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February 2022

Feb 28

Going All IN: United Way event connects hundreds for day of community service

By Sponsor Insight

United Way of Central Indiana will host its second Go All IN Day June 24 across the region

By Margaret Matray, communications manager, United Way of Central Indiana

In the September sun, volunteers armed with flyers and trash grabbers fanned out across the 900 block of North Delaware Street in Indianapolis.

They passed out snacks to neighbors and told them about the services offered at Recovery Café Indy. They spread the word about the cafe’s upcoming anniversary barbecue. And they plucked garbage from bushes, curbs and fences.

Recovery Café Indy was one of several dozen organizations that participated last year in United Way of Central Indiana’s first Go All IN Day, an organized day of volunteering and community service across the region. More than 500 volunteers tackled over 70 projects, including assembling care kits for seniors, mulching playgrounds, planting community gardens and stocking food pantries.

As a result of the event, Recovery Café recruited a handful of new long-term volunteers, and nearly 80 people attend its anniversary celebration, said Aubre Jean, the cafe’s program manager. Go All IN Day also helped the cafe’s members connect with new people and feel supported, she said.

“It felt like we were coming together as a community to do something important, to help maintain the neighborhood and to share the word,” Jean said. “It was awesome because it was not just our organization doing this – the whole entire Indianapolis community was doing something to give back.”

United Way will host this year’s Go All IN Day on June 24 and hopes to grow the event in its second year – with more volunteers and more projects across Boone, Hamilton, Hancock, Hendricks, Marion, Morgan and Putnam counties. The nonprofit is currently recruiting interested volunteers, nonprofits, community groups and grassroots organizations at uwci.org/go-all-in-day.

In the coming months, organizations with an annual operating budget of $1 million or less will be able to apply for small grants to fund their projects. And United Way will help connect volunteers to projects leading up to the event.

For last year project, Recovery Café received a $500 micro-grant that went toward supplies for the neighborhood clean-up and refreshments for volunteers to enjoy while networking after.

Jean saw Go All IN Day as a way to bring together different organizations that share a common goal of helping others. The event also built on the cafe’s efforts to get members walking outside and keep the block clean, as Recovery Café had “adopted” its street through Keep Indianapolis Beautiful.

Recovery Café operates under the nonprofit We Bloom and is part of a network of cafes across the country. It launched out of a space at Horizon House several years ago and is now located inside the Unity of Indianapolis building.

The cafe serves people in recovery – not solely from substance use but also from domestic violence, trauma, mental health struggles, homelessness and other challenges. It offers programs, connects people to services and hosts recovery circles facilitated by trained peer recovery coaches.

Jean said the cafe provides a loving environment. Many members attend daily because it’s their community — a place to belong. There, they can share a cup of coffee or a meal from the nonprofit Second Helpings.

For Go All IN Day, Jean set a goal of recruiting 25 volunteers but exceeded that with nearly 40. Top leaders from United Way and volunteers from Keep Indianapolis Beautiful and First Financial Bank, which helps fund the cafe, all participated – along with cafe members and staff.

Peter Hanscom, United Way’s vice president of marketing and digital engagement, had often driven by the cafe but didn’t know what it did. Hanscom and his family have places where they normally volunteer and give back, but Go All IN Day gave him an opportunity to get out of that comfortable pattern and meet new people and organizations.

After handing out flyers about the cafe that day, Hanscom and the other volunteers toured the facility, learned about its mission and talked with members about their recovery stories.

“The sacrifice of just one day gave me an appetite to stay involved outside of the ways I normally would have,” Hanscom said.

Jean said Recovery Café is still working on its plans for this year’s Go All IN Day. But she’s already reserved a spot online.

The event gives organizations a chance to connect, be creative and recruit more volunteers than they normally would to finish a project.

“It felt amazing to have people from these organizations come and support,” Jean said. “And what it showed is that we are supported and we are seen for the work that we do.

“For any organization who wants to feel connected to that bigger picture and give back in any way – it’s an opportunity to do so.”
To learn more about Recovery Café Indy, go to www.recoverycafeindy.org.

Volunteers and organizations interested in participating in this year’s Go All IN Day can learn more and sign up at uwci.org/go-all-in-day.

Feb 21

Strategic planning enabled food bank to readily expand operations during pandemic

By Feature

Retiring Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana CEO John Elliott reflects on his tenure

by Shari Finnell, editor/writer, Not-for-profit News

Note: Listen to the full interview with Gleaners’ John Elliott, who talks about strategic planning and provides advice for other nonprofits as they plan for upcoming years.

By any definition, Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana faced a nightmarish situation during the early months of the pandemic in 2020. While demand for food surged to unprecedented numbers, the organization’s typical sources of donations — particularly those from grocery stores — plunged to zero, recalled President and CEO John Elliott, who recently announced his retirement. At the same time, the food bank’s volunteer force dwindled in the face of lockdown orders and the uncertainty around the deadly disease.

Faced with similar daunting circumstances, many food banks temporarily or permanently closed their doors. In New York City, for instance, 39 percent of food banks were closed during the height of the pandemic.

An ambitious strategic plan that had been developed years prior to the pandemic allowed Gleaners to not only keep its doors open but serve 103 million nutritious meals in 2020 — up from 20 million in 2016, said Elliott, who plans to hand over the leadership reins to his successor in September.

“Strategy is absolutely our roadmap,” Elliott said. “We started our strategic plan in February 2019. At that time, we began a lot of change and growth planning, and set a goal of closing the meal gap and keeping it closed. That meant, after 2019, we would need to do 2 ½ that year’s food distribution, sustain it and do it in the right way.”
Along the way, the team also focused on significantly increasing efficiency.

“We did not expect to get 2 ½ times the donations that people have historically given us so we did dozens of things to improve our efficiency,” Elliott said. “We went from 41 cents a meal when I got here to 12 cents a meal last year. There wasn’t one magic thing that led to that, but dozens of dozens of things across the entire organization.

“After about nine months of the pandemic, we didn’t update that strategic plan,” he added. We found ourselves, in a sort of an intriguing way, checking off 2023 strategic plan goals early.”

With the implementation and acceleration of the strategic plan, Elliott said the food bank has undergone a permanent transformation.

“You cannot quintuple your distribution, while simultaneously have dramatically improved the nutritional quality and unprecedented variety of foods,” he said. “We have absolutely left behind the old food banking model of passively waiting to see what loose cans and boxes people choose to donate and then that’s what we distribute. We’ve proactively even maybe aggressively gone after financial resources to shop for food at the lowest cost and at the best nutritional variety we can try to create for the families we’re privileged to serve.”

A renewed focus on employees

Human resources was another key focus of Gleaner’s strategic plan — which also significantly paid off when faced with the challenges of the past two years, Elliott noted.

“We invested in our people,” he said. “We redefined every job, every role in the organization and some of the more impactful ones when the pandemic came along.”

As part of that plan, program staff members served as local service managers of assigned geographies, Elliott said.

“They were out in the field, interacting and working with our partners, understanding the neighborhoods, understanding the counties, and knowing exactly what they needed from us to succeed — not confined by historically what we had done for them or with them. But what did they actually need to do their part of closing the meal gap in their area, providing wraparound interconnected solutions.”

Since that work started in 2019, the team was better prepared to meet the needs of the community. “By the time the pandemic hit in early 2020, we already were equipped with that information. Also, if we had not moved to this current location with this facility in 2010, we absolutely could not have handled the pandemic response. We might very well have done what happened at some food banks and many food pantries around the country, which was temporary shutdowns, limiting our response, and running out of food distributions. But that didn’t happen. We were able to handle it because we were already on a growth and change trajectory.”

As part of the strategic plan, employees were evaluated to ensure they were in the right positions. The organization also hired new employees who would be equipped to handle demands well into the future — not simply fulfill the duties of the previous employees, Elliott said.

“In many ways, we started from an organization that was financially at risk in 2016 to one that is very stable and solid now. It was a financial journey. That financial journey began with my doubling the fundraising team when I got here and, much like corporations will use a dramatic increase in sales to turn the company around, we used a dramatic increase in fundraising to give us the resources to do all of the other things.”

Lilly Endowment, Inc., and other organizations provided the funds needed to expand its team, Elliott noted. “But, from there, we had to earn our own way.”

Looking to the future

Elliott noted that some nonprofits could be shortchanging themselves by focusing on challenges instead of future-setting goals.

“If you have a mindset as a nonprofit that, ‘Well, we’re short-staffed,’ or ‘We don’t have enough funding,’ you can diminish what you get versus if you’re more optimistic and project a vision your stakeholders see, hear and respond to.”

By establishing a vision that Gleaners needed to run at 2 ½ to 3 times the distribution it had in 2019, the food bank was equipped to handle even more under pressure, he said. “Now, we know we can do it in normal times.”

Feb 21

Employee retention tax credit: Refund potential for organizations big and small

By Sponsor Insight

by Ryan Lauer, author, Barnes Dennig

Passed as part of the CARES Act at the onset of COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, the Employee Retention Tax Credit (ERTC) Program, in very simple terms, is a credit for continuing to pay employees during the pandemic if certain tests are met.

While the name suggests it’s related to tax, it’s an actual cash refund if you qualify. The credit is driven off of headcount and can add up to a significant sum depending on your total headcount and payroll. It can add up quickly, even for small organizations, as the credit could be up to $5,000 per employee in calendar year 2020 and up to $21,000 per employee in calendar year 2021. If your organization experienced either a gross receipts decline or more than a nominal portion of your business was suspended in 2020 or 2021 because of a government order, you may qualify.

The ERTC did not garner the media attention the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) did when the CARES Act first went into effect because, at that time, businesses and organizations were only allowed to pursue one program – and the vast majority chose the PPP route. However, the Consolidated Appropriations Act (CAA) passed in late 2020 reversed course and allowed taxpayers to pursue ERTC even if they took a PPP loan. Overnight, the number of organizations that could qualify exploded and has resulted in significant cash refunds for thousands of organizations.

The ERTC program is in place for wages paid between March 13, 2020, and Sept. 30, 2021. President Biden signed the Infrastructure Innovation and Jobs Act back in November 2021, sunsetting the Employee Retention Tax Credit (ERTC) program one quarter early (with some exceptions for recovery startups). This early “cut-off” eliminated the 4th quarter of 2021 as a qualifying quarter for the credit – but it doesn’t preclude taxpayers from still claiming the credit for prior eligible quarters.

Qualification: Gross receipts method

To qualify under the gross receipts method, your organization must have experienced a 50% decline in gross receipts during a calendar quarter in 2020 as compared to the same calendar quarter in 2019. To quality in 2021, the threshold is lowered to only a 20% decline in gross receipts as compared to the same calendar quarter in 2019. PPP loan proceeds (when received or when forgiven) are not included as a gross receipt for purposes of this test. While the 50% decline to qualify in 2020 is a steep mark to hit, the reduction to 20% in 2021 results in many more organizations qualifying for the credit. Having said that, the gross receipts method is not the only way to qualify for the credit.

Qualification: Government suspension of operations/partial suspension

Didn’t meet the gross receipts decline test or have a full business shutdown as a result of a government order? There’s still a chance organizations that operated as essential businesses could qualify for the Employee Retention Tax Credit. To qualify under a partial government shutdown, a business unit or program that comprised at least 10% of the gross receipts in the same quarter in 2019 and was suspended from operations (as a result of a COVID-19 government shutdown order), would qualify the entire organization.

For example, if Business Unit A (or Program A) was shut down for a period of time at the onset of COVID-19, and the unit generated 15% of 2nd Quarter revenue in 2019, that could potentially qualify the overall business for the ERTC during the 2020 shutdown period.

Furthermore, in this example, it’s not only Business Unit A that has qualifying wages for the credit: all wages of all business units of the company would qualify during this period of time. Thus, as long as a nominal portion (10%) of the business was suspended, it could be enough to qualify the whole business for the credit.

Eligible wages

Wages that are eligible to be utilized for the credit include W-2 gross wages, pre-tax employee paid health insurance premiums and employer-side paid health insurance premiums. One caveat to keep in mind – wages utilized for PPP forgiveness, or any other credit, cannot also be utilized as qualifying wages for the Employee Retention Tax Credit. Having said that, organizations that received PPP proceeds are still seeing sizeable refunds on the ERTC side, so taking a PPP loan isn’t a reason to not consider the ERTC.

Other considerations

The Employee Retention Tax Credit is a taxable credit. The funding is taxable in the year the wages were paid and could require an amended tax return for taxable legal entities. However, non-profits will not have tax burden related to the credit and may not need to amend their 990s for this.

The ERTC is claimed on an amended quarterly payroll tax return (Form 941X). Once the IRS processes Form 941X, a check is issued to the taxpayer for the credit amount, plus interest. The statute of limitations for filing amended payroll tax returns is three years from the due date of the return, meaning to apply for the Employee Retention Tax Credit for the 2nd quarter of 2020, the amended return needs to be submitted by July 2023. Therefore, there’s still time to apply for the credit.

Find out if you qualify

The Employee Retention Tax Credit can be a massive opportunity if your organization qualifies. With the potential credit up to $5,000 per employee in calendar year 2020 and up to $21,000 per employee in calendar year 2021, organizations both big and small could greatly benefit from applying for the credit.

If you have questions about the qualification process, or want to know if your organization can benefit from the Employee Retention Tax Credit, talk to a member of the Barnes Dennig non-profit team today.

Feb 14

4 reasons to outsource your accounting function

By Sponsor Insight

by Laura N. Haffner, CPA, senior managing consultant

The current economic environment has significantly changed the way organizations look at their talent pool internally or externally. More than ever, organizations have had to become more creative in their efforts to retain their employees. If they are hiring, the desired compensation likely has increased as well.

In this climate, organizations also are faced with a business decision on whether they should hire staff or outsource various functions of their organization. One of the most common areas that could be outsourced is the accounting function.

Here are four reasons to outsource your accounting function

  1. You benefit from working with a team of seasoned professionals.
  2. Services are scalable and flexible.
  3. It can increase automation and efficiencies.
  4. You can realize cost savings. Over the long run, outsourcing your accounting function to a trusted provider can provide for a greater return on investment as compared to hiring, training, and updating in-house personnel.

BKD serves approximately 1,720 nonprofits across the country, ranging from small private foundations to large international organizations, giving us a solid understanding of the issues nonprofit organizations face. Working with an experienced, professional team of nonprofit advisors can help save you time and money while increasing your peace of mind. BKD can help with the following, and more:

  • Monthly close process
  • Nonprofit financial reporting
  • Grants management and compliance
  • Audit preparation, including Single Audit
  • Grants management and compliance
  • Audit preparation, including Single Audit
  • Budget development, process, and execution
  • Implementation of new accounting standards
  • Financial operational assessments
  • Policies and procedures
  • Executive and nonexecutive compensation consulting
  • Other projects on your CFO to-do list

Contact Laura and Dan to learn more or submit a proposal request.

Laura N. Haffner, CPA, senior managing consultant
Haffner is a member of BKD’s Nonprofit Advisory Services team and has more than eight years of assurance and advisory experience in public accounting. Her expertise includes not-for-profit financial reporting, audit preparation, outsourced accounting functions, technology solutions and implementation, and advisory services. She has experience working in several accounting systems including Sage Intacct, Quickbooks Online, MIP Abila, ACS Realm, and others. Haffner also has experience performing audits and attest engagements for for-profit entities and employee benefit plans. She is a member of the American Institute of CPAs and the Indiana CPA Society and is a Certified Quickbooks Proadvisor.

Daniel J. Waninger, CPA, director
Waninger has served the nonprofit, higher education and governmental sectors for more than 15 years. His experience includes working with higher education institutions, membership organizations, museums, religious organizations, foundations and social service agencies. He has provided audit services in accordance with Government Auditing Standards and Single Audit standards, managed numerous audits and completed a six-month apprenticeship in BKD’s quality control department.
He also serves as a presenter on technical topics, such as FASB new standards and best practices for nonprofit organizations. Waninger also is a member of the BKD Nonprofit Center of Excellence, the American Institute of CPAs and Indiana CPA Society.

Feb 07

Nonprofit’s executive director steps down to implement a shared leadership model

By Feature

Earth Charter’s Jim Poyser, Shannon Anderson and Tatjana Rebelle all are directors

by Shari Finnell, editor/writer, Not-for-profit News

Pictured: Tatjana Rebelle, Shannon Anderson and Jim Poyser

Within the first year or two into his role as the first paid executive director of Earth Charter Indiana (ECI), Jim Poyser, the former managing editor for NUVO, felt a sense of uneasiness as he looked around the room during a board meeting. 

“I remember thinking, ‘We are all white and old.,” recalled Poyser, sharing some of the history that led him to seek a replacement for his role as executive director of the 21-year-old nonprofit organization. 

The homogeneous nature of the ECI’s board in 2013 hadn’t gone unnoticed by ECI board president Rosemary Glass Spalding, a long-time board member for the local nonprofit organization. “When I joined the board a few years before that, it was so glaring and obvious,” Glass Spalding recalled. “And John Gibson, who was the one of the founders of Earth Charter Indiana, had a mantra that we will be an intergenerational organization.” 

Although ECI has since made significant developments in recruiting and maintaining a diverse board, Poyser also wanted to explore options for a new face of the organization.

Earlier this year, after a series of brainstorming and organizational meetings with ECI’s staff and board members, Poyser accomplished his vision by abandoning his executive title and becoming the director of advancement. At the same time, co-workers Shannon Anderson became director of advocacy and Tatjana Rebelle became director of youth programming.

“We know that climate change is going to be most impactful to frontline communities, including low-income communities, communities of color and females,” Poyser said. “I was doing a lot of presentations in schools and community centers. And I started to recognize that an older white male coming into a community to speak to people was never effective.”

The path to a shared leadership model

Early on in his tenure, Poyser started the process of bringing more diverse voices to the forefront by asking others, including females and people of color, to represent ECI at speaking engagements. “I felt it was the right thing to do. I had my time to speak. I had my opportunities. And I’m not seeing things move quickly enough in Indiana regarding climate.”

Years later, as part of the organization’s strategic plan, the team was able to significantly increase its budget. That was when the organization was able to hire Anderson as a full-time assistant director, and more recently, Rebelle to oversee youth programming.

And in 2020, in the wake of increased demonstrations from white supremacists and civil rights activists protesting the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police, Poyser felt the time had come for the change in executive leadership he had been contemplating.

“It seemed like the right direction,” Poyser recalled. “It was an instinct with the way things were unfolding around us.” 

Dismantling a hierarchy

When Poyser first approached ECI co-workers Anderson and Rebelle about his decision to hand over the reins of executive director to another person, they both paused at the prospect of disrupting a strong working relationship. 

Anderson, who excelled in advocacy work, had no desire to take on the top leadership role. Rebelle had the same response. And neither of them was highly interested in the possibility of a new person taking over the leadership position because they all worked so well together.

So, after that initial conversation, Anderson and Rebelle, who had personally experienced the benefits of a shared leadership model while working at The Kheprw Institute, explored the possibilities of a shared leadership or distributive leadership model for ECI. While many researchers and thought leaders have long touted the benefits of this type of leadership, it hasn’t become mainstream. 

“All three of us have these strengths that all balanced themselves out,” Rebelle said. “The areas that I’m really interested in are the ones that Jim and Shannon might not want to do. We asked each other, ‘What do you love about your job?’ and ‘What are some of the things you don’t really love about your job?’”

That questioning led to a more formal work discussion in which all three team members hashed out answers to those questions in a Google document, listing the things they wanted to continue to do and those they would prefer to hand off to someone else, Anderson recalled. “There was a fluidity to it when we started moving things around,” she said. “It was a three-person collaboration.”

Anderson also said the pre-planning was critical for further adoption of the proposal. 

“If Jim hadn’t been part of this three-person collaboration, I think it would have been very hard to sell to our board,” Anderson said. “But because all three of us were totally in sync on this almost from the moment it was brought up, everyone was really comfortable with it. It feels very organic and authentic.”

Gaining board approval

Once they had a detailed plan on how the shared leadership model would work — with workflow charts and pie charts, the team had numerous meetings with the board to move forward with acceptance and implementation.

“There were some concerns and questions when we actually took this to the board to get feedback. And the obvious one is, ‘Well, who’s in charge?”,” she said. “‘Who’s responsible, ultimately, to the board for achieving the strategic goals of the strategic plan?’ And the answer is, ‘They all are.’”’

During those meetings, they addressed how they would be accountable with each other and resolve conflicts.

“We’ve made a commitment to each other to be honest,” Rebelle said. “We also decided to bring in the executive committee if there’s something that the three of us can’t figure out as a unit.”

Based on her history of working at the organization, Anderson said, she anticipates that there won’t be conflict per se. “It’s good to be prepared for disagreements, but I think it will be more along the lines of ‘We have two paths before us. And we’re excited about both, but we can only do one.’”

The team’s plan was convincing. Within a fiscal quarter, the board had adopted the new leadership plan.

A new way forward

Under the shared leadership model, the board will be more integral in the personnel aspects of the organization, Glass Spalding said. 

“In the past, I and the executive committee did Jim’s personnel evaluation and Jim did Shannon and Tatiana’s. They’re now going to do each other’s in addition to their own self-evaluations,” she said. “But the board will have to be more involved.”

Along the way, other concerns were addressed, including the following:

  • What will supporters think? Poyser had been at the helm of ECI for more than eight years and is well known throughout the community and among funders. “The board was really concerned,” Glass Spalding said. “Jim has been the face of Earth Charter Indiana for a number of years. He’s a very dynamic person and there was concern that a perceived demotion or change could be detrimental to the organization. They didn’t want to have any ramifications from that.” Poyser addressed those concerns by pointing out that all three of the staff leaders can be considered the face of the organization. “Shannon Anderson is the leader of Earth Charter Indiana at places like the Statehouse,” he said. “Tatjana is the leader in other sectors. From a biodiversity standpoint, it really makes sense for the strength of the organization to have a team of leaders who are all on the same plane. In a way, this is just formalizing what I felt to be happening already.
  • Would the executive director be OK with losing his title? Poyser said that he wasn’t attached to his ED title and, as a result, didn’t have qualms about losing the “executive” in front of his name. “My transition to director of advancement is a natural fit for a transition from executive director,” he said. “The director of advancement and an executive director are very similar positions in the realm of grants and contracts.”

The team members all acknowledged that they will continue to refine the new leadership model as they navigate changes in the coming months.

Glass Spalding said she doesn’t anticipate any major challenges with the transition.

“In observing them, they’re all very highly driven people. The personnel issues are very nuanced in terms of more of an approach to achieving the goals of the strategic plan,” she said. “The question will be, ‘How do we meaningfully evaluate whether they’re achieving what we hope and expect?’ As the year progresses, we want to make sure we’re still on the same page, and that our expectations and their expectations and work match.”

And the benefits of a shared leadership model far outweigh any difficulties in making a transition, Glass Spalding said.

“I do think, especially with a small organization, this is a really a very exciting possibility for organizations to look at,” she said. “The upside is you have the ability to achieve a lot more with a lot less red tape or bureaucracy. It’s very symbiotic and synergistic, words that are sometimes overused, but they really do fit this situation.”

Anderson said it also is a significant step toward inclusion.

“People may be scared to take on a change like this because they can’t imagine not being in control,” Anderson said. “I don’t think they realize that there’s a better version of everything when we elevate different voices. Jim’s not quitting. He’s not retiring. He’s going to be keeping us healthy going forward, but he’s also letting other voices come forward. A lot of organizations could benefit from deciding to doing something different. It puts you on a path toward a better future where there is more inclusion and there are more people of color at the forefront of movements.”