The Nonprofit CEO Podcast

Adam Jeske
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Non-Profit

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. 1d ago

    Do We Pull the Plug on a 50-Year Program | Jews for Jesus CEO Aaron Abramson

    Jews for Jesus had been sending staff to present to churches for 50 years, more than 1000/year. Pastors invited them in. Churches put them on the schedule. People started to give.  Then the invitations started declining, and the costs kept rising.  Aaron Abramson stepped into the CEO role and knew a reckoning was coming. He had been in the organization for 25 years, including a stretch as COO. The question was not whether to act, but when and how much. In his second year, he pulled his executive team offsite and put everything on the table. They talked about radical options. They talked about doing nothing.  They landed somewhere in between: cut the department nearly in half, keep the engine at its core running, and carve out budget to find a new relationship with churches. There was a restructure, and there were layoffs. The decision involved people who had been with the mission for 20 years or more.  Aaron shares what it took to hold that, why he needed the whole team riding with him rather than just signing off, and what he has learned about communicating a hard decision to boards, major donors, senior staff, and those in the field, all with different stakes in what they hear. Aaron Abramson is CEO of Jews for Jesus, a global organization with nearly 300 staff. He's also the author of Mission Design: Leading Your Ministry Through Organizational and Cultural Change.

    Do We Pull the Plug on a 50-Year Program | Jews for Jesus CEO Aaron Abramson

  2. Aug 11

    025 He Got a $60 Million Gift. Then He Left | Freedom Fund CEO Nick Grono

    He got the largest gift in his organization's history. Then he left anyway. Nick Grono had been employee number one at the Freedom Fund since 2014, the only leader the anti-slavery organization had ever known, and he had already decided to step down at the end of the year. Then, in late 2025, an unexpected $60 million arrived from MacKenzie Scott, roughly three times the organization's annual budget. Everything that made leaving hard suddenly got harder. This conversation covers what made him go ahead anyway, why he spent months quietly reducing staff and slowing spending before that gift ever arrived, and what he believes a departing CEO owes the person who comes next. He also shares a world exclusive: the new nonprofit he is launching to back the next generation of nonprofit leaders. Nick is candid about the rest of the load. What Arthur Brooks and Richard Rohr taught him about the second half of a career. How he trained himself to stop deciding unilaterally and pull his leadership team into almost everything. And the quarterly all-staff call where any employee can ask him anything, anonymously, and "I don't know" became one of his most useful answers. Nick Grono is the CEO of the Freedom Fund, a global anti-slavery organization working across 10 countries on a roughly $20 million budget. They work alongside and on behalf of the estimated 50 million people trapped in forced labor, trafficking, and forced marriage. He is the author of How to Lead Nonprofits, and he steps down at the end of 2026 after 13 years.

    025 He Got a $60 Million Gift. Then He Left | Freedom Fund CEO Nick Grono

  3. Aug 4

    024 Treating Complaints as Gifts | World Renew Executive Director Carol Bremer-Bennett

    Carol Bremer-Bennett sensed there were meetings before the meeting and meetings after the meeting.  The initiatives she was pushing kept stalling, and she couldn't get people to say what they really thought. So about halfway through her tenure, she brought in a culture coach and ran the Lencioni five dysfunctions assessment. Trust came back yellow. Every other layer of the pyramid came back red. Not one green. (That's bad.) It took her breath away. But Carol decided to be thankful for it. This conversation covers her decision to build a culture of psychological safety from the top down, starting with herself, and why treating complaints, concerns, and hard feedback as gifts instead of threats became the most consequential choice she made as a leader.  It's also about what the roughly year-long delay cost her before she found the courage to act. Carol also talks about the structural change the culture work required, how a flat organization once left her supervising as many as 18 people directly (that's also bad), and why she told staff to not be loyal to her. Carol Bremer-Bennett is U.S. Executive Director of World Renew, a Christian relief and development organization working in more than 20 countries, with $18.3 million in U.S. revenue in fiscal year 2025.

    024 Treating Complaints as Gifts | World Renew Executive Director Carol Bremer-Bennett

  4. Jul 28

    023 Did I Just Completely Mess That Up? | Abara Executive Director Sami DiPasquale

    Sami DiPasquale put three border properties under contract in the same week. Abara had received its 501c3 status the month before. He had no money, but he moved anyway. Abara is a nonprofit in El Paso that works on both sides of the US-Mexico border, in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, creating spaces for connection, belonging, and peace across deep divides.  The three properties sat right against the border fence, on a piece of land Sami calls one of the most historically significant in the Americas, five and a half acres of historic buildings that could become the physical hub of the work.  He'd wanted the land for years. It had never been for sale. Then, a month after Abara finally became its own legal organization, all three parcels listed within a week of each other. This conversation covers how Sami structured private loans and LLCs to close the deals before Abara could even legally receive tax-deductible gifts, why he was nearly certain before the moment ever arrived, and the leadership lesson he wishes he'd learned earlier. He also explains why a book about leading without authority in a WWII internment camp is the most formational leadership read he can recommend. Sami DiPasquale is founder and executive director of Abara, a border peacebuilding nonprofit in El Paso, Texas. He has lived and worked in El Paso for more than 20 years, and much of Abara's work grew out of an organization he led there previously.

    023 Did I Just Completely Mess That Up? | Abara Executive Director Sami DiPasquale

  5. Jul 21

    022 Ending Our Only Recurring Revenue | World Hope International President & CEO Jenn Peterson

    World Hope had run a child sponsorship program for 30 years. Jenn Petersen was one year into her CEO tenure.  The program was declining, the administrative lift was high, and it was no longer serving donors, field teams, or communities the way anyone had hoped. It was also the only recurring revenue World Hope had, and it funded a narrow slice of the work. Jenn spent six months listening before she decided. She talked to the field teams, to the sponsors, to the people the program was meant to serve, and to peer organizations that had made the same shift before her. In the Philippines, a pastor who partners with World Hope sat her team down and told them, without any prompting, the exact thing she needed to hear. Then she had to tell the sponsors. Jenn talks about the hardest moment of the transition: a 96-year-old man who came to a church service with oxygen in his nose, handed her a check for his sponsored child, and left her wondering how they could tell him at all. This conversation covers why donors accept the logic of a change like this and grieve it anyway, what it took to move her team from fear to ownership, why she walked people through the change slowly instead of ripping the bandaid off, what she calls the messy middle, and what she has learned about her own identity in the seat. Jenn Petersen is President and CEO of World Hope International, a Christian relief and development organization working in clean water and sanitation, global health, and protection. She came to the role from International Justice Mission, as well as pastoring a church in NYC.

    022 Ending Our Only Recurring Revenue | World Hope International President & CEO Jenn Peterson

  6. Jul 14

    021 Am I Too Far Ahead? | The Gathering CEO Josh Kwan

    Josh Kwan leads The Gathering, a national community of philanthropists and impact investors who span the full political and theological spectrum. His only real currency is trust, and every consequential decision he makes runs through one question: how far can he push this community before he gets out too far ahead of them?  He points to a line from the organization's founder: if you climb out of the trench and wander so far in front of your community, they start to think you're the enemy. That tension shows up when Josh decides who gets on stage at their keystone event.  This conversation covers his decision to bring a Republican and a Democrat senator before the community at the same time, what the calculus looked like, and why he tells newcomers he can almost guarantee they will hear someone at the conference they strongly disagree with. He also talks about why trust is meant to be spent rather than hoarded, why feedback from people on opposite ends of the spectrum is how he finds his way back to center, what he wishes he'd understood about the board relationship before his first time as a CEO, and what Ernest Shackleton has to do with leading a nonprofit. Josh Kwan has led The Gathering since 2019. Before that, he co-founded Praxis, a creative engine for redemptive entrepreneurship.

    021 Am I Too Far Ahead? | The Gathering CEO Josh Kwan

  7. Jul 7

    020 Turning Down Money You Need | Flourish Fund Founder & CEO Dan Vogel

    Dan Vogel spent months building a partnership with a large institutional funder. Flourish Fund was barely a year old, still in startup mode, without a stable base of funding. The money would have been meaningful, and the credibility would have been great.  Then it became clear the funder wanted more control than Dan could give without compromising the collaborative model he was building. So he told the granting institution it might not work. He got off the call and immediately wondered if he had just blown up months of work and put his young organization at risk.  What happened next surprised him (and me). This conversation covers how Dan decided what he was willing to risk, why the honesty he feared would end the partnership was what saved it, and what he learned about holding the line when his team wanted the organization to speak out on current events.  He also talks about waiting too long on his first firing decision and what it cost him, why he stayed in performance mode with his first board chair for two years, and what changed when he stopped trying to show that he was crushing it. Dan Vogel is founder and CEO of Flourish Fund, a collaborative philanthropy fund launched in 2023 that pools capital from high-capacity givers to tackle problems too big for any one organization to solve, starting with the foster care system. He previously led the North America team of the Center for Public Impact, a nonprofit founded by BCG that grew to 40 staff and a $10 million budget.

    020 Turning Down Money You Need | Flourish Fund Founder & CEO Dan Vogel

  8. Jun 30

    019 The Mud Floor Test | Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Exec. Dir. Ann Graber Hershberger

    Ann Graber Hershberger spent nearly four decades connected to Mennonite Central Committee before she led it: first as a worker in Nicaragua and El Salvador, then through years of board service, alongside a 33-year career as a nursing professor. She is retiring this summer as its executive director. When she set out to address racial equity at MCC, the question wasn't whether to act. The organization had tried before, more than once, and those efforts had ended up on a shelf. The hard part was how to do it so something would actually change. This conversation covers how she chose a process built for quiet, lasting change over public declaration, and what it felt like to hold that decision as a white woman with institutional power and no personal experience of what she was trying to address. She also talks about the decisions a CEO has to carry without being able to explain them, the mental test she set for herself years ago to stay grounded, and what she wishes she'd understood about technology before taking the job. Ann Graber Hershberger has served as Executive Director of Mennonite Central Committee, a relief, development, and peace organization that has worked through Anabaptist churches for over 100 years in approximately 45 countries.

    019 The Mud Floor Test | Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Exec. Dir. Ann Graber Hershberger
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
4 Ratings

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
    2026
  • Episodes
    27
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Nonprofit CEO Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Nonprofit CEO Podcast

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