What Works: Conversations on Nonprofit Leadership with Marla Moody

Farah shares practical insights on building stronger relationships, creating a sense of belonging and making space for people to feel comfortable being themselves. She also discusses the value of third places, active listening, vulnerability, authenticity and empathy in both professional and personal life. 🎯 How can leaders build stronger connections? 🎯 What makes a third place meaningful? 🎯 Ho...

Trust is the currency most nonprofit leaders never learn how to spend, and Karrah Lompa built an entire career learning how to earn it. As Managing Director of the UCLA Social Justice Research Partnership and Co-Founder of the Watts Leadership Institute, Karrah has spent over a decade proving that grassroots community leaders already hold the real solutions to their neighborhood's hardest problems...

Anna Mottice learned long before she ever stepped into a boardroom that the best performances never happen by accident, they happen by design. Today she leads alumni engagement at OHSU Foundation, quietly rewriting what nonprofit leadership looks like by proving that creativity and data are not rivals fighting for attention, but partners building trust, loyalty and community impact that lasts.  Th...

Sharon Attipoe-Dorcoo, MPH, Ph. D. of TERSHA LLC brings a powerful human centered leadership perspective that challenges transactional thinking and reconnects leadership with culture, relationships, storytelling, humility, and meaningful community impact. 🎯 Storytelling Beyond Data: Turning evidence into experiences people remember 🎯 Culture Shapes Leadership: The narratives leaders carry into e...

Nonprofit growth demands more than funding. Heather Collier, founder and president of Ascend Consulting, brings 18 years of experience helping nonprofits build strategic capacity, strengthen internal systems, and create sustainable community impact. Heather challenges the idea that bigger is always better. Growth should follow community need, mission alignment, organizational capacity, and the abi...

Joe Darago left the pulpit to fight a four and a half billion dollar problem: well meaning donors funding orphanages that hurt the very children they want to save. As Executive Director of The Hope Effect, Joe reveals how his organisation moves children out of institutions into real families, and why the nonprofit world needs an abundance mindset paired with fierce stewardship.  🎬 What you will e...

Kamy Akhavan spent over two decades walking into the most divided rooms in America and leaving with something nobody else could, proof that listening is the most radical act of civic leadership alive today. Managing Director of the USC Center for Political Future, Kamy has trained elected officials, legislators, and the next generation of civic leaders to navigate political polarization, bipartisa...

Matthew Stephens stepped into a nearly 200 year old institution and chose to reimagine what it truly means to serve the living. As President and CEO of Mount Auburn Cemetery, America's first garden cemetery, he is rewriting the rules of legacy nonprofit leadership, nature rooted community healing, and purposeful organisational change one green acre at a time. 🏛 The 200 Year Vision That Quietly Tra...

Deanna Wilken turned a seven person volunteer operation into a 128 strong global force spanning 28 countries, and she did it without a single salary line. As Founder and President of Human Rights Research Center (HRRC) and Co-Founder of Unruled Masses, Deanna has built something most leaders only talk about: a team that actually wants to stay. 🎙 The Volunteer Empire: Scaling a 128 Person Mission D...

Brad Voss left a successful business career, boarded a plane to Nairobi, and chose the hardest mission of his life, rebuilding futures for street-connected children through Remade. When Kenya's government mandated the shutdown of every residential care facility in the country, Brad did not fight it. He listened. He researched. And he led a complete reinvention of a 30-year-old organization from in...

What if the only thing standing between a child and their future was one person who believed in them first? Thais Rezende, CEO of BUILD.org and former CEO of BizWorld.org, scaled a nonprofit into the world's largest teacher led entrepreneurship education movement, reaching 850000 students globally. This is not charity. This is the unleashing of talent the world keeps overlooking. In this episode o...

Most nonprofits are bleeding talent and calling it a budget problem. Heidi Bailey, Founder of Bluebird Coaching LLC, spent years inside the eye of that storm as both an HR Director and Executive Assistant, and what she discovered will permanently change how you think about your people strategy. 📌 The Hidden Price Tag Nobody Budgets For Turnover costs up to 50% of an employee's salary. Every time....

Tyler Chein walked away from a neuroscience PhD to answer one question no nonprofit dares to ask out loud: who is your data actually working for? From brain development labs at the University of Michigan to leading research and evaluation strategy at TRAILS, a national school-based mental health nonprofit, Tyler brings a framework that transforms data from a compliance burden into the most powerfu...

What if the real reason your nonprofit is quietly falling apart has nothing to do with your team and everything to do with the culture you are building as a leader without even knowing it? Alex Montgomery, Managing Director of Team VKA, left a civil rights law career to spend over 20 years transforming how mission driven organizations operate, lead, and sustain impact. She is not here to recite th...

Most people think rescuing a trafficking survivor is the finish line. Merrie Karimov, Founder and CEO of Harbour Hope International, is here to prove it is only the beginning. With over 28 years of nonprofit leadership and a front row seat to some of the most overlooked truths in the anti-trafficking space, Merrie is rewriting what restoration really looks like inside Central Florida and far beyon...

What if the secret to a thriving nonprofit was not a bigger budget, but a braver culture? Henriette Recny, President of People and Organizational Strategy at The Literacy Lab, has spent over 15 years building workplaces where purpose does not cost people their wellbeing. A former career teacher turned organisational architect, Henriette brings a radical yet grounded philosophy to nonprofit leaders...

What if the antidote to a fractured, algorithmically poisoned society was already broadcasting 60 years ago? David Fischer, President and General Manager of KNKX Public Radio, walked away from a 35 year performing arts career, picked up a ringing phone on a beach, and said yes to the most urgent mission in media today. 🎙 From Burnout to Broadcast: A Career Reinvented Against All Odds 📡 The KNKX B...

She walked into nonprofit leadership with zero nonprofit experience and built one of the most purposeful equine welfare movements in America. Melissa Kitchen, President of the Equine Network Foundation, is proving that rescued horses do not just need humans. Humans desperately need them too. 🎬 What You Will Explore in This Episode 🐴 The Rescue Crisis Nobody Talks About 200,000 horses in transiti...

What happens when the world counts you out, your in-laws are breaking you down, community leaders are working to destroy your name, and you have no home to call your own but you build something anyway? Minister Dr. Maddie Cheatham did exactly that. Her story is not a motivational myth. It is moral courage made real, lived out in the darkest corners of survival with a daughter watching and a mother...

One mother's love for her son became a lifeline for hundreds of families navigating autism, and the ripple effect is still growing. Christine turned the everyday challenge of raising a neurodivergent child into Sun, Moon, and Stars & Company, a nonprofit built on joy, community, and the radical belief that no family should ever feel alone. In this deeply moving episode of What Works, host Marl...

The nonprofit sector is running on a broken hiring system and it is silently destroying mission driven organisations from the inside out. Most leaders are hired to check boxes, onboarded like an afterthought, and handed a role with zero clarity about what change is actually supposed to look like. The cost is not just financial. It is cultural, strategic, and deeply human. With over 30 years across...

The nonprofit world has a broken system nobody wants to admit , passionate people are being burned out, under directed, and blindsided by leadership gaps that quietly destroy impact. Robby Burroughs, former Managing Director at NDN Collective, Pomo tribal member, college professor, and coach, pulls back the curtain on the uncomfortable reality of working inside mission driven organizations. From f...

Most nonprofit boards are silently killing the very organizations they were built to protect. The uncomfortable reality? It is not a funding problem. It is a governance problem nobody wants to talk about. 25-year C-suite advisor and bestselling author Heather H. Bennett, Partner and Managing Director at Newport LLC, pulls back the curtain on what actually makes a board of directors powerful versus...

The nonprofit sector is running on a broken system nobody wants to admit exists. Behind the mission driven work, there’s a hidden truth leaders rarely say out loud scarcity thinking is quietly destroying team performance, leadership growth, and long term impact. This conversation exposes the uncomfortable reality of outdated leadership strategies, why high performing professionals fail when promot...

The nonprofit hiring crisis nobody talks about is quietly breaking organizations from the inside. While leaders focus on funding, programs, and impact, the hidden truth is that poor onboarding and weak leadership practices are silently destroying team retention, culture, and long term mission success. In this powerful conversation, Addie Candib of American Farmland Trust exposes the uncomfortable...