“I get by with a little help from my friends.”
-The Beatles
Before I was an Executive Director, I could scarcely imagine what a high-wire act it was. Fundraising, managing a reticent board, dealing with staff issues, budgeting, dumpster diving for lost retainers–yup, all in a day’s work.
The hardest part of the ED job was the loneliness of shouldering a responsibility that nobody else could understand. Nobody but me had the full 360 view. Nobody but me was responsible for holding up the tent in the same way. I couldn’t afford to crumble, to slow down or to crack.
You will be unsurprised to learn that this was not the route to longevity in the job.
My source of strength and support during my ED years were the relationships that I forged with other EDs. I’ve cried with them, laughed with them, swapped war stories and brainstormed solutions. The job of an ED would be impossible without the support of a community.
I was reminded of this last week as I closed out with my last cohort of Fundraising Accelerator students. For eight weeks, I was in the company of extraordinary nonprofit leaders who are engaged in work that changes the world. Their work spanned everything from feeding hungry children to mourning ones that have passed, from empowering girls to supporting future engineers, from supporting incarcerated people to write their stories to creating equitable access to sex education.
While our issue areas were diverse, what brought us together was hope for a better world and the tenacity to make it so.
We talked fundraising, but what we created was so much more than that. It was a caring community and a space of support and learning. We laughed, we cried and we came together to raise money for the causes we love with real, actionable and authentic strategies.
I’m so grateful for the opportunity to work with these 15 leaders and I’m honored to call them friends.
