The Nonprofit CEO Podcast

World Hope had run a child sponsorship program for 30 years. Jenn Petersen was one year into her CEO tenure. 

The program was declining, the administrative lift was high, and it was no longer serving donors, field teams, or communities the way anyone had hoped. It was also the only recurring revenue World Hope had, and it funded a narrow slice of the work.

Jenn spent six months listening before she decided. She talked to the field teams, to the sponsors, to the people the program was meant to serve, and to peer organizations that had m...

Josh Kwan leads The Gathering, a national community of philanthropists and impact investors who span the full political and theological spectrum.

His only real currency is trust, and every consequential decision he makes runs through one question: how far can he push this community before he gets out too far ahead of them? 

He points to a line from the organization's founder: if you climb out of the trench and wander so far in front of your community, they start to think you're the enemy. That tension shows up when Josh decides who gets on s...

Dan Vogel spent months building a partnership with a large institutional funder. Flourish Fund was barely a year old, still in startup mode, without a stable base of funding. The money would have been meaningful, and the credibility would have been great. 

Then it became clear the funder wanted more control than Dan could give without compromising the collaborative model he was building. So he told the granting institution it might not work.

He got off the call and immediately wondered if he had just blown up months of work and put his young organization a...

Ann Graber Hershberger spent nearly four decades connected to Mennonite Central Committee before she led it: first as a worker in Nicaragua and El Salvador, then through years of board service, alongside a 33-year career as a nursing professor. She is retiring this summer as its executive director.

When she set out to address racial equity at MCC, the question wasn't whether to act. The organization had tried before, more than once, and those efforts had ended up on a shelf. The hard part was how to do it so something would actually change.

This...

Ted Esler launched a partially self-funded health insurance program for the staff of Missio Nexus member organizations. It grew from zero to $22 million in about 18 months. Then COVID arrived. 

Claims went quiet while people stayed away from the doctor, so the program looked healthy when it was not. The bills landed all at once when they came back, and the losses grew large enough to threaten an association running about $2 million a year. 

His consultants told him to ride it out. He decided to pull the plug. 

Then he laid the full numbers in...

A member publicly demanded to know where the Alliance to End Hunger stood on the Gaza conflict.

Half of Eric Mitchell's coalition supported one side. Half supported the other. 

Silence was its own answer. He held off as long as he could, then decided to speak. 

Before the statement went public, he pulled leaders from both sides into crafting it. He talks through how he kept the consultation tight, who he brought in, and why staying strictly in the lane of food access let the Alliance say something true while helping people on bo...

Michael Wear had a clear vision for the Center for Christianity and Public Life: deep formation work, deep investment in cohorts of twelve to sixteen fellows, commitments measured in years.

Some potential funders kept pointing to cheaper models. Other organizations were reaching thousands for less. The constant temptation was to take a shortcut, starting with something splashy and backfill the real work later.

Michael kept asking one question: a shortcut to what? A shortcut would have built something else entirely.

He launched in October 2022 without a full year's budget, watching financial thresholds with...

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...

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...

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? 

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, a...

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...

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...

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.

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. A...

Jody Levison-Johnson had a big idea and had to decide whether to bet her organization's resources on it. A film was coming out that could either quietly fade or become an inflection point for how the country thinks about the nonprofit sector. She had to decide if Social Current should lead the campaign that followed, and how much to ask her board for.

She also talks about the two ways CEOs drift into bad decisions: chasing off-mission funding and refusing to sunset programs they love, plus why she thinks the hardest decision most nonprofit CEOs eventually face...

Curtis Chang set out to build a nonprofit nobody would ever know by name. He wanted Good Faith to be like Target: the store as the brand, not the founder. 

Four years later, Curtis, David French, and Russell Moore were at the center of the most prominent faith-and-politics curriculum in the country. A quarter million people had used it. This conversation is about how a founder navigates a pivot, and why market need and relationships sometimes rewrite the plan.

He also talks about the two ways nonprofit CEOs drift into bad decisions: chasing off-mission funding a...

Andy Crouch uses a framework from Peter Greer to name a structural problem with honest at the heart of many nonprofits. It's the stakeholder gap, and he argues it creates built-in incentives to not tell the whole truth all the time. And the better you are at fundraising, the more danger you're in.

Andy also traces the 40-year collapse of institutional trust to something deeper than politics: the unmasking of prestige as mere dominance. And he makes an unexpected case that the generation coming into the workforce right now may be the best in decades, if you...

Olivia Mulerwa spent months carrying a decision she couldn't talk about with anyone who didn't already have a stake in the outcome. She needed to have a hard conversation with a beloved board member. The rest of the board was unwilling to even discuss it. She had to decide in isolation.

This conversation covers how she made that call, the listening process she used in advance, and the one person she thinks of before making any major decision at Mission ONE.

Olivia also talks about stepping into the President's role just three months after being...

Dr. Jennifer Holloran walked into her first board meeting as CEO of American Bible Society and left with a $5 million crisis and a collapsing timeline, with no peers she could call.

This conversation covers that decision, how she navigated a pressurized process, and what she wishes she'd had in those first weeks that was lacking.
She also talks about the energy calendar she built after hitting a wall, the decisions that still keep her up at night, and what it looks like to lead a legacy organization toward better health and effectiveness. 

Jennifer is P...

On this episode of The Nonprofit CEO Podcast, hosts Adam Jeske and Krish Kandiah dive into the complex, consequential decisions that shape nonprofit leadership. Krish Kandiah, founder of the Sanctuary Foundation and a key figure in driving the UK’s response to refugee crises, shares his journey from fostering children in his own home to influencing national policy and launching innovative charities. Together, they explore the challenges of starting organizations rooted in personal conviction, navigating government relationships, and leading through changing political landscapes. Listeners will hear candid reflections on letting go as a founder, inspiring large-scale community action, and ma...

Phil Buchanan had 48 hours to decide whether he would speak out when it seemed everyone else was staying quiet.

We talk about that decision, the actual calculus, and the strategic mistake he thinks many nonprofit CEOs are making right now.

He also talks about what nobody told him before he became CEO, the culture he has spent 25 years building, and why standing for nothing is the fastest way to lose trust.

Phil is president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, a research and advisory organization serving foundations and donors across the sector, and...

The role of the nonprofit CEO role is isolating. The decisions are high-stakes, the support is often thin, and the margin for error can literally be life and death.

The Nonprofit CEO Podcast is where those decisions get talked about honestly. 

Hosted by Adam Jeske, The Nonprofit CEO Advisor, this podcast goes beyond theory and best practices to the real choices that define careers and shape communities.

If you're a nonprofit CEO navigating tough calls, or you know one who is, this is the conversation you've been missing.

For patterns, synthesis, a...