We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

Katie Hannah printed out the rejection email and brought it to the interview. "After careful consideration, our board of reviewers has determined that your application does not make the case for membership at this time."

Most fundraisers file that away and move on. The Director of Development at Momentum Leaders sent one open-ended question instead — and it turned into a $223,000 yes for a leadership nonprofit in Birmingham, Alabama. 🩵

This is Possible in Practice, a limited series of case studies from leaders in the We Are For Good community — the ask they sent, the risk th...

$1,500 in lifetime giving. A million-dollar gift in the will.

Tony Martignetti calls it the planned giving multiplier — the gap between what a donor gives you while they're living and what they leave you when they're gone. It's often measured in the thousands. And the donors most likely to trigger it aren't your wealthiest. They're your most loyal. 🩵

Tony has spent 29 years in planned giving — as a frontline fundraiser, a director of planned giving at two nonprofits, and now founder of Planned Giving Accelerator, where his clients have secured millions in bequests. His new book exists to prov...

One in five adults now get their news from TikTok. Over 40% of adults under 30 do. That same feed is where younger donors are finding the causes they'll give to. Trust has shifted from institutions to individuals, and most nonprofits are still running the old playbook. 🩵

Patricia McLoughlin is General Manager of The Anthem Awards, where she reviews more than 2,000 entries a year from 42 countries. Her team turned that vantage point into the Shared Influence report, then into something more useful: a set of plays any nonprofit can run, whether you have a media budget or a staff of...

Big Brothers Big Sisters has been collecting data for 120 years. When an economist finally studied it, the case for support changed completely: young people who were mentored are 20% more likely to attend college and earn 15% more.

Ginneh Baugh, Chief Impact Officer at Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, has spent two decades helping nonprofit leaders measure what actually matters. Her system is three steps — know your data, show it as a story, grow the movement around it. 🩵

In this episode, you'll hear:

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:

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 episo...

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:

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:

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:

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 tabl...

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...

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:

Madge Thomas leads a leadership academy most nonprofit professionals have never heard of — one that's quietly spent nearly two decades and $100M+ training over 165,000 nonprofit leaders worldwide. As president of the American Express Foundation and head of corporate sustainability at American Express, she's built it on a deceptively simple premise: invest in the leader, not just their programs, and the impact ripples outward — to the organization, the community, and long after any single initiative ends.

Madge makes the case that the people powering nonprofits are the sector's most under-resourced asset — then shows how the Academy is changing that w...

There are 12 million kids in the U.S. with a mental health concern, and four out of five never get treatment — not because the care doesn't exist, but because it takes an average of 15 years for proven research to reach the providers families actually visit.

Dr. Lisa Hunter Romanelli has spent her career closing that gap. As CEO of The REACH Institute — and its very first employee 19 years ago — she's helped train nearly 10,000 primary care providers in evidence-based children's mental health care, with a goal of 16,000 by 2027. 🧠 But this conversation is really about storytelling. Lisa has taken a public...

The traditional nonprofit playbook is full of defaults nobody voted for: merge only when you're desperate, expect your team to run on empty, soften your mission to stay safe, and treat funders like they're doing you a favor. At the We Are For Good Summit, four leaders sat down to throw all of that out. 🧠

Hosted by Stacy Huston, CEO of SixDegrees.org and a social impact strategist working at the intersection of storytelling, influence, and action, this conversation brings together Tammy Tibbetts (She's the First), Lindsey Fuller (The Teaching Well), and Becky Straw (The Adventure Project) — three...

The Kiki and ballroom scene, built by Black and brown LGBTQ+ youth of color in New York City, has been creating art, designing fashion, performing, and building community for over 20 years.

Meet Colby King 👋 He’s the founder of Kiki Arts Collaborative, an economic development platform turning ballroom artistry into sustainable careers in arts, culture, and media through creative mentorship, job training, and internship placement. In 2025, that work earned Colby the David Prize, one of five awarded annually to the most luminary nonprofits in New York City. 

In this episode, you'll hear:

Dr. Sanjay Bindra is a practicing cardiologist who built a $2.5 million endowment at a zero-staff nonprofit in less than four years, with no campaigns and no urgency emails. Then he studied why it worked. 

The result: the GIVE Study, a 12-month real-time look at how small nonprofits can achieve sustainable recurring giving through trust, behavioral design, and strong governance. 

In this episode, you'll hear:

An 85% graduation rate against a district average of 60% — at a second-chance school in the South Bronx where the primary healing tool isn't a worksheet or a clipboard. It's a professional recording studio. 🎙️

J.C. Hall is a licensed clinical social worker, a hip hop artist, and a 2024 David Prize winner (one of just five awarded across New York City). At Mott Haven Community High School, he's spent 13 years building a program where trauma-exposed students rewrite their own narratives — set to a beat. His own path here ran through addiction, psych wards, and a teenage years he didn't expect to...

"Crisis creates clarity, and philanthropic funding is the best risk capital we have." That's how Hala Hanna reads the moment we're in, and as Executive Director of MIT Solve, she has the data to back it up.

MIT Solve has spent a decade brokering the relationship between companies, funders, and the early-stage innovators closing equity gaps in health, learning, climate, and economic opportunity. Their 460 solvers are reaching 430 million lives, have mobilized $87 million in direct funding, and have collectively raised $1.4 billion. And Hala has a front-row seat to the fundamental shift happening in how money moves toward mission.<...

As Co-Founder of Caring Across Generations and President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Ai-jen Poo has spent decades working at the intersection of policy and culture — because she knows you can't change one without the other. 

A MacArthur Fellow, Time 100 honoree, and author of The Age of Dignity, she's now launching a million-care-conversations campaign and a new production label, Give Not Take Media, to get care stories into film and television at scale. 🩵

In this episode, you'll hear: