Nonprofit Diaries
The stories that don't make the newsletter.
Nonprofit Diaries
"The culture moment that helped me stay in nonprofit work...”
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
A new job. A sick kiddo. A conversation that would set the stage for culture and care moving forward.
In an industry that's seeing so many people leave, Evan shares a moment in time that made him STAY.
🫡 Become a Nonprofiteer™, read the SISR Report, and learn more about the "Dear Nonprofiteer" 'zine 👉 https://www.thenonprofiteers.com/
✍️ Got your own story to tell? Submit a diary entry to be featured on the podcast 👉 https://bit.ly/4tXt0d6
🩷 Connect with our community on LinkedIn 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/company/nonprofit-diaries/
Hi everyone, welcome to the Nonprofit Diaries, where we share the stories that don't make the newsletter. I'm your host, Kimberly Bottom, and this week's guest is so passionate about supporting nonprofit professionals that he trademarked the phrase nonprofiteer, which is how you describe someone who believes the people are just as important as the mission. I love that. He has faithfully dedicated a quarter century to nonprofit work, leading a range of initiatives from community to programs to advancement. He is a wordsmith with several publications already available, more coming soon. I just love his LinkedIn content because it mixes that thought leadership and lived experience with humor and lightheartedness, something we all need nowadays. And he is also a co-host of another podcast called Good Nonsense, which, much like the nonprofit diaries, brings an honest take to life in the social sector. So, loyal listeners, please welcome the nonprofiteer godfather himself, Evan Wildstein. Evan.
SPEAKER_01Wow, that was too much, but also perfect.
SPEAKER_00I feel like it's just enough. There's actually stuff I left out, like you're a dad and you're a what you call recovering rock star. I feel like you're always gonna be a rock star. I love also a musician myself, but probably not to the level that you are. But love that. Yes, yes. We should start a band. Okay. Nonprofiteers, the band. It's like the Lumineers, but the nonprofit version.
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm. Okay. Instead of all their songs that have, aren't they the ones that do all their songs or like one female name, like Gloria and Cleopatra, right?
SPEAKER_00Really?
SPEAKER_01We could just do we could do that, but like it's just the name of bad former bosses.
SPEAKER_00That tracks with the the typical content that we're getting here on the nonprofit diaries. So yeah, we can absolutely go down that road. Okay, more to come on that, guys. Setting the stage for your diary entry, none of us are going to argue that nonprofit work is hard, even though it's rewarding and wonderful in ways that no other profession can be, right? We keep hearing about this burnout and this turnover, but you have had an almost 25-year career in nonprofits. I mean, first of all, what's your secret?
SPEAKER_01Uh you know, I maybe at the end of the career that will make sense. I think when it's I'm a little bit more than midway through my career. So when I'm at the end of it, maybe I'll have a prescription for it. But I generally find that the thing that keeps me here, and this is interesting to say, because about a week ago I was chatting with a couple colleagues north of the border up in Canada, the YMCA work well people. Um, they are Dave and Kate, they're they're amazing, and they do kind of the same type of work, yet research that I get to do down here up in Canada. And at the beginning of that chat, one of them said to me, I didn't realize until looking at your LinkedIn that you actually work in nonprofits still to this day. Yeah. I think that there is this conception or misconception, if you are one of the three people who follow my stuff online, that I that I consult or I vend or I coach or anything like that. But for except for one very small detour at the earlier part of my career, the joke I like to make is that C3s have provided my W-2s. And for our for your non-US listeners, that is a tax joke uh about the fact that nonprofits, actual nonprofits, have paid my paycheck for just about a quarter century.
SPEAKER_00To your point, when we met, because we met through uh mutual connections of the nonprofit hive. I feel like I'm dropping their name every time I have a person on the pot on the podcast because they're just such a great conduit of community. Um, but I I did assume that you were a coach, a consultant, something like that, because your content is so it's just heartwarming. Like it really is something where you'll just drop something that says, hey, you're changing the world. Somebody probably didn't tell you that today. Let me be the one. You're really just doing the work and understanding how hard it is, um, and knowing that people need to feel seen and prioritized and loved on, which I 100% agree with. And I know in your own personal journey, you had mentioned to me that there was a moment for you when there had been past experiences that maybe made you consider leaving, and this moment made you want to stay. And I love that flip of the narrative. So give us a little insight on that experience for you.
SPEAKER_01So I work for a really fabulous, I want to say small, but we're not that small, Montessori School here in Houston. It's the oldest of its kind in the American Southwest. Um, for those not familiar with Montessori. For at our school in particular, we have students as young as 14 months and we go all the way up through high school. Um at the time when I began this job, uh, my wife and my own son was very young and in schooling of his own. And it was, I think, the second or third day on the job, and our kiddo got hand, foot, and mouth. And if there are non-parents listening, or parents of kids who haven't yet gotten uh hand, foot, and mouth, it's pretty gnarly and it's kind of all consuming, both for the parents and the kid. And so it was again like day two or three, I had to call my boss and say, I know I just started, but kiddo is sick, and I just sort of pause just to see what the reaction would be. And my boss, who's reasonably awesome in all the right ways, said, Your job right now is father, not employee. So go do what you gotta do, and let's keep in touch and swing back in when you're ready. And I think two or three days went by before I even picked up the phone and had to call again. It was just he got better. I came back into work, and no one batted an eye. And it's right, it's not hard, but I think a lot of people don't have that experience and it becomes hard for them.
SPEAKER_00Outside of your own experiences, right, which are wonderfully varied and provide a lot of different insights, but you're also like a data guy. You want to gather the real information so that we can actually understand and diagnose if that is the way that we need to move forward, any sort of problem. So you do that through something called the Social Impact Staff Retention Project. Tell us a bit about that.
SPEAKER_01After 25 years, you know, even after five years, I think you you come to some realizations intuitively based on what you've experienced, what you see. But, and I'll tell the story as quickly as I can. The colleague that I do that work with, her name is Michelle Flores Brynn. If anyone has heard of me or my work, they've definitely heard of Michelle. She just happens to be here in Texas. And back in 2022, we co-led a session for the Houston Association of Fundraising Professionals. It was that moment in time where like self-care and self-practices, we were encouraged and openly doing those things where budgets weren't getting pulled back, we weren't scrubbing DEI language from the websites and things like that. So we led this session and supposed to be a tiny little session, and then the the event convener said there are too many people want to come, so we're gonna put you in a big room. And it was just it was a good problem to have, and it was a big vent fest. I think we had a whole presentation with a PowerPoint and everything planned, and we maybe got through like 10 minutes of that before hands started going up, and people were just sharing with us things that we had experienced ourselves, we had heard. We had just spent the last most of us two, two and a half years locked in a room with a Zoom screen, and we weren't out in front of people. And then Michelle and I went out to the parking lot after that and said, that was a lot, and we hope we hope that should be the beginning of the conversation, not the end. And fast forward to fall 2023, we kicked off the Scissor Social Impact Staff Retention Project, which is an annual fall cent, meaning we signed it out in the fall survey of asking people essentially, are you looking for a new job now or over the next year, or are you not? And then some of the underlying questions below that. And we've done this now three going into four years this fall. We'll kick off uh the 2027 survey, and we found some very consistent things in doing it, which is yay for the data, but nay for what it's telling us about the experience of nonprofiteers in the United States in particular. That's it's a big field, and we are focusing specifically on people who work with and for US nonprofits, just because so we can focus. One of the things that Michelle and I find repeatedly in this research, and I do have to credit her with this, because when really the the the seed idea for this project was mine, and I wanted to start with why are people leaving? And Michelle's brilliance, she said, not 100% of people are leaving. We know the numbers are probably not great, but there's probably a gaggle of people who are happy in their jobs and want to stay in their jobs. And we should ask those people why they want to stay in their jobs. And no surprise to any one of us who's been on a team or manage people before, the ability to flex in your work. And I think one of the clean ways we describe that is the ability to work hybrid or remote when life happens.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01That as we look over the average of all the years we've done this research, the ability to flex when necessary is one of the top reasons, if not the top reason why people stay. And what's funny too is that when we look at the reasons why people leave, I think in this industry we think they're not getting paid enough. And we sort of drag that snanting line through the mud. And no, nonprofits writ large are not paying corporate level salaries. But all things considered equal, even if you pay someone 30% more than they were making, if the other crap is still crappy, the pay is only going to go so far. But if you look on the happiness side, the things that have very low hard costs to them, but I think for a lot of bosses, it's kind of an emotional stretch that they have to do. If you're used to seeing people in the office, and if you can't see them in the office, my God, how do I know they're actually getting their work done? Because God forbid we just look at the tasks and work that are happening. Um I I think there are a billion and one bad stories that people will tell you on the shore that I could tell myself. And I just think we have to remember that there are people out there who will lean into things like the data say, the data say, if someone needs life to flex, allow them to flex as long as the work is getting done.
SPEAKER_00Stories like that that showcase how one seemingly small but big to you act of kindness or understanding made such an impact to understand that, like, you know, if you are, let's say, an executive director at a nonprofit that's having a turnover problem, it doesn't necessarily mean you've got to go rethink your entire strategy. You've got to get raises approved by the board. You know what I mean? Like there are those things that you can do to make a meaningful impact. And things like the report that you put together is what brings that to the attention of the people that need to know that. And I actually love you shared with me that you've got something exciting coming up that's gonna be, it was eventually, or at some point it was a book, but then you wanted it to be more flexible and kind of like living and breathing. Um, that's gonna let other people chime in regularly with their opinions. So tell us about that because I have a feeling people listening to this podcast would want to be a part of it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, again, all the best things in the world come with or through my wife. And back around the late 2025 holiday season. I had I had a book that I wrote a few years back in 2022, 23. And it was a short book, maybe 90 pages, very field guide-esque. You could kind of pick it up, put it down when you need to. And November, December this past year, I started thinking what book number two would look like. And the working title of that was gonna be something like the the nonprofiteer's field guide for staying. And staying was gonna be in parenthesis, like a budget item, like it could be a debit or a credit. Um, and staying is sometimes not always the most healthy thing for a nonprofiteer to do. Right. Uh, and then I was chatting maybe about four to six weeks ago with my wife, and she was like, Another book, huh? She's like, you know, you once you put the book out, the book is out. And if you want to change, edit, update it, there's got to be like a second edition or something like that. She's like, is there a magazine out there, something more periodical in nature? And I said, oof, I guess I'm creating a magazine. And so last month or so I've been working on what this would look like because the benefit of that is content, you know, in our scissor data, we find that big reasons for saying you're going are always staying the same, but there's always more interesting stories and depth that we can go. So I I'm at the early stages of this. I don't know if it's going to be twice a year, quarterly. Right. Um, but the goal will be a lot of my own experiences in my own essays, but also um sections of that which will sort of like a podcast, be sort of a written version of getting to know nonprofit people who are doing really great work.
SPEAKER_00What is the name? Does it have a name yet? So we can keep an eye out.
SPEAKER_01It does.
SPEAKER_00Is it is it's a secret?
SPEAKER_01No, it's not really a secret. I should actually probably start talking about this. And you can also go to just dear nonprofiteer.com.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01It's Dear Nonprofiteer.
SPEAKER_00I love that. All right. Simple. And and you had mentioned, you know, took a took a minute to trademark that name, so let's use it as much as we can, yes?
SPEAKER_01I'm using it. And the the subtitle, the subtitle of the book is gonna be the same as this, and it's gonna be Love Letters to the People Keeping Humanity Afloat.
SPEAKER_00Oh, so good, so good. Yes, see, this is the word Smith that I'm talking about. People, go follow Evan on LinkedIn if you want real good advice, but also just like somebody that's gonna make you feel good because you should, right? That is the point, is that the people doing nonprofit work have their heads down doing hard work because they love the mission, the world, their community, etc., we need to love them. And we do. So if you haven't already, go follow Evan on LinkedIn, go to nonprofit or dear nonprofiteer.com and sign up for all the exciting things that are coming out. And thank you so much for being here today. This is your weekly reminder to hydrate and practice self care. And as Evan and I discussed, maybe do some stretches. Because you know, when you get into your 40s like we are, that's also important. But take care of yourself, dear friends. And Evan, thank you again for being here. I appreciate you so much.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Good to talk.
SPEAKER_00You too. Bye, everyone.