Unscripted Green & Non-Profits

Jeremy Rivera
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We're talking with non-profit organizations, founders, and activists who are furthering green initiatives or community benefit programs.

  1. 2d ago

    Paul Pape: Turning Strategy Into a Game Your Team Will Actually Play

    Paul Pape is the barkeep and game master at Gamify Business, where he turns strategy and operational problems into role-playing game mechanics. It started when a stuck CEO's love of gaming turned into a four-hour session, and that session became a consulting method. His framework splits people into linear thinkers and cloud thinkers, and his claim is that conventional planning documents fail roughly half of them. If you have ever watched a strategic plan die in a drawer while the people it described kept working, that will land. What he covers Linear thinkers versus cloud thinkers, and why one planning format cannot serve both The authority machine problem, building recognition is not the same as acquiring support Ride the dragon of passion, on why chasing recognition directly tends to starve it Working with neurodivergent clients rather than around them Why we are running it here. Paul makes the point directly in the episode that this can be run as a nonprofit version or an outreach programme. For an organisation whose planning day has to hold staff, volunteers and a board in one room, a format that works for more than one kind of brain is worth a look. Originally aired on Unscripted Small Business. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.

  2. 2d ago

    David Wilson: Findability Everywhere, and Why Cause Partnerships Are Defensible

    David Wilson, executive vice president at Zozimus, has been doing this since AltaVista. His argument is that search engine optimisation has become search everywhere optimisation: being findable wherever a decision gets made, rather than ranking for its own sake. The part worth a nonprofit's attention is his point about defensibility. His example is a tattoo shop working with veterans' groups, where the partnership creates something a competitor cannot copy by spending more money. For a cause organisation, that is the case for corporate partnership stated in the partner's own language. What he covers Findability over rankings, because only one of those places has a rank tracker pointed at it Turning Search Console into a gap list by comparing expected against actual click-through Internal linking, still one of the most reliable tactics and the least fashionable Digital PR and brand carrying the load as unbranded search erodes Your About page as the thing an AI model reads to decide whether to trust you Why we are running it here. Nonprofits compete for attention against organisations with far bigger budgets. Findability and genuine community partnership are two of the few levers that are not purely a spending contest. Originally aired on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.

  3. 2d ago

    Mike Montague: Use AI Like Iron Man, Not the Terminator

    Mike Montague of Avenue9 draws a line between two ways to point AI at a problem. The Terminator approach builds an agent and sends it out alone. The Iron Man approach wraps a person in the technology and sends the person. His whole practice is built on the second one. He has also done the work in a nonprofit context that most agencies never touch: teaching questioning skills to border-crossing agents for an anti-trafficking charity in Africa. It is a short passage, and it is the clearest example in the episode of the method surviving outside a sales floor. What he covers AI reliably earns a C plus, useful, and not the part anyone was paying you for Bad strategy plus AI is just faster failure; it amplifies in both directions Keeping your online reputation matched to your real work rather than inflated past it Degenerative engineering, using AI to distil what you already are instead of generating more of what you are not Why we are running it here. Nonprofits are being sold AI harder than almost anyone right now, usually as a staff replacement. This is the counter-argument, from someone who sells AI services for a living. Originally aired on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.

  4. 2d ago

    Benjamin Behrooz: Community Involvement as an Actual Growth Strategy

    Benjamin Behrooz of Branding Los Angeles builds brands for blue-collar and home-service businesses, and one of his most consistent recommendations is the one most marketers treat as a nice-to-have: show up in your community, repeatedly, on the record. His own firm runs an NYPD toy drive, donates to Shriners, and organises Santa Monica beach cleanups. He is candid that this is both genuine and good for the business, which is the honest version of a conversation nonprofits rarely get from a corporate partner. What he covers Empathy as a practical tool for finding what a customer, or a donor, actually cares about Holding authenticity while you scale, and where most organisations lose it Where AI helps marketing and where it flattens the voice you built Using community involvement to build visibility that advertising cannot buy Why we are running it here. If you have ever built a corporate partnership and found the company wanted a logo placement and nothing else, this is a useful look from the other side of that table at what makes a partner stay. Originally aired on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.

  5. 2d ago

    Rebecca Prejean: Accessibility Is a Retention Problem, Not a Compliance One

    Rebecca Prejean of EBGC advises nonprofit leaders on accessibility, and her argument reframes it: stop selling accommodation as compliance and start selling it as productivity and retention. For an organisation running on volunteers and a thin payroll, that is the version of the pitch that actually moves a board. Her route in was personal. Her son has autism, and the advocacy she learned for him became the work she now does for organisations. What she covers Why structured meetings are the cheapest accommodation most organisations never make Self-advocacy after a late diagnosis, and why so much of the workforce is arriving there now Framing accessibility in terms leadership already budgets for, productivity and retention Where AI genuinely helps, and where it is being oversold Why we are running it here. Rebecca works with nonprofit CEOs, and she is speaking at Cause Camp on the accessibility gap in nonprofit organisations specifically. The episode is about workplaces generally, but the volunteer-heavy, under-resourced org is where these ideas bite hardest. Originally aired on Unscripted Small Business, hosted by Zaneta Chuniq Inpower. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.

  6. 4d ago

    94% of Women Execs Played Sports | Melyssa Jaskiewicz

    Only 24% of C-suite executives are women. 94% of them played sports. Melyssa Jaskiewicz built Leveling the Fields on the space between those two numbers. She goes into Charleston elementary schools and hands third through fifth grade girls a sport they have never tried. The program is called EmpowerPlay, and the clever part is who coaches it: the school's own teachers, hired and paid. The kids already know the hierarchy, so classroom management transfers for free, and the money lands in a teacher's pocket. In South Carolina, twice as many boys play high school sports as girls. Melyssa's read is that this is a pipeline problem, not an interest problem. There is no youth program feeding the middle school feeding the high school, so the team never forms. The barrier for families is options and logistics, not desire. She is also honest about the skill that did not transfer. Twenty years in sales, and asking a friend for money is still awkward: "We have a school on a wait list and we need $14,000 to pull that school off the wait list. Can you give me $100?" If you want to end that particular conversation, bring the program to a school or donate. Diagnosed dyslexic and ADD in the 1980s, she makes a blunt argument about cutting PE: you cannot take kids with fast brains and expect them to sit still for eight hours. She has the before-and-after story of one disruptive student to back it up. On AI, she is not generating graphics. She runs paid Claude and ChatGPT as collaborators for grant writing, pasted a thousand Instagram followers in to find collaboration targets, and has Claude clearing bounced email into HubSpot. Response time is a nonprofit's version of speed to lead, the thing Ignitvio measures in home services: she met a volunteer who waited nearly a year to hear back from a shelter. Her team answers in hours and staffed a volunteer manager to make sure of it. If you want to be one, they are taking volunteers and coaches. Connect with Melyssa on LinkedIn. Leveling the Fields is @levelingthefields everywhere. Read the full recap: https://unscriptednonprofit.com/melyssa-jaskiewicz-leveling-the-fields-girls-sports-pipeline/ More from the network: Unscripted Non-Profit and Unscripted Small Business. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

  7. Jul 23

    Giving Gen Alpha the Tools to Regulate a Dysregulated World

    You cannot teach a child to regulate if you are dysregulated yourself. Queen D. Michele spent 27 years in classrooms before founding the Fula History & Genealogy Society in America. She joins host Jeremy Rivera to explain why Generation Alpha is growing up emotionally dysregulated and what it would take to hand them the tools. Key takeaways Three nuggets structure the episode: the matrix, generational trauma carried in DNA, and the fact that unconscious adults cannot teach consciousness. 27 years of classroom evidence. This is not a theory arrived at from outside the school system. 52 Insights for Gen Alpha turns the five SEL competencies into a personal journey, adapted by AI rather than delivered as a fixed curriculum. The free online pilot starts 8 September. Which is the practical reason to listen now rather than later. Guided meditation is the big gun. Her words for the intervention that does the most work. The screens never turn off, and that is a different environment from the one any previous generation regulated inside. On this page Why Gen Alpha is dysregulated The three nuggets 52 Insights and the five SEL competencies The big gun Guinea-Bissau and the decade of return People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Why Gen Alpha is dysregulated Queen D. Michele taught for 27 years, which means she watched the change happen in real time rather than reading about it afterwards. The environment a child regulates inside now includes a screen that never turns off and an attention economy engineered against calm. Her framing is not that children are worse. It is that the tools were never handed over, and the adults holding them are struggling too. The three nuggets The matrix. The systems and defaults a child inherits without ever agreeing to them. Generational trauma carried in our DNA. The idea that what was not processed gets passed down rather than resolved. Unconscious adults cannot teach consciousness. The one that does the most damage in practice, because it puts the work back on the grown-ups first. That third one is the load-bearing claim of the whole conversation. Every regulation programme aimed only at children is building on a foundation nobody checked. 52 Insights and the five SEL competencies Her programme, 52 Insights for Gen Alpha, takes the five core SEL competencies and turns them into a personal, AI-adaptive journey rather than a fixed syllabus. The design choice worth noting is the adaptation. Social and emotional learning delivered as one curriculum to thirty different children assumes they all arrive at the same place. They do not, and that assumption is why so much of it fails to stick. A free online pilot starts on 8 September. The big gun Guided meditation is what she calls the big gun. It is the intervention with the shortest distance between doing it and feeling the difference, which matters enormously when the audience is children who will abandon anything abstract. Guinea-Bissau and the decade of return

    Giving Gen Alpha the Tools to Regulate a Dysregulated World

  8. 12/18/2025

    Megan Ihnen: When the Concert Season Is a JPEG Google Can't Read

    Somebody wanted to hear the Brahms Double Concerto played live and could not find anywhere to look it up. That is the origin of the Live Music Project. Founder Shia Lyon went looking, and discovered that Seattle alone had around thirty community orchestras publishing their entire concert season as a JPEG. Megan Ihnen is now its executive director. Key takeaways An image is invisible to search. Around thirty Seattle orchestras had put their whole season into a picture file, so as far as Google was concerned the concerts were not happening. Listener agency is the product. Filter by piece, composer, instrument, price, house concert against concert hall, or sensory-friendly format. Spontaneous Free Tickets turns donated seats into audience development, with post-concert surveys fed back to organisations that almost never hear from first-time attendees. The software is built in-house by volunteers. Corporate matching hours from Seattle tech employers plus bootcamp graduates who need public-facing portfolio work. They ran the programmes manually for years before automating them. Which is why the automation fits what actually happens. Geographic expansion before new art forms. A deliberate order, and the opposite of what most non-profits do. On this page The concert season nobody could search Listener agency Spontaneous Free Tickets Shipping software on a volunteer dev team Sponsorship that does not extract from the arts People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper The concert season nobody could search She sees that their concert season is a JPEG on their website and realizes like, Google can’t scan this. Google has no idea that this concert is happening, right? — Megan Ihnen This is the whole problem in one sentence, and it is not unique to classical music. Any small organisation that publishes its schedule as a designed image has removed itself from search. The information is on the site. It is just not readable. For a community orchestra the cost is direct. Someone in the same city is actively looking for the thing you are performing, and there is no path from their search to your hall. Listener agency The Live Music Project calls itself a classical music advocacy and tech-for-good organisation. Its answer to the discovery problem is a calendar built around how people actually decide to go to a concert. By piece, so the Brahms Double Concerto search that started all this now returns something. By composer and by instrument. By price, which quietly removes the biggest barrier for new attendees. By format: house concert against concert hall, and sensory-friendly performances. But we’re using technology to make that easy. Just make it easy to be curious. — Megan Ihnen Spontaneous Free Tickets Organisations donate unsold seats. The project gets them to people who would not otherwise come. Then the part that makes it a programme rather than a giveaway: attendees answer a post-concert survey, and the responses go back to the organisation. Small ensembles alm...

  9. 03/27/2025

    San Diego Cleanup Events

    Hello, and welcome to the Unscripted Non-Profit Green podcast. I'm your host, Nathan Short. Today, we're spotlighting upcoming community cleanup events in San Diego, focusing on opportunities happening within the next week. Engaging in these events is a fantastic way to contribute to environmental preservation and connect with like-minded individuals.​ Fiesta Island Trash Cleanup by Rock N' Block Kicking off our list is the Fiesta Island Trash Cleanup, organized by Rock N' Block San Diego. This event is scheduled for Saturday, March 29, 2025, at 10:00 AM. Volunteers will gather at 1519 Fiesta Island Road in San Diego to participate in this Adopt-a-Spot beach cleanup initiative. RSVPRock N' Block will provide necessary supplies, including gloves, bags, vests, and buckets. Participants are encouraged to wear comfortable attire, bring sun protection, and carry a water bottle. This family-friendly event welcomes friends, families, and even four-legged companions to help preserve the natural beauty of Fiesta Island. To ensure adequate supplies, an RSVP is required. You can find more details and RSVP at their website.​ Litter Free La Mesa: Alvarado Avenue and Stormwater Channel Neighborhood Cleanup Also on Saturday, March 29, from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM, I Love A Clean San Diego, in partnership with the City of La Mesa, is hosting a litter cleanup event. Volunteers will focus on diverting litter from local watersheds to prevent it from reaching the Pacific Ocean. Participants should wear comfortable clothes, closed-toed shoes, and bring sun protection. For more information and to register, visit I Love A Clean San Diego's events page.​ Compost Giveaway at Lake Murray Park For those interested in sustainable gardening, there's a Compost Giveaway event on Saturday, March 29, from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM at Lake Murray Park, located at 6320 Murray Park Circle, San Diego. This event is exclusively for City of San Diego residents. It's a great opportunity to enrich your garden soil while supporting the city's waste reduction efforts. Details are available on I Love A Clean San Diego's website.​ Sunset Sweep: Manzanita Canyon Looking ahead, on Thursday, April 10, from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM, there's the Sunset Sweep at Manzanita...

  10. 03/07/2025

    Andy Choi of Do Good Points: Profit with Purpose & Overcoming "The Great Detachment"

    The workforce is more detached from its work than it has ever been measured to be. Andy Choi of Do Good Points thinks the fix and the business opportunity are the same thing. Jeremy Rivera talks to him about profit with purpose, and about why non-profits need to think more like companies rather than less. Key takeaways The Great Detachment is a marketing problem as much as an HR one. People want their work to mean something and most brands give them nothing to attach to. Every business can carry a social impact element. Andy’s claim is that there is no category where this is impossible, only categories where nobody has bothered. Brand equity is now tied to social responsibility. Not as a nice-to-have. As a valuation input. Non-profits need a profitable mindset. Not to make profit, but to stop treating sustainability as somebody else’s job. The narrative around non-profits has to change before the funding does. Action beats intention. The gap between what people say they care about and what they do is where the whole sector lives. On this page The Great Detachment What profit with purpose actually means Why non-profits need a profitable mindset The for-profit partner nobody asks Pursue what breaks your heart People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper The Great Detachment Andy starts from workforce dissatisfaction, and treats it as a signal rather than a complaint. People are not detached because the work is hard. They are detached because they cannot see what it is for. That is a solvable problem and it is solvable commercially, which is the part that makes this episode more than a values conversation. What profit with purpose actually means Marketing can be a tool for social good, and Andy’s argument is that it is one of the few tools with enough reach to matter. A campaign that moves product and funds a cause is not a compromise between the two. It is the only version that is sustainable, because the moment the budget tightens a pure-cost programme is the first thing cut. He is direct that every business can incorporate a social impact element. The barrier is imagination, not category. Why non-profits need a profitable mindset This is the uncomfortable half of the conversation. Non-profits, in Andy’s view, have been trained into a mindset that treats money as slightly shameful, which leaves them permanently dependent and permanently under-resourced. Resources are what solve societal problems. An organisation that cannot fund itself is not more virtuous. It is just smaller. The for-profit partner nobody asks The practical opportunity: there are plenty of commercial companies that would happily extend their marketing reach through a genuine non-profit partnership. Save Fry Oil comes up in the episode as exactly that kind of business. Brand equity is tied to social responsibility now. That means the partnership is worth something real to the company, which is what makes it durable rather than a favour. Pursue what breaks your heart The closing note is a call to action, and it is specific. Pick the thing that breaks your heart rather than the thing that scores well. Then do something, because intention without action is where most of this sector’s energy goes to die. People, ideas and sources...

  11. Season 1 Trailer

    Introducing Our Unscripted Interview Podcast for Green inititives and non-profits

    As part of our social enterprise, Community Clean Links, we're interviewing teams who are making a difference in their community by cleaning up trash, helping those in need and improving our world.

    Introducing Our Unscripted Interview Podcast for Green inititives and non-profits
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We're talking with non-profit organizations, founders, and activists who are furthering green initiatives or community benefit programs.

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