We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

We Are For Good
We Are For Good
  • 4.9 (273)
  • Non-Profit
  • Updated Semiweekly

The We Are For Good Podcast brings nonprofit professionals + everyday changemakers into conversations with the most innovative, heartwired leaders in social impact. Hosted by Jon McCoy + Becky Endicott, each episode unpacks fresh mindsets, practical skills + inspiring stories designed to help you work smarter, build healthier cultures + accelerate our collective impact. Join our value-aligned community—it’s free—at weareforgoodcommunity.com. About We Are For Good We Are For Good is a storytelling, learning + activating community built for nonprofit professionals + everyday changemakers. Through our podcasts + media, purpose-driven activations + global gatherings, we equip for-good leaders with the connection, skills + inspiration to grow their impact. Because we believe community is everything—and together, we can create an Impact Uprising. Learn more at weareforgood.com.

  1. 4d ago

    731. What the World's Most Effective Nonprofits Have in Common (And You Already Have It Too) - Scott Curran

    Scott Curran has helped former presidents, Fortune 500 companies, and street-corner nonprofits turn good intentions into real impact. After a decade as general counsel of the Clinton Foundation and ten years building Beyond Advisors, he kept noticing the same thing: the world's most effective changemakers and the hometown hero nobody's heard of have the exact same nine things in common. So do you. That pattern became his new book, Better Good — a framework any organization can start using today with a Post-it note. 🩵 In this episode, you'll hear: What every effective organization has in common — and why the billionaires and major foundations you're comparing yourself to are struggling with the same things you areThe nine-factor social impact framework: your profile, platform, and passions, plus your time, talent, and treasure, plus scale, sustainability, and storytellingHow two people with nothing extra — a suburban mom of five and a med student fighting a rare disease — built global organizations from what was already in front of themYou'll walk away with a clear inventory of what you already have, a free action plan, and your next rung on the ladder. No new money, credentials, or permission required. 🩵 Episode Highlights: (3:06) What's lifting for Scott right now: awareness and intentionality(4:35) Stubborn optimism and the pattern hiding in plain sight(9:22) The billionaire who didn't have it figured out either(10:21) Why we undervalue what we already have(14:25) The hidden framework: nine factors(18:21) Nancy and Watts of Love(21:59) Every Cure, hometown heroes, and why success leaves clues(26:19) One good thing: someday starts nowEpisode Show Notes: www.weareforgood.com/episode/731 // Join the We Are For Good Community—completely free. Join fellow changemakers, share takeaways from this working session, and keep collaborating in a space built for connection, inspiration, and real impact: www.weareforgoodcommunity.com Say hi 👋 LinkedIn / Instagram / Facebook / YouTube / Twitter

    731. What the World's Most Effective Nonprofits Have in Common (And You Already Have It Too) - Scott Curran

  2. Aug 5

    730. Capacity Is the Strategy: How to Make Your Org More Sustainable - Brooke Richie-Babbage, Chidi Asoluka, and Casey Lardner

    Most nonprofit leaders treat capacity like a fuel tank — something you deplete and refill. Brooke Richie-Babbage makes the case that capacity is something you design, and that the strain you're feeling is information about that design, not about your dedication. She's joined by two leaders who've rebuilt theirs in public: Casey Lardner, Executive Director of Genspace, the world's first community biology lab, and Chidi Asoluka, Founder and CEO of NewComm, which went from a classroom experiment with 18 kids to a student-led organization delivering projects for the NYC Department of Health and Mount Sinai. 🩵 In this episode, you'll hear: Why sustainability starts with clarity — you can't design the right systems until you know what you're running towardThe mindset shift from vision holder to architect of systems, and how Chidi stopped being the bottleneck in his own orgHow Casey unlearned "strain equals effort" and started treating burnout as a diagnosable syndrome, not a cost of doing businessThe roles-and-responsibilities work that has to land before shared decision-making or partnerships can actually lighten your loadWhat frees up when operational work leaves the founder's plate: time in the field, time to think, time to dreamYou'll walk away with a practical way to read your own strain as data — and a starting point for building an org that keeps running when you step back. 🩵 Episode Highlights: (1:18) Meet Casey and Chidi: what feels real right now(3:22) The founder bottleneck(6:19) Unlearning hustle-as-virtue in a growing org(8:09) "It's too soon to panic"(9:41) From teacher to architect: building repeatable systems(11:52) Clarity first: defining who you're not(14:54) Roles, ownership, and Invitation Power(17:34) What sustainability actually feels like day to day(21:20) Where to stop pushing and start redesigning(22:09) Live the lessonEpisode Show Notes: www.weareforgood.com/episode/730 // Join the We Are For Good Community—completely free. Join fellow changemakers, share takeaways from this working session, and keep collaborating in a space built for connection, inspiration, and real impact: www.weareforgoodcommunity.com Say hi 👋 LinkedIn / Instagram / Facebook / YouTube / Twitter

    730. Capacity Is the Strategy: How to Make Your Org More Sustainable - Brooke Richie-Babbage, Chidi Asoluka, and Casey Lardner

  3. Aug 3

    729. The 4-Step Formula to Get Your Mission Seen by Media, Partners, and Donors - Jenn DeBarge Goonan

    Jenn DeBarge Goonan has sent thousands of pitch emails to editors, producers, and partners. She's distilled what works into four steps — and they work whether you're chasing press coverage, a corporate partner, or a major donor meeting. Jenn launched Lululemon into the U.S. market, built campaigns for Ben & Jerry's, and now runs JAG Communications, where she's spent 20 years making mission-driven work visible. 🩵 In this episode, you'll hear: Step 1: Why every note has to be a one-of-one, and the 10 minutes of research that makes it landStep 2: Lead with connection, not credentials — including what to cut (the attachments, the links, the three paragraphs about your org)Step 3: Make one specific, realistic ask instead of three, and why "a 20-minute conversation" outperforms everything elseStep 4: Silence is not rejection — the "10% more value" follow-up that turned two dead pitches into TV coverageThe one-page message guide that has to exist before any of the four steps work — and how to build it this weekYou'll walk away with a repeatable formula for outreach that actually gets answered, plus the foundation that makes it credible. 🩵 Episode Highlights: (2:44) From high school cheerleader to social impact cheerleader(4:48) Why passionate leaders end up sounding like word soup(5:30) The one-page message guide north star(7:22) How to build it: your ED first, then five anonymous interviews(9:43) Partnerships: find the overlap before you pitch(12:29) The 4-step formula, steps 1–3(15:33) Step 4: don't assume silence is rejection(16:41) The formula in action: two follow-ups, two placements(18:33) Social math, Substack, and the 57 million(20:23) Operation Warm: "This is my first coat ever"(22:58) One good thing: make it easy for people to help youEpisode Show Notes: www.weareforgood.com/episode/729 // Join the We Are For Good Community—completely free. Join fellow changemakers, share takeaways from this working session, and keep collaborating in a space built for connection, inspiration, and real impact: www.weareforgoodcommunity.com Say hi 👋 LinkedIn / Instagram / Facebook / YouTube / Twitter

    729. The 4-Step Formula to Get Your Mission Seen by Media, Partners, and Donors - Jenn DeBarge Goonan

  4. Jul 29

    728. How to Tell Stories That Fill the Hope Gap: 3 Lessons from 8 World-Changing Leaders - Jon and Becky

    The gap between hope and despair has grown from 4% in 2010 to 27% today. That's the "hope gap" — and it's the reason Jon and Becky spent 10 episodes sitting with eight change leaders who are filling it, one story at a time. 🩵 In this series finale, they pull out the throughlines: what actually made these missions land, and what any nonprofit can copy starting Monday. In this episode, you'll hear: Why clarity is a superpower — and how to say what you do, who you serve, and why the problem is solvable in 30 seconds without losing the emotion underneathThe head-and-the-heart formula: why "factually true" and "emotionally true" aren't the same thing, and why your story needs bothHow your personal story becomes your mission story — and how to build a culture where staff, volunteers, and board members feel safe enough to share theirsThe stats that stopped the room cold — from mental health to caregiving to what social platforms serve kids in under three minutesThe "one good thing" you can steal from Sesame Street: research + education + creative production, working togetherYou'll walk away with three portable lessons and a simple challenge: find the stat, find the human, put them together, and lead with hope. 🩵Episode Highlights: How the series came together — meeting Afdhel Aziz (1:44)Story as infrastructure: why narrative shapes culture (3:10)Theme 1 — Clarity is a superpower (5:42)The stats that stop you cold (7:24)Theme 2 — The head and the heart is the formula (9:32)The Heath story: when a number changed everything (11:23)Theme 3 — Your personal story is your mission story (13:04)Building the container: safety, dignity, co-creation (16:46)Trust is the work (19:56)One Good Thing — the Sesame model (21:08)Your call to action: share your story (22:52)Episode Show Notes: www.weareforgood.com/episode/728 Series Hub: https://www.weareforgood.com/hopegap // Join the We Are For Good Community—completely free. Join fellow changemakers, share takeaways from this working session, and keep collaborating in a space built for connection, inspiration, and real impact: www.weareforgoodcommunity.com Say hi 👋 LinkedIn / Instagram / Facebook / YouTube / Twitter

    728. How to Tell Stories That Fill the Hope Gap: 3 Lessons from 8 World-Changing Leaders - Jon and Becky

  5. Jul 27

    727. Working Session: The Automation Playbook That Added $200K at Year End - Rachel Bearbower

    One client reclaimed 15% of their lapsing donors and added $200,000 by year-end. No new campaigns. No bigger team. Just a stewardship system running quietly in the background. Rachel Bearbower built it. As founder of the Nonprofit Automation Agency, Rachel has helped clients climb from 35% to 50% donor retention in a single year, recover nearly $20,000 in lapsed gifts in 90 days, and hand 20+ hours a month back to overstretched teams — all without losing the human touch. 🤖💛 In this episode, you'll hear: The exact case study behind the $200K: what a 15% retention lift looks like when you automate stewardship instead of scrambling to remember itThe five stewardship automations that carry a new donor through their first 100 days — from the instant acknowledgement to the second-gift askHow to automate a thank-you draft straight into your inbox so it still sounds like you — exclamation points and emojis includedWhy your CRM should be your single source of truth, and the quiet data-cleanup mistake wrecking your listThe one thing that has to happen before any AI tool works: clean dataYou'll walk away with a first automation you can build this week — start with the highest-leverage thing you're not doing, test it on one or two donors, then scale. 💛 Episode Highlights: Meet Rachel and the Nonprofit Automation Agency (0:52)The two connected problems: retention and capacity (1:55)The five donor-stewardship automations (3:32)Thinking beyond week one: the first 100 days (7:17)Case study: a 15% retention lift worth $200K (8:09)Where to start + why your CRM is your source of truth (9:16)Keeping automation human (11:31)Tools: Zapier, native integrations, and using Claude (14:40)Your first automation today (15:38)One good thing: the DIKW pyramid and clean data (18:06)Episode Show Notes: www.weareforgood.com/episode/727 Series Hub: https://www.weareforgood.com/wsl#podcast // Join the We Are For Good Community—completely free. Join fellow changemakers, share takeaways from this working session, and keep collaborating in a space built for connection, inspiration, and real impact: www.weareforgoodcommunity.com Say hi 👋 LinkedIn / Instagram / Facebook / YouTube / Twitter

    727. Working Session: The Automation Playbook That Added $200K at Year End - Rachel Bearbower

  6. Jul 22

    726. Stories to Fill the Hope Gap: Turning County-Level Wins Into National Change - Hannah Fried, All Voting Is Local

    Most of us picture democracy being decided on Election Day. Hannah Fried spends her life on the part nobody watches — the quiet, local decisions made months and years before a single ballot is cast. Hannah is co-founder and CEO of All Voting Is Local, a national nonprofit working year-round in eight states to remove voting barriers for Black, Brown, and Native American communities. She and her co-founder spent years saying "somebody should start an organization" focused on the local officials quietly deciding how elections run — then realized they were the somebody. They built it from her kitchen table with no money, got incubated by The Leadership Conference, and went independent in 2022. In this episode, you'll hear: Why the decisions that make or break your right to vote — where polling places go, what hours they're open, how vote-by-mail works — get made by local officials long before any ballot is castThe playbook for turning one county-level win into a national conversation — and why story is the engine that does itWhy "it's never too late to get involved" is more than a platitude, plus the concrete ways any person can plug in this yearIf you've ever wondered whether slow, local, unglamorous, years-in-the-making work actually adds up — this conversation is your answer. 🩵 Episode Highlights: Hannah's journey: from voter protection to founding All Voting Is Local (1:54)The mission: making democracy's invisible infrastructure visible (5:17)The eight states where AVL works (6:41)The Apache County win: adding polling places for the Navajo Nation (7:08)From local to national: the Day of Action in Selma & Montgomery (10:24)How to get mobilized — where anyone can start (12:39)A moment of generosity: her daughter as her greatest teacher (14:49)One good thing: keep going (17:16)Where to connect + becoming a poll worker (18:47)Episode Show Notes: www.weareforgood.com/episode/726 Series Hub: https://www.weareforgood.com/hopegap // Join the We Are For Good Community—completely free. Join fellow changemakers, share takeaways from this working session, and keep collaborating in a space built for connection, inspiration, and real impact: www.weareforgoodcommunity.com Say hi 👋 LinkedIn / Instagram / Facebook / YouTube / Twitter

    726. Stories to Fill the Hope Gap: Turning County-Level Wins Into National Change - Hannah Fried, All Voting Is Local

  7. Jul 20

    725. How to Fund, Storytell, and Scale What Feels Unsolvable - Sam Teicher, Coral Vita

    Half the world's coral reefs have died since the 1970s. That's the kind of number that makes a person feel too small to matter. Sam Teicher has built his whole approach around refusing to let it. Sam is the co-founder and Chief Reef Officer of Coral Vita, a company that grows coral in land-based farms and plants it back onto dying reefs. He could have built a nonprofit to do it. He built a for-profit instead — after a UN-funded project collapsed when a small, restrictive grant didn't renew — and started with just $1,000. A decade later, Coral Vita runs farms from the Bahamas to Saudi Arabia and has earned Sam the Earthshot Prize and a Forbes 30 Under 30 nod. 🌊 His work is a masterclass in three things every mission-driven leader is wrestling with: how to fund it, how to storytell it, and how to scale it — when the problem itself feels unsolvable. In this episode, you'll hear: Why Sam walked away from a grant-dependent model — and what his frustration reveals about the limits of restrictive, short-cycle funding for any small orgWhy Coral Vita builds with communities (local jobs, free land for partners, on-site education centers) instead of parachuting in — and why the jobs piece is non-negotiable, not a nice side effectWhy "feel first, then think" storytelling beats leading with statistics when your cause feels too big to solveWhat "hope as a discipline" actually looks like when the odds are genuinely bad — from a self-described optimistic realistYou'll walk away rethinking sustainable funding, community-led impact, and how to keep a team going when the problem feels bigger than you. 🩵 Episode Highlights: From a DC kid to a lava-rock lagoon in Hawaii: Sam's origin story (2:30)White House climate team to founding Coral Vita (4:43)What coral reefs actually are — and the $2.7 trillion case for saving them (8:54)Why local jobs are non-negotiable, not a side effect (13:06)Storytelling a problem this big without paralyzing people (16:54)Adopt-a-coral and the "optimistic realist" (18:04)What you can do right now (21:29)A moment of generosity: pink booty shorts in Samoa (24:46)One good thing: the shots you don't take (26:18)Episode Show Notes: www.weareforgood.com/episode/725 // Join the We Are For Good Community—completely free. Join fellow changemakers, share takeaways from this working session, and keep collaborating in a space built for connection, inspiration, and real impact: www.weareforgoodcommunity.com Say hi 👋 LinkedIn / Instagram / Facebook / YouTube / Twitter

    725. How to Fund, Storytell, and Scale What Feels Unsolvable - Sam Teicher, Coral Vita

  8. Jul 15

    724. Stories to Fill the Hope Gap: The Fight to Hold Big Tech Accountable - Imran Ahmed, Center for Countering Digital Hate

    A 52-year-old man who'd spent too long online reading conspiracy theories walked up to Imran Ahmed's colleague — a member of parliament and mother of two — and killed her, screaming internet slogans as he did it. That was the moment Imran realized the online world and the offline world had quietly become the same world. Imran Ahmed is the founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a US–UK nonprofit that produces the hard evidence lawmakers, advertisers, and parents use to hold social media and AI companies accountable. 🧠 In this episode, you'll hear: Why the algorithms rewarding hate and lies aren't broken — they're working exactly as designed, and what that means for your mission's messageWhat CCDH found when they opened a TikTok account as a 13-year-old girl (the numbers are worse than you think)Why social media is the one industry in America you essentially can't sue — and how that single gap created what Imran calls "technology tyranny"The STAR framework — Safety, Transparency, Accountability, Responsibility — that's giving lawmakers a simple, values-based way to regulate platformsWhy copying the outrage playbook will never work for the good guys, and what a four-star general taught Imran about winning an information war insteadYou'll walk away understanding the information environment your organization actually operates in — and why Imran still believes, without a shred of naivety, that the good guys win. 🩵 Episode Highlights: Growing up in Manchester and the road into politics (2:27)What the Center for Countering Digital Hate does (7:41)Deadly by Design: what TikTok feeds a 13-year-old girl (8:51)The one industry you can't sue — and "technology tyranny" (12:43)The information environment every nonprofit operates in (18:15)Fighting an information war: a lesson from a four-star general (18:15)Moving people with data and story (21:11)A story of generosity: Mr. Haydens and Humpty Dumpty (23:10)One Good Thing (24:53)Episode Show Notes: www.weareforgood.com/episode/724 Series Hub: https://www.weareforgood.com/hopegap // Join the We Are For Good Community—completely free. Join fellow changemakers, share takeaways from this working session, and keep collaborating in a space built for connection, inspiration, and real impact: www.weareforgoodcommunity.com Say hi 👋 LinkedIn / Instagram / Facebook / YouTube / Twitter

    724. Stories to Fill the Hope Gap: The Fight to Hold Big Tech Accountable - Imran Ahmed, Center for Countering Digital Hate
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The We Are For Good Podcast brings nonprofit professionals + everyday changemakers into conversations with the most innovative, heartwired leaders in social impact. Hosted by Jon McCoy + Becky Endicott, each episode unpacks fresh mindsets, practical skills + inspiring stories designed to help you work smarter, build healthier cultures + accelerate our collective impact. Join our value-aligned community—it’s free—at weareforgoodcommunity.com. About We Are For Good We Are For Good is a storytelling, learning + activating community built for nonprofit professionals + everyday changemakers. Through our podcasts + media, purpose-driven activations + global gatherings, we equip for-good leaders with the connection, skills + inspiration to grow their impact. Because we believe community is everything—and together, we can create an Impact Uprising. Learn more at weareforgood.com.

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