find your cause

Carmen James Randolph is the founding president and CEO of the Women's Foundation of the South (WFS) , a New Orleans public foundation that builds the health, wealth, and power of women, girls, and gender expansive people across 13 Southern states.  Carmen has spent more than three decades in nonprofits and philanthropy, starting with literacy and education work with children in Washington, DC, th...

Cherie Hoeger is the co-founder and CEO of Saalt, a B Corp based in Boise, Idaho that makes reusable period care: medical-grade silicone cups, discs, and period underwear. She started the company in 2018 after a call with her husband's aunt in Venezuela, who could not find pads or tampons in stores.  Saalt is sold at Target, Walmart, REI, and costco.com, and Cherie has appeared on Good Morning Ame...

Laura Parker is the CEO and co-founder of The Exodus Road, a nonprofit that finds and frees people trapped in human trafficking and works toward a world where no human is bought, sold, or exploited.  She and her husband Matt moved to northern Thailand with their three kids for a short humanitarian stint at a children's home for hill tribe girls, where they learned how fake job offers pulled teenag...

Maria Bryan is the Partnership Marketing Manager at DonorBox, where she runs the ambassador program after spending two years as a DonorBox ambassador herself, and the founder of When Bearing Witness, a trauma-informed storytelling training program and podcast for nonprofit storytellers and fundraisers. She facilitates the When Bearing Witness Trauma-Informed Storytelling Certification Program, whi...

Weanne Estrada is the Mental Health Specialist at ADRA International, the global humanitarian arm of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. ADRA serves in about 120 countries across roughly 1,000 projects in health, nutrition and water, education, livelihoods, and disasters and emergencies, with a mission to serve humanity so all may live as God intended. Weanne grew up in the Philippines, where recurr...

Claire Smith is the founder and CEO of Beyond Investing, a firm that builds investment products for vegans and environmentalists. After more than three decades in finance, including years at UBS and as a research analyst and partner at Albourne Partners, she left her hedge fund analyst role in 2017 to start the company. Beyond Investing runs two ETFs, the US Vegan Climate ETF (VEGN), operating sin...

Sarah Jakle is the founder and executive director of DemocraShe, a national nonpartisan nonprofit that gives historically underserved high school girls free online training in resiliency skills, public policy leadership, and civic engagement, paired with a stipend so cost is never a barrier to participating. Sarah built the program after a diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis derailed her career as a...

Kristy Norbert is the co-founder and executive director of Empowered Network, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2017 that partners with survivors of human trafficking to achieve economic independence. A Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 20 years of experience, Kristy didn't set out to work in anti-trafficking. After moving to Connecticut, she met Abby Fabiaschi, the board chair of an anti-t...

John Molineux is the founder and CEO of Love Justice International, a Christian nonprofit that fights human trafficking through a method called transit monitoring: training volunteers to intercept potential victims at borders, airports, bus stations, and other transit points before they are exploited. He moved to Nepal after college at Taylor University and stayed for 20 years, later relocating to...

Dvora Inwood is co-founder and Head of Product at Samaritan Scout, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that built the first AI-powered search engine dedicated to connecting people with local, in-person volunteer opportunities. The idea started with her daughter, a high school freshman who kept running into a wall trying to find real, nearby service hours, only to find Google surfacing large national organizatio...

Shane Lukas is the owner and creative strategist of A Great Idea (AGI), an LGBTQ+-owned brand communications agency he founded in 2015, based in Greensboro and Durham, North Carolina, working with purpose-driven nonprofits and for-profit companies in healthcare and education across the country. He is also a two-time TEDx speaker (his second talk focuses on values), an author with a book coming out...

David Homan is the founder and CEO of Orchestrated Connecting, LLC, a private global community of connectors spanning thousands of family offices, investors, artists, and impact leaders across dozens of countries. He is also the founder of SOAR Connect (Strength of Authentic Relationships), a relationship intelligence platform built to help people ask for what they need and match trusted introduct...

Vladimir Baranov is the founder of Human Interfaces, where he coaches science and tech executives and founders on the leadership and communication skills their technical training never covered. His path there was not direct. He spent years in financial services before co-founding a wealth management SaaS company that grew over seven years and was acquired by Franklin Templeton, then moved into aer...

Jermaine Ee built a chatbot to help his mother put her life into words: her belongings, her memories, the people she loved. A few months into the project, she had a stroke and passed away. Before that, on a family trip back to Oklahoma, she stood in a remodeled Burger King and finished a story she'd carried for forty years. Jermaine turned that mission into HeirLight, an app built to make estate p...

Home economics. Wood shop. Music. The enrichment classes that taught a generation how to actually live got quietly cut from schools, but the kids still need them. Omari Davis built an organization to put them back. Omari Davis is the founder and executive officer of Get Out And Learn Something (GOALS), and a returning Find Your Cause guest five years after his first appearance. In this conversatio...

Steven Muncy was 23 years old, had never left the US, and couldn't speak a foreign language. He bought a ticket to the Philippines anyway. Forty-six years later, he leads Community and Family Services International, a 500-person organization working with hundreds of thousands of displaced people each year across Southeast Asia. In this conversation, Steven talks about the lessons that only come fr...

Illinois has already lost between 80% and 91% of its wetlands over the last 200 years. Most of that land is now farmland, and most people have no idea it happened. Peter Goodspeed, Restoration Program Director at The Wetlands Initiative, has spent his career working to reverse that loss, one acre at a time. In this conversation he explains what a wetland actually is (it is more than standing water...

Lesley de Jonge is the founder and executive director of Let's Keep the Ball Flying, a nonprofit connecting the global volleyball community to spread access to the sport. In this conversation he and Joseph Smalzer get into the moment in Nepal that started it all, why a jersey can be a bridge into belonging, how the organization teaches coaches in rural areas to build a volleyball from plastic bags...

Bill Crouch spent two decades as a college president before founding BrightDot, a consulting firm that has worked with over 150 nonprofits to fix the one problem most of them refuse to name: they do not know how to talk to the people who have the money. In this episode, Bill and Joseph dig into why fundraising staff turn over every 16 months, what a funeral home owner taught Bill about donor psych...

Brian Wenke has spent over a decade as Executive Director of It Gets Better, one of the most recognized LGBTQ+ youth organizations in the world. What started in 2010 as a single video response to a wave of youth suicides became a global storytelling movement reaching young queer people across 19 countries. But Brian is not interested in staying relevant forever. His goal is to put the organization...

Sponsorship Inquiries: https://calendly.com/gtzp/gtzp-impact-alignment When a crime happens, the system focuses on putting the perpetrator away. The victim testifies, helps the prosecution, and then gets forgotten. There are no programs, no financial support, and no path forward for people whose lives have been completely upended. David Thiruselvam saw that gap and built a law firm around it. Vict...

Sponsor inquiries: https://calendly.com/gtzp/gtzp-impact-alignment/ In May 2020, Adam Mizel was yelling at his television. His wife turned to him and said, "You've been screaming at the TV about the Yankees for thirty years and they never hear you. If you feel this way, what are you going to do?" He stood up, walked away from private equity, and spent the next five years building a movement to reu...

She was 15 years old and in the hospital for five months when she made a promise to herself. When she got better, she would pour that same love back out into the world. She kept that promise. Now she runs the Gladys Giving Foundation, bringing inclusive holiday celebrations, essential resources, and a new youth workshop to communities that other systems have already turned away. No ID required. No...

He grew up in a railroad town in a single-parent household, channeled his anger into football and grades, got into Johns Hopkins, failed at stockbroking, and lived out of a conversion van. Two years into the insurance business, making $124,000 a year, buying Corvettes and getting magazine features, a 12-year-old kid drowned and Tony Holland had to process the death claim. That moment ended his ego...

Sponsorship Inquiries: https://calendly.com/gtzp/gtzp-impact-alignment Tania Rempert has spent her career inside nonprofits that are doing real work but cannot prove it. As founder and board president of Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation Org (P.I.E.), she helps mission-driven organizations identify what they are actually changing, measure it, and tell that story to funders with confidence....