What I've learned in my two months as the CEO of a nonprofit. (WLMN State of the Union)

Growing the WLMN has been a real learning experience.

Just being upfront, I’m going to ask for your help at the end of this. You can choose to ignore that if you want, but I do hope something I have to say here will be enlightening about the process of turning the Wanna Learn More Network into a genuine, world-changing, nonprofit organization.

Many of you are part of that network today and may not even know it, and you probably have been for months or years. The network exists as our answer to how you can make a media organization that takes action and heals this world in the 2020s digital environment. What is the answer to propaganda? What is the answer to hate?

I can’t guarantee we have that answer, but what I’ve experienced is that genuine connection will override propaganda and hate if given time and nourishment. It’s a belief I hold so strongly, and one I’ve seen work, that I’m willing to dedicate myself to creating an organization that does that. What we (as a culture) are doing is not sustainable, and I believe we can try something new with the right ideas and the right approach.

Our organization doesn’t just work on facts, it works on truth. And truth, sometimes, requires faith, trust, and belief. It also requires honesty, so here’s what I’ve learned and done totally wrong in the last few weeks.

Expectations are Hard in NonProfit Land.

For the last few years in the WLMN, I’ve joked that I was the SABDFL (Self Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life). I wasn’t as controlling as all that, but it was helpful for our organization when I could simply make decisions and make them happen because I was the one taking the risk on all sides.

Today that’s not true, and it’s weird having to craft sales pitches for an organization that previously moved when I said it needed to. I’ve had to learn a lot about communicating with folks who don’t have my knowledge set or experience in the organization and not all of it has been pretty. Bumping into boundaries has a way of teaching you about your assumptions and behaviors as much as it frustrates you.

I’ll give you a funny internal story that I think has been very telling. For a lot of our applications a Mission Statement is required to get grants and whatnot. I crafted a mission statement that I genuinely believed reflected the organization we’d led up until now and then I brought it to the board for a vote. I expected some changes, of course, but around the 3rd hour of revisions I found myself frustrated with the amount of haggling over a single word or the placement of a comma.

But what I was really getting frustrated at was that what I thought was a crystal clear vision for an organization that our board had known for years had some discrepancies. Suddenly, people were disagreeing with ME (the founder) about what the WLMN was and stood for. We worked through it and in about 4 hours total we had a beautiful mission statement. I privately complained to a friend about how long that took and they said, “Only 4 hours? The last time I was on a board crafting a mission statement took weeks.”

I’m not even sure what lesson I gleamed from this, but it sits on me how amazing our team is even when we disagree and how unified we are in our north star. I learned that my impatience exists in a vacuum of unrealistic expectations, sometimes. It definitely would have changed my feelings to know that we did in hours what others do in weeks. My frustration turned into a bit of humor about it, what I felt was a roadblock was remarkably fast progress.

Since then, I’ve been trying my best to calibrate my expectations against what other orgs have done while also holding us accountable for not giving our our speed in the name of red tape and pleasing every voice on our board. At some point, decisions need to be made and I’m glad that even if I’m not the sole decider anymore that we still act with remarkable speed.

Smells like Team Spirit

I’m really used to being able to just disappear for a few days and come back with a full solution for a problem the organization has. Now there are many factors at play and I have to remember I’m on a team. Sometimes my team has to remind me of that.

For instance, we’re working on a mutual aid program for Q3. It’s foreign to me to have to think of a phased approach to making sure everything works, all the liability that goes with it, and so on. Normally, I’d come back with blueprints and our team would run off and do it and we’d learn on the fly. But now, y’all have higher expectations of us and we have to be better than that internally as well.

But, in that spirit, I do want to tell you what we’re planning.

1. A dictionary program that is meant to not only make previously opaque language about sex, sexuality, race, and more accessible but to encourage understanding of the culture behind each word and its usage. This has been on my mind for years and I’m excited to get working on it.

2. Our Mutual Aid Program that will not just connect people monetarily but in times of crisis to help each other. We’ve been doing a lot of work making sure every aspect of this will be secure, safe, and most of all helpful. We know mutual aid isn’t just finance, it’s putting bodies out there delivering groceries and medicine or helping fold clothes. I can’t wait to tell you more about it later this year.

There’s other stuff but these are perhaps the two I am most excited about. We’ll definitely be keeping y’all updated on our website. Part of the reason these things are taking longer is simple because we need to do them right, and legally. We take that seriously and as you read earlier, nobody hates roadblocks more than I do so trust we won’t be delaying more than necessary.

Fundraising is not trauma informed

When we started this organization, we had to transfer over from a situation where I owned and ran the entire network privately (and funded it as well) to a new model where I had to answer to a board of directors and so on. In my rush to be a good CEO, I knew one of my tasks was fundraising.

We had so many ideas. Ideas we still have and believe in, that require time and investment to make happen. I allowed myself to get pulled into a world of spreadsheets and budgets more than my work with people in the last few weeks and that has weighed on my heart a little bit. I’ve missed writing and talking with people as much as I did previously. Even worse, I’m like, a halfway decent fundraiser at best. Asking people for money has never been my strongest skillset when I grew up knowing, full well, how much a single dollar could cost people.

We’ve had some amazing donors so far, one even donated $5k to our matching program. Blows my mind. But the ones that hit me the hardest emotionally are when I see people giving $1 and $5 and $10 because I know full well if they had more they’d give it. Big numbers are a beautiful investment and I am so grateful for them — but when you’re down to a tight budget every month, $1, $5, and $10 are acts of belief.

So to every person who donated amounts like that, I want you to know I’ve paid attention and appreciated them entirely because I know what it’s like to put your faith into something and just have to hope you’re not going to get screwed. That hits me in a tender spot, remembering how I relied on the charity and good will of others to eat sometimes as a child. It makes me think of the man who (along with his wife) gave us spaghetti when we were living in the campground because we didn’t have a home.

That spaghetti tasted better than anything at that moment. And when I see $1 and $10 donations in our feed, I just want you all to know I know what that money means to you and I will do my best to make your faith pay off. I won’t always succeed, but you’ve got my promise and the WLMN’s promise that I’ll never stop trying.

Each Community is Truly Unique

I know it seems silly but I’ve been positively inundated with well meaning advice from business types about how to do fundraising for the WLMN in the last few months. And, honestly, not a lot of it has been effective. I don’t think that’s because you all aren’t susceptible but because that’s just simply never been our relationship. I’ve been trying to write my fundraising bits like a CEO and that wasn’t right.

I may be a CEO, now, but that’s a reflection of our relationship and it was wrong of me to think that relationship had changed. We don’t talk to each other like that. We talk like people to each other. I won’t say I forgot that, but I did forget to check my blinders when it came to taking advice. I trusted a lot of fundraising advice that I shouldn’t have, and the result was simply that I don’t think we did as well as we could have.

Our relationship is our thumbprint, and I am sorry for how much I’ve chosen to try to act my role instead of making my role act like me. That’s definitely a lesson I’ll be carrying forward. The WLMN isn’t just any organization, and you aren’t just any community. What we have is special and it has been for the last 6 years.

From Me To You.

This is the part where I ask for help. Right now, we’re in a weird limbo in fundraising. The next few months will be the biggest challenge while we get ourselves set up with all the nonprofit fundraising programs. We need your help to hit our numbers. Conservatively, we need to raise about $4,000 more in the next 4 days (by the 26th of July).

In total, we want to raise about $10k each month. That funds the tech we’re developing, our mutual aid funds, as well as hiring some of our team members who have worked for the last 6 years donating their time entirely.

I still believe the best way to do that is 1000 people at 10 a month and I genuinely think we can do that. But right now our immediate concern is that fundraising deadline.

The biggest expense in our budget is, if I’m being honest, me. Most of our programs right now rely heavily on my presence, time, and energy. It’s one on ones with orgs and families, writing, talking to you all, planning resources, and more.

We are, first and foremost, always going to be a media organization even if we’re a creative application of what media can be. What I’m asking you for right now is slightly selfish, and you shouldn’t just have to trust that I’m doing the things you can’t see.

Each month, I’ll be providing a publicly available report on *my* activity personally. In the name of accountability, I think that’s fair. Yes, any donations you send help do all those other programs I’ve mentioned, but ultimately it’s me doing invisible work that I have never put in front of you to see. So now I will, because I think that honors the trust in our relationship.

The first report will come out at the end of August, and will come out every month following. I’ll also make myself available for questions about the org and our programs to our members each month as well. You’ll get announcements about those in the near future with dates and times. They’ll be conducted on live stream and the archives will remain available on Youtube.

So here’s where I ask for help. Can y’all help us raise 4k in the next 5 days? Every single donor gets featured on our donor wall https://wannalearnmore.com/thank-you and we’ll add more perks later. But I’ve been saying that for a while. Truth is this is about us working together to make things happen. I’m believing in you all the way I’ve always believed in you and I hope that you still believe in me and our organization.

Remember this is a team effort so I am going to open myself up to you all for the next 5 days around the clock in a chat here on Substack, Facebook, and so on. If you need advice, support, or reassurance all you have to do is message me, and I’ll respond as soon as I can to help you cross whatever hurdles you need to cross. We’re working together like we always have.

Let’s go build the world we want, together.