacked online and we were regularly cancelling and replacing cards due to poor fraud controls built into those credit cards.

In no time at all, Charity Charge was able to get us a credit line of $100,000, based on the strength of our financials and our operations. We are very grateful for your help in getting us a credit line and resulting credit cards that will actually meet our operational needs on a regular basis.

Thank you so much! We are looking forward to working with you going forward!

Jill Zimmerman, Chief Financial Officer at Villa Montessori School