Succession planning. We all know it’s a possibility, but none of us wants to think about it. What processes do you have in place to protect your organization from losing funding? How will you manage the optics and let funders know your organization’s values and vision won’t change just because one person steps down?
Hint: Don’t make it all about you!
Join me today as I talk to Cassie Haynes and Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, the powerhouse co-founders of Resolve Philly, to get the lowdown on how they emerged from a leadership transition after Cassie, a black co-founder, stepped down from her position to be closer to her newly widowed mother.
Find out what strategies they used to mitigate damages, disperse responsibilities, and elevate staff members to positions of higher visibility so that the organization could continue affecting change to make Philidelphia’s journalism scene a more equitable and diverse playing field.
“We have always prioritized the storytelling around our work coming from those who are carrying out the work. More and more folks on our team are… showing up at conferences to talk about the work. […] When our funders think about who Resolve is, they should think about 25 people.” – Cassie Haynes, Resolve Philly Cofounder
Important Links:
https://resolvephilly.org/
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nonprofitlowdown/support
Episode Transcript
RHEA 0:00
Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I’m your host, Rhea Wong.
Hey, podcast listeners. Rhea Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown. Today we’re going to talk about what I considered to be a pretty interesting case study of when a black founder leaves an organization. So today My guests are Cassie Haynes and Jean Friedman Rudovsky. They are co-founders of Resolve Philly, and they’re in an interesting transition point.
Cassie, do you wanna tell us a little bit about what Resolve Philly does?
CASSIE 0:32
Sure I haven’t done this in a couple weeks. I officially transitioned out of my role as co-executive director alongside Jean at the beginning of June.
For five years, Jean and I led Resolve Philly together. Before Resolve Philly existed. Jean was a project editor for what a lot of people thought was gonna be just a real short term experiment like, We’re gonna invest a little money in some collaborative reporting in Philadelphia, and it’s gonna be a fun, splashy project.
And then that’s gonna be that. And as it turns out, that’s what became resolve. Gene started off facilitating a group of local news outlets in Philadelphia. Focused on reentry from prison as a topic. The shared approach was rooted in solutions journalism.
And from there, those partners found so much value in working together that they opted to continue to work together. And at that point Jean had really, gotten some funding around a new topic. Economic mobility in Philadelphia. I was the deputy executive director of the city’s anti-poverty agency.
We had grown close because our children were in daycare together and we started dreaming and scheming and planning Jean with her background in journalism and, . At a threshold really of a lot of opportunity with this group of reporters and the newsrooms they represented opting to continue to collaborate and share resources and work together.
I was frustrated with the city of Philadelphia and wanted to find a new way to make an impact in my community. And we did resolve. That’s how we came together. Resolve is really focused on developing and advancing journalism that’s rooted in equity and collaboration and the elevation of community voices and solutions.
And so this is really centered around this collaborative reporting and also has grown to encompass so much more.
RHEA 2:32
To get to the topic at hand, Cassie, you as one of the founders of Resolve Philly. What significance does your identity as a black woman founder bring to the organization?
CASSIE 2:42
I mean, I think a lot. One of the things that is not surprising hopefully to anybody listening is that journalism is still, relatively white and relatively dominated by men. And so my presence in a space that is still by and large dominated by white men, I think is is important.
It brought important conversations to the front. I came to the industry with a lot of ignorance or blissful naivete about who is who and what decorum looked like in some of these forums that I was engaging with people in. And I think being able to question and challenge.
Some of our partners, some of our funders in some really specific ways is definitely particularly at the beginning in establishing resolve alongside Jean as an anti-racist organization. What does that mean? And I think that’s something that I. Brought to the table, Jean was there for that work and those conversations, and that’s something that really got baked into the fabric of the organization.
RHEA 3:48
So, Jean, for you white woman, what was the significance for you working with Cassie and then also uplifting a lot of black voices as the center of the work?
JEAN 3:59
It’s the element that Cassie just mentioned that journalism is such a white space therefore, it felt even weirder to be doing journalism, to be carrying out journalism in Philadelphia, which is a predominantly black city. And so thinking about the, juxtaposition there as Cassie said I led this reporting project around reentry. I took it into its next phase of a reporting project around economic mobility and solutions to poverty in Philadelphia.
But it would not have been my place. I truly believe this to found something greater and bigger that was focused on centering the experiences of the majority of Philadelphians, and thinking about information needs of people who have been long excluded by, misrepresented by, or harmed by journalism.
I could not have done that as a white woman. Period. Full stop. Because it is not my experience. The organization that we evolved into and that Cassie and I came together to found was around those guiding principles, right? How do we change journalism in the way that it happens so that it Honors and provides information for not just about the groups that I just mentioned, and specifically in Philadelphia, that meant there needed to be black leadership and black founding at the beginning.
And that is what Cassie and I could do together. Particularly, I would say in the first year was a very steep learning curve for me in the sense that, up until that point, I had been a reporter for almost my entire professional life. I had not been a leader, I had not been an entrepreneur, I had not been a manager, and I had not been in a co-leadership.
Space with anyone else. And so being able to do that alongside Cassie, where as Cassie intimated, we had these hard conversations from the very beginning about power dynamics, not just within the industry that we were trying to change, but between the two of us and what it meant to be a black woman and a white woman coming to together to do this work.
And so, I think resolve. Could not have happened without the two of us working together in this way from the very beginning.
RHEA 6:18
So it sounds like the conversations about race and inclusion equity were really baked in from the beginning. And Cassie, your perspective, I know you for personal reasons, have left the organization.
What are the things that you thought about from an organizational perspective before you decided to step away?
CASSIE 6:37
To be honest, and I will try to talk specifically about from an organizational perspective, but also I think it’s important to acknowledge
there’s such a hazy boundary there. And not in a bad way, a way that I like, feel very blessed to have experienced, that Jean is one of my best friends, my colleagues or people whom I love deeply, like Capital L, love, and so there was the organizational perspective and also that had to encompass how I thought about the relationships.
The people, how the people were going to continue to be cared for, what that would look like. So just, giving some context there, I think in a lot of ways emotionally it would’ve been easier to just be like, alright, what does the organization need and let’s focus on that and take these, sometimes challenging feelings out of it.
Okay, so with that said there were the two of us. One of the things that we talked about a lot in almost every forum we could find ourselves in was the power of our shared leadership. And the impact that had on our ability to fundraise, our ability to fully support the humans carrying out the work of the organization, our ability to, show up fully, in all of these different spaces.
And especially at the beginning,. Two founders are better than one . Three might get a little messy. I don’t know. I’ve never been in a, in that situation. But two it is important to, to have that. And I think taking that away and not figuring out what the solution would be to make sure that, of course, the capacity for fundraising and the capacity for supporting the team, but also the thought partnership, the, Diversity of perspective represented in the highest levels of decision making within the organization. Some of the earliest conversations Jean and I had were really focused on ensuring that we had the people in place to be able to withstand the, removal of a big chunk of a certain kind of capacity.
RHEA 8:44
Jean, right now you are the sole executive director of Resolve Philly. I’m curious, from your perspective, how do you maintain the continuity of the culture and the values that Resolve Philly was founded on when you’re a founder who is a black founder, is gone.
JEAN 9:00
I think I wanna preface that by saying, ’cause there might be some folks
who are listening to this and thinking, well, why not bring in another co-executive director right now? Like, why not continue that chair leadership? Why not continue that balance?
When Cass first decided to leave we were starting succession planning. My first instinct was, okay, so we’ll hire another co-director.
And then through conversations with Cassie and other trusted folks, they questioned beyond that and said , I understand that is how you’ve been leading and what you would be most comfortable with. Is that best for the work right now? Is that best for your team right now? And also think about the power dynamics that would exist between another person who would be stepping into that role.
It is one thing to co-lead with your co-founder. It is another thing to have a co-executive director that comes in and a co-founder who is still in that role, that is just inherently different. And so, after. Thought and conversations. We decided for now that I should stay sole executive director.
It certainly does not rule out co directorship in the future, and I genuinely hope that is in Resolve’s future again. But I wanted to first just address that straight on. Back to your original question, I think leading off of what Cassie was mentioning about.
The people who work within our organization First of all, we have an incredibly diverse staff, and I use the word diverse in the most genuine sense and like meaning of that term. I’m not just talking about racial diversity, I’m talking about diversity in life experience, in professional background, in learning styles, in just so many different ways.
We have a master team that brings That, that brings so much from so many different spaces and places literally around the world. And also given what I said about Philadelphia and our population it is also important that we have a number of black staff on our team.
And at all, levels I’m talking about also diversity from executive team leadership, senior leadership throughout the entire organization. One of the ways that Cassie and I really thought about shared leadership from the beginning was not just shared leadership between each other, but how do we have shared leadership throughout the team whether it’s, folks sharing responsibilities for certain.
Activities that they’re carrying out or shared leadership across different programs and working collaboratively together. How are we dispersing leadership and decision making amongst the organization? Those are processes mainly thanks to Cassie that we have been working on for years.
And I think that fact made it much. Easier for Cassie to transition out of this role. role. And for us to feel confident that we are still carrying out the work just as we were six months ago when she was sitting as co-executive director. So there’s the shared leadership on the team and then there is just the way that we do our work.
We see ourselves as the local newsroom, essentially of the future, right? What local news should look like in the future down the road. ’cause we’re not quite there yet. And one of the ways that it should look like is centering community engagement and centering community voices.
That work has been ongoing for years where it is community voices, particularly the communities I mentioned earlier who have been long excluded or harmed by traditional media narratives who are influencing. Or directing or in some cases even writing our coverage. There is a centering of those black voices and those bipo voices in our actual work product.
That has been work that has been led by other folks on our team for a long time now. And so again, the impact of Cassie stepping out Is lessened because those cycles and that work continues.
RHEA 12:49
Part of leadership transition is also managing perception, right? And particularly perception externally with funders. Cassie, either of you can answer this, is how were you. Mindful about managing the optics of it, particularly given the fact that the philanthropic world has started to become very sensitive about funding black-led organizations.
CASSIE 13:10
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think being really transparent about it, , we had a relatively healthy timeline which enabled us to have one-on-one conversations with our funders. So it wasn’t like our funders were hearing about it, in a big public announcement. Jean and I have really strong relationships with the people who represent the institutions that fund us.
And many of them know that my dad passed away two years ago. Many of them know that, my family had been planning a move and ultimately moved back to Michigan to be with my mom. And so I think, having those conversations recognizing that when you know people as humans, when you show up to your job as a whole person and you receive other people as a whole person, our funders aren’t concerned about what it means for resolve Philly or for our work or for our focus on.
What it means to, to live out anti-racist values. Because they know us as humans they know our work. They know the people who are carrying out the work. We’ve always, as an organization, really tried to showcase the individuals on our team that are doing the thing. And so I think funders see, the.
The larger picture, the greater scope of resolve of Resolves leadership and without intending, for that to be a strategy around succession planning. That is one of the practices that we’ve just put in place in terms of how we do our work.
That really set us up for how our funders in particular and also stakeholders that are not. Financial stakeholders perceived my transition. It was warm.
JEAN 14:55
In large part that has been true and also we are now in a position where there are some funding opportunities that we are not allowed to go for anymore. Because there is not a black or BIPOC person sitting in the executive level seat specifically.
Without naming names, but two examples of how Funders who, approach their work with an equity lens have really differed in their approach to resolve at this moment in time. There is one funder where written into how they were doing their work.
They necessitate that there be BIPOC leadership at the top levels of the organization. So both board and executive leadership, and they made it very clear to us, we are taking this sort of to the letter of our own law.
There is no longer a black executive director, therefore you are ineligible for funding, period.
We had another funder who we thought we would not be able to get funding from because of their, very intentional. And I should also say excellent focus on equity. This funder who we thought we might not be eligible for, came back and said to us, actually our priority.
Is to fund organizations with diverse and proximate leadership, and you as Resolve, have diverse and proximate leadership, and we would welcome an opportunity to continue talking about funding for you. So, it’s really interesting that there are these two, funders who have the same goals and are going about it in different ways.
RHEA 16:28
One thing that you said, Jean, is that, from the beginning it felt important for Resolve Philly to have someone with the lived experience of being a person of color or a black person in the leadership role as the sole Ed. Now, without having that lived experience, how are you thinking about making sure that it stays part of the fabric of Resolve Philly?
JEAN 16:50
Distributing power and distributing leadership.
Resolve up until the beginning of June had been a very founder led organization. It was Cassie and my’s vision. When we came together in 2018, we didn’t hire our first staff folks until spring of 2019, and now we’re at 22 full-time employees. We, Particularly over the last year, have worked really hard at redistributing power and decision making throughout the organization.
And I’m trying to essentially double down on that process. In our executive team now, there’s me as executive director. There’s Aparna Mukherjee as our Chief programs officer, and there’s Becka Gorelick as our Chief Operations officer.
Becca has been with us since 2019. She was one of our first hires at Operations Manager. She’s someone who has, come up within the organization, was recently made. C o Aparna, someone who is new. She came in from outside in December. And then me, and the position that I have more or less occupied from the beginning.
And that trifecta is really great. Someone who’s been here, someone who came up and just this morning be, and I, and Aparna, we’re working on essentially a Venn diagram of our. Of our spheres of influence and our, spheres of decision making. Cassie and I had our own Venn diagram essentially as co-executive directors, where there was a lot of overlap.
But looking at, when there are programmatic decisions that need to be made, is my voice. My voice is giving Aparna input. Aparna will be the decision maker on those things, and she will listen to my input. She will listen to input from other folks on the team, but when there’s, strategy program stuff that is Aparna’s lane, and I actually feel like she’s.
Way better at this point to be the person making those decisions than I am because she is much more directly connected to the work being carried out on the day to day. Similarly with Becca on the operations side, Becca handles finance and ops and hr. And so we’ve been talking through when it comes to Grant prospecting and going after funders.
Becca is not in our development team. She’s not seeking the funds, but us being in constant conversations about the funds that we are seeking, particularly anything that is restricted so that she can have power and weigh in and say, you know what? This actually is not a smart move for us right now because of X, Y, and Z.
And so those decisions being made collaboratively. So I hope that answers like a little bit more, specifically some of that distributed, because those, a lot of those things that I just discussed were things that in the past, Cassie and I. We would make those decisions.
CASSIE 19:35
I think that’s a good example of how executive decision making is distributed. But one thing that I think is really important to point out is that as an organization, resolve actually has codified a decision making matrix that involves, all levels of the organization across all parts of the organization.
And so when we’re making a decision, I. I’m continuing to say we for the purposes of this conversation, but when we’re making a decision, for instance we all show up as part of the consulting work that, we do with newsrooms across the country. There’s a decision making matrix that the entire staff has been trained on that, lives in an accessible place that people can refer to.
So when a new client or a potential client comes into the organization, everybody who has a stake in. Working with that client or determining whether we are working with that client has the opportunity to participate in that decision making structure. And it’s something that happens every single time.
It’s part of a process.
RHEA 20:34
love that so much because I find, especially with founders, not in your case, but. Generally with founders, everything lives in their heads and so it’s hard for them to scale or delegate or distribute authority because everything is not on paper. So that’s really a great tip.
Cassie, lemme come back to you because as a founder, I know that the. Role that you play is more than just a job, right? It is so much a part of who we believe we are in the world. It’s, in many ways your baby. I’m wondering if there’s advice that you can offer founders who may be listening about any lessons learned in the process of moving on from this organization that you co-founded.
CASSIE 21:13
The right amount of time in terms of, what a, what that transition runway looks like is clutch and that it’s not uniform, it’s not, you should tell your people at this time and then public announcement at this time. I think recognizing though that.
For your organization to be successful time is going to be important. There are things that have to unfold as they unfold. I feel like we had the right amount of time for us. I think
RHEA 21:48
What was that time? Was it a year?
CASSIE 21:50
It was a little less than a year from start to finish.
It was July of last year when I articulated to Jean that, I was thinking about maybe a couple years, and then it was. The late summer only a couple months later when we actually made the decision to move to Michigan.
And so at that point, Jean and I were in this position where I wasn’t ready. I thought I needed more time with the organization. I wasn’t prepared at that point to talk about leaving as soon as. When I did leave the summer of 2023 in my heart I thought I wanted, at least two more years.
And at that point, that was a really that was a tension point. That was a hard conversation. I wasn’t ready to hear what Jean was sharing with me, which was the organization. Is not going to function the way it needs to be functioning with its co-executive director living in a different state.
And that’s true. Yes, the timeline and whatever it is Workshopping it a little bit, being open to it changing. I had one timeline in my head and I had to be open to my work by saying, that’s not a timeline that’s gonna work for the organization. Let’s find something that’s gonna work for everybody.
And, it did end up being in my best interest. And in the organization’s best interest , it aligned. It aligned. One last thing, which I think is like a mantra that Jean and I held onto for the better part of the, real kind of six months of really working on the succession planning.
And that was making the implicit explicit. There were a lot of things that, I, that I thought were on the table or clear or, that Jean and I together thought were clear to the board, or maybe we were operating under some assumptions or, wanting to make sure that the staff was appropriately included in plans, in timelines.
So really focusing with all of your important people. If it’s a co-founder, if it’s your executive leadership, it’s, your whole staff, your board, your funders, making the implicit explicit.
RHEA 23:56
That’s really good advice. And actually that leads me into my last question before we jump into q and a. Jean, can you talk a little bit about the role of the board in this transition? Because you spoke about the fact that you have representation at the board level, I assume, and the truth is boards don’t really think about succession planning until they’re forced to.
So what was the role of the board in thinking about making this transition in a really thoughtful way?
JEAN 24:20
The board did not engage very actively in our succession planning. Cassie and I really took the lead on that. And also, board development was a key part, and continues to be a key part of our succession planning.
Because Cassie and I, we, had a board, obviously since we got our 5 0 1 C three status towards the end of 2018. There was that first year of just finding some folks who could be on the board. Starting in 2020 was really when our board took real shape.
And also it continued to be a founder’s board. It was a group of people who were. Our champions who were supporters, who wanted to show up for us and for the work. And who really deferred to Cassie and I when it came to the vision and the work and all of the things because they respected that we were the founders and that we were, the stewards of the vision going forward .
That obviously we recognized last year really needed to change because not only was one founder leaving, but I really wanted to move from a place of, as I have been saying, like taking off my founder’s hat and really sitting more squarely in the role of executive director and not feeling like I am carrying sort of the weight of the vision and all the things forward.
So, Starting towards the end of last year and through this year, we’ve done a few different things. We’ve done some heavy board recruitment, and are establishing full board development process that involves more consistent programmatic updates to the board about what.
Is going on with just the work of the organization facilitating opportunities for relationship boarding amongst board members and also between board members and staff, because there hasn’t been that much of that in the past either. And so it is incredibly important that the board kind of step into its…
I don’t wanna say new role but you know, new connection to the work of the,
CASSIE 26:15
it’s new turf for the board. It would’ve been hard, I think, for the board to occupy that turf before now, actually.
RHEA 26:24
Yeah. And it’s all an evolution, right?
’cause a founder board is really different than a second stage board, which is really different than an established institutional board. Exactly. So it’s like exactly. As you grow, the board grows, the staff grows. I’m gonna welcome some q and a. Rashid, you had a really good question.
Do you wanna jump in here and ask?
RASHID 26:41
But is it true that after crises we usually see an uptick in philanthropy that then levels off a year after. So, 9/11 the pandemic, any other natural crises that are happening.
Is that consistent with what we’re seeing across the data?
CASSIE 27:04
The staff is the Gosh, I’m not gonna say frontline ’cause , we don’t need to repeat militaristic phrases in non militaristic settings. But, the staff are my colleagues that do the work, that carry out like Jean and I go get the money, and I think we have always prioritized. The the storytelling around our work. Coming from those who are carrying out the work. Our folks are the ones who are showing up at conferences who are, showing up in training situations to teach other people about the work. Because of some of the processes that we have put in place over the last year, particularly knowing that there would be a shift in leadership, in decision-making our team are also, in budget decision-making roles.
It’s not an influence that we hold and we make that really clear. To our funders. And our funders see it, they see it when they see, various other folks talking about the work that they’re carrying out on behalf of the organization.
It shouldn’t be just jean’s face or jean’s face and Aparna’s face and Becca’s face, when people think about resolve, when our funders think about, who resolve is, they should think about 25 people.
RHEA 28:30
That’s a beautiful response. The other thing I’ll just add here, Rashid is. I’ve heard folks who are transitioning out approach funders and ask them to make commitments in advance of the new executive director or the new leader stepping in to give them a bit of a runway.
And so that’s something that you can consider as well. We have a question coming in from Natoya. Natoya, do you wanna jump in here and ask your question?
NATOYA 28:52
Sure I can ask. Hi Jean and Cassie. Hi. So I just started at Resolve not too long ago. It’s been a very different experience in a good way.
My question is just based off of the lived experience piece that Cassie and Jean were both speaking of. Because I’ve witnessed personally, and I think folks just see it in general, a lot of organizations that want to be racially inclusive and I. Include the lived experiences of Bipo staff, but it gets into a situation where, They lean very heavily on those lived experiences and the ability of BiPAP staff to educate and uplift fellow staff as well as the community served.
So I just wanted to know what advice either of you would have for leadership on how to maintain that balance between not leaning so heavily on Bipa staff and their lived experiences, but also creating a space where they feel free to be leaders in that area and share.
JEAN 29:49
That’s a great question. I have I have a couple thoughts and then Cass, I would also love your thoughts on this one too.
So I think a few things. One is First of all, creating a work environment where things like that can be said very explicitly, right? Like, I think creating an environment and I will talk about how to do that but the goal of creating an environment where, for example, if there are BIPOC folks on staff who are feeling like, you know what?
It is an emotional labor and burden that I am having to educate my white colleagues on X, Y, and Z , there’s a lot of steps to getting to a workplace where feedback can be freely given to the quote unquote higher ups.
And I would say the number one role in that is if you are a leader, And you want your team to be able to give good feedback. You have to understand how to receive that. And the number one thing you can do is , model that well. That’s one thing. The second I think diversity amongst staff way too often gets reduced to numbers.
Also there is a numbers question in the sense of if there is just one black person on staff, it is much more likely that they’re gonna feel a toll or responsibility to speak for all of the other people who come from similar experiences with them. It is important that there is safety in numbers in some way, I think it is incredibly important that, for example, me as a white leader, and this has, in all honesty, this has happened at Resolve where someone on our team who is Bipo and who has come to me, or at this point it was me and Cassie to express some discontent with how a white colleague was treating this person.
I felt it really important. That it should be me who has the conversation with this white colleague to call that out and have that not be Cassie, and have it not be the person who was feeling subjected to this. Behavior that is my work to do as a white person in this world to work with other white folks in recognizing the ways that, racism and prejudice is playing out in their own behavior.
Because these are things that have been instilled in us since we were born into this country that is a racist country. And so any opportunity, for fellow white leaders out there where you can take on that labor is incredibly important.
Anything to add, Cassie?
CASSIE 32:21
Yeah, I mean, I think, I don’t know, as a black person who has been there in different workplaces, in other workplaces, I think my ability to show up to my job being me, being exactly who I’m and me modeling that for my colleagues, so that they felt safe showing up exactly who you know as who they were.
I do think that just undergirds what Jean brought up of being able to have these conversations openly and respectful. Maybe not, openly, but in appropriate ways and respectful ways, in ways that, our colleagues can hear. ’cause that’s who we are. I think there is something about.
The highest levels of leadership, practicing safety, demonstrating a safe environment, protecting at all costs. The safety of the people on the team that doesn’t make that never happen, doesn’t mean that, bipo colleagues won’t feel the burden. The weight of educating, of explaining of.
But it does ensure that there is a safe space for that person to bring that up so that it’s not something that sits with him. So that it’s something that can be addressed and so that it’s not a weight that, at some other point later in time falls on another marginalized person or person with marginalized identities or experiences.
RHEA 33:52
To go back to the point that you all made about distributed leadership I think it sounds like you’ve been really thoughtful about how there’s representation should these things arise again. So say you’re a person of color who does feel like they have to have a conversation, like there are other folks on the executive team who they can go to.
Jean, obviously you, but also others. We’re out of time. Thank you so much to both of you for joining us. This has been a really interesting conversation and I really applaud you for the thoughtful and intentional way that you’ve thought about transitions because it’s not always the case.
And Cassie, good luck to you, whatever you end. Thank you. Up doing next. Folks, if you’ve enjoyed this conversation, I recommend that you go to my website, subscribe to my newsletter, and you will get information about conversations like this in your inbox every Tuesday morning.
Thank you so much, everyone.
Have a great day.
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