The Nonprofit CEO Podcast
Nonprofit CEOs carry decisions they can't fully discuss with their board, their team, or their peers. So they carry them alone.
Each week, Adam Jeske, The Nonprofit CEO Advisor, sits down with a nonprofit CEO to go inside the decisions they carry: the agonizing restructure, the wonky board dynamic, the moment that defined their tenure.
Adam has been in over 230 of these conversations. The patterns are striking and valuable. This podcast surfaces them so you can lead with the perspective most CEOs never get.
For weekly patterns, synthesis, and peer intelligence between episodes, subscribe to The Nonprofit CEO Briefing at nonprofitCEO.com.
Episodes
30 episodes
029 What Am I Even Doing Here? | Prison Fellowship President & CEO Heather Rice-Minus
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 leadership team. The...
028 Teach Me to Care and Not to Care | Biola University President Barry Corey
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 university had moved an...
027 Weather the Storm? Or Walk Away? | Growing Hope Globally President and CEO Kaitlyn Slate
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 anchored the org...
026 Do We Pull the Plug on a 50-Year Program? | Jews for Jesus CEO Aaron Abramson
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, and the cost...
025 He Got a $60 Million Gift. Then He Left | Freedom Fund CEO Nick Grono
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 had already decided t...
024 Treating Complaints as Gifts | World Renew Executive Director Carol Bremer-Bennett
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 halfway ...
023 Did I Just Completely Mess That Up? | Abara Executive Director Sami DiPasquale
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 sides of the US-Me...
022 Ending Our Only Recurring Revenue | World Hope International President & CEO Jenn Peterson
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, or communiti...
021 Am I Too Far Ahead? | The Gathering CEO Josh Kwan
Josh Kwan leads The Gathering, a national community of philanthropists and impact investors who span the full political and theological spectrum.His only real currency is trust, and every consequential decision he makes runs through one ...
020 Turning Down Money You Need | Flourish Fund Founder & CEO Dan Vogel
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 the credibility would have ...
019 The Mud Floor Test | Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Exec. Dir. Ann Graber Hershberger
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 career as a nursing professor....
018 Pulling the Plug on a $22 Million Program | Missio Nexus President and CEO Ted Esler
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 people stayed a...
017 Speaking Calmly While Holding a Powder Keg | Alliance to End Hunger President Eric Mitchell
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 long as...
016 Should I Take This Shortcut? | Center for Christianity and Public Life Founder, President & CEO Michael Wear
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 pointing to cheaper ...
015 The Path of Humiliation | Harrison Center for the Arts Exec. Director Joanna Taft
Joanna Taft proposed starting a charter high school out of the arts nonprofit she was leading. She had no background in education. Her artists were leaving Indianapolis because nobody was buying their work, and she decided the fix ...
014 The Decision After the Decision | World Relief President & CEO Myal Greene
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 needed to change anyway.<...
013 Please Don't Let Me Break This! | Christianity Today President & CEO Nicole Martin
Nicole Martin is five and a half months into leading Christianity Today. The prayer she keeps coming back to: "God, please don't let me break this!"She began leading a 70-year-old organization founded by Billy Graham, and found it trying...
012 Deciding Before You Know | Wheaton College President Philip Ryken
Phil Ryken had believed for years that Wheaton College's signature orientation program should be required for every new student. The research was there, and he saw what it could mean for Wheaton. But that meant scaling a high-connec...
011 Prophetic or Pragmatic? | Bread for the World President & CEO Eugene Cho
Eugene Cho started at Bread for the World two days before the COVID lockdown. In his first week, a tweet of his went viral, landing in the Washington Post. He had to figure out how to lead and how to speak, in real time. And this is while stepp...
010 Telling Donors You Got It Wrong | HOPE International President & CEO Peter Greer
Everything was up and to the right. Hope International had just received an award for innovating in a post-conflict setting. Peter Greer the biggest champion of more.Then the cracks started to show.Peter had to stop, own ...
009 Are We Going Bankrupt? | Christian Leadership Alliance President and CEO Tami Heim
On March 12, 2020, Tami Heim learned the governor had shut down public gatherings in Texas. The Outcomes Conference was weeks away. And she was facing the possibility that Christian Leadership Alliance was, in her words, completely bankrupt.
008 Using AI to Rewire a Whole Nonprofit | Hope Rises International President and CEO Bill Simmons
In one month, CEO Bill Simmons shipped more than 15 working applications and 70,000 lines of code to his team, without adding a single software license or outside developer. He did it with about $25,000 in internal time, replacing s...
007 Seven Years In. Feeling Nauseous. | Social Current President and CEO Jody Levison-Johnson
Jody Levison-Johnson had a big idea and had to decide whether to bet her organization's resources on it. A film was coming out that could either quietly fade or become an inflection point for how the country thinks about the nonprofit sector. S...
006 Pivoting Away from Your Original Vision | Good Faith Founding Executive Director Curtis Chang
Curtis Chang set out to build a nonprofit nobody would ever know by name. He wanted Good Faith to be like Target: the store as the brand, not the founder. Four years later, Curtis, David French, and Russell Moore were at the center ...
005 The Hidden Vulnerability of the Nonprofit CEO | Praxis Partner Andy Crouch
Andy Crouch uses a framework from Peter Greer to name a structural problem with honest at the heart of many nonprofits. It's the stakeholder gap, and he argues it creates built-in incentives to not tell the whole truth all the time. And the bet...
