The Founder's Journey: Lessons on Organizational Development and Design - Brooke Richie-Babbage

8:18PM Sep 6, 2023

Speakers:

Becky Endicott

Brooke Richie-Babbage

Keywords:

organization

people

nonprofit

founder

feel

stage

leader

growing

brooke

podcast

focus

talk

sense

growth

conversation

structured

important

board

call

mastermind

Hey, I'm John.

And I'm Becky.

And this is the We Are For Good podcast.

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, where Nonprofit Professionals, philanthropist, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.

So let's get started. Becky, are you just so happy right now?

Yes, my my face is grinning ear to ear. I mean, we're here in season eight. And we're just so excited to kick off a new founder series and there's only one person that could kick off the founders series. And you know her well, she's been on the podcast, she's been on evolved panels, we've had different discussions. It's our joy today to introduce Brooke Ricci Babbage back to the community. She's the founder of bending art consulting and y'all today, we are talking about organizational design. We're talking founder fatigue, and building and leading an organization that you love. And Brooke is the one she's like our phone, a friend for all leadership things because she is so evolved in the way that she thinks about how nonprofit founders and leaders can launch scale leader organizations with more clarity and confidence and leaving behind the overwhelm that I know all of us feel, not just founders. She is also host of the nonprofit mastermind podcast. If you have not listening to that, please go immediately and add that to your queue and subscribe. But amidst all of that, she also has a thriving business. She's like a twice Harvard grad. She is an attorney. She is a nonprofit founder and leader and mom. And she is the person who inspired my sustainable sisterhood that I talk about here all the time on the podcast, y'all we're about to lead you through this founders journey with such an incredible human Welcome back, BRB.

I mean, I have to just start off by saying that if I could like bottle, you guys, and carry you around with me, all the time, that's just the most heartwarming, wonderful intro. And I am, as you know, such a fan girl of VR for fan girls, that you're building. I love it, too. It's just, it's such a joy. And we said this, you know, before we hopped on, I will show up anywhere you asked me to. So I am so excited to be here. And I think it's gonna be a great conversation.

I agree. And we've had you on before. I mean, you've had some incredible conversations, you walked us through habits of an impactful, Executive Director, you've talked about evolve leadership. And I want you to start since maybe our listeners already know a little bit of your background, since you've been on a couple of times, I want you to share a little bit of your founders story with us, and where that started, and maybe what you learned from it that led you to where you are today.

I love that I think the founder story is so important. And often it starts far earlier in our lives than we think. Right? We often ask founders, how did you come up with the idea of your organization or what you're doing. But really, when I look back at my own journey, there have always been two threads, social entrepreneurship, or what we call social entrepreneurship now, and coaching and teaching and sort of bring people along with me. So there's this sort of founding of the most recent nonprofit that I ran, which we've talked about. But when I think about my actual origin story, I remember being 14, I grew up in Michigan, and a tiny Well, I didn't think it was tiny at the time, a small city called Birmingham and I really wanted to create a, a theater program for children. And I specifically wanted to do plays the taught social lessons, which, you know, oh, my God totally resonates with who I am. And so I reached out, right, I reached out to the, like, Birmingham City Hall, like Community Center, and I was like, Hey, I have this great program. Can I come run it? And I know the people on the phone I spent, like, what's happening right now? Like, who are you? But I was very earnest and I put together a whole plan I typed it up, I brought it over. And you know, adult me understands what was happening in their minds, but kid me took it very seriously. And I was like, we're peers. This is my is my plan. And they let me do it. And they paired me with an actual grown up and let me run a summer program of sort of social justice theater for 10 year olds. My Word you know, I share it because looking feedback, I've just always wanted to do the thing that I am doing, which is find ways to create positive change in community with others. And it looked different at 13 than I did 23 or 33, or 43. But those threads have always been there. I think more immediately, to answer your question, I started my professional journey. As an anti poverty lawyer you mentioned here in New York City. And even then it was very sort of entrepreneurial, I had already started my first nonprofit while I was in law and policy school at Harvard. And I just really love the messiness of those early years when everything feels possible. And you're sort of always right on the edge of something. And you have to quickly make sense of things that don't seem like they make sense, like I am drawn to that. And that's partly why I think I love coaching founders and people in the early stages of their organizations. So I spent my first few years practicing in a fellowship called the Skadden fellowship. And basically, you design a social justice law initiative. And then you have to pitch it to a nonprofit, to be your host sort of convinced them that it's worth, you know, bringing on this programming, and then you go and have to pitch it to SCAD and law firm, to the partners to see if they think it's worth investing in because they pay your salary. And so I sort of hit the ground running with designing a vision and trying to get buy in. And that experience of building that initiative and running it. And I worked for an incredible organization called the National Law and Social Policy Center for Law and Social Policy here in New York, it was called the welfare law center at the time. And they really supported me in that. And that led directly to the founding of my second organization, where I spent more than 13 years and the rest is history.

Well, I mean, BRB, it kind of all connects, I love hearing new threads of your story, because I'm like, Oh, that makes so much sense. To know, you just this person that's so has so many tentacles in this and you can just feel your heartbeat come through. And I love that we've already listed your podcast because I just want to lift your email list. And you can hook people up to this because I will definitely just you need a drumbeat in your ear, you need a community around you to do this work, because it is so dang hard a lot of times, and I think you do that. So well, Brooke, and so you talk about life cycles a lot, you know, and I think it's so important to understand that life cycles in our organizations in the way that you describe this is helpful. So would you talk us through that and how we can use that, whether we're a founder or not listening to that? Why is that important to understand? Absolutely.

So I love a good framework. It's my Virgo brain. And what I like about the nonprofit lifecycle sort of concept as a framework is that it's super simple. And it helps organizations at any stage, like you said, whether you're founder or not stay on track as they grow. And I think that's really important sort of knowing what to focus on. And knowing what you can give yourself permission to ignore for the moment or let go of can be one of the toughest things about leading a growing organization, because everything feels important. And so the idea of the lifecycles is that organizations move through set stages of development, as they grow from idea and startup all the way through maturity. And that there are benchmarks and processes and systems and structures and ways of leading that are sort of inherent to each stage. And they're different. And so knowing what those benchmarks are knowing what you should be focusing on as a leader in each stage, and letting go of the ones that are in later stages of development and saying, You know what, it's okay, that my board is not raising a million dollars, like the number of times that I talk to nonprofit leaders of incredible small nonprofits, say $450,000, who actually feel guilty, because they can't somehow can't get their boards to raise a million dollars or to raise $100,000, which is also crazy. I will say. It's really interesting. And so this framework, I think, can lighten the load a little bit by saying, Oh, but actually, here's where you are, right? Here's the stage of development you're in. And here's what you should be focusing on. And when you get to that next stage, you can focus on that next thing. So there are six stages of growth development. There's a seven, that is about the client, but obviously, we're not talking about that here. So the first is and there I talk about them, almost like the stages of development of a person or an organism. So infancy is the idea of birth and initial launch. So that's when you are basically like, I'm going to be a nonprofit, or I'm going to be a social enterprise or be corporate, whatever the entity is that is formed, that's separate from me. That's when you're born infancy. The next stage is childhood. And that's post startup, you're learning to walk your identity, the identity of the institution is becoming separate from that of the founder slowly but surely. And what does it mean to be an organization? Right, you're sort of figuring that out. The next stage is your teen years. And this is early growth stage the teen years. Awkward is exactly right. Messy, awkward, chaotic. The focus is on growth is on scale, you're building your team, your board is shifting out of the startup board, friends and family, you have new programs, you have new partnerships as a leader, this is one of the toughest times to run in a growing organization. It doesn't always happen along budgetary lines. But often, this sort of early growth phase is in those low to mid six figures. Right? So 200 to 600k budget, you're learning how to raise money, everything feels new, right? Think teen years, all the things you think about teen years, apply that raising

six figures as a team, you know, it's tricky

to try on different identities. It's like, Oh, I thought this is who I was. But nope, that that's doesn't exactly fit. And so, you know, as the leader of an organization at that phase, where part of what you feel like you are responsible for doing is stewarding others towards a mission or Northstar? How do you stay out in front of that messiness. Right. So that's one of the challenges of that phase. And I'm going to talk about some of the the hallmarks of each phase. But I want to make sure folks know what the framework is young adulthood comes after a teenage kid. And I call this the late growth phase. So a lot of times when organizations sort of Google growth stages, I get a lot of folks who email me and are like, I looked at growth stages, just because it sounds so interesting. People talk about startup, and then growing nonprofits, but growing nonprofits are actually a thing, right? There. They grow in different ways at different stages. And so I split it up into early growth stage, teenagers, and then late growth stage, which is nearing maturity, right? It's not coming out of childhood anymore. And it means that some of the core infrastructure, you've settled on it, right? You have a team structure that feels like it's right, you have programs that are values aligned, and you started to let go of the ones that that aren't, you're beginning to have a board that actually sees itself, not a staff, not as an extension of your volunteers, but actually a governance body beginning to have that, right. You have funding partners, as opposed to just funders. So those pieces are in place and late growth or young adulthood is about ironing out the edges, right, and bringing it all together into a coherent clicking, everything's moving forward together organization, which is the mature adulthood phase, right? We call it the zone of maximization. And the best way to describe that one is, you look around, and you think, huh, this is working. Right? There's and maybe you only feel that for one morning of one year. That's right. But that sense of my team knows what they're doing. They're clicking. I'm working well with a board that are like, I don't constantly wake up at night thinking, Where the heck is this money going to come from that? Feel like, you know, you've got a point of view, you're building some thought leadership. That stage feels good, right? Mature adulthood feels good now, like all of us know, about adulting. It is not every day as an adult, although I thought this would be the case when I was a teenager. It is not every day that we look around, and we're like, I got this adult thing, right? Most days, I don't. And I think that's true for organizations too. And so one of the other things that I highlight that I like about this framework, is it reminds us that just like any organism, just like being a mature adult, we don't always click right. Our lives are not always easy. And so sometimes we're back in this messy middle in some area of our lives, right. You mentioned, like, Yeah, Mom, I have a nine year old and a five year old and they're wonderful, incredibly high. And I cannot. I can't describe the number of days where I'm like, Am I just stuck in this messy minute like, Am I ever gonna figure this out? Right. So that, organizationally, that's true as well, and nonprofit leaders can beat themselves up because they look around and they're like, hey, last year, we were clicking, and now I'm back to like, what's going on with my board? Are my tech my staff has friction, or we just ran headlong off a funding cliff and now our finances are off again. That's normal. Right? You will cycle through the stages of development. And that's okay. And so I really, I try to remind folks that so that they don't carry sort of any guilt or feeling like they're failing as a leader

or even regressing, like if you're feeling that it's just a part of it. And I and I, thank you for just walking so gently along with everyone on this, because I feel like I can send some exhales from founders who feel seen in this framework.

Yeah. So I think the key is to know the hallmarks of your stage, like, know what the benchmarks are, so that you can set the right goals and address the right challenges for that stage. And you can exhale and let go of the rest. Right, knowing those benchmarks, helps you know, where to focus, where to focus your growth, where to focus your energy and your staff. And to understand that it's not always the right time to grow in every area. Right growth is not a monolith, growing every single part of your organization all at once, can sometimes be one of the things that is fueling burnout. Right? Sometimes you want to focus on leveling up your fundraising. But your board is a bit stuck and messy. And so it isn't actually ready for you to add new people. And that's okay. I highlight five considerations to reflect on at each stage so that you can sort of make sense of this framework and operationalize it. Can I go through the plays? Yes, do I'm such a step by again, Virgo. So just step by step. I like I want people to be able to do things. So the first is you want to ask yourself, what is the nature and scope of my goals right now? What should those be? So is it survival? Right? When you are an early stage nonprofit? Maybe Thought Leadership isn't the thing you should be focusing on? And you really need to focus on how do I learn to fundraise? How do I build a team so that we are still here at a year? Right? That's a different goal than how do we grow? Or how do we deepen our impact? So being really clear about what the nature and scope of your goals should be? Second, what's the mindset that I need to grow into or develop as a leader at this space? Just me personally, what am I being called to navigate or grapple with? What do I have to learn to do differently? And I think it's really important. This one's really important, because so often, I've been there, and I know you guys have seen this two leaders sort of immerse themselves into the organization, and only think about organizational growth. But it's really important to separate out leadership growth, from organizational growth, they're related, they feel one another, but who I am, as a leader, and fueling myself and building my own skills, and pushing through my own sort of growth edges is separate and distinct, in ways that are important from what's important for the organization. So that's the second question, how do I need to grow as a leader? Third, what level of strategic clarity? Does it make sense for me to try to have right now? What's the time horizon of my planning? So how far into the future can I look with clarity and certainty for that to make sense, if I am seven months into a new nonprofit, it may not make sense to have a five year strategic plan. I just can't see that far ahead with enough clarity and certainty for for that plan to make sense. It's not going to actually guide my work, I'd have to be a more stable organization for that to resonate. So what is the level of strategic clarity that I should bring? Forth? What should my fundraising and finances look like right now? am I focusing on increasing income? Should I be first focusing on diversification? Should we be looking at stability, each of those are different areas of focus. And a more mature organization can really focus on stability, multi year six or seven figure grants. That doesn't make sense for $100,000 nonprofit that is in the sort of early growth phase where really we need to start looking at diversification and increasing revenue. Right. So fundraising and finance, and then the last one is capacity for sustaining your work. How many people do I mean, what, what role should they have? Am I thinking about my staff roles the right way? Should my board be structured the way that it's structured? One of the biggest examples here is people beat themselves up all the time about board committees. Yeah, like the number.

Oh, my gosh, and the drain of the companies is really

mean. It's real. And I would say eight times out of 10 when I have conversations and I work with organizations under $2 million, that launch to grow, when I have conversations with them, my advice is, like are the committee's right, you don't have a 13 person $2 million raising board, that's not your board. That's not the stage of development you're in. And so if you only have five people on your board committees are actually going to move you in the wrong direction. It's, it's going to drain people's energy, it's going to fracture their focus, what you actually want are one or two clear goals that everybody works on together. And then you identify how different people will plug in and as you grow, those areas of focus that the individuals have will organically developing to commit Yes. And the exhaling the wait, I don't have to have seven committees. I'm like, you don't even have some people. Like who's gonna be on the committee to relief? Yeah, so I think asking those questions is really important.

I mean, there's lots of things that I want to say, Brooke, after. I mean, you framed that. But I think a picture we come back to a lot on the podcast kind of intentionally is this iceberg idea. You know, I think it's really easy to see these other organizations and want to emulate or read this best practice and begin to implement it. And I think what you're doing here is getting to the heart of like, understanding what stage you're at, and dialing in and maximizing that stage, because it really is an advantage if you really can view it that way. And because you don't have to worry about everything. But the things you need to worry on need to be these key things. So thank you for that permission, I wonder, we're going to transition because in all of this, we want to talk about building organizations that we love, you know, and I know that exudes through you just talking about your work, you know, you just light up. But as a founder, or whether you're a founder or not, again, I feel like I need to keep adding that caveat. How do we pour into growing and building and leading these organizations into ones that we love? You know, and what are the systems and infrastructures behind doing that?

It's such a big question. So

good luck. I love my question.

I ready, I'm ready, I could do it. So I think it comes down to for me two things. I've seen sort of these two, not necessarily related to one another, but critical threads, in my own experience of starting and leading multiple organizations as a board member for dozens of organizations. And in literally all of my teaching and coaching, there are these two things that matter. They are intentionality, and networks of support. So intentionality is basically this. Getting clear about the organization that you want to lead and grow, how you want to feel, leaving it, and then designing and building that organization. And this is why that feels so critical to me and why I think I keep seeing organizations that lean into intentionality fight overwhelmed the best. And I'm talking here to leaders of nonprofits, but this is actually your entire team, right? Your staff, your board, bringing intentionality to the design of their organizations, growing the nonprofit can feel that can does feel chaotic. There are so many decisions growing a business. I mean, you know, the three of us talk about all the time, there's so many opportunities everywhere, new partnerships, exciting programs, all of the things, and it's really overwhelming, and it can be overwhelming, or they talked about positive stress, it can be exciting, and really fuel burnout. And if you just sort of let it happen around you, and respond and react, you'll you're just going to be sort of pulled under the current or the current is going to pull you out into the whirling chaos of the ocean. The Gree, to which the leaders that I work with feel a diminished sense of overwhelm, is directly tied to their level of intentionality. Right? Are they getting out in front of the decisions, the choices, the processes, the structures, and designing them on the front end and saying, this is actually how I want my team to feel together? This is how I want us to move through the world. Now let's reverse engineer that rather than building your team and saying, Hmm, we aren't actually moving through the world the way I want us to move through the world that's more overwhelming than fill that the intentional design, right. So you and I have talked about this concept of organizational design. For this reason, I think it's really powerful. It identifies nine building blocks that make up every single organization. Every organization is made up of the same nine building blocks and it provides a way for those organizations to be hyper into tensional, about how they want to bring those building blocks together, how they want to design the organization, from the structure, to compensation, to how teams will work together to meetings to how they want to deal with issues of power and authority, and autonomy and mastery. Right? By naming what these core building blocks are, and saying, This is how I want power to show up in our relationships. Right? This is what that's going to look like, this is how we're going to operationalize it, this is what's going to happen when we feel ourselves bumping up against somebody else's area of autonomy. By getting out ahead of those conversations, you can co create an organization that is much closer to your ideal than if you just wait and sort of let things develop and evolve on their own.

i Okay, I just have to compliment you on this. This is such a radically different way to operate and to move forward. And, yes, we dive into strategy at the onset of things, but the intentionality of purpose and of design and of abundance. It creates a shift, I think in the cultures and it really creates healthy cultures, I think having that very difficult conversation about power alone is shifting. So do you have time? And can you kick through a tick through all of those nine for us? Because I'm sure there's a lot of people out there saying, Where do I start? And which ones do I need to focus on that are represented in my organization,

there are, like I said, nine building blocks. So I'll just walk through them quickly. And give just a few examples of how you can think about bringing them into conversations with your team, this works with your staff, this works with founders who are who have no staff and want to be intentional from the beginning. This works with organizations that have hundreds of people on a team and boards, you know, of dozens of people just to get on the same page, right about the design elements. So the nine building blocks that make up every organization our purpose. That is how clear are we about our reason for being? And how is our purpose showing up in all aspects of the organization? Strategy? How do we plan? How do we prioritize? Are we clear about the path we'll use to get to earn Northstar purpose? Is everybody on the same page? This is always an interesting conversation to have. Because different people in different parts of the organization think they that everyone's on the same page. And often they are not right about our core strategy. The third is resources. How do we define and allocate our resources? are we including things like our time, our energy, our space, not just our money in our broad definition of the resources that we need to do our work? We're not let

me just let me just interject.

impostor syndrome ignited?

That's a tough one. I think just like the sector as a whole, we think resources money. And it's like, that is part of the problem. Yeah, you know, so thank you for that framing. So good.

Oh, it's a huge part of the problem. And maybe we think about time, right? So when you look at people's calendar, they talk about time management. But here's the kicker, energy. Right, like, you can look at your calendar and see 10 meetings a week, let's say, but it's not actually just the time, it's the mental energy after the meeting, it's decompressing. It's planning like energy as a resource. And you know, I have always done a lot of social justice work with organizations that work in communities that have experienced trauma. And the energy what made me start focusing on energy is a resource is, even if the social worker that was on my staff only met with one young person a week, right? So if you look, there's no money being spent other than her salary, the time is a a two hour meeting, you would actually have a false understanding of the resources being expended because that one meeting, so we worked, one of the groups that we worked with three young women who had been trafficked that one meeting, she could only do one of those a week, right, like the energy that was required to come back, and then to switch into talking about strategic partnerships. So that's a real resource. And so having a conversation as a whole team, about how are you guys expending your emotional resources? And how as a leader, do I need to take that into account when I think about how we meet and you know who you're partnering with? So absolutely, and actually, one of the things that's important about these building blocks is they aren't static and they aren't separate. So how we talk about our resources and reason it's I talk about it as a canvas or a matrix, right, they intersect. So how we talk about our resources, and how we talk about meetings? Those should intersect with one another. Right? So I'll go through them and then talk about some of the intersections. So the fourth one is culture and norms. What are the relationships and practices that we want to have define our work together? Right? What do we promise one another? What do we need from one another? How do we want to show up for one another, and together as a collective? And how do we operationalize our values? So naming those and getting clear about those? The next one is structure. How do we organize our team? How do we organize and by team I mean, our board, our structured network, our advisors? How do we structure our relationship to the people and to the work? How are we organizing our programs? Do we have too many? Are they the right ones? Do they relate to one another? Right, all the structural questions that undergird our work. The next one is information and workflow. How are we dividing and organizing, both independent and shared information and work? So for growing organizations, this one changes a lot, because you know, when I was sitting at a desk, right next to my first full time, hire my director of programs, and it was just the two of us how we shared information, and how work flowed between us was so simple. I turned to her and I said, Whatever you'd say, and maybe she sent an email if I was out of the office, like super simple. Three years later, we have 13 people on my team. And so me as the executive director, how do I get information from somebody that I don't manage, that I might not see, in a given week that works for somebody else that I also don't manage? Right? That there's complexity there. And getting out in front of that, and naming that can be really important. Next is compensation. And this similar to resources is not just about money. This is actually how you know, how do we signal to our team that they are valued. Part of that in our society is money. But if you've just stick with money, particularly in our sector, you're not having the expansive conversation about value and demonstration of value and shared value and collective work that you need to have. And so this is an opportunity to say, what does compensation full compensation for your work look like? Right, how can I as a leader support you and make you feel valued? The next one is meetings. And I referenced this one, how effectively and efficiently Are we meeting and coordinating our work? Another thing that I think we get wrong, most

of us get wrong? Feeling the collective nod of everyone listening?

Absolutely. Right. The next one is authority and power. And we sort of referenced this one, right, who gets to make decisions about what? Who gets to hold accountability, what does that mean? What does that look like? And then the last one, and these are not in order of importance, like I said, they all intersect. The last one is mastery and innovation. This is about how we learn how do we learn? How are we supporting learning how we were? How are we supporting failing forward? How are we supporting personal and professional growth and evolution as individuals in the sector, not just the organization? How are we growing as an institution? And how do we give permission? Like I said to fail, right? What does that look like in our organization, both explicitly and implicitly, right? There's so many leaders that say, Oh, I'm totally fine if you try something, and it doesn't work. But actually, that's the explicit sort of rule. But a lot of times, and one of the reasons I love encouraging organizations to take, you know, a retreat and just talk through each of these boxes. I sat in a room and listened to one of the most amazing leaders I've ever worked with here in the city, who works with and organizes collectives of collectives. He very earnestly said, I want us to innovate and experiment and try. And if it doesn't work, okay, we'll come back together and learn, and he couldn't figure out why people weren't doing that. And what, when they had this organizational design conversation at a retreat. What he heard people say was, we don't want to let you down. Like, we don't think you're going to be mad. That's not you know, we know you've said that, but you raised money for us to try this. And we don't want to let our people are our teammates down. So we want to do what we know is going to work. That's a totally different talent. He thought he's like, maybe I'm not maybe they don't trust me. Maybe I'm not articulating. Maybe they don't feel safe. So he was fighting one challenge. Totally different challenge, right, this sense of letting one another down. is a is a different thing to work on. And so it was really important for him to hear that when they talked about this box, this mastering innovation and failing forward box, because he realized what I'm saying is great, but it isn't the thing they need to hear. Right, I need to have a different set of conversations with people. So I think that was a really powerful example of how I've seen organizations use this clarity and sort of bringing to the surface, the implicit understandings and ways of working that are beneath the surface. So those are the nine boxes. Those are the nine, the nine things,

Brooke Ricci, intentionality, Babbage right here. I'm so glad we're kicking off this founder series with your guiding light, because this is the stuff that matters, this is the stuff that's going to keep people in the game that keep us fighting together, even what you're talking about risk, like we just came off this powerful conversation with Seth Godin, it's like, our work necessitates it. Because we're trying to figure out some of the world's most hard issues, we gotta keep trying, like, we can't get down on trying. So getting this stuff, right, dialing it in is just so crucial. We got to talk about this, because I'm feeling the weight of this conversation as founders talking to a founder. The heaviness is real, though, you know, like the fatigue can be real. And I think we want to create safe space community to talk about it like what how do you move through founders fatigue, compassion, fatigue, just in general, because all of this kind of compounds to a lot of pressure sitting on the weight of that founder, talk to us about that.

I'm so glad you said that. Weight, and pressure are, you know, if you do a word cloud, of what leaders and founders experience on a day to day basis, I think those would be like the biggest works, it can feel very heavy. So I'm really glad you guys are focusing on this. And I think you've always been really good about bringing that to the forefront and creating spaces for folks to talk about it. For me, the second sort of thread, right, so the first one is intentionally the second thread is directly about that. And it's networks of support. And I don't mean networking, I don't mean, you know, the funder briefings and all the things. I mean, how the three of us, for example, connect your skin and support one another. It's your squad, my sustainable sisterhood, right that we've talked about where the Group of Seven Executive Director, women, we met the first Wednesday of every month, for over a decade, we still meet even though none of us are executive directors anymore. And we got one another through not just in terms of emotional support. But operational and strategic support are these were other women, for me, that I knew were out on that proverbial limb. Also, right? There's a way in which if you think about, again, sort of the metaphor of growing up, the older you get, or the more mature your organization gets, you're not all sort of in the trunk together, you branch off, and organizations look different. And they function differently. They have different challenges. And so finally, you look up as a leader, you should have out on this limb by yourself, you got a team, they're there to support you if you fall, right? But that the buck stops with you and that that's where the weight comes from. And so having the sustainable sisterhood having this group of peers, this crew were I wasn't out on their limb with them. But I was out on a limb and they could look across to me on my limb and say, Hey, how did you navigate benefits? Right? I mean, I want to give my team benefits, we are underpaid. I don't know where the money is going to come from. But it's really important from a values perspective. What did you do? Right? So there's the emotional support, and then there's the I can be as close to a co leader with you as possible. Right now, I'm in a mastermind with amazing women. Actually, I think they just released a podcast Cindy and Jessie Wagman. And confession confessions did a whole episode where we were driving back from one of our two in person gatherings. And we pulled out the recorder in the car. And we're like, let's just talk about this mastermind thing, because everybody's playing master me real wants. Yeah, it's amazing. So to zoom out this thread, to answer your question more directly, John, how do you fight fatigue, you have to have a crew, you have to have a structured network of support, or you will burn out as you navigate the chaos. So the crew is important, but I actually think there are three types of people that you want to focus on. Actually, my newsletter today just talked about it. You'll see it Becky, when you open it. So your crew, your mastermind, your sustainable sisterhood, my sustainable sisterhood was really important. Those peers, the second is a coach. So I've always believed I Yeah, I think, you know, going back to this organizational growth, the five questions that I said, Who do I need to grow into as a leader, that investment in yourself, by getting a coach, by working with a coach, it could be group coaching, it could be a one on one coach, but at every stage of development, where things got really messy for me, and really heavy, having someone who wasn't in the mess with me, but understood the mess, and could say, here's some best practices, here's what I hear you saying, why is that the narrative, right? Like, why are you understanding it this way? And does that serve you was so, so powerful, I cannot emphasize that enough. So that's the second. And the third are advisors and mentors. So most of us have mentors, most of us have advisors. But organizationally, some of the most powerful people in my sort of structured network that I could leverage were people who weren't on my board, and were not my staff. But they had strategic expertise, they knew something about that area of work that I wanted to, we started doing corporate partnerships, and I knew nothing, I knew one person that worked in a corporation, that was my dad, and he was a brilliant source of information. But you know, I was like, I should probably bring more people into my world to take some of the weight of figuring this out the strategic weight of figuring this out, off of me. So having those strategic advisors that agreed to pick up the phone, when you call and agree to leverage their expertise, on your behalf is really critical. So those are the sort of three core sort of key types of people that I think you need to have in this network, your your crew, your coach, and your advisors. And it may not feel like rubber on the road, it may feel like I don't have a Friday afternoon or a Tuesday morning, or, you know, we met on Wednesday mornings to like meet with my crew. But making that time and building those relationships creates that foundation. Almost like the base of a well, right it is fresh, clear, healthy, rejuvenating water that you can tap into when you need to.

And I just want to add, if you think you don't have an hour, to give to yourself, to pour back into yourself, relook at your calendar, because you're worthy of being poured into. And you're worthy of pouring into others with the learnings that you're finding and the insights and the failures. And I think when you have a hype squad of people who've been there, it just changes the game. And it underscores the whole everything that we say here, it's our final value of our company, which is community is everything, find your community nine, your hype squad, you are worthy of that. And so I want to ask you, how are you going to round this all out? What's your one good thing that you would leave for our audience today?

Bring it home, right? That's a my one good thing is actually something we haven't talked about. And it's meditation. I think that the a secret to success, a good habit, something that has sustained me that isn't organizational, but it's really foundational is finding time every day to quiet my mind. And so I am a huge proponent, my husband and I meditate, we're teaching our children to meditate that you know, the world can feel like a lot adulting can feel like a lot. Add to that leaving an organization founding an organization holding the the weight of other people's needs and salaries and all of the things and if you can, even for five minutes, sit in silence and just let your brain relax. It can actually refuel you in ways that might not seem immediately obvious, but are so like, in your soul core. So that's my that's my one good thing.

And here's the thing, I just love this so much. I mean Brooke can be part of your squad because of how you show up so generously. And so as we round out, I want to point people to how they can connect with you how they can listen to your podcast, how they get leadership forward, and their inbox, pointers to all the things Brooke just such a fan.

Absolutely. And it's you know, one of my favorite things coaching training being other people's hype squad, helping them sort of sense make so that it's not so chaotic. So the best ways are my newsletter is called leadership 4321 And you can sign up for that at Brooke Ricci babbage.com backslash leadership forward. My non profit mastermind podcast you can subscribe on my website, and that comes out every week. And then I'm actually launching a new private podcast just for founders. Yeah It's just for founder's. And people can join that that'll come out later this month, people can sign up for the waitlist, that's going to be every Friday. And it's going to be a sort of call and response, right? If you sign up, you get to ask me questions, and I will answer them for you. In this private podcast, I will do many trainings, all the things that founders need, I will be your head squat. So you can get that at brick Ritchie, babbage.com, backslash nonprofit founder, BRB, we love

you so much. We learned so much from you, thank you for what you're doing to help us navigate this world with in a way that feels good, that feels like it's controlled and strategic and open minded and abundant. And I just, I just think you're radically wonderful. And I hope everybody goes and follows Brooke,

thank you. And I will just wrap up by saying, I am a firm believer in abundance in the abundance of the universe. And I think that what people are doing nonprofits, social enterprises, we're bending the arc of history towards justice, we really are and it's hard work and it's important work and MLK, if we do it together. That's, that's why I named my company bending arc.

It's such a powerful quote, I want to be a part of that we call it Impact Uprising over here. And it's going to take many hands to do it many belief systems one conversation at a time. Thank you, my friend.

Thank you for having me.

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