The Nonprofit CEO Podcast

Adam Jeske
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Nonprofit CEOs carry decisions they can't fully discuss with their board, their team, or their peers. So they carry them alone. Each week, Adam Jeske, The Nonprofit CEO Advisor, sits down with a nonprofit CEO to go inside the decisions they carry: the agonizing restructure, the wonky board dynamic, the moment that defined their tenure. Adam has been in over 230 of these conversations. The patterns are striking and valuable. This podcast surfaces them so you can lead with the perspective most CEOs never get. For weekly patterns, synthesis, and peer intelligence between episodes, subscribe to The Nonprofit CEO Briefing at nonprofitCEO.com. 

  1. 018 Pulling the Plug on a $22 Million Program | President and CEO of Missio Nexus Ted Esler

    3 days ago

    018 Pulling the Plug on a $22 Million Program | President and CEO of Missio Nexus Ted Esler

    Ted Esler launched a partially self-funded health insurance program for the staff of Missio Nexus member organizations. It grew from zero to $22 million in about 18 months. Then COVID arrived.  Claims went quiet while people stayed away from the doctor, so the program looked healthy when it was not. The bills landed all at once when they came back, and the losses grew large enough to threaten an association running about $2 million a year.  His consultants told him to ride it out. He decided to pull the plug.  Then he laid the full numbers in front of his members, against advice that this was too much transparency, and asked them to help cover the debt. Every one of them agreed, each paying an extra month's premium to keep the group whole. The conversation opens out from there. Ted has watched many CEOs make these calls up close, and he names the inability to say no as the most vexing problem he sees capable leaders face.  He talks about strategy as choosing what you will not do, and the pruning season his own team is in right now. He also holds a quieter conviction: a CEO with no life outside the work will not last in it. His standard icebreaker asks leaders to name a hobby, and rules out family and reading, because he wants to know who they are when the job is not in the way. Ted Esler is President and CEO of Missio Nexus, the trade association for the faith-based mission agency world. The organization is  109 years old and serves 340 member agencies whose staff work across the globe, including active conflict zones. Ted has led Missio Nexus for over 10 years.

    35 min
  2. 017 Speaking Calmly While Holding a Powder Keg | President of the Alliance to End Hunger Eric Mitchell

    16 Jun

    017 Speaking Calmly While Holding a Powder Keg | President of the Alliance to End Hunger Eric Mitchell

    A member publicly demanded to know where the Alliance to End Hunger stood on the Gaza conflict. Half of Eric Mitchell's coalition supported one side. Half supported the other.  Silence was its own answer. He held off as long as he could, then decided to speak.  Before the statement went public, he pulled leaders from both sides into crafting it. He talks through how he kept the consultation tight, who he brought in, and why staying strictly in the lane of food access let the Alliance say something true while helping people on both sides of the conflict. Eric also leads a bipartisan organization in a city that wants to sort everyone onto one side of the aisle. He is candid about the gap between the job he trained for and the job he got. He came up on Capitol Hill. He now spends half his time raising money. Eric Mitchell is President of the Alliance to End Hunger, a 107-member coalition spanning corporations, faith groups, universities, and nonprofits working to end hunger in the U.S. and globally.

    38 min
  3. 016 Should I Take This Shortcut? | Founder, President & CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life Michael Wear

    9 Jun

    016 Should I Take This Shortcut? | Founder, President & CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life Michael Wear

    Michael Wear had a clear vision for the Center for Christianity and Public Life: deep formation work, deep investment in cohorts of twelve to sixteen fellows, commitments measured in years. Some potential funders kept pointing to cheaper models. Other organizations were reaching thousands for less. The constant temptation was to take a shortcut, starting with something splashy and backfill the real work later. Michael kept asking one question: a shortcut to what? A shortcut would have built something else entirely. He launched in October 2022 without a full year's budget, watching financial thresholds with the runway ahead quickly running out. His first hire came on two weeks before launch. He talks about what it took to know the moment was right: a board that embodied the mission rather than just orbiting it, the intuition that comes from knowing something inside out,  the pressure of asking someone else to divert their career to join you in something unproven, and and why he framed CCPL as a 30-year mission from day one. Michael Wear is the Founder, President, and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, a nonpartisan institution dedicated to the formation of Christians for the sake of public life. CCPL's flagship Public Life Fellowship Program is now in its fourth year. He previously served in the White House directing faith outreach and writes regularly for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post.

    39 min
  4. 015 The Path of Humiliation | Harrison Center for the Arts Exec. Director Joanna Taft

    2 Jun

    015 The Path of Humiliation | Harrison Center for the Arts Exec. Director Joanna Taft

    Joanna Taft proposed starting a charter high school out of the arts nonprofit she was leading. She had no background in education.  Her artists were leaving Indianapolis because nobody was buying their work, and she decided the fix was to grow a new generation of art patrons. (Talk about a long-term vision…) She raised the idea to a city commission expecting someone else to run with it. They just looked back at her, waiting for her to take it on. But right after the hearing, a board member pulled her aside and told her she was not the person to lead this school, and asked her to step down from the new initiative. However, nobody else would take her place. So she got to work.  Joanna says her biggest fear is humiliation, and her specialty is starting things she knows nothing about. Sounds like a lot of fun, right?  But that willingness to go forward through her fear keeps doing great things. It built an art center inside a near-empty church. It launched the charter school, now with more than 3,000 graduates. It also conceived of a neighborhood cultural preservation museum and opened in only fourteen months, using assemblage art and augmented reality she had never worked with before.  Joanna describes the only thing she believes she knows how to do: weave other people's ideas into something worth caring about, something fundable and sustainable.  Joanna Taft is the Founder and Executive Director of the Harrison Center in Indianapolis, housed in the city's oldest Presbyterian church building. She has lived four blocks from the Center for nearly 40 years.

    30 min
  5. 014 The Decision After the Decision | World Relief President & CEO Myal Greene

    26 May

    014 The Decision After the Decision | World Relief President & CEO Myal Greene

    Myal Greene inherited an organization with a mission statement that everyone loved. World Relief had run on that mission statement for fifteen years. Internal staff admired it. External donors knew it. Myal knew it needed to change anyway. This conversation is about the eighteen-month, discerning, board-engaged process. Myal walks through how the decision surfaced during strategic planning, why he never saw himself as the decision maker but as the person facilitating the board toward a good decision, and how he handled staff who were terrified of the process. But while Myal thought he was deciding about a mission statement, he was actually making the decision after the decision. A single upstream choice forces a cascade of downstream effects not fully grasped. Strategy. How the organization raises money. Who it hires. How it allocates capital. Years later, World Relief is still living into the consequences. We also talk about hiring for culture addition rather than culture fit, and why Myal considers capital allocation the most underrated decision a nonprofit CEO makes. Myal Greene is President and CEO of World Relief, a global Christian humanitarian organization founded 80 years ago that works around the world and across the US as one of the major refugee resettlement agencies. He spent fourteen years at the organization before stepping into the CEO role five years ago.

    27 min
  6. 013 Please Don't Let Me Break This! | Christianity Today President & CEO Nicole Martin

    19 May

    013 Please Don't Let Me Break This! | Christianity Today President & CEO Nicole Martin

    Nicole Martin is five and a half months into leading Christianity Today. The prayer she keeps coming back to: "God, please don't let me break this!" She began leading a 70-year-old organization founded by Billy Graham, and found it trying to be five things at once on one budget with one team. It was a philanthropy, a media company, an investigative journalism outfit, an external presence for the church, and a pastor. Something had to give. In her second month, she gathered her leaders and wrestled for hours with one key question: What are we?  The answer redefined the budget, the editorial direction, and the culture. And it meant admitting the organization is one thing, and it is not the other four. This conversation is about inheriting something significant and then reshaping it without destroying it. Nicole talks about the daily discipline of building a new culture inside a legacy institution. Rev. Dr. Nicole Martin is President and CEO of Christianity Today. CT reaches 41 million people annually through its journalism, podcasts, and publications, with a third of its audience outside English-speaking contexts.

    31 min
  7. 012 Deciding Before You Know | Wheaton College President Philip Ryken

    12 May

    012 Deciding Before You Know | Wheaton College President Philip Ryken

    Phil Ryken had believed for years that Wheaton College's signature orientation program should be required for every new student. The research was there, and he saw what it could mean for Wheaton.  But that meant scaling a high-connection, immersion program from 200 students to 550 in a single year. And that, in turn, meant recruiting 45 additional faculty members, asking them to give up two weeks of August and solving problems that didn't have easy answers. And yet, Phil made the change. This conversation covers what COVID made possible, what he did with criticism about moving too fast, and how he and his wife rode bicycles all over the city to meet up with students at a key time.  Phil also talks about where the hardest decisions arise, what he wishes someone had told him before he became president, and one piece of conventional leadership wisdom he quietly ignores. Dr. Philip Ryken is President of Wheaton College in Illinois, a Christian liberal arts institution with $206 million in revenue in 2024.

    32 min
  8. 011 Prophetic or Pragmatic? | Bread for the World President & CEO Eugene Cho

    5 May

    011 Prophetic or Pragmatic? | Bread for the World President & CEO Eugene Cho

    Eugene Cho started at Bread for the World two days before the COVID lockdown. In his first week, a tweet of his went viral, landing in the Washington Post. He had to figure out how to lead and how to speak, in real time. And this is while stepping up to lead an organization that had been led by the same person for 29 years. Our conversation covers the three goals he holds in constant tension: building proximity to power, speaking truth to power, and building power in ways that reflect the organization's values. He also walks through how he led a yearlong rebranding of a 50-year institution without producing grief, and what the difference is between being listened to and being acquiesced to. Eugene also talks about why he doesn't "enjoy" his work and why purpose is a better word than joy for what keeps him going in the current moment. Eugene Cho is President and CEO of Bread for the World, a Christian advocacy organization with a staff of 60-plus working to end hunger.

    41 min
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About

Nonprofit CEOs carry decisions they can't fully discuss with their board, their team, or their peers. So they carry them alone. Each week, Adam Jeske, The Nonprofit CEO Advisor, sits down with a nonprofit CEO to go inside the decisions they carry: the agonizing restructure, the wonky board dynamic, the moment that defined their tenure. Adam has been in over 230 of these conversations. The patterns are striking and valuable. This podcast surfaces them so you can lead with the perspective most CEOs never get. For weekly patterns, synthesis, and peer intelligence between episodes, subscribe to The Nonprofit CEO Briefing at nonprofitCEO.com. 

Information

  • Creator
    Adam Jeske
  • Years Active
    2k
  • Episodes
    19
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Nonprofit CEO Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Nonprofit CEO Podcast

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