Surveying the Field: Interviewing Meghan Freebeck
Written by Victoria Shadle
As part of Surveying the Field and my endeavor to interview 20 strangers with experience in the nonprofit sector, I recently spoke with Meghan Freebeck.
Meghan has spent her career working in the nonprofit sector first in Chicago at an arts education organization and then a homeless shelter, and later at a suicide prevention organization in San Francisco. Meghan is currently CEO of Project Homeless Connect SF which makes access to services for individuals facing homelessness more efficient and effective. She is also Founder and Board President of Simply the Basics — the first national hygiene bank that works with local donors and organizations to collect and distribute hygiene products. (In October, 2020, Meghan will be leaving her role with Project Homeless Connect and is excited to turn her focus to the work of Simply the Basics, where she will lead the organization as the Chief Executive Officer).
Keep reading to hear how Meghan answered our four big-picture questions about the nonprofit sector:
- What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about the nonprofit sector?
- If you could tell nonprofit volunteers, donors, or board members one thing — what would it be?
- What do you believe people think about working in the nonprofit sector, and how has that aligned with or challenged what you’ve experienced?
- What cultural or structural norms have you seen at individual nonprofits or the sector as a whole that you would like to see change?
Meghan sees so many misconceptions about the nonprofit sector — starting with a confusion about what constitutes a nonprofit. She finds a lot of people talking about charity or community groups and assuming that they must be a nonprofit. She believes this causes confusion as people don’t realize that being a registered nonprofit requires a great deal of work and comes with oversight requirements.
“People don’t always realize that nonprofits are legitimate businesses — setting up a nonprofit requires registering with the government and sometimes includes lawyers; it’s challenging, you need to form a board of directors, create board bylaws, and have a plan for financial accountability. It’s still a business, but often requiring greater financial oversight and accountability.”
Meghan thinks it’s wonderful when people want to get involved and do good in their communities, but encourages them to first volunteer with existing nonprofits before starting their own. She explains that new initiatives that are unreliable or problematic can not only hurt the community, but the reputation of the sector. Founders need to both make sure they’re adding value to the community and that they’re prepared to make a long-term commitment to this work.
“It’s the same as starting a business when you start a nonprofit, but it can hurt the community and make the industry look reckless and irresponsible when you create an organization without the understanding of what you’re committing to. It also is not fair to the people that you set out to serve if you are unable to fulfill those promises.”
Before founding Simply the Basics, Meghan did extensive research surveying 250 nonprofits serving homeless populations in California and meeting with people with lived experiences with homelessness and hospitals and emergency rooms to hear about their perspective on the issue. From her first menstrual hygiene drive until the organization was fully incorporated it took roughly 15 months.
“Before we developed our Mission and business plan to become a nonprofit we made sure we understood the need of the community. We wanted to create a structure that wouldn’t duplicate existing services, but instead added to them.”
Five years later they have remained volunteer-based (though they are excited to be hiring their first employees this year!) and because of private funding they have had the luxury of being really honest about their needs and resources because they can focus on programmatic work.
In thinking about nonprofit volunteerism more generally, Meghan believes volunteering should be done in a way that gives time back to staff, helping them achieve more with volunteer help then they would be able to do with just their employees. From her experience, this gets distorted when companies try to use volunteering as a means of team building or to increase their own employee engagement.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had companies call and say they want to have this many people volunteer on this day doing this specific activity. That makes it less about helping the organization and more about team building for the company… nonprofits basically become event planners for volunteer opportunities which distracts them from their mission.”
Meghan often sees organizations agree to these types of requests because they’re hoping that once the company or individuals get involved they’ll become moved by the mission and turn into donors.
Rather than reaching out with a wish list for how you want to get involved, she suggests prospective volunteers and groups look at the organization’s website to see what, if any, volunteer help they could use. Meghan cautions that just because volunteers are willing to give their time doesn’t mean that it’s necessary helpful for the organization; it depends on their programs, needs, and resources. This is especially true if volunteers are providing general support and are do not have any in-need or relevant skills and training.
“If you’re not an expert in housing [but want to volunteer directly with the homeless], you may not be as helpful directly with clients but could support in other tasks. Wanting to volunteer in a direct service role would be like calling a law firm and offering to be a lawyer for a day. Staff do go through extensive training to become experts at what they do, like in any other company.”
If volunteer opportunities are not available or a fit, Meghan hopes people will consider making a donation to support the organization’s work. And even if you do end up volunteering, still consider making a donation!
Lastly, Meghan suggests both individuals and organizations make an effort to use volunteering as a learning moment. When people volunteer with her organization they’re asked to join a discussion about homelessness; it’s a moment to talk about the issue and reduce some of the stigma around individuals experiencing homelessness.
Switching to think about what it’s like working in the nonprofit sector, Meghan finds people often have the idea that employees are like glorified volunteers when in fact they’re experts in their services. She would like to see more trust in nonprofit employees and their expertise.
Meghan also wants people looking to break into nonprofit work to understand that nonprofits are not interchangeable; a mental health nonprofit is going to be very different from an animal shelter and if you’re going to work in programming you need specific training and expertise.
When asked what else Meghan would like to see change about the culture or structure of the sector, she focused on nonprofit funders and their requirements.
“I’m starting to see this change already because I think COVID has forced a lot of foundations to look at philanthropy differently, but I would love to see more change in the expectation that nonprofits should not have overhead and funds need to be spent on programming.”
Meghan believes not funding overhead does not make sense; it’s like asking a business not to cover rent, operations, or be able to hire and retain the best people.
“You want to be able to offer competitive salaries for the best people… if the expectation is to solve social issues, you need to hire and retain talent, and a lot of that comes down to compensation.”
Meghan currently sees some direct service workers barely making minimum wage and having to worry about income loss and homelessness themselves. She believes a lot of this could be helped by funders changing their perspective on restricted grants or program-only grants where they want all of the funds to be spent solely on programming.
For many organizations, staff salaries are the key component of programming. Take, for example, a suicide prevention or other crisis prevention program — when a funder doesn’t want to support staff salaries they’re essentially not supporting the key service of having a skilled worker available to talk with someone in distress.
“When we purchase a product from a business, that company tells us the cost and we pay that, we don’t pay but then dictate to the company how to break down that money. It should be the same with a nonprofit, if you’re making a donation because you want to contribute to a positive impact or change in your community, you need to allow that organization to operate with sufficient overhead.”
Meghan would also like to see more collaboration among nonprofit organizations. Right now organizations are often competing for funding and have to adjust their program model to fit what that particular funder is requesting. Instead, she would love to see organizations talking to each other, acknowledging they have the same goals, and going into projects together based on their core competencies.
“The greatest impact happens not when services are duplicated, but when organizations collaborate… At the end of the day, we’re looking to achieve so many of the same goals and we’re going to do it better together.”
Last but not least, Meghan wants to see organizations push themselves to do better with living out the values they put forth in their mission with their clients and with their staff.
“We need to put our values into everything that we do. This means it is not enough to simply post about being an anti-racist organization or serving the community with compassion, and not enough to only ensure we treat clients with compassion, we also need to work to ensure those same values exist in the way we operate our organizations, in our hiring practices, and in our internal workplace cultures.”
For example, if your organization values services being delivered freely to the community, then that means asking a client to share their story is no longer giving a free service — even if you ask for permission.
“There is always a hierarchy of power between a service provider and a person in need of services. As such, there is no true consent [when asking clients to share their stories or to take their photos to share publicly] because of the power dynamic. I would like to see us do a better job when we talk about dignity and respect. Being willing to learn is crucial.”
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Thank you to Meghan for your honest reflections on the nonprofit sector and your suggestions on how we can improve! To see how two fundraisers at health-related nonprofits in Chicago and Tampa responded to these questions, check out the article below. Learn more about The Nonprofit Collective Blog by reading this article and stay in the loop about what we’re up to by following us on Facebook and Twitter.
