Mission Forward with Carrie Fox

Every so often, a leader steps into a moment that seems built for them. New CEOs appointed days before the COVID pandemic, or during economic volatility, or any number of other challenges — and it's like they were made to be there, in that moment, to steer the ship calmly through the uncertainty.Ike Anand is one of those leaders. He is the president and CEO of ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, a seat he stepped into a year ago, after joining the organization in 2020.That work reaches well past Memphis. Mission Partners' research with nonprofits and foundations last year found the sector split roughly down the middle on AI: half ready to lean in and trust that it's part of their future, half not willing to go there at all. Anand's answer starts with how rather than whether, and it rests on the principles he brought with him to the job. The first of them gives this episode its name. Get a little bit better every day. You aren't competing against anybody else, Anand says; you're competing against yourself, and the race is long.Which suits an organization whose reputation was built the same way — a game of inches, every day, for more than sixty years. Anand describes himself as carrying that brand for a period of time, with a responsibility to hand it on in good condition to whoever comes next. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (05:44) - Trust (11:31) - Governance (19:29) - Scaling and the Four Principles

In Brockton, Massachusetts, a Cape Verdean grocery store sits next door to a community health center. They're side by side on purpose. When BlueHub Capital looked at the neighborhood, it saw residents wrestling with food and health and decided those weren't two problems but one, so it financed the store and the clinic together and put them within a few steps of each other. A small decision. It also explains how an organization stays alive for forty years.Elyse Cherry co-founded BlueHub in 1985 with $3,500 and a single idea: build healthy communities where people of limited income live and work. The idea has never changed. Almost everything else has. Over four decades the organization has run a loan fund, a venture fund, a utility-cost company, a foreclosure-relief program, and a one-percent loan to cover the cost of citizenship. Cherry separates the why from the how. The why is fixed. The how gets reinvented whenever the work demands it.Which raises the obvious question: how do you know when to change the how? Cherry's answer isn't vision or instinct. It's location. BlueHub keeps its offices inside the neighborhoods it serves, because the people who live there understand what they need before anyone downtown does. They may not know how to build a capital structure. They know which corner needs a grocery store. Sit close enough and the next move tends to announce itself.The longest test of the idea is Roxbury, where BlueHub has been headquartered for twenty-five years. A new 40-year impact study counts $147 million in financing, another $910 million leveraged on top of it, and more than 3,200 homes, along with childcare, schools, and job training. Numbers like that come from the same nerve that, during the 1992 banking collapse, led a then-tiny BlueHub to buy its own distressed loans back from the federal government at ten cents on the dollar and rewrite them so families stayed housed. When you're making something that has never existed, Cherry figured, you have nothing to protect, so you may as well be bold.All of which brings up courage, a word Cherry uses carefully. Courage can be quiet, she says, but it can't be silent. Stop moving, and the people who don't share your values win without a fight. It's a modest creed for a hard season, and a workable one. The leaders who last are the ones who stay close — to the community they serve, and to the financial realities that let them keep serving it. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (07:29) - Proximity (13:14) - CDFIs (21:42) - The Roxburry 40-Year Impact Study (28:12) - "Courage can be quiet. It can't be silent."

You probably know the dream where you need to run and your legs won't obey. Carrie names that dream halfway through her conversation with Tanir Ami this week, and from there it's hard to let the idea go. What Tanir describes, and what the whole nonprofit and foundation sector seems to be describing right now, is the waking version of it.In 2020, leadership looked like a million-dollar check hand-walked to a closed UPS office. Decisiveness was the whole job. The uncertainty was acute but legible: a virus, a curve, a set of immediate needs. You moved, or people died. Today's uncertainty is different. Tanir calls it "quieter." The threats are diffuse, the timelines unclear, the systems shifting in ways that might not surface for months or years. The instinct to charge forward survives. The sense of which way to charge does not.Tanir, in the middle of all this, did the opposite of what the field expected. She narrowed. While other leaders were being told that strategic planning had become too hard to attempt, she and her team spent the year writing one. Not a sprawling, hedge-everything plan. The CARESTAR Foundation's new strategic plan turns on a single sentence: eliminate racial disparities in emergency medical services care across California.The 2026 Insights on Purpose research that anchors this season found that most leaders are making major changes to grantmaking or fundraising, and most are doing it without a strategic plan at all. The reasoning is easy to follow: when the ground keeps moving, why commit to a destination? Tanir's answer runs the other way. When the ground keeps moving, the destination is the only stable thing on the horizon. The path will change. The collaborators will undoubtedly change. The question of what you are trying to alter about the world only gets sharper under increasing pressure.When Tanir shared this new, tighter focus publicly, nobody backed away. They moved toward her. Committing publicly to one specific thing made her easier to find, and the plan turned into an invitation. In this week’s Research Brief, Matt Price points the same direction: health-focused nonprofits report the lowest optimism of any subsector in the study, and they are the ones who most need a funder willing to cover work that is, as he puts it, "sometimes under attack."Carrie's dream, the one where you run and stay in place, marks one texture of leadership in 2026. This conversation points to another. Choose one thing, say it out loud, and build the plan around it. The legs start moving again. The dream hasn't ended. You've just stopped trying to outrun it. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (01:18) - Introducing Tanir Ami (04:42) - Why is Racial Justice so important to Pre-Hospital Care? (05:54) - Reflections on Leadership Today... versus 2020 (13:35) - Reimagining Creativity and Collaboration (16:22) - The Strategic Plan (23:05) - The Ten-Year Retrospective (27:55) - Research Briefs with Matt Price

Every generation inherits a story about how people move up in the world. Go to college, the story goes. Get the degree. Climb. It's a story that has shaped policy and philanthropy for three generations running, and for tens of millions of Americans, the story does not describe reality. What remains is a gap. Not a talent gap, as this week's guest is careful to distinguish, but an opportunity gap.Two populations standing on opposite sides of a chasm, motivated people looking for a path, and employers who cannot find workers. This chasm is not bridged by ambition alone. It has to be built.Phil Weinberg has spent fourteen years at STRIVE building exactly that kind of bridge, and what makes his account worth hearing is the architecture underneath it. This week, Carrie Fox talks with Weinberg about what it takes to grow a nonprofit through three successive crises without losing the thread, why he draws a sharp line between individual resilience and the organizational kind, and how the conventional wisdom American philanthropy has held about nonprofit overhead may have had it backwards the whole time.It's a conversation about consistency as a form of leadership, about the unglamorous decisions that compound into durable institutions, and about what happens when an organization stops apologizing for the infrastructure that makes its mission possible.This week also marks the debut of a new recurring segment on Mission Forward: Research Briefs, a short conversation tucked into the end of each episode for the next three months, featuring Mission Partners' Researcher in Residence Matt Price. In each brief, Matt connects the themes of the week's conversation to what the latest data is telling us about the field. This first installment puts Phil Weinberg's reflections in context with new Gallup data on how American workers are feeling about the job market — and what the numbers reveal about resilience, leadership, and the gap between struggling and thriving. Stay tuned at the end of the episode.Links & NotesSTRIVESTRIVE's Story (40-year history, founded in East Harlem, 1984)STRIVE Programs (Career Path, Future Leaders, Fresh Start)STRIVE Network (directly operated sites in Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, and New York, plus affiliate partners)Phil Weinberg on LinkedInMission Partners' 2026 Insights on Purpose™ ReportMatt Price, Researcher in Residence at Mission PartnersGallup: U.S. Worker Thriving Declines as Job Market Pessimism Grows (March 2026 release)BDO's Ninth Annual Nonprofit Standards Benchmarking Report (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (03:09) - Leading through Turbulence (06:32) - Building Resilience Across the Team (12:42) - The Non-Profit Business (21:34) - Demand versus Capacity (30:49) - Research Briefs

There's a version of this conversation that could feel heavy — a public health communications director navigating a moment when national guidance has gone quiet, trust in federal institutions is eroding, and the very words her organization was built around have become politically radioactive. That version exists. But it's not the one Amanda Kwong, from the Public Health Communications Collaborative (PHCC), shows up to tell this week.In this conversation, Amanda shares the philosophy that powers PHCC, the initiative Amanda directs, which has grown to a community of 40,000 health communicators across the country. Together, Carrie and Amanda examine why the communicators doing the most important work right now aren't the ones broadcasting the loudest. In fact, they are the ones listening the most carefully.This episode provides a framework to evaluate whether the language you're using is still doing what you think it's doing. Words shift. Culture moves. A phrase that once built credibility can quietly become a barrier, and the communicators who don't notice are the ones who lose their audience without ever knowing why.As Amanda reminds us, the organizations that will come out of this moment with their credibility intact are the ones that kept asking the harder questions. They didn’t continue asking “what do we say?” but instead asked, “What does this actually mean to the person we're trying to reach?” (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (02:21) - Introducing PHCC (13:33) - Making the Complex Approachable (18:08) - Resources found at PublicHealthCollaborative.org (22:13) - Dancing Apolitically (31:19) - Finding the Good, Celebrating the Hope

In a recent staff survey at the Greater Washington Community Foundation, 100 percent of employees said they were clear on the organization's mission and vision.Six years ago, that number was 39 percent.That gap is what happens when an organization decides, at the height of a pandemic, to stop thinking in three-year cycles and commit to a ten-year framework instead. Tonia Wellons was thirty days into her role as president and CEO when COVID hit — canceling a 600-person gala, sending staff home, building a crisis response from scratch. And then, as the uncertainty stretched on, she and her board planned further out, not less. Because the plan isn't a prediction. It's a fixed point. And fixed points are most valuable when everything else is moving.What's moving right now is almost everything. In 2020, the crisis had a shape — federal resources flowing outward, community energy concentrating around visible needs. Now the disruption comes from a different direction. What Wellons calls "dispersed energy" has replaced collective momentum: people still care, but without a center of gravity, that care is very hard to organize — and very hard to sustain.Nonprofit leaders are resilient by training. But resilience and endurance are different capacities. Over ten consecutive years of crisis, the sector has been asked to sustain both, and the cumulative cost is real. Boards that aren't actively asking how to lighten that load are going to lose people — not in a single wave, but in quiet rolling exits. Some of those, Wellons is careful to note, are the right response. A thoughtful departure or sabbatical isn't failure. It's a sector populated by human beings.The same honesty shapes how she talks about the foundation-nonprofit relationship. The power dynamic is real, she says. But the way through it is relational, not structural — funders explaining why they stopped doing something, nonprofits naming the blind spots that foundations can't see from where they sit. The alignment the sector keeps reaching for will arrive person to person, or not at all.Last fiscal year, the Greater Washington Community Foundation granted approximately $70 million — a record — while donor giving and national philanthropic support both reached new highs. None of it happened because the environment got easier. It happened because the foundation had a fixed point, and a leader who understood that holding steady and standing still are not the same thing.Links & NotesRead the Insights on Purpose™ ReportThe Greater Washington Community Foundation (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (01:22) - Introducing Tonia Wellons and the Greater Washington Community Foundation (08:12) - Making Room for Planning (13:52) - On Resilience (28:04) - A Spotlight on the Good

What if the defining feature of nonprofit leadership right now isn’t burnout or bravery, but a kind of double vision—an ability to stare straight at worsening conditions and still believe, perhaps stubbornly, that impact can grow?As we launch season twelve of Mission Forward, Carrie Fox sits down with Stacy Palmer (CEO of the Chronicle of Philanthropy) and Brian Fox (Chief Strategy Officer of Mission Partners) to unpack the 2026 Insights on Purpose™ Report, built from interviews and a national survey of nonprofit and foundation leaders. The numbers land with a thud: nearly everyone says the environment is harder than it was a year ago, and yet large majorities still think their organizations can increase impact over the next five years. This is not optimism in the syrupy greeting-card sense. It’s optimism as a job requirement—paired with a private ledger of worries about cash on hand, staff departures, restructuring, and the creeping sense that “resilience” is something we describe more easily than we actually feel.So this week, we look at what nonprofit and foundation leaders are really carrying right now—what they’ll say out loud, what they’ll admit in private, and why the gap between those two versions matters. This is the story of confidence and strain living in the same institutional body. About “resilience” as something everyone invokes, but fewer people can define in a way that survives contact with payroll, boards, and the calendar. About why planning feels harder when the ground won’t stop shifting—and why the answer probably isn’t a bigger plan, but a different relationship to planning altogether.If you’re leading an organization, funding one, serving on a board, or simply trying to understand why so many leaders sound calm while feeling anything but, this episode gives you a lens—and a few powerful questions worth keeping close. The report, in their telling, isn’t a stack of charts. It’s a set of voices—unfiltered—trying to say what’s happening before the sector pays for it in closures, mergers, and communities left without the organizations they rely on.Our great thanks to the Chronicle of Philanthropy for their partnership in bringing this report to life. We hope you’ll take the time to read and share it broadly. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (02:30) - The Importance of the Report (03:41) - Doing the Research (13:51) - Risks Ahead in the Demand Experience (18:39) - Foundation Optimism (21:04) - Strategic Planning (23:54) - The AI Divide (27:42) - Looking Ahead

Leaders want to bring more compassion into the culture of work, yet many wrestle with how to do it in a way that feels both authentic and respectful.The answer lies in the simple act of looking out for one another.This short-form episode is part of the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication insights directly to your inbox. If you like what you read, we hope you’ll subscribe to ensure you receive this each week. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (01:30) - Super Human _____This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.

When Dr. DeRionne Pollard talks about leadership, she doesn’t begin with titles or institutions. She begins with memory: a two-year-old child clapping cymbals in a community college classroom, a six-year-old sitting outside a glass-paneled door while her aunt trained to open an in-home childcare center, a young girl learning generosity from neighbors who showed love through casseroles and practicality through labeled Tupperware. These early stories might be sentimental details—but even more important: they form the foundation of a life devoted to service, community, and purpose.This week, Carrie welcomes Dr. Pollard at a moment of meaningful transition. After leading Nevada State University through a period of growth and change, she has stepped into a national role as President of the American Association of Community Colleges. The shift has asked her to reflect on the shape of her career, the communities that raised her, and what it means to lead with intention in a system that touches every corner of the country.Dr. Pollard shares how she prepared herself for the move—literally mapping out her goodbyes and thoughtful introductions on a whiteboard—and why leaving a campus was both a professional milestone and a personal test. She speaks openly about legacy, shaped in part by the loss of her mother at a young age, and how that experience continues to guide her toward work that feels both meaningful and deeply human.As she steps into this new chapter, her perspective on community colleges offers both clarity and optimism. She describes these institutions as engines of opportunity: responsive, resilient, and built to serve learners across every age, background, and ambition. Her vision for their future isn’t theoretical—it’s grounded in lived experience and in the communities that shaped her.Closing out the season, Carrie reflects on the generosity woven through this conversation. The entire arc of “hellos, goodbyes, and the space between” comes into sharper focus through Dr. Pollard’s story—one that reminds us that intention, humility, and connection can shape the work long before strategy ever appears on a page. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward _____This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.

Twenty-one years ago, when I started my first communications firm, a mentor offered a warning I’ll never forget: “Starting a firm focused on nonprofits is bound to fail. There won’t be enough work to sustain you.”Twenty-one years later, and we’re still here.This short-form episode is part of the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication insights directly to your inbox. If you like what you read, we hope you’ll subscribe to ensure you receive this each week. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward _____This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.

Pete Wright has spent decades amplifying other people's voices. As a producer, he's an invisible architect of countless conversations, the one who shapes stories without telling them, who creates space for others to shine while remaining carefully out of frame. But what happens when the producer becomes the protagonist?In this episode of Mission Forward, Carrie turns the tables on her own show's producer—a role reversal that reveals something unexpected about the nature of legacy, presence, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.Pete's journey from behind-the-scenes collaborator to solo podcaster with "Headstone" represents more than just a podcast pivot. It's a confrontation with what he calls a "terrifying hello"—the moment when there's no net, no team, no one to blame or credit but yourself. For someone who has made a living being the essential person nobody sees, stepping into the spotlight requires a fundamental reimagining of identity.The conversation that emerges between Carrie and Pete is intimate in the way that only comes when two people who've worked together closely finally sit down to really see each other. They explore the deaths that shaped them, the hellos that changed them, and the space between where presence lives."Saying hello is an act of courage because it implies change," Pete says, getting to the heart of why so many of us struggle with transitions. Every hello promises that something about us will be different on the other side. Every goodbye demands we let go of a version of ourselves we've grown comfortable being.In an industry obsessed with personal branding and thought leadership, Pete has built a career on making other people's ideas more powerful. His new solo podcast isn't an abandonment of that philosophy but an evolution of it—using his platform to explore how ordinary people create extraordinary legacies through the simple act of being present for one another.As Pete and Carrie navigate questions about presence, legacy, and the space between hellos and goodbyes, they reveal something essential about how change actually works: it's not in the dramatic moments but in the daily practice of showing up, of choosing courage over comfort, of saying yes to the person you're becoming while honoring who you've been.Links and NotesHeadstone with Pete Wright“How to Be Remembered Without Saying a Word With Carrie Fox,” Carrie's appearance on "Headstone," July 19, 2025“After Life,” Radiolab, First Broadcast July 27, 2009 (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (03:45) - The Story of Headstone (24:45) - The courage of Hello (30:01) - Enough is Enough _____This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.

What happens when a community refuses to let its story be told from the outside in? In this conversation, Carrie Fox sits down with Lisa Snowden, Editor-in-Chief of Baltimore Beat, to explore what it means to build journalism as a thriving business model and an act of community care. Born out of the ashes of the Baltimore City Paper and shaped by the unrest following Freddie Gray’s death, Baltimore Beat has never been about neutrality—it has been about presence, about listening, and about amplifying voices too often ignored.Lisa traces her journey from courtroom reporter to newsroom leader, revealing how perspective and personal truth can reshape the role of journalism itself. She describes the radical choices that have guided the Beat: shifting from for-profit to nonprofit after early financial collapse, accepting a transformative million-dollar grant at the height of the pandemic, and creating “beat boxes” that don’t just hold newspapers but double as neighborhood resource hubs. Inside those boxes, you’ll now find Narcan, notebooks, water bottles, or even hand warmers—small objects that together become an expression of community solidarity.Even the act of delivering the paper has become something larger than distribution. By replacing outside delivery contractors with local community members—drivers who know every street and corner—the Beat stumbled into a model of journalism that is participatory, intimate, and trusted. Today, those same drivers are welcomed by shopkeepers and seniors waiting for the latest issue, reinforcing a sense of belonging that no algorithm or national newsroom can replicate.What emerges from Lisa’s story is a portrait of local journalism as a lifeline. In her telling, journalism cannot be sterile or detached. It must be human. It must show up. And in the Beat’s case, it must be willing to save lives, as when a box outside their office provided the Narcan that brought a neighbor back from an overdose. This is the work of journalism that doesn’t just inform a city—it sustains it. And it is proof that local news is not dying, but thrives in reinventing itself as the heartbeat of a community. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (02:08) - Lisa Snowden and the Birth of Baltimore Beat (13:34) - The Beat Boxes (23:33) - Finding the Pulse of Local News (26:42) - Support Your Local News _____This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.