Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.
So welcome to the good community, we're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
So let's get started. Becky, what's happening?
I love when we meet people for five minutes, and it feels like there are a long less bestie it feels like today.
Like we've got like such a world changer in the room. I love that we say that in the intro just kind of casually, but who we brought in today is going to rock all of our worlds because she is really living at this intersection of really trying to figure out the impact that really matters. You know, in this space where there's so many missions, there's so much work to be done, it's hard to cut through the noise and figure out what's really most effective, what has evidence based practice behind it, and then live in the vortex of that of finding funding to support it and sustain it and grow it. And we've got like one of the most amazing experts in the room with us. I'm so excited to introduce you to Heather Reynolds. She's the managing director of the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities. For the rest of this episode. We're calling it LEO, which is their amazing acronym. But this is up at the University of Notre Dame up in South Bend, Indiana. And we have some great fans in Indiana too. So I love that we're having this conversation today. But you know, we were connected by DJ Donna who came on the podcast a few months ago, has a huge heart for this specific mission and kind of tipped the hand to say you've got to talk to Heather, because what they're doing the work around poverty is just so incredible. And I want to lead in with a little bit of stats, we don't always do this from the beginning. But just to give some context of where this conversation is going is that 40% of Americans will experience a year or more of poverty in their lifetime. Like how do you even sit with that, you know, in a room of 10 people, that's four out of 10 of us. And then 43% of American kids today live in low income families. And even though their parents may work, it's just not enough to make ends meet and have this on the minds and hearts of a lot of us as we're going into like this economic recession and things are in flux. And so, you know, Heather's work is about centering evidence based practice around this about how do we pull ourselves out of this? What are the programs that are working, and I love the lens on these kinds of catalyst ideas that could change the world. And so Heather is the is the Managing Director I mentioned at LEO, their vision is learning what works to reduce poverty. She's an expert speaker on poverty and nonprofit strategy. But before this, she was so close to us. She was in Fort Worth for more than 14 years back, she was the CEO of Catholic Charities down there. And so she has an incredible background in the nonprofit space. But huge honor to have you in the room with us, Heather, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Oh, y'all. It's such an honor to be here. Thank you so much for being willing to meet with me today. And having me on your show. I'm super excited.
Well, the honor is literally all ours. And we're really excited for this conversation. I feel like it's a heavy topic, but I'm hoping today, we can see it through the lens of the hope that you all are finding through research. But first, we want to know you like take us back to your story. I mean, your winding path that landed you at LEO now but take us through growing up and kind of the key milestones that brought you here today.
Yeah, well, um, okay, I got a lot of stories. So I'll start with this. It was it was very funny. So I went to TCU. And that's how I got to Fort Worth. And I started out as radio TV film major, mainly because I was dating my high school sweetheart, who was so interested in that who became my husband of 20 years now. And long story short realize, Oh, that's not the right professional call for me. And I told my parents at the time, you know, I really think I want to be a full time volunteer, I care about my communities. And when my parents were like, That's a great idea, you know, spending time in community. They didn't like the volunteer word associated with that and so I was very lucky
Or the full time
Right, right. I was very lucky to stumble my way into the profession of Social Work and got went on to get my master's degree in social work, thought I was going to be a therapist started at Catholic Charities Fort Worth. I was there almost two decades, the last about 13 years as their CEO, started as a therapist because I thought that's how I could contribute best to the world and quickly realized you needed to be a really good therapist, you need to have a lot of patience, which is not my number one gifting.
Not my highest strength.
You kinda got to know how to do that. And so but transition to some other elements of the organization and quickly fell in love with the idea that I was serving in a place that could bring not just real help to people but real hope to people. When I talk about like people struggling in poverty, what I see again, and again, it's just such a devoid of hope. And I think hope is a really powerful thing. And so anyway served my career at Catholic Charities until I transitioned over here to LEO about four years ago.
I'm just so proud of your work. And having this constant thread of how we're looking at poverty and the effects of poverty is just going to always be an evergreen theme on the We Are For Good podcast because we live in the richest nation in the world. And the fact that 43% of children, you know, whose dual working parents cannot provide enough for them is entirely and wholly unacceptable. And so I thank you for pouring into this work. And I think it does take a village and a community to be enlightened to what the data is saying. And, and as we were saying, before we got on and I will be the first to confess it right here is that we are data averse, here in the nonprofit sector. And that starts with me, we're afraid of it. We don't know how to interpret it. We don't know how to use it to move our missions forward. So I'm excited about how you do that through the lens of poverty today. But first, we just want to get really educated. So can you do some tone setting for us because you've worked in this field, in just in the poverty fighting field, not only as a service provider, a therapist, a nonprofit professional, talk to us about what you've learned and what you've experienced that led you into this really deep research work at Notre Dame today?
Yeah, great question. So, you know, it started when shortly after I had become CEO of Catholic Charities Fort Worth, there was an article in our local newspaper, the Star Telegram. And in this article, it was talking about this CEO of a homeless organization who was retiring after reading about two decades of service to the community running this homeless shelter. And I remember reading this article, and while everyone was just so proud of him and his legacy, and what he had done, rightfully so, I found the article very sad, because in the article, he was quoted as saying that he believed the homeless, were no better off on the day he retired than on the day he began. And I remember reading that and thinking, I don't think there is a sadder thing I could say, or that my team at Catholic Charities Fort Worth, or the volunteers or the donors could save, like, you pour your heart, your soul into serving your community, and then feeling like after decades of work, that nothing's different. So that became a real rallying cry. For me, that is like really kind of extended throughout my career. But how that translated first, at Catholic Charities Fort Worth was, was, frankly, the wrong way. I became very convicted on we need to grow people are whole people, which is true, right? Somebody walks through our door, and we help them with this, but they may need five other things. And so we began on this path of growth, we began on this path of adding programs and services and so much for people who are coming to us saying I need you. And then we looked back on that after a few years, and said, okay, what's different. And I think what we saw was still a high volume of repeat customers. And you know, if you own a coffee shop, or a restaurant or a boutique, you know, repeat customers are awesome. If you're running a nonprofit organization, that kind of means you failed. And so I just, we, our team at Catholic Charities just sort of say like, something's not right here, we're missing something. Because we keep growing both the slots of number of people we can serve and growing, the types of services, but we're not seeing the gains we want to see. And then that really started to shift through what ended up being like this tense situation, where we met these two professors at the University of Notre Dame Jim Sullivan, and Bill Evans, who now who then later co-founded LEO, and our relationship with them and our relationship with LEO and LEO's very early existence. That's what really began to change everything. And you know, as a social worker, that's my heart. That's what I'll always be even though I sit in the world of academia now. But it's, it's it's really that that started to shift that data, that understanding, sort of shift our practice and ultimately shift the impact of that we were having on the life that we all care about to serve.
Heather Reynolds. I mean, a thread of our podcast is asking bigger questions, and that's which you exactly are doing, you know, like, it's not just being okay with the status quo. It's like, what's driving that was the underlying factors. And I just think, when you put that against getting right with how you can show up, you don't want to get to the end of your career and feeling like, it didn't matter, right, that can be one of the most, I don't know, hurtful things. I can't, I can't think of a right word. But I just think if you can iterate and get better, what that would do to the team to like, and not just even talking about your beneficiaries, because clearly, they're the winners in that equation too. But like what it does to your staff that are burnt out, and they're tired, but if they can see wins, like what that does to bring people more into the aliveness, you know, and so, I love that you're, you're taking us into this conversation in that way. And I want to let you set the tone for the state of poverty in our country, because I feel like as we like to understand your work, like, kind of paint a picture of where we're at, we let him with some incredible stats, I don't know, if you want to pepper it with more, or just give us some context to those.
Yeah, you know, I mean, it describing poverty, you know, I do love sharing, the 40% of Americans will spend a year or more of their life in poverty by the time they reach the age of 60. Because you can break that down, like 37 million people, right, that's, you know, we can, you know, Whoa, that's a big number, but we can quickly dismiss that. But when you think of like sitting in a room with 10 people, four of them, that just starts to you know, humanize it a little bit more. So I mean, I would say, just broad strokes, you know, we have for being one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, we just the level of abundance we have as a country. And the level of people suffering in poverty is just, it's just not okay. I agree with, it's a moral dilemma. It's an ethical dilemma, it's a big issue. And then when you go to the very, very micro level of it, and meet people struggling, in poverty, meet people who have been marginalized, you get why, you know, you want to commit your career, your work, your life, to having preferential option for the poor, because they don't have preferential option, if you just look at us as a country as a whole. And you know, Leo exists, because we really believe that it shouldn't be this way. Many of us would believe that right. And our, I guess, kind of unique way of thinking about this is that, if you look at the amount of resources spent on poverty in our country, last number I heard was, it's about 20 to $22,000 per poor person that we're actually spending on poverty. So we can't even argue that this is a resource issue, given that there's an abundance of resources in our nation and abundance of resources being spent on this very issue. What we would argue is that if you look at, let's just take what the federal government spends a year on poverty, less than 1% of that spending is being spent on programs that actually have the evidence, causal evidence behind them that they work. And so like LEO is, our position is not spend more spend less, our position is we need to take that money we're spending and spend it well, not because the policymakers frankly, not because the taxpayers like most maze, we care about those groups, but mostly because people in poverty deserve our best and how better to give them our best and to make sure when they walk through the doors of a Catholic Charities or whatever it might be, that they walk through a door, and they're asking for something, and they're given something based on what they need. And based on what we as, as a society actually understand works.
I mean, you are looking at this through a completely different lens than everyone else. And I want to thank you for it. Because asking different questions and altering your delivery of mission based on date data. And I don't just say like the quality, like the quantitative, I'm talking about the conversations you have with people who are living this, looking at it in that way gets to root. And that's the problem if we're not dealing with the root of the issue than we do get to our retirement and say it's the same, you know, and so you're doing this really hard work. And I have to say, I'm going to say something pretty unpopular here. In our sector. There are people working in nonprofit who are living in poverty because they do not earn a living wage. We are among many of these people. And I thank you for diving into the data because I think many of us, especially when we were growing up, especially those of us with privilege, when we think about people living in poverty, we're thinking of people living, you know, under the overpass, or in the box or what No, this is 40% and this is people we know these are people our kids go to school with these are people we are shopping next to in the grocery store. And it's a issue that affects absolutely every one of us. So I want to dive into like, what is the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities doing? Like, tell us about your mission. Tell us about your research and your programs that's informing this different way to look at this issue.
Yeah, and I appreciate you saying about, you know, the living wage concept. Because, you know, I, one of the things that we saw firsthand at Catholic Charities and had to really put a mirror in front of our face and address it is, we were coaching and training our team to coach and train people on a pathway out of poverty, yet they were struggling in poverty themselves, and that that's a whole separate conversation. But that led us down a different path to say, oh, whoa, whoa, we've got work to do internally, first, to address this issue, because that's not okay. We're asking our helpers, to help people on this journey. And they themselves are struggling in this journey as well. So I'm so glad, Becky, that you that you talked about that. Like, you know, when you look at LEO, and what we do, I think maybe the best way to explain this is to share my own personal anecdote when I was at Catholic Charities Fort Worth, and then we can talk, you know, broadly, when I was at Catholic Charities Fort Worth, you know, we brought LEO down to Fort Worth, they looked at our programs and services. And we said, we want to start somewhere, where do we start? And there was this one little, little, little program of the many things Catholic Charities Fort Worth did that was trying to help people get to a living wage through increasing their education. And so what we were doing basically is providing intensive mentorship and support to low income students at community college, with our with our with our hypothesis, why we were doing this work is we were thinking, you know, there's academic reasons why someone in poverty would not graduate from community college. But there's some life happens reasons if you're a single mom of three kids, and you know, and you can't figure out how to put food on the table for your kid tonight, I'm sorry, education is going to be probably one of the top things to go right. And so our thought was, how do we help that family with the life happens stuff to keep education at the forefront of their mind at the forefront of their ability, so that they could get to a place where they're ultimately earning a living wage or just wage for their family. And so what we ended up doing with LEO, is LEO, we were in a situation the unfortunate situation that the community college in which we were serving had tons of students who could use this service, we at Catholic Charities Fort Worth had limited resources to only help about at the time, 120 students. And so we used the sad fact that there was way more students who needed this than didn't to conduct the type of experiments we do at LEO, which are randomized control trials. And so at the start of every semester, students would say Me, Me Pick Me. And we would take that pool of students and randomly assign who got the service and who did it based on our limited ability to serve everyone. And then we would, Notre Dame's Leto was able to follow in the data, what happened to both groups, what happened to the group who got the Catholic Charity services regarding their persistence and completion? What happened to that group, who didn't? And one of the most amazing things that we saw is that students who got the service were four times more likely to persist and complete, to go on then and earn higher employment levels, earning levels, things like that, versus the control group. And we were able to use that data to know this works. And then we were able to take that to the local community, and raise millions of dollars. So 1000s of people a year could now be served by that service, versus just the 120, we were able to do initially.
Brilliant, you made the business case for that. I mean, you'd definitely invest in a company that was going to give you four times the return. Brilliant.
That's right. That's right. And you know, that's a case study of something that happened in Fort Worth, Texas. But the beauty of the LEO research because since Notre Dame, obviously is that, you know, the world's university, but we focus at LEO domestically. What we have been able to do with that data is, is work with some groups in DC to actually get some federal law change. So now that they're in our country typically has focused on this specific issue as an access issue. Like we need to make sure people have access to post secondary education. While that's important, who cares if everybody's accessing if they're not completing and so what we've been able to do is now because of this research, we've been able at the federal level now we have a completion fund. So now you're starting to see some movement in federal funds flow not just to access but to actual completion.
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Wow, I mean, what a comprehensive mission that you show up for and I think like just the most small case studies, that you're a part of all the way to like trying to impact the way the entire country perceives or approaches that entire issue. So I mean, I just gotta know, I mean, as a leader that's in that kind of vortex of all these competing things like, how, how do you balance your time? This is not on the script, I'm just baffled that like, you're working at advocating and changing national things. You're working at the local level, you're fundraising, like how do you show up, other than just know where to plug in? And I think a lot of people feel that but hearing your story, I'm just like, really overcome by all the different lanes you're playing in?
Yeah. I mean, I think for me, in my career, it's always been important for me to understand, like, what are the things in the organization you're working on? That are truly those comparative advantages? What are those things that are unorthodox or unique? And I kind of live in a world where I do everything average except those things.
That's key, right? Know what your strengths are and pouring gasoline on that.
Yeah, I do that as an individual, I do that as a leader. And I do that like, at an institutional level of like, you know, we can spend I can, I can spend all day trying to be good at x, or, you know, I can delegate X to somebody else, and really lean into what I'm best at. And I have found that, that increases my job satisfaction, and decreases my chances of burnout. But then it also I think, helps us live in a world where people are focused in their strengths. And organizations are focused in their strengths. Like, you know, we, I think in the nonprofit world, we went through this phase, I hope we're coming out of where it's all about excellence, excellence, excellence is get accredited, let's be excellent at everything. And, and I just don't buy that like, like, there's some things you just need to do fine. And there's probably three or four things you need to do at excellence. And so you take LEO, for example, one of the things that we would define as our comparative advantage, and we have to do at that excellence level, is what we call world changes world changers. I love that phrase we call poverty versus adversaries. And, and one of our comparative advantages is we don't just do research, sitting here at the University of Notre Dame, who cares, we do research with poverties versus adversaries front and center at what we do. So you won't find the Oh projects where we're just learning things and doing things in a vacuum. We're finding nonprofits with innovative solutions, we're saying, what do we need to learn about this, and then we're diving in in partnership with them to learn those things.
Okay, I'm fist bumping over here. Right back. I mean, the deal to me is, like, we talked about partnerships a lot on the podcast, too. And it's like the world, we all want this innovative lens, like, we want to grab arms with each other. And this is what you all are saying is find the people that are doing it really well deeply and spread that idea. And you lock arms with those that are doing the other thing really good. Like you don't need to be all things to all people, but do the things you're doing really well. And I think we can all take a lot from that of just how we show up in our work to you know, call you their capabilities or something like that, I think is another good word for it. But wow I'm over here freaking out.
And thank you for the curiosity and the unique partnership lens. Because we say this all the time. The answers that reside to the most systemic problems in our world are on the front lines of that issue. They are right there in the community. We just have to ask. And so talk to me about this research. Like, what are you guys seeing? Talk about your findings? Is there been something that surprised you something like these huge aha moments? Tell us what you're seeing and hate nonprofits? Let's listen up and let's figure out how we can adapt to it.
Good. Yeah, great question. So, LEO has 90 projects currently going on or
90?
Yeah. And we're scaling eight years from now we'll be at 300. So we're in major growth mode at LEO. Because there's, I mean, remember what I said at the beginning, less than 1% of our programs have evidence behind them. Like, unfortunately, there just needs to be a lot of evidence building going on here in our country. And so I would say some of the things that have been most surprising to us, what our evidence has shown is, is it is really effective, just from a return on investment standpoint, to give resources to people in need to prevent them from becoming homeless. So we've run studies with Santa Clara County, we've run a study with Catholic Charities. In Chicago, we've run a study, we're just launching a study with Mary's Place in Seattle, the two cities where we have results in show the same thing and two very different communities across our country, that if somebody is on the brink of homelessness, very little resources, I'm talking five $600 can often be the deal breaker between them being stable and housed and not sliding into homelessness, versus sliding into homelessness. And while those dollars spent, do not help somebody on a path of upward mobility, what those do is ensure that they don't go into homelessness. And as you guys know, being in this space, which being in homelessness, that's a whole nother level of complication. And a whole higher degree of stuff is needed to move you forward from that point. And so that's a big area of study we've done in found a lot there. But I would say probably one of our most fascinating areas of study we're seeing again, and again and again, whether it's Fort Worth, Texas, or Rochester, New York, or Rapid City, South Dakota, is we are seeing that if the most important intervention that is showing again and again, is working for upward mobility is that intensive case management is that forget, a funding source tells you you can only serve someone for six months forget, you know that you can't go on a long term journey with somebody No, like doing life with a family or a person in poverty, over the long haul, having an attitude and a mindset of relentless pursuit of those individuals, of those families. And having the framework of your services not be punitive, but be strengths based. So like, often, what we see is that, you know, you might, you know, have a client who lies to you. And you might go, oh, gosh, we've got to dismiss this client, they lied to us. And if you kind of unpack that, and go a little lower into that, you start to realize, like, Well, why is that client lying, maybe that client is living in a domestic violence situation, which lying has become like the number one coping mechanism for survival. Like, it's not always so simple is like this is right and this is wrong. And so that those relationships, and having the framework of a client is a person of strength, and understanding what their strengths are, so that you can reference those strengths to help them overcome the vulnerabilities they have in their life is time and time again, what our studies are showing actually works and makes a difference.
I feel like we just saw this play out John, when we talk to Kelly Lyndgaard of Unshattered, the way that they are looking at women coming out of addiction into recovery is 100% different it is also through this very unique lens. It's community based, it's not shame based, it's totally empowerment. And it's all about completely shifting the lens. And to me, it's an instant infusion of humanity. And it's in its understanding that these issues are complicated. And and not binary in any sense of the word. And so I absolutely love that you're doing that. And I would wager your results are by using that framework are as impactful as Kelly's who's who's had one relapse in six years out of my entire nonprofit. So I think there's something to this giving humanity and giving support.
It's huge. You know, like I think the best example I can give this is there was this like, we're going we're going away from this now which is which is promising to me but like the social service industry for a while. There's this sentiment, like, well, poor people need to know how to manage their money. But it's not just about money management, poor people are often some of the most resourceful people you will ever meet. And so like the whole industry moved for a while to this place of like financial literacy, and we're going to teach everyone how to manage their money in poverty, and poof, that'll solve the issue. And you know, what we have seen what one example I love with a partner was where the way they did financial literacy, if you will, is they would say to a person they were working with, you know, tell us your values, what do you value most in life? And the person would say something such as, like, my children, or my children's education, or a nice home or whatever. And then they would do an extra activity that would be like, check your spending for the next month, how are you spending your resources? And then with no judgment, the person, the helper would say, Okay, let's look at your values and how you're spending your money. What do you see? And then the client, the person, you know, would have the AHA cause of, oh, wait, I'm saying I value my housing situation the most. But the most like the top line item I'm spending my money on is giving money away to friends and family. Okay, let me think about this. Maybe differently, do I want to shift my values? Or do I want to shift my spending and making some trade offs there? That's how people change. We all change when we have our own AHA is not when someone tells us what to do all day, right. And so that's what we see as something that's working really well.
I mean, I love that example. We're big on values around here. And we think it's revolutionary to basically everything and core to everything. So I love that that example. I mean, we talk a little bit about your impact evaluations, I feel like this is a process that maybe a lot of nonprofits can learn from. Is this what you were explaining with Catholic Charities Fort Worth that example, kind of go a little bit more of like, what's behind the scenes? What does that look like to really do this evaluation process? And how could we consider doing that at other nonprofits?
Yeah, great. So we are always looking at LEO, for new nonprofit partners, we take on about 20 new organizations a year. One of the things that I love about LEO is we don't charge nonprofits for research. I mean, research is already hard enough to do so we bear the brunt of the research costs, while the nonprofit bears the brunt of their surface costs. And so what we have found again, and again, is that you know, when you are working within a nonprofit is so easy to focus on the urgent. And that makes sense, right? You've got a lot of people who need a lot of help with a lot of needs. And so what we try to say is like, okay, research is important, but it's often not the urgent. So how do we take something that's important, and take little bite sized pieces of it over a period of time to make this actually something that gets done. And so we spend time kind of our processes, we spend time up front, vetting a nonprofit, then vetting us, seeing are we right for one another? And when that answer is a yes, a nonprofit comes with a small team to a two day workshop here. At that they learn all about the type of evaluation we do, they learn all about culture and capacity. And then they're paired with their research team here at LEO. And then they leave us and they go through with their research team, virtually a 16 week process where every week, they're basically spending two to three hours on developing their research study with us that culminates in a second workshop, where they come back here to campus, and they present it to a group of benefactors to our LEO team to potential other faculty affiliates, and share what they're gonna launch with us. And then from there, we actually move into launching those studies. And so what we try to do is say, you know, you as a nonprofit organization, you don't have 10 to 20 hours a week to be spending on research, we're going to take that heavy lifting, if you can give us two to three hours a week. That makes it where we can get something extraordinary done together.
It is amazing. And I just sit there thinking about if you're working in this mission, and you are really leaning in to being a change agent, not just for your mission, but for the cause. I mean, this is just the marketer in me asking you this Heather because I'm trying to figure out in my mind, how we can socialize this, like what tactically does a nonprofit get because I'm thinking they got to share that with their board, they got to share it with their staff, they need to share it on their socials. And it's such a great conversation starter. And this is the content we want our rabid fans and our ridiculous you know, ideal is to champion so I'm like really curious about the tactical pieces.
Yeah, so the nonprofit working with this gets three main pieces right. The first piece is they get a lot of us you know, shouting from the rooftops how brave and incredible they are to even undergo this level of testing. Because we could learn what they do doesn't work, right. And that's not the best feeling. But they're brave enough to say we want to know, right? And so they get a lot of heralding from us on that. The second piece they get is the actual research product. So that is the kind of end report both broken down in a thick way and in a digestible way that says, what do we understand? Does this work? Does it not work? For whom does it work? Why does it work? What outcomes does it shift? What's kind of the return on investment based on how much it costs versus what the return is? And then they can use all of that however they please. And the third thing they get from us then, is we have been building a policy and impact team the last few years at LEO, who then works with the nonprofit to say, now that we are learning this, what do we want to do with that? And for some nonprofits, that is local scale, for some times, like we're working with no one nonprofit in Indianapolis, where they were like, we want 30 of our programs all across the nation. And so we worked with them on testimony to the Arizona state legislator, like legislature, together that resulted in state policy change to their program could even exist in the state of Arizona, and then an unlocked about 15 million of state funding to start their first bit of operation in Arizona, every nonprofit that's going to look different for right. But our goal is to figure out now that we know this, what do we do with this? And so that's kind of the third real tangible product and nonprofit gets with us.
You guys are so smart. I mean, the way you're unpacking it, the way you're educating is wonderful. And I just want to put out a call to all the researchers please come into our world. We have unbelievable data, stories, we have engagement points, we can actually we just need some partners to help us interpret it and figure out how we can use it to pivot on our mission. So love that you're in the space. Heather, we value story so much on this podcast, because we think it's the best way for human beings to connect on a personal level. Curious if there's a story of philanthropy that has really resonated and stayed with you in your life that you'd be willing to share with our community?
Yeah, I have a lot of philanthropy stories, but probably my favorite philanthropy story is a woman by the name of Mandy. She actually was in an unfortunate situation where she was living in poverty, she was walking several miles a day to work in the DFW community, and started having all these legal issues because of that happened one day to see the Catholic Charities Fort Worth transportation. One of the buses go by and thought, oh, maybe they could help me get to and from work. She was helped through that, and then helped through a conglomerate of other services at Catholic Charities Fort Worth, and I will never forget, we asked her to share her story at one of our fundraising lunches and we invited her, obviously to take part in the entire program and lunch as well. And I will never forget the donation she made at that event. And I um, why I thought that was so beautiful, is she was probably at that point. Specifically, she was at a place where she probably still didn't have a lot of discretionary income. But the fact that she chose to give to an organization she believed gave a lot to her, meant more to me than million dollar donations that I've gotten in other places, because that was just giving out of sacrifice and giving out of such conviction. So I love those stories of generosity, because we need all types. But seeing that generous heart, whether you're giving millions, or whether you're giving $1 I think is a really beautiful thing.
Thank you for adding chills to my arms. So good. As we started to round up this conversation, yeah, thank you Mandy, is we like to ask all of our guests, what's their one good thing? This is just like a piece of advice you could leave with our community or a hack or a mantra. Heather, what you want to get?
Oh, that's a good question. So one of my favorite quotes, and I need to know who like is the author of this quote, because I quote it all the time. But is courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes it's the quiet voice at the end of the day, saying I will try again tomorrow. And I love that quote, because it just kind of sums up how I feel. And I would say most of us in the helping profession fill is there are days where we need to roar and roar loudly. And then there's days where you just are beat down by the work especially those folks who are on the front lines like our LEO's partners, where we're you're just beat down and the best you can do is in that quiet hush say, I'll try again tomorrow. And I think just that is just a really motivating quote for me to always keep in mind.
Oh, I love that quote. And it's by Mary Anne Radmacher. Thank you Google.
I was going to guess Katy Perry so that's good.
Totally. So Heather, you've dropped so much good wisdom today, I think we're feeling really fired up about this topic about getting activated around it. Tell people how they can connect with you. How can they connect with LEO, and learn more about your work? Tell us where you hang out on socials.
Yeah, thank you for that. So if you go to leo.ndu.edu, you can find us there, you can find us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, connect with us on all of those platforms. Because we are always even on our website, you can go to sign up for like our regular eblasts and our newsletters. Because we are always trying to put out everything we learn both these amazing poverty adversaries that we're working with that are doing brave, creative, innovative things. And then also as we get data and learnings and tidbits that you too, can utilize in whether it's your benefaction or in your services, like we want our evidence put to use. And so the more you can follow and engage with us that that would be amazing.
Just gotta put this out there for nonprofits, there are many ways to plug in here, you there are ways to take the data and use it to make a case for support. If you're a nonprofit who's listening to this, who falls within this category, and you have data or story that you'd like to be explored and shared, please reach out to Heather. And I'll say if you're just an average human being who's here listening, because you care about other human beings, find a way to dive into this cause wherever you are in the world, every single community in the world has poverty in it. And we are only as good as we can be when the least among us, has as much as we have. And so let's figure out how to equalize a little bit. Let's figure out a way to do it in our corner of the world. And Heather, man, we are just rooting you in the LEO team on keep going because this is systemic shifting work that really does provide a lot of hope for us.
You guys are wonderful. Thank you. And thank you for what you do to share our story and share all these other incredible stories you do on your podcast. It is it is you are world changers. So thank you.
Oh, this is just the impact uprising in action. So thank you so much for coming on and opening our hearts. We appreciate you.
Thank y'all.
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