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September 2015

Sep 29

Research reveals approaches to retain volunteers

By Sponsor Insight

By Marlene Walk, assistant professor, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis |

Most nonprofit organizations rely on volunteers to help provide services and could not function without this source of support to conduct programs, raise funds or serve clients.

In 2013, 25.4 percent of adults in the United States volunteered with an organization contributing a little over 8 billion hours. However, nonprofits are confronted with two main challenges with a volunteer workforce.

First, nonprofit organizations are increasingly confronted with pressures to become more competitive. As volunteers are important to organizational performance, nonprofit managers are faced with increasing demands to account for the value of volunteer contributions, thus, requiring them to adapt their practices.

Second, the nature of volunteering is changing. Volunteers’ motivations and expectations have become more individualistic and ad-hoc and are less driven by long-term commitments. Moreover, contemporary volunteers increasingly expect their motivations and expectations to be met and are willing to leave the organizations if they do not perceive a good fit due to a mismatch between volunteer motives and volunteer tasks.

Thus, knowledge about how to attract, and most importantly, how to retain volunteers is even more important for nonprofit leaders.

Given these two challenges, researchers have proposed two main approaches to facilitate volunteer retention through a match of volunteer motives to volunteer tasks.

One approach — the functional perspective — argues that individuals with different reasons to volunteer might be willing to take on same types of tasks. The other approach — the diversified perspective — argues that only particular motives relate to individuals’ willingness to take on particular tasks as such that different tasks satisfy different volunteer motives.

For example, the functional perspective implies that volunteers are driven by motives such as altruistic values, professional career opportunities, and possibilities to spend time with friends and would be equally satisfied when given the task to lead a meeting, reorganize the filing cabinet, help others or organize a fundraising event. The diversified perspective on the other hand posits that individuals with a particular motive such as enhancing career opportunities will be satisfied when given a particular task such as leading a meeting, but less satisfied when given other tasks such as reorganizing the filing cabinet.

In an article that I co-authored (Willems & Walk, 2013), we shared our research that found that neither approach is sufficient and provided evidence for the importance of a combination of the functional and the diversified perspective.

In a research sample of youth volunteers, my co-author and I learned that most volunteers are satisfied if provided with the possibility to fulfill a broad and basic set of tasks. However, additionally, we identify four, more diversified, relationships between motives and tasks.

  • For those individuals with high expectations to express their personal altruistic values through volunteering, tasks related to administration, leadership, facility maintenance and fundraising were especially salient.
  • If volunteers aim to create or enhance professional career opportunities and are less motivated by the opportunity to be with friends, leadership tasks are most likely to fulfill their expectations.
  • Individuals who are not motivated by the creation of professional career opportunities are most satisfied when provided with administrative and facility maintenance tasks.
  • Finally, individuals who volunteer as a means to compensate for negative feelings or address personal problems are most satisfied if provided with tasks that can be done individually.

Ultimately, my co-author and I propose that effective volunteer management strategies could consist of a generalist base that guarantees the execution of a basic and broad set of volunteer tasks. However, in addition to that, nonprofit managers might want to pay attention to the motivational differences among specific groups of volunteers in order to be able to better match extreme variations of individual motives to volunteer tasks.

marlene-walk Marlene Walk is an assistant professor at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI and studies human resource and volunteer management in nonprofit organizations.

Sep 29

Former leaders reflect on change, progress

By Feature, Leadership

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors |

Nonprofit careers can start in a variety of ways.

— Willis Bright initially was a social worker, which developed his listening skills.

— Ellen Annala worked for multiple nonprofits, which helped shape her understanding of community.

— Jim McClelland was trained as an engineer but made the transition after a tutoring gig.

— Betsy Bikoff worked in the for-profit sector, but served on nonprofit boards.

— Hoagland Elliott had a lengthy for-profit care before taking on the challenge of leading a neighborhood health clinic.

All five retired from prominent nonprofit careers in the Indianapolis area. Combined, they spent over 150 years in the field.

During their careers, there were changes in the economy, technology, laws and regulations, competition and American culture. The number of nonprofits grew to over 1.5 million nationally, and between 1977 and 1997, increased 115 percent, or about 23,000 organizations per year.

This summer, these longtime leaders sat down with Charitable Advisors to share their know-how, discuss changes they have seen and offer input on what still needs to be changed in the nonprofit world. This is the second story from the conversation.

Two former leaders noted an evolution of executive titles. In the ’60s and ’70s, leaders at both Goodwill and United Way were called executive secretaries. The original titles, according to Annala, made it clear that the executive worked for the board. They have also witnessed a shift in executives’ roles in the community.

“While the executive is still hired by the board, I think over the years, the role, too, has evolved, not just within an organization, but in the city and in the community,” said Annala, who retired in 2012 after 23 years in leadership at United Way of Central Indiana.

In the 1970s and 1980s, nonprofit leaders were casual players in civic projects and in the transformation of Indianapolis. The movers and shakers, mostly from the corporate world, were called the city committee, and generated the ideas that would change the city’s future.

Today, nonprofit leaders have been asked to sit at that table.

Annala thinks that happened because corporate leaders could no longer spend 25 percent of their time in civic leadership roles.

Today’s nonprofit leaders deserve a lot of credit, said Bikoff.

“It takes real talent to be an executive director or CEO of a nonprofit when you think about it. The board chair changes every couple of years, sometimes every year,” she said.

“It’s quite a feat to be excellent, and fortunately, we have some excellent, excellent CEOs and executive directors of nonprofits in our community and we have for a number of years,” said the former Fairbanks Foundation vice president and chief grant-making officer who retired in January.

Another area that has changed during their careers is the boards’ responsibilities. As the numbers of nonprofits increased, so has regulatory scrutiny. In the 1960s, there were concerns about the growing universe of charitable, tax-exempt organizations. By the 1980s, nonprofits supported by grants, contracts and earned income were governed by insider boards. The governance structure of nonprofits has become more professionalized, and the level of expectations for leaders has changed, too.

“There are boards that I have observed that the nonprofit’s leadership was trusted so much, nobody asked any questions,” said Bright who retired in 2012 after spending 25 years at Lilly Endowment.

“When there was an implosion, everyone was scurrying around trying to figure out how to save this organization where a few questions along the way might have enabled the organization to have not only a real purpose that it was serving in the community and adding value, but it would not have gotten into the difficulty it was experiencing at the time,” he said. “There has to be trust with accountability.”

McClelland, too, thinks questions from board members are critical. Earlier this year, McClelland completed 41 years as president of Goodwill of Central Indiana.

“I would tell people on our board, many times the best thing you can do for us, is to ask us the right hard questions. That is hugely valuable. Make sure that we’re thinking things through, that we’re not missing something,” said McClelland.

All five leaders worked through difficult financial times. During their watch, there were a half dozen recessions, including the major recession of 2008. The bursting of an $8 trillion housing bubble and the financial market chaos led to a downturn in nonprofit contributions and return on investments.

But not all the changes that resulted were bad.

“In the nonprofit sector, you don’t have those same market forces and some nonprofits can hang on long beyond their usefulness and, quite frankly, beyond their demand,” said Annala. With the recession she saw clarity and in some nonprofits’ cases, a nimbleness or willingness to change.

“The shift in accountability and competition has forced a sense of being clearer about what you’re doing, who you’re serving, what you’re trying to accomplish and whether you’re doing it. I think there’s a new clarity,” said Annala.

According to Bikoff, planning for the future has become more the norm.

“Since the 2008 recession, more nonprofits and more nonprofit boards are taking planning more seriously, and trying to pay attention to what the organizational strength is, and are leaving behind those things that they used to do that they are no longer doing as well,” she said.

“That’s not all organizations, but a great many of them have tried to narrow their focus and many are also paying attention to their ability to implement those plans, which is almost more important than the plan itself. That is a good sign.”

Bright believes there is an incredible amount of pressure on executive directors to raise money, which has challenged program quality, because leaders have to spend so much time identifying resources.

“I’m not sure resources have increased to the same level as the number of organizations that are out there. For all the talk of sustainability, it makes it very difficult for that to occur,” Bright said.

While urban planning began in the early 20th century, strategic planning is relatively new for the nonprofit sector. Annala said even that planning has changed in order for organizations to remain competitive.

“I think there’s a role for some strategic planning or at least being clear about strategic direction. Before it was like ‘plan, do, plan, do.’ Now I think it’s a little more like plan, do, plan, do (faster). It’s like you’re going roughly west or roughly east and you may zig and zag along the way, as you try different things, but it’s not the long strategic planning that some of us used to go through.”

For Elliott, who retired after a decade as CEO at Raphael Health Center, a quality needs assessment is critical for any group thinking about starting a nonprofit.

“When Tabernacle Presbyterian Church decided to do something to help the health care in the neighborhood, they did the best needs assessment I have ever seen. When I came in a year later, I was just amazed at what a thorough job attendees of the church did. They traveled to other cities, looked at other health care sites. They did door-to-door neighborhood surveys. Right from the start, there was a need,” said Elliott.

But the economy made others take notice, too. Returns on foundations’ investments saw the same downturn.

“I think a number of the forces that you talk about were initiated by the funding community, private, public and others. I think it’s made boards of directors take their stewardship more seriously. They are not just there but try to give some direction, to do some planning and to figure with the staff how they are able to achieve outcomes and impact,” said Bright.

McClelland believes the nonprofit sector is incredibly fragmented and that over his career, there has been a proliferation of nonprofits, and an enormous increase in public spending to address major social problems. In his opinion, there are good things happening, but each one addresses one problem, issue, or one target population. They have difficulty aggregating capital or talent, replicating what works and getting it to scale.

“If you look at a lot of major social indicators, they’re worse today than they were 40 years ago,” McClelland said. “There’s a lot of data supporting the notion that these major social problems are related to poverty, low education levels, crime rate and teen pregnancy. As a society, we don’t tend to treat them as if they’re related. The public sector operates in silos. We have got to stop operating as little independent fiefdoms.

“I don’t think the answer is more money. I think the answer lies in making much more effective use of the existing resources.

“We have got to start working in a much more focused manner to leverage and combine the capabilities across the sectors. It could be within the sectors and focus. Not just collaboration for the sake of collaboration, but focused efforts to achieve something that right now is proving to be very difficult to achieve. I think this could happen. I really do. And I see some examples of it now. There needs to be a lot more of it,” said McClelland.

What is each proudest of?

  • For Annala, it is bringing a greater focus to community-level outcomes and watch as is the case with earlier childhood.
  • For Bikoff, it is helping the Fairbanks Foundation grow in the early years, and establishing strong, ongoing relationships with grantees and making a difference in the community.
  • For Bright, it is working to create a funders’ collaborative that supports high-quality summer programs for youth and influencing others around the country to do similar things.
  • For Elliott, it is building a staff from four to 15.
  • For McClelland, it is how Goodwill has adapted and improved over time.
Sep 29

Profiling the nonprofit leader of tomorrow

By Feature, Leadership

By Jean Crawford, contributor, Ivey Business Journal |

The nonprofit sector’s ability to provide its services has come under ever-increasing pressure with changes in public policy, significant client demographic shifts, new commercial initiatives, and growing competition from for-profit providers. Although the sector has responded creatively in many instances, the increasingly complex environment is straining the skills and abilities of nonprofit leaders to meet such demands.

Whether in the profit or the nonprofit sector, all organizations fundamentally need strong leadership talent to execute their strategy successfully. Therefore, ensuring a steady supply of leaders is critical. This is not an easy task.

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Sep 22

Why the world needs tri-sector leaders

By Feature, Leadership

By Nick Lovegrove and Matthew Thomas, contributing writers, Harvard Business Review |

The critical challenges society faces — such as water scarcity, access to education, and the rising cost of healthcare — increasingly require the business, government and nonprofit sectors to work together to create lasting solutions. But this is only possible if the senior executives of our leading institutions are what Dominic Barton, Worldwide Managing Director of McKinsey & Company, refers to as “tri-sector athletes” — leaders able to engage and collaborate across all three sectors.

Our research at The InterSector Project shows that these leaders often have prior experiences in each sector and a unique ability to navigate different cultures, align incentives and draw on the particular strengths of a wide range of actors to solve large-scale problems.

Take water scarcity. A potential 40 percent gap between global freshwater demand and supply by 2030 puts billions of lives — and dollars — at stake. And all three sectors have skin in the game. For agri-food and beverage businesses, fresh water is an essential ingredient in their production process. Governments are often the stewards of water and regulate its use. Nonprofits work to ensure access to clean water and conservation of watersheds and the environment.

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Sep 22

In the ‘reverse Peace Corps,’ future leaders hone skills

By Feature, Leadership

By Frances Stead Sellers, senior writer, The Washington Post |

After the speeches, the presentation of certificates and the photo op come the slightly sophomoric awards you might expect at an eighth-grade graduation. Graduation day at the Washington International School? A fin d’annee fete for Model U.N. students? Or some hug-the-globe gig for junior diplomats that Secretary of State John F. Kerry dreamed up?

No, this is the 15th graduating class of Atlas Service Corps, a Washington-based nonprofit founded in 2006 with the goal of creating a “global network of changemakers.” At a time when terrorist groups win attention for recruiting disillusioned young Westerners to join them, Atlas Corps is acting as a “reverse Peace Corps,” aiming to identify outstanding young nonprofit leaders around the world, and to bring them to serve and share their overseas experience for a year or so in the United States before they return home to apply their new skills. After a recent endorsement from the State Department, the fellowship has attracted as many as 1,000 applicants a month.

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Sep 22

How to develop as a nonprofit leader

By Feature, Leadership

By Bridgespan writers |

Many people who are working within the ranks of nonprofit organizations could become great senior nonprofit leaders. However, in part because of budget constraints, few organizations in the sector have formal professional development programs to prepare mid-level managers for senior roles. As a result, most mid-level nonprofit professionals must take responsibility for their own career development.

One way to begin the process is to tap the experience of senior leaders who already have worked their way up within the sector. To that end, we spoke with six senior nonprofit leaders — all of whom have spent much if not all of their careers working in the nonprofit sector — about their career paths and the lessons they learned along the way. We also asked what advice they would give to mid-level managers looking to move into senior nonprofit leadership roles.

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Sep 21

BKD Foundation’s 2014 charitable giving surpasses $10 million

By Fundraising, Sponsor Insight

The BKD Foundation is the firm’s charitable arm. The BKD Foundation is solely funded by BKD partners’ and employees’ monetary contributions. It aims to enrich the communities BDK serves through financial donations and volunteerism. The foundation supports not-for-profit organizations of all types and sizes, including employees serving in volunteer roles.

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Supporting youth organizations

While the BKD Foundation provided support to a number of Indiana organizations, it made significant contributions to causes that serve the state’s youth. Junior Achievement of Central Indiana, The Villages, Big Brother Big Sisters of Northeast Indiana and Boys & Girls Club of Evansville are just a few of the organizations that benefited from foundation dollars. But the support went beyond monetary, numerous employees also regularly volunteered.

Outside of youth-specific charities, the Indianapolis and Bloomington BKD offices continued its five-year donation commitment to the Eskenazi Health Foundation for its violence intervention program and to the Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County, a nonprofit that supports local charities.

Indiana BKD employees personally went above and beyond with charity efforts by donating both money and time — to Habitat for Humanity homebuilding efforts, the Salvation Army Toy Town toy drive, the March of Dime and many more.

Surrounding communities

The Fort Wayne and Merrillville offices sponsored The Carriage House Dancing with the Fort Wayne Stars event. Several BKDers also volunteered to tabulate votes and help with event-related activities throughout the year.

In Evansville, the team chose to support Community One, a local nonprofit dedicated to housing restoration and community development needs.

To learn more about the foundation’s support, browse the digital version of the 2014 foundation report.

Sep 15

Leadership transition – Who’s up next?

By Leadership, Sponsor Insight

By Bryan Orander, president, Charitable Advisors

For 15 years, research has warned of the unprecedented number of nonprofit executive directors/CEOs expected to change organizations, retire or leave the sector. In the original Daring to Lead study in 2001, two thirds of nonprofit executive directors did not believe in five years that they would still be with their current organization. Updates to this study in 2006 and 2011 found surprisingly similar results.

Though the recession definitely stalled those predicted leadership changes and retirements, nationally the nonprofit sector has begun to see these predicted changes. Recently, The Boston Globe reported on transitions in the Northeast, and in Central Indiana, every few weeks brings news of another executive who has set a date to move on to his or her next adventure or has given his or her board notice of an upcoming retirement.

Who is replacing those departing long-time executives?

In the past several years through my consulting work with nonprofits to help guide changes of leadership, I have seen these changes firsthand.

People often ask about these CEO/ED transitions. Typically, I approximate statistics based on my recent work; however, I thought it time to take a closer look.

To make the math easier, I took the last 25 leadership transitions and looked at some key factors. These go back approximately five years. The organizations have ranged in size from annual budgets of a few hundred thousand dollars to over $20 million and staff teams from three to more than 500. Most client organizations have been in the $1-10 million range.

Two qualifiers: Charitable Advisors is most often contracted for planned transitions and most of clients did not have internal candidates or potential successors that applied for the ED/CEO role.

Here is a quick snapshot.

Where did the CEO/ED go?

  • 16 retirements = 64 percent
  • 4 board terminations = 16 percent
  • 3 CEOs took another job = 12 percent
  • 2 new organizations, with no previous ED = 8 percent

Was the successor hired for the position an internal or external candidate?

  • 20 external hires = 80 percent
  • 5 internal hire/promotion = 20 percent (seven searches had internal candidates)

What is the background/sector of the successors?

  • 10 program = 40 percent, including two from government
  • 7 fund development/policy = 28 percent
  • 4 CEO/ED from another nonprofit organization = 16 percent
  • 4 corporate sector = 16 percent, three of the four had been

volunteers or board members for the organization that hired them

From these numbers, I think there are a few insights that can be drawn and useful to board members and senior staff looking to future leadership changes.

  • Internal successors are the exception because so few organizations have additional leaders with a broad organizational understanding and skill set. Of the 25 transitions, seven had internal candidates. Of those seven organizations, five selected the internal candidate as the next ED/CEO.
  • An organization’s next CEO/ED has probably not been a CEO before. Confirming national research, like Daring to Lead, most new ED/CEOs are coming from the leadership team of another nonprofit but were not in an ED/CEO role.
  • Few leaders make the jump directly from corporate America without having served as a board member or volunteer. Search committees look at a broad range of candidates, but are often most comfortable with people who fit the traditional nonprofit skill sets and culture.
  • A next leader is increasingly likely to bring a fund development background versus a programmatic background. Traditionally, the leaders of small to mid-sized nonprofits have come from the program ranks because the emphasis was on serving clients well. While that client emphasis continues, nonprofit boards are increasingly concerned with the leader’s ability to attract resources to grow and sustain the organization.

Your plan of action 

Ensuring capable staff leadership is one of a nonprofit board’s most important roles. Whether the reason is retirement, illness, resignation, dismissal or transitions, the change can put your organization and the people you serve at risk.

Here are a few things that staff and board leadership can do over the next month or two, if you haven’t already, in preparation for an eventual transition.

  • Be prepared for the inevitable. In many organizations there is such a reliance on the CEO/ED so that when that person leaves or is terminated, the board feels uncertain about who is in charge and what comes next. A brief emergency succession conversation at an executive committee or board meeting every year is critical.

   Charitable Advisors has developed a template that boards have found useful. For a copy of this easy-to-use emergency succession plan, please email me at: Bryan@CharitableAdvisors.com  

  • Build your staff and management team. Every nonprofit should aspire to grow future leaders. The ideal circumstance is for an organization to have one or two viable internal candidates when it launches its search for a successor. However, most nonprofits are small and have few, if any, managers except the CEO/ED. Even larger nonprofits have a management team composed of specialists in finance, programming, fund development or human resources, and often lack the organizational-wide perspective of the CEO/ED. So you may not have internal candidates without an intentional development effort to broaden individual leadership experience.

 

  • CEO/ED sets the tone in developing leaders. The current CEO/ED and how he or she works with the staff team sets the stage for the next generation of organizational leadership. A CEO with a controlling style is less likely to develop strong leaders as potential successors either because those people aren’t hired, they leave or they are never groomed for more responsibility. Growing your team prepares for the future and can make the ED/CEO’s job easier by spreading the load.

bryanBryan Orander is founder and president of Charitable Advisors. After 18 years of for-profit leadership in the Fortune 50 business world and a disability-related nonprofit, Bryan joined a large regional accounting and consulting firm. In 2000, he founded Charitable Advisors with the vision of going beyond traditional consulting to become a connector, advocate and problem solver for the nonprofit sector.

Sep 15

Goodwill’s approach to growth: one view

By Feature, Leadership

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors |

For Kent Kramer, the answer was easy. As a candidate earlier this year for the president’s position at Goodwill of Central Indiana, he was asked to title a chapter in Goodwill’s history book that would describe his future tenure.

Kramer’s answer: Tipping point.

His explanation: “I look at some of the initiatives that we have going on, they’re on the verge, a tipping point. When you have that critical mass of activity, and it hits that tipping point, all of a sudden the impact becomes enormous. And that’s where I feel we are on an education front and definitely on workforce development,” said Kramer.

Goodwill and Kramer understand that balancing growth and scale also means understanding and respecting their complex interplay.

Kramer was hired as vice president of retail in 2002. His task was to grow Goodwill’s retail revenue. But growth for growth’s sake was not the goal. Goodwill’s board saw the additional revenue as a way to boost its mission.

In his first 10 years, Kramer and his team were successful in increasing revenue from the retail side. They boosted the number of stores to 52 from 24 and grew the number of employees at those stores to 2,200 from 700. Since then, new concepts like e-commerce and outlet and boutique stores have been introduced. Goodwill’s Central Indiana staff is now at 3,200, and last year, 30 Goodwill agencies from around the country visited Indianapolis to learn more about retail growth.

But that’s not all that’s grown. Kramer saw the organization’s work with people and families take a more holistic approach. Although Kramer is proud of opening those stores, he sees the broader effect of increased revenue. Goodwill has taken on a larger mission – helping people get to economic self-sufficiency. Two ways that Goodwill plays a significant role in reducing poverty and the array of accompanying social problems is through its Excel Centers and its Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP), both launched in the past decade.

Education has been part of Goodwill’s program portfolio since 2004, when it opened its first charter high school – Indianapolis MET High School. Since its opening, Goodwill has learned many lessons from that venture.

Those lessons spurred the opening in 2010 of the first Excel Center, a dropout recovery charter high school at Goodwill’s headquarters on Michigan Street on the city’s Westside. Designed for students 18 and older to gain a high school diploma, the first school had more of an online approach. Goodwill realized, however, that students needed an adult to coach them and hold them accountable, so the model was modified.

In 2014, Excel enrollment reached 3,000 with 501 graduates.

“We have Goodwill to surround these people. We help place them, we help coach them to success, we help knock down barriers that might still exist, and we stay with them to make sure they’re successful,” said Kramer. “All of our expansion efforts have gone to the Excel Center, and it’s kind of like, it’s on fire, and we want to keep feeding that fire because of the results.

“Let’s say, if only half of them of those come off of public assistance, that’s pretty significant,” Kramer continued.

Now there are 11 Excel Centers in Central Indiana, with two new locations in Noblesville and on the Southside near the University of Indianapolis. It has also licensed three centers through Goodwills in other cities — South Bend, Memphis, Tenn., and Austin, Texas. And in October, the Annie E. Casey Foundation is supporting the growth with a grant to bring 15 Goodwills from around the country to Indianapolis to learn more about the centers.

Continuous improvement is one of Goodwill’s key principles and its boards’ regularly review growth and impact. Goodwill has three boards – general operation, education and foundation. Each board requires that at a one-year anniversary, and then again at two years after an operation is in place that the staff dusts off the original proforma and matches it up with actual results.

“Basically at board meetings, we give a mission impact report. If we have underperforming programs, which we’ve had in the past, and if we’re not getting the impact we need, we’ve made that decision to remove ourselves from it,” Kramer said. “The last thing that we want to do is to take donations from either used-goods donors or cash donors, and invest in something that doesn’t have a mission return or an economic return. Ultimately we look for both.”

Goodwill also is always looking for better ways to analyze data to show how it is changing lives. In an 2013 economic impact assessment for Goodwill, for example, Ball State University found that in its first two years Excel Center graduates showed gains in average annual wages of $4,572.

So it’s not surprising that impact was a critical factor when Goodwill was researching the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) as a potential program to bring to Indiana. One of the attractions was that the program collected 2,000 data points for every client it serves and had nearly four decades of evidence to support its effect.

The program, headquartered in Denver, has a holistic approach to working with low-income mothers and their families. Each first-time mother is matched with a registered nurse who has regular contact with the family until the newborn turns 2 years old.

Since Goodwill of Central Indiana and the Indiana State Department of Health launched the program to Indiana in 2011, it has served 600 families. This year with additional support and connections to local Goodwill agencies, NFP announced programs for Lake, Madison, Delaware, Tippecanoe and White counties, and with support from private donors in Indianapolis, it will provide services to mothers living in high-risk zip codes.

But the program offers more than trying to ensure the health of a newborn. As the nurse and mother build trust, the nurse has conversations about family self-sufficiency and how this new mother might provide financial support for her family. Those conversations have led some of the mothers to enroll in the Excel program. Besides a high school diploma, the centers offer specific certifications for jobs like pharmacy technicians, electrical systems technicians, welders and information technology techs.

In order to initiate new programming, the ability to invest is critical. Expanding, according to Kramer, takes a good organizational financial backbone and cash to work with. With foresight 45 years ago, Goodwill established a foundation that allows investment in innovation and provides working capital to incubate ideas.

Growth, as Goodwill has learned, cannot always be achieved with existing staff.

“We had to hire those competencies. Sometimes when you’re growing and you’ve got an opportunity to grow fast, it’s difficult to have 100 percent home-grown talent.

“Goodwill historically has been a very entrepreneurial type organization, so you’ve got to have leaders that embrace that idea and embrace change, and not only embrace it but are change agents themselves. Status quo is a very difficult world to live in if you want to grow,” said Kramer.

Since Kramer was announced as Goodwill’s president, everyone asks him what’s next. For him, it’s not new projects, but moving things in a solid direction.

“We’ve got to be really good at keeping our eye on the ball on all of the three big opportunities — education, retail and Nurse Family Partnership — to make sure we’re efficient and delivering results. The ‘what’s next’ is getting really, really good at moving people to middle skills jobs. We’re doing it, but what’s next is ‘Watch us do it really, really, really good,’” said Kramer. “We haven’t finished. We still have lots of opportunities across our network to continue to grow.”