Mental health support needs a place in the everyday work of a nonprofit. Regular check-ins and clear ways to get help give staff support they can turn to while doing demanding work.

Sarah talks with Weanne Estrada, a mental health specialist at ADRA who supports people working in humanitarian settings. Together, they explore what nonprofit leaders can learn from supporting staff before, during, and after emergency deployments, including the everyday moments of connection that staff said mattered to them.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

Why Weanne sees mental health support as essential to...

Show Notes

When you explain an idea to your team, the big picture may be clear in your head, but it's probably not as clear in your team's head as you think it is. Specific examples help other people understand what you mean and what the work actually involves.

Sarah Olivieri walks through how to add useful detail to everyday communication so you can get what's in your head into the minds of your team. She shares practical examples from leadership meetings, planning, and the experiences of people your nonprofit serves. She shows how describing what happens...

Show Notes

Reaching out to potential major donors can feel premature when you haven't figured out how you will follow up. A written contact list and a plan for the next interaction give you a simple place to start, without mapping out a year of conversations.

Sarah shares this approach using questions from nonprofit leaders starting major gifts programs in the Inspired Philanthropy Circle. She shares her own struggle with following up, the scheduling habit that helps her stay connected, and ways to give people something to look forward to together.

In This...

Episode Description

Reaching out to potential major donors can feel premature when you haven't figured out how you will follow up. A written contact list and a plan for the next interaction give you a simple place to start, without mapping out a year of conversations.

Sarah walks through this approach using questions from nonprofit leaders starting major gifts programs in the Inspired Philanthropy Circle. She shares her own struggle with following up, the scheduling habit that helps her stay connected, and ways to give people something to look forward to together.

In...

A fundraising story asks people to care and act. How you gather and share that story matters to the person who lived it, the audience hearing it, and the donor relationships you hope to build.

Sarah invited Maria A Bryan, a trauma-informed storytelling trainer who helps nonprofits tell difficult stories while protecting the people involved, to unpack how consent, safety, and choice belong in fundraising. They discuss asking for stories without pressure, preparing audiences for difficult content, and building donor relationships around shared impact rather than guilt.

Who it's for

Show Notes

Arriving at a team meeting with a solution already worked out can feel like you're helping everyone get ahead. When the work needs several people's perspectives, leaving the solution open gives the team a chance to develop something together that none of them could have created alone.

Sarah discusses when preparing a solution before a meeting can get in the way of collaboration, drawing on her experience helping teams create something new together.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

What to consider before working out a solution ahead of a...

Show Notes

Arriving at a team meeting with a solution already worked out can feel like you're helping everyone get ahead. When the work needs several people's perspectives, leaving the solution open gives the team a chance to develop something together that none of them could have created alone.

Sarah discusses when preparing a solution before a meeting can get in the way of collaboration, drawing on her experience helping teams create something new together.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

What to consider before working out a solution ahead of a...

Episode Description

Trust can be measured. It grows through honest communication and fair treatment, and it can break when leaders mishandle change.

Sarah invited Kim Bohr, President and CEO of SparkEffect, whose annual research tracks organizational trust across the US, to discuss what builds trust, what breaks it, and how leaders can protect it through disruption.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

Why 85 percent of people faced major disruption in two years

What Kim's research says builds trust

Why hard conversations should get to the point

...

Show Notes

Planned giving often lands on the someday list right beside the wealth screen a nonprofit can't yet afford. Tony Martignetti says you can launch it this week with one honest conversation about a gift in a will. No campaign, no brochure, no page.

Sarah sat with Tony Martignetti, a front-line planned giving fundraiser since 1997 and author of the new book Planned Giving Accelerated, to discuss how a small or mid-size nonprofit launches planned giving in a single week, without a wealth screen or a legal background.

How Tony's...

Episode Description

Many nonprofit leaders treat strategy, operations, and team as three separate pillars in their organization, but in fact, they are part of one integrated system. In this episode, Sarah goes into strategy, operations, and team as the who, what, where, when, and how of running a great nonprofit. She shares how these are built into her Impact Method®, which she developed back in 2017.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

Why strategy, operations, and the team have to work as one system

Episode Description

Many nonprofit leaders treat turnover as a problem to solve after someone resigns. The organizations that handle it well plan for it before the hire, in how the job itself is designed.

Sarah invited Steve Cadigan, LinkedIn's first Chief Human Resources Officer and the person who grew the company from 400 people to 4,000 while the median tenure on his own staff was nine months, to talk about how to build an organization that works when people come and go, and how to stay connected to the good ones after they leave.

In...

Episode Description

Many nonprofit leaders pick a marketing tactic first- a gala, a Facebook fundraiser, a social media takeover, and then hope it works. The organizations that get a real return pick the goal first and let the goal decide the tactic.

Sarah goes solo to work through how to build a marketing strategy simple enough to fit on one page, drawing on the years she spent running a marketing agency for nonprofits.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

Executive directors about to spend money on a tactic a board member suggested<...

Show Notes:

Most nonprofit leaders treat retention as a problem to fix after the hire. The organizations that keep people for decades treat it as something they build into the hire itself.

Sarah invited Crystal FitzSimons, the president of the Food Research and Action Center and someone who has been at FRAC for twenty-four years leading a team where staff routinely stay ten, twenty, and even forty years, to unpack what actually holds people in a nonprofit for the long term.

This episode is for:

Let Them Go Well with Sarah Olivieri

The thought shows up quietly and then keeps coming back. Maybe this person is not right for us. Then it sits there for months while you look for more evidence and rehearse a conversation you never have. Meanwhile the person you are worried about is stuck in a job that is grinding on them too.

In this solo episode, Sarah walks through how to know when it is time to let someone go, and how to do it in a way that leaves everyone intact.

Show Notes

Most nonprofit leaders already know they can't make every decision themselves. They've said it out loud in meetings and retreats. They want more decisions happening close to the work.

Then a year later, they're still the bottleneck.

Sarah sat down with Jocelyn Wyatt, CEO of Alight and co-founder of ideo.org, to unpack why distributed leadership stalls inside organizations that say they want it, and what it actually takes to make it real across a global team of over two thousand humanitarians.

Here's what you'll hear:

How...

Lunch Is Leadership with Sarah Olivieri

Lunch is the first thing to go. The calendar fills up, something has to give, and the hour in the middle of the day is the one that looks optional. Skip it enough times and you start making your biggest decisions of the week on an empty tank.

In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why lunch is a leadership decision, and exactly how to get it back on your calendar and keep it there.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

Why your blood sugar spikes...

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

Many nonprofit leaders I talk to about major gifts describe some version of the same wall.

They know the money is out there. They have heard the statistics about wealth transfer and donor-advised funds. They have sat through the trainings. And still, nothing moves.

So they go looking for the missing skill. Better scripts. A new CRM. A workshop on how to ask.

Here's what I often find when I see an organization trying to do major gifts...

Ride the Wave Already Moving with Sarah Olivieri

Strategic planning gets treated like a decision you make in a quiet room, then hand down to the team. So leaders sit down to "set direction," invent something new from scratch, and spend the next year trying to force it into existence. The resource burn is real. The traction usually isn't.

In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why strategy is mostly discovered rather than decided, and how to tell the difference before you commit the year to it.

The two sides...

Top 5 Episodes Countdown

Five episodes rose to the top over the last two years of this show. Trauma. Cash flow.

Starting a nonprofit from scratch. Health equity. Organizational design. On the surface they have nothing in common. Underneath, all five are making the same argument, and none of them tell you to work harder.

Sarah pulled the download data on the last hundred episodes and ranked them across thirty-day, ninety-day, and lifetime windows. The same five came out on top every time. In this solo episode she counts them down and reads the...

Build Programs That Stick with Sarah Olivieri

Most programs are built middle-out. Someone has an idea for a workshop, a curriculum, a service, and the design starts with the activities. The end result is fuzzy, the beginning state is assumed, and the middle is a stack of sessions that made sense in the moment. Then clients start drifting between steps, going quiet, and finishing without really finishing.

In this solo episode, Sarah walks through how to design a program on purpose so it actually delivers the change it promises.

In This Episode, You'll...

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

There is a quiet belief inside a lot of nonprofits that running things like a business would somehow cheapen the mission. That budgets, product thinking, and direct asks belong to the for-profit world, and that the nonprofit world runs on something purer. Heart. Passion. Care.

The care is real. The problem is that heart gets asked to do a job it was never built to do. When there is no clear product, no business-grade financial forecasting, and no habit of quantifying value in dollars, people...

The Budget Layout Trap with Sarah Olivieri

Money gets tight. The bank balance looks thin, or the bottom line slips into the red, and the first move almost everyone reaches for is the same one: cut expenses. It feels responsible. It feels like control. And when your budget lumps every expense into one big pile, it is also the fastest way to cut the very spending that was bringing money in.

In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why the standard budget layout quietly sets nonprofits up to make the wrong cut, and how she structures a...

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

There is a particular kind of nonprofit leader who is very good at almost everything. They can build the budget. They can write the grant. They can run the intake, fix the database, cover the front desk, and close the books when the bookkeeper leaves. When something breaks, they already know how to fix it, so they do.

This is where nonprofit CEO leadership capacity quietly becomes the ceiling on the entire organization.

When the most capable...

Episode Description

Most leadership books focus on the individual, their style, their skills, their presence. What rarely gets named is the leadership structure itself, the actual model your organization runs on. Sarah would argue that structure is at least half of good leadership, and without it, even a strong visionary creates whiplash instead of momentum.

In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why leadership structure matters, why the org chart tends to make things worse, and what a distributed, outcomes-based model looks like inside a nonprofit.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

...

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

There is a quiet assumption baked into how most nonprofits operate. If you need something, you build it yourself. Need a fundraising event, plan one. Need HR, handle it in-house. Need systems, cobble them together. The nonprofit shared infrastructure that could carry all of this rarely enters the conversation, because the default is to go it alone.

I understand where the instinct comes from. Nonprofits are scrappy by necessity. Budgets are tight, and doing it yourself feels like the responsible, frugal choice.

But...

Stop Using To-Do Lists

Every time you look at your to-do list and ask "what should I do next," your brain drops into a small version of strategic planning. That mode burns real energy, and you do it over and over all day long. Add in the secret to-do list, the tasks you never even write down but still have to do, and the list stops feeling like a tool and starts feeling like a weight.

In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down the to-do list trap and the calendar-based system she uses instead, the same one...

Episode Description

Imagine a burning building with three people trapped in three rooms. You run to the first and free them halfway, then the second, then the third, then back to the first. You spend all your time running and never fully free anyone. That image is what split focus actually costs an organization, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

In this solo episode, Sarah walks through how to prioritize when everything feels urgent, drawing on her years as an executive director and her work coaching organizations through it.

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

A year ago, a single nonprofit had $20 million in federal grants on the books. Three awards from three different agencies. By every conventional measure, the funding base looked strong. Then federal priorities shifted. All three grants were eliminated. The organization went from 30 staff to 18 in a matter of months, but they are still standing. That nonprofit is From Prison Cells to PhD, and its founder, Dr. Stanley Andrisse, is the guest on this week's episode of Inspired Nonprofit Leadership. The story has stayed...

Episode Description

The right team is the thing nearly every organization comes back to, whatever else they're working on. Funding, scale, board questions, they all run through the people in the seats.

And the way to get the right people is to hire well.

In this episode, Sarah shares four tips for better hiring, drawn from her own process and the work she does with the organizations she coaches.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

Why building a list of people you'd love to work with before you ever have...

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

Ask any nonprofit leader what their organization needs most, and you will hear the same answer almost every time. More money. We need more funding. We need to hire. The whole nonprofit resource problem, in their telling, comes down to a number that is too small.

I have worked with hundreds of organizations, and I have stopped taking that answer at face value. Not because leaders are wrong about feeling stretched. They are absolutely stretched. But when you peel back...

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

There is a moment that arrives in almost every mission-driven organization. You build something that works. A program, a platform, a process. It depends on one person, one vendor, one funder, one system that only one set of hands understands. And for a while, that works just fine.

Then that one thing disappears. The developer leaves. The funder pulls out. The grant ends. The person who knew how everything fit together walks out the door. And suddenly the thing you...

Most nonprofits are walking into 2026 making the same three fundraising mistakes that quietly sank them in 2025. None of the three look like mistakes from the inside. They look like prudence. They look like stewardship. They look like the responsible thing to do when reserves feel thin and the board is anxious. They are actually the most expensive habits in the sector.

In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down the three patterns that drain nonprofit fundraising power, why scarcity mindset masquerades as good financial management, the difference between spending money and investing it, and the three leadership moves...

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

Most nonprofits I talk to are not avoiding strategic planning because they don't believe in it. They're avoiding it because the process is heavy, the resulting document is long and hard to act on, and six months later it feels out of date.

So they wait. They wait until something forces the conversation. A new executive director. A board crisis. A funder asking for it. By the time planning starts, the stakes feel enormous, the calendar feels short, and the team feels exhausted before the...

Episode Description

Most nonprofit leaders are running a calendar built out of obligations they accepted on autopilot. The board asks. The donor meeting. The standing call that has been on the schedule for so long nobody can remember why. The week fills up, and the week after that, and the work that actually energizes the leader gets squeezed into whatever is left. Which is usually nothing.

Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through how to design a schedule around energy and alignment, drawing on the way she has run her own organization on...

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

There is a belief running quietly through most of the nonprofit sector. It says that being underfunded is just part of the deal. That if you chose this work, you also chose to do it with too little money, too few people, and salaries that would never fly in the for-profit world.

That belief feels like realism. It is actually a design choice.

When the rules that govern your funding are unclear, unfair, or built by people...

Most leaders trying to scale their organization start by doing more. Longer days. More meetings. One more push to get the next milestone over the line. The ceiling shows up anyway, because a founder cannot scale herself. Growth is more in, more out. Scale is more out per unit of effort, and that math only changes when the structure underneath the work changes.

Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through the role redesign that makes scaling possible, drawing on the Impact Method framework and a decade of running her own organization on it.

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

There is a moment most executive directors know.

A funder is hinting at money for a new initiative. A long-time staff member is pushing for an expansion. A community partner is asking whether you can serve a new population. Your inbox holds three more open questions just like these. Everyone is well-intentioned. Every option has a case.

You close your laptop on a Friday and feel the weight of having to decide.

This is the kind of tired...

Episode Description

Most leaders think of delegation as a way to get time back. That framing is half the story, and it's the half that keeps leaders stuck in the weeds. When the conversation around delegation only centers on the CEO's calendar, the team ends up filled with people who do tasks well and own almost nothing.

Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through why delegating outcomes, not tasks, is what builds a team capable of running the organization forward.

Why task-focused delegation accidentally selects for "that's not...

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

Most nonprofit leaders I work with want to move faster, decide cleaner, and hold the standard. From the outside, that looks responsible. From the inside, something else is usually happening.

When a leader skips the relational work because it feels slow, the cost doesn't disappear. It moves. It shows up later as rework, attrition, board friction, and team members who go quiet in meetings because they have stopped expecting to be heard. The bill comes due downstream, where it is harder to trace.

Episode Description

Most founders are running their organization from operator mode and calling it leadership. The doing feels productive. The decisions feel necessary. And the strategic work, the part that actually points the organization in the right direction, keeps getting pushed to "when things calm down."

… And things never calm down.

Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through the difference between CEO mode and operator mode, why staying stuck in the doing creates a bottleneck that stalls growth, and how to start protecting visionary time even when you are wearing every hat.