Mission Forward with Carrie Fox

TruStory FM
TruStory FM
  • 5.0 (29)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Weekly

Mission Forward with Carrie Fox Hosted by social impact expert and B Corp leader Carrie Fox, the Mission Forward podcast explores what it really takes to move a mission forward in today’s society. With her signature blend of heart and head, Carrie sits down with some of the world’s most-admired purpose driven leaders to dig into issues you’re experiencing right now: from how to navigate difficult issues, how to lead through uncertainty and how to tackle tough conversations with courage and care. With guests ranging from Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, purpose-driven CEOs, storytelling and fundraising experts, and people in the driver’s seat of social change, this show will inspire and activate you as a mission-moving leader, too. * About the Host (https://www.missionforward.us/about-carrie) * Listen to Past Episodes (https://www.missionforward.us/episodes)

  1. Oct 8

    Raising Money in the Age of Uncertainty with Dan Katz

    Some crises come with a playbook. In 2008, the answer was financial intervention. In 2020, it was a collective mobilization that sent money flowing to organizations that hadn't even asked for it. But the environment in which nonprofits are fundraising today doesn't come with such a playbook. There's no agreement on the solution, and for many organizations, the causes they've spent their careers advancing have suddenly become harder to name out loud. Dan Katz gets it. As founder of CIMA Consulting, he partners with nonprofits in criminal justice, the environmental movement, reproductive rights, and youth services, and his counsel for how nonprofits can best navigate this moment is refreshingly steady: go back to the fundamentals. Get clear on mission, vision, and values. Invest in how the organization actually runs. Stop asking one development director to do five jobs. Build new revenue channels one small step at a time, before you need them. And when everything is pushing you to speed up, try slowing down instead. That last point matters most as new tools make it easier than ever to look and sound like everyone else. Dan's view is simple: donors are people, and people can tell. The organizations that draw supporters in and keep them are the ones willing to be exactly who they are. This is a conversation about staying calm in a crisis, and about the virtuous cycle that calm sets in motion. A grounded organization attracts staff, board members, volunteers, and donors who share its north star, and together, they can help carry it forward. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (01:54) - Introducing Dan Katz (06:38) - About CIMA Consulting (10:12) - The Tension of Confidence (15:07) - What is Working at the Crossroads? (20:56) - A High-Functioning Fund-Raising Department (29:23) - Finding Calm in a Crisis

    Raising Money in the Age of Uncertainty with Dan Katz

  2. Sep 17

    Practicing Patient Urgency with Gary Green Part 2: Key Takeaways

    Gary Green told Carrie he could hire ten more people tomorrow and still be redlining. Nearly a thousand calls came into the Student Press Law Center's hotline last year, from 46 states, up 42 percent in two years. So he slowed the organization down long enough to build a plan. Carrie comes back this week with what stayed with her: why the step back belongs in the middle of the chaos, what it takes to hold a crisis clock and a fifty-year clock at the same time, and why capacity comes from the community you keep. What sticks hardest is Gary's answer on hope — thousands of young people walking into journalism, seeing only the opportunity in front of them. Listen to the full conversation: Practicing Patient Urgency With Gary Green. Learn more at splc.org. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

    Practicing Patient Urgency with Gary Green Part 2: Key Takeaways

  3. Sep 3

    Practicing Patient Urgency With Gary Green

    Some organizations run at the speed of the crisis in front of them. Others play a long game measured in decades. The Student Press Law Center does both at once, and Gary Green has spent the last year making sure his small but mighty team knows exactly how. Gary is the executive director of the Student Press Law Center, which since 1974 has managed the hotline that a student journalist calls when someone with authority wants a story to go away — and censorship has been the leading reason for those calls ever since. Last year alone, students and their advisers reached out nearly a thousand times, from across 46 states, with calls up more than 42% in two years. Gary will tell you he could hire ten more people and still be redlining, given the increased demand in student press legal services. So he did something that sounds backward in a moment like this one. Last year, he slowed the organization down. Over the better part of a year, SPLC asked students, advisers, board members, and funders what they actually needed, and turned those answers into a three-year strategic plan called To Our Future, built to stay nimble in a landscape no one can predict five years out. The phrase that anchors this conversation isn't in the strategic plan, though. It's one Carrie brings to it: patient urgency. It's what it takes to answer today's hotline crisis while quietly working, state by state, toward student press freedom laws in all fifty — a New Voices movement that, as Gary says, may take another fifty years to finish. Underneath all of it is a promise Gary makes plainly: SPLC turns no one away. Every student journalist, every call. That matters more than ever now that students working through news-academic partnerships filed more than 44,000 local stories last year — in many communities, the only account of the county commission or the school board that exists anywhere. Plenty of those newsrooms have had SPLC's number for decades. This conversation is about everyone else: the newsrooms that have never heard of it, and have no idea there's been someone standing beside them all along. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (09:19) - The Strategic Planning Process (21:25) - Patient Urgency (28:04) - Hope (30:21) - Get Involved

    Practicing Patient Urgency With Gary Green

  4. Aug 20

    Getting Better Every Day with Ike Anand Bonus+ Part 2: Key Takeaways

    Define the guardrails, then let people loose inside them. That is how Ike Anand leads ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and it shapes everything from how the organization takes on new technology to how it regards the other charities working alongside it. Carrie Fox returns to her conversation with Ike Anand on leading people through a moment that makes them anxious, and on the definition of the job she hasn't stopped thinking about since. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

    Getting Better Every Day with Ike Anand Bonus+ Part 2: Key Takeaways

  5. Aug 6

    Getting Better Every Day with Ike Anand

    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

    Getting Better Every Day with Ike Anand

  6. Jul 23

    The Case for Staying Close with BlueHub Capital’s Elyse Cherry Bonus+ Part 2: Key Takeaways

    Forty years into leading one of the country's pioneering community development financial institutions, Elyse Cherry has changed nearly everything about how BlueHub Capital does its work — and nearly nothing about why. In this week's reflection, Carrie Fox sits with what that distinction makes possible, and why the leaders who last tend to be fixed on a question rather than attached to a product. It's a short conversation about proximity, persistence, and a particular kind of courage — the quiet kind that looks less like defiance and more like refusing to stop. If you've ever felt forced to choose between staying true to your mission and adapting to the moment, Cherry has a reason to think you've been asked the wrong question. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (00:56) - Why Makes the How Possible (01:56) - Proximity is a Pre-Condition for Impact (03:10) - Courage Cannot be Silent

    The Case for Staying Close with BlueHub Capital’s Elyse Cherry Bonus+ Part 2: Key Takeaways

  7. Jul 9

    The Case for Staying Close with BlueHub Capital’s Elyse Cherry

    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."

    The Case for Staying Close with BlueHub Capital’s Elyse Cherry

  8. Jun 25

    How to Build a Legacy that Outlasts You Part 2: Key Takeaways

    In 2020, the emergency announced itself. The need was visible, the urgency undeniable, and that clarity gave leaders permission to act — to move a million dollars across town before lunch and hand-walk the check to a barely-open UPS store. Five years later, Carrie Fox reflects on her conversation with Tanir Ami of the CARESTAR Foundation and lands on a tricky puzzle: the urgency hasn't gone away, but it has gone quiet. The systems are still shifting, but they're shifting in ways that are less visible, and that invisibility is what makes them so hard to act against. This is where a North Star stops being a poster on the wall and becomes an operational imperative. This week, takeaways from an important and ongoing conversation: clarity of purpose makes action possible, strategic planning is a lifeline rather than a luxury, and the most meaningful impact is the momentum you’ve created, and then leave behind. And for CARESTAR, that momentum has a name — eliminating racial disparities in emergency medical services. What they measure as achievement isn't just in the form of grants or the dollars deployed. It's that an organization sitting just outside the center created the space for a statewide conversation no one else could convene, and then committed to keeping that conversation alive long after its own work is done. If you haven’t listened to the main conversation with Tanir, it’s a good one. You can find it right here. (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

    How to Build a Legacy that Outlasts You Part 2: Key Takeaways
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Mission Forward with Carrie Fox Hosted by social impact expert and B Corp leader Carrie Fox, the Mission Forward podcast explores what it really takes to move a mission forward in today’s society. With her signature blend of heart and head, Carrie sits down with some of the world’s most-admired purpose driven leaders to dig into issues you’re experiencing right now: from how to navigate difficult issues, how to lead through uncertainty and how to tackle tough conversations with courage and care. With guests ranging from Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, purpose-driven CEOs, storytelling and fundraising experts, and people in the driver’s seat of social change, this show will inspire and activate you as a mission-moving leader, too. * About the Host (https://www.missionforward.us/about-carrie) * Listen to Past Episodes (https://www.missionforward.us/episodes)

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