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

    5d ago

    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
  2. 014 The Decision After the Decision | World Relief President & CEO Myal Greene

    May 26

    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
  3. 013 Please Don't Let Me Break This! | Christianity Today President & CEO Nicole Martin

    May 19

    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
  4. 012 Deciding Before You Know | Wheaton College President Philip Ryken

    May 12

    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
  5. 011 Prophetic or Pragmatic? | Bread for the World President & CEO Eugene Cho

    May 5

    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
  6. 010 Telling Donors You Got It Wrong | HOPE International President & CEO Peter Greer

    Apr 28

    010 Telling Donors You Got It Wrong | HOPE International President & CEO Peter Greer

    Everything was up and to the right. Hope International had just received an award for innovating in a post-conflict setting. Peter Greer the biggest champion of more. Then the cracks started to show. Peter had to stop, own the mistake, and go tell the donors who had believed what he told them. Peter is one of the most intentional leaders I've interviewed about building a personal network of advisors. He also names something I think every CEO should wrestle with: not whether you and your organization has cracks, but where they are and who can see them. Peter also shares a family decision that he nearly got wrong, and what it revealed about what most nonprofit leaders are carrying. Peter Greer is President and CEO of Hope International, an international development organization operating in about 30 countries, with $41 million in revenue in 2024.

    25 min
  7. 009 Are We Going Bankrupt? | Christian Leadership Alliance President and CEO Tami Heim

    Apr 21

    009 Are We Going Bankrupt? | Christian Leadership Alliance President and CEO Tami Heim

    On March 12, 2020, Tami Heim learned the governor had shut down public gatherings in Texas. The Outcomes Conference was weeks away. And she was facing the possibility that Christian Leadership Alliance was, in her words, completely bankrupt. In the next 24 hours, she called legal counsel before the board, received an unexpected offer from a tech platform, and decided to pivot the entire conference online before anyone else in the sector was doing it. Within 30 days, she took it global.  CLA eventually trained over 11,000 leaders in more than 100 countries on the platform she built that week. Tami also names something I hear from CEOs frequently: crisis has a unique power to make leaders think the unthinkable. The question is whether you can get there before the crisis forces you. Tami Heim is President and CEO of the Christian Leadership Alliance, celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2026.

    25 min
  8. 008 Using AI to Rewire a Whole Nonprofit | Hope Rises International President and CEO Bill Simmons

    Apr 14

    008 Using AI to Rewire a Whole Nonprofit | Hope Rises International President and CEO Bill Simmons

    In one month, CEO Bill Simmons shipped more than 15 working applications and 70,000 lines of code to his team, without adding a single software license or outside developer.  He did it with about $25,000 in internal time, replacing software that would have cost over $750,000 to build. Most nonprofit CEOs are still asking whether to pay attention to AI. He's already restructuring how his organization functions by using it. Bill Simmons is President and CEO of Hope Rises International, a Christian global health organization working in more than 50 partnerships across Africa and Asia to address neglected tropical diseases. Annual revenue: $11.3 million.  This is the first time I've seen how AI can transform the processes and outcomes of the nonprofit sector.

    42 min
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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
    2K
  • Episodes
    16
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Nonprofit CEO Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Nonprofit CEO Podcast

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