Surveying the Field: Interviewing Allison Ehrich Bernstein &Natalia Jasso
Written by Victoria Shadle
This week I conducted my first two interviews kicking off The Nonprofit Collective Blog’s first series Surveying the Field. While it’s exciting to get this project started, I have a long way to go to reach my goal of interviewing 20 strangers in the nonprofit sector and am still asking people to sign up to be interviewed.
My first interview was with Allison Ehrich Bernstein, Principal at Allative Communications, a communications consulting firm based in the Urbana-Champaign area of Illinois that works with mission-driven organizations. Prior to consulting, Allison worked in various public sector roles and on political campaigns.
My second interview was with Natalia Jasso, the Co-founder and Executive Director of the start-up nonprofit Inclusion is Sweet which provides vocational training to individuals with disabilities in the San Antonio area. Natalia juggles leading this volunteer-run nonprofit with finishing her Bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology and Exercise Science.
Below is a summary of what Allison and Natalia had to say during their separate interviews in response to the same four big-picture questions about the nonprofit sector:
What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about the nonprofit sector?
Both Allison and Natalia brought up a common misconception that nonprofits are not professional organizations — that they don’t make and spend significant money and have few, if any, paid staff. In challenging this assumption, they also both shared a strong conviction that the work of nonprofits is valuable to society and staff deserve to not only be paid, but paid a fair living wage.
Paying good people is important to the development of the organization. . . programming can’t run and grow and thrive if you can’t get funding. — Natalia
As Natalia works to grow Inclusion is Sweet, she’s found it challenging to balance the need to invest in good people to sustain and grow the organization with the reality that securing start-up funds is an uphill battle, especially with grants being primarily available for program expenses instead of capacity-building or operating expenses. Allison similarly brought up the well-known overhead myth that challenges donors to stop using expenses for administrative and fundraising costs as a measure of a nonprofit’s effectiveness or performance.
In sharp contrast to the notion that the lower the overhead the better, in both conversations we talked about the dangers of underfunded, volunteer-run organizations. We agreed that while these nonprofits can accomplish a lot on a shoe-string budget, if they were properly invested in they could fully develop and have a much greater impact.
It’s hard to get momentum going when you’re constantly worried about next year’s budget. — Allison
Allison also brought up the misconception that nonprofits are only focused on short-term relief. We agreed that while that is certainly true when you think of the traditional charitable nonprofit response to emergency needs such as a soup kitchen, that clearly ignores a wide swath of organizations dedicated to long-term and systemic change. She encountered people with this impression of nonprofits while working in political campaigning and the public sector.
If you could tell nonprofit volunteers or board members one thing — what would it be?
Allison and Natalia both brought up the value add of volunteers and board members, but also the need for them to understand how their actions impact the staff. Natalia suggests board members not be afraid to take more initiative, and Allison wants volunteers to remember that while they may drop in and out and feel like they’re operating in a bubble, they are still part of the wider team and need to be mindful of how their actions fit in to the wider picture of what the staff is driving.
Do you think there is a stigma about working in the nonprofit sector?
Similar to the first question, this also brought up talk of an assumption that people working in the nonprofit sector are doing so altruistically and that they’ll both be paid less and that is ok because they’re working there purely for the mission.
What’s one thing about the structure of the sector that you wish you could change?
Talking about the structure of the sector proved to be a less stirring question, with Allison even challenging the notion that the sector as a whole makes sense to analyze as the connective tissue is really a tax status.
When people talk about nonprofits, they’re really just talking about a tax status; nonprofits range from massive foundations and universities to tiny, volunteer-run organizations. — Allison
When thinking about the structure of individual organizations, and her organization Inclusion is Sweet in particular, Natalia brought this question back to the role of the board of directors and the challenge of board members not fully understanding their governing role. She also shared that if there are three phases of board recruitment (joining because of a belief in the founder, joining because of a belief in the mission, and joining because of a belief in the organization) Inclusion is Sweet is likely in the second and moving towards the third as she expects the organization to continue to grow and gain notoriety. There was the suggestion that as the board develops, so will individuals’ understanding of how their position impacts the organization and operates in relation to Natalia as Executive Director.
In addition to learning from Allison and Natalia’s experiences, I also walked away with thoughts on what I’d like to explore further and how I’d like to change my prompts for the next round of interviews which are scheduled for the week of August 3rd.
I left my conversation with Allison wanting to learn more about the interplay between nonprofits, elected officials, government agencies, and policy development. If you can share more, reach out I’d love to talk!
I also decided that the last two questions need to be slightly reworded to get to the heart of what I’m looking to uncover. I think the word stigma has too much of a negative connotation and I’ll be adjusting this question moving forward to ask “What do you believe people think about working in the nonprofit sector, and how has that aligned with or challenged what you’ve experienced?”
The phrasing of the final question about desired changes to the structure of the sector also felt limiting and moving forward I will adjust it to be “What cultural or structural norms have you seen at individual nonprofits or the sector as a whole that you would like to see change?”
I’m looking forward to continuing this exploration and seeing where it takes me!
—
Read more about The Nonprofit Collective Blog and my background here, and sign up to be a guest for the Surveying the Field series here.
