Welcome. It’s September, and this month we’re talking about change: how it is necessary and how difficult it can be to navigate.

Joining me in conversation are three nonprofit leaders from Jefferson County: Executive Director Claudia Coppola from Olympic Neighbors, Director Brent Bellamy from Community Boat Project, and Board President Cynthia Osterman from The Benji Project.

Each of these individuals, and their staff and volunteers, faced challenges – both structurally and in the community – to how they might best serve their clientele. While the issues were not particularly unusual in the world of nonprofits, they were unique to each of them.

What Was Changing?

Brent from the Community Boat Project – “We were going through a leadership transition and needed  a strategy for this important next phase of the organization.”

Claudia from Olympic Neighbors – “We were in our 5^th year of operation, but the last three of those years were during Covid. We had been so focused on keeping our clients healthy and meeting state regulations that we needed some support to get our focus back on the bigger picture. We weren’t sure if that picture made sense anymore.”

Cynthia from the Benji Project –  “A year or so after our founding, we needed help with a lot of foundational work – how to present our mission to the community, how to fund operations, how to avoid burnout.”

In talking with Brent, Claudia, and Cynthia it was easy to feel the passion they had for the work. In each scenario, their hearts were in the right place. But if one thing is true about successful nonprofits it is while altruism, understanding and commitment are all necessary ingredients, they are not sufficient. That is, in addition to the right mission statement, an organization needs to have the right strategic plan.

How to Address Change?

I also talked with Jen Kingfisher from the Jefferson Community Foundation and Anne Morisseau, a volunteer with JCF who specializes in strategic planning. As Director of Community Partnerships Jen Kingfisher creates and maintains relationships with community change makers like Brent, Claudia and Cynthia. As a change advisor and facilitator with 35 years of experience, Anne works with JCF to provide facilitation and guidance to non-profits in Jefferson County.

 It was in these roles that Jen and Anne engaged with Community Boat Project, Olympic Neighbors and The Benji Project.

As I talked with Anne in preparation for meeting with Brent, Cynthia and Claudia, she told me, “Change is stressful, so effective change management is all about how you take people through it in an appropriate and productive way. Organizations that do this well, ones that are mission-driven and have a good plan, tend to thrive.” 

Without acceptance of what needs to change, initiatives met with resistance, passively and/or actively, will very likely fail. Through the auspices of JCF, Anne worked with each of our three non-profits, giving them a framework to be more thoughtful in building a strategic plan with the scaffolding necessary to meet their missions.

 Creating Brave Spaces

In the case of Olympic Neighbors, the change that needed to happen was to move from where it was –  a small startup run by a Board of Directors consisting of parents and family members – to an organization that could now hire staff to do the day-to-day operations. It was at a place where it needed to shift from a more operational focus to a strategic one.  

Those involved in this shift were individuals who knew each other well and were close. As Claudia pointed out, “We are a small, tight-knit group, and sometimes it’s really hard to say you don’t think we should move ahead with an idea one of your colleagues is so passionate about.”  

In working with the group, Anne’s expertise helped create a “brave space;”  that is, a space where honest and very hard conversations could happen. As she defined it for me, “A brave space is where people have the courage to be honest about their thoughts as well as the courage to receive other people’s honest thoughts – all the while keeping the mission of the organization in the forefront.”

The specific challenge facing Olympic Neighbors was the overwhelming desire to find a way to begin to meet the residential needs of a massively underserved population in Jefferson and Clallam counties. When facing a family who has a member with a disability in need of a service that might be available at one of the larger nonprofits in King County,  the natural compassionate response of volunteers and staff, was to say, let’s see if we can do that, thus setting up a classic scenario for burnout by the best intentions. 

The brave space that Anne helped them create allowed them, in Claudia’s words, “To say we are not able to provide every needed service right now. In the past saying that made us feel like we were failing. Instead, we realized we just had to go back to the basics, look at our opportunities and our strengths, and do what we can do.”

They can now stay focused on their mission of providing residential housing and work to build a much-needed second adult family home. In concert with Habitat for Humanity (Check) they plan to engage with the community this summer, answer questions about the project and start working on a Capital Campaign to raise the necessary funds.

A great opportunity to learn more about the new plans will be at Olympic Neighbor’s Annual Fundraiser that happens on August 4th at the Bishop Hotel. Put it on your calendar! Claudia and everyone from Olympic Neighbors would love to see you there.

Bringing Clarity to the Discussion

As I was talking with Cynthia of The Benji Project, she reminded me that Anne and JCF have been doing strategic planning and change management in the community for several years. Over four years ago in fact, not long after their founding, Anne did some work with The Benji Project that Cynthia felt was particularly pivotal and critical at the time.

Back in the day, she remembers that, “There was no ready-made instruction book for us at the beginning. Our mission and programs offering a mindful self-compassion curriculum to the community was, and still is, unique, not just for Jefferson County but for the country at large.”

Cynthia believes the work they did with Anne provided a foundation that really enabled their first several years of growth, scaling their programs beyond small community-based groups to include school-based programs and more extensive after-school offerings. The result was giving many more teens the opportunity to learn evidence-based stress management techniques. Over the years, The Benji Project has worked with more than 1,700 teens in Jefferson County.

One technique from Anne that Cynthia found particularly effective came during a productive round of brainstorming. Ideas were overflowing on butcher paper that had been taped to the walls of the meeting room. Maybe too many ideas.  In turn, Anne gave each participant five stickers, set her timer for 15 minutes, and told everyone they had to vote for, ie, put a sticker on, their top five.

It was a simple, but effective technique to bring clarity and consensus to a room bursting with good thoughts. It was a process the Staff and Board would, in one form or another, continue to employ as they worked through what Cynthia remembers as a near-constant state of transition. She believes, “It would have been a much heavier lift if we had been trying to fix a situation that felt broken. We started from a clean slate and we were fortunate to have made good moves. The rewards from working through change were immensely positive.”

In hindsight, the strategic planning work done in the early days was also important preparation for being able to weather the COVID pandemic. The Benji Project’s programs were designed to happen in person, so when the lockdown happened and the need to provide mental health support amongst teens spiked, the organization had to pivot its delivery model as well as respond to a sudden surge in need..

Thanks to emergency funding grants from JCF and the strategic planning work done before, they were, fortunately, prepared and agile enough, as Cynthia recalls, “to show up for our community’s young people.”

We Are the Same But Not the Same

Earlier this year, JCF hosted a day-long strategic planning workshop attended by the Community Boat Project along with Owl360 and Housing Solutions Network. Bringing these three non-profits with different mission statements together was a novel approach for JCF, but Jen and Anne seemed to think it worked out pretty well. 

As Anne recalls, “Having three organizations, each with a different mission, in the same room for a limited amount of time, made it so that they couldn’t languish or spin their wheels on just one thing. We’d break into small groups and then come back together into larger discussions, and more often than not, one or more of the organizations would find themselves taking a nugget of information and making it their own.”

One of those in the room, Brent Bellamy, Community Boat Project’s new Director, agrees.

He sees a wealth of non-profit organizations in Jefferson County serving a relatively small but very unique community with a lot of compassionate individuals addressing a wide range of needs. At the same time, he sees a lot of overlap. Recalling his time at the workshop, he told me, “ We serve the same demographic for Owl360 for sure, and we overlapped with Housing Solutions Network in the work our kids did building Tiny Houses with them. It is not unusual for us to see other non-profits sharing the same clients, with similar mission statements using the same language.”  

The challenge, he realized, was to be able to articulate, internally as well as externally, what they were doing differently in the way they addressed the needs of their target population. Sitting across the table from Owl360 and Housing Solutions Network in that workshop allowed him and his staff to see the good things they shared and the good things that made them unique.

The workshop was productive not just for Brent, but also for his staff. He had recently been hired by the Community Boat Project’s Board to follow in the footsteps of Founder Wayne Chimenti, and the opportunity to sit at the table with other non-profits was helpful.  

As he says, “It was good for me not to take anything for granted, but rather to recognize there’s a shift in people’s attitudes. We – myself and some of the staff – had not been around that long, so bringing in new voices and new thinking helped us coalesce and move forward into the organization’s future.”

To me, that sounds like listening to the sounds of change gracefully, with an open heart and active mind – both necessary and sufficient conditions for success.

How JCF Helps

Jefferson Community Foundation connects people, ideas, and resources to build a future of opportunity for all in Jefferson County. It’s what they do, and who they are.

Strategic planning and change management workshops and counsel are some of the ways JCF helps non-profits build their future so they can improve the future of their clients. Be in touch if you want to learn more about what we offer. 

Finally, an anecdote that Brent shared with me, seems to sum up the attitude of JCF and how they work in community. He recalls being a relative newbie in Port Townsend and to the local NPO world and being invited by Jen to one of JCF’s regular meet-and-greet happy hours. He says, “I was new to the area, new to my position at Community Boat Project, and there I had the opportunity to meet other executive directors, make connections and just feel very welcomed into the community and I realized then and there, it’s not just me on my own figuring it all out.”

Amen, brother.

Well, that’s this month’s conversation. I hope you enjoyed it.

Tom

About our featured organizations: