The Nonprofit CEO Podcast

Heather Rice-Minus walked out of a board meeting without an important approval. She had presented a new mission and vision for Prison Fellowship, built over a year of listening in prisons and long work with her leadership team. The lawyers wordsmithed. Her board chair asked whether people would understand it. The words went back on the shelf. She went home and sat with her husband, wondering what she had signed up for. Four months later, at her first board meeting as CEO, she put the same words back on the screen. She had sent a memo in advance explaining why each one was chosen. The vote to approve was unanimous. This conversation covers what happened in between, including the January meeting where she asked her leadership team to tell her what to change in the draft, and the cascading decisions that followed the vote. She also talks about the board selection process she has been rebuilding, why she would rather have 13 board members than the maximum of 21, the parental leave policy she announced in her first all-staff meeting, and why the people slightly askew from your vision are the hardest ones to see. Heather Rice-Minus is President and CEO of Prison Fellowship, the nation's largest Christian nonprofit serving people in prison, their families, and those coming home. Prison Fellowship reported $70.3 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025 and is celebrating its 50th year in 2026.

Barry Corey is starting his twentieth year as president of Biola University. He says he is on his third presidency at the same institution. Early on, he hired a senior leader he liked and respected. Years later the university had moved and the role had moved with it. Barry agonized for weeks over a decision he already knew was inevitable, and when he walked in to deliver it, the office started to spin and he nearly passed out. That decision, and what it cost to make, sits at the center of this conversation. Barry has also written a book, Necessary Burdens , with contributing author John Townsend, on the fourteen burdens carried by the one person at the top of an organization. His argument is that those burdens turn into assets once a leader stops reading them as evidence of weakness. This conversation covers why the top leader personifies the organization and absorbs its criticism as personal rejection, the distinction he draws between wanting to "be president" and wanting to "do president," and how fifteen years of retreats with a small group of other presidents has sustained him in the work. He also talks about the T.S. Eliot line he leads by, the five things he told his board he would do himself and delegate to no one, and why he calls it the president's office and never his own. Barry Corey is president of Biola University, a 5,500-student university in Southern California. His book Necessary Burdens , written with John Townsend, releases today.

Kaitlyn Slate stepped into her first CEO role knowing she was very different from her predecessor. The board wanted her to diversify revenue. The staff wanted her to understand who they were. And the farmers who had anchored the organization's model for 26 years were in the most difficult agricultural economy in recent memory. Kaitlyn had to decide whether to chase a quick win or stay true to a model that was severely strained. This conversation covers how she worked through the tension between diversifying revenue and protecting mission identity, how she thinkis about the farming communities at the heart of their work, and what a pilot program is teaching her about expanding the donor base without drifting. She also talks about why the loneliness of the CEO role surprised her, plus what she carries from degrees in historic preservation into how she thinks about organizational identity. Kaitlyn Slate is President and CEO of Growing Hope Globally, a 26-year-old membership-based food security organization working with 13 partner organizations globally.

Jews for Jesus had been sending staff to present to churches for 50 years, more than 1000/year. Pastors invited them in. Churches put them on the schedule. People started to give. Then the invitations started declining, and the costs kept rising. Aaron Abramson stepped into the CEO role and knew a reckoning was coming. He had been in the organization for 25 years, including a stretch as COO. The question was not whether to act, but when and how much. In his second year, he pulled his executive team offsite and put everything on the table. They talked about radical options. They talked about doing nothing. They landed somewhere in between: cut the department nearly in half, keep the engine at its core running, and carve out budget to find a new relationship with churches. There was a restructure, and there were layoffs. The decision involved people who had been with the mission for 20 years or more. Aaron shares what it took to hold that, why he needed the whole team riding with him rather than just signing off, and what he has learned about communicating a hard decision to boards, major donors, senior staff, and those in the field, all with different stakes in what they hear. Aaron Abramson is CEO of Jews for Jesus, a global organization with nearly 300 staff. He's also the author of Mission Design: Leading Your Ministry Through Organizational and Cultural Change .

He got the largest gift in his organization's history. Then he left anyway. Nick Grono had been employee number one at the Freedom Fund since 2014, the only leader the anti-slavery organization had ever known, and he had already decided to step down at the end of the year. Then, in late 2025, an unexpected $60 million arrived from MacKenzie Scott, roughly three times the organization's annual budget. Everything that made leaving hard suddenly got harder. This conversation covers what made him go ahead anyway, why he spent months quietly reducing staff and slowing spending before that gift ever arrived, and what he believes a departing CEO owes the person who comes next. He also shares a world exclusive: the new nonprofit he is launching to back the next generation of nonprofit leaders. Nick is candid about the rest of the load. What Arthur Brooks and Richard Rohr taught him about the second half of a career. How he trained himself to stop deciding unilaterally and pull his leadership team into almost everything. And the quarterly all-staff call where any employee can ask him anything, anonymously, and "I don't know" became one of his most useful answers. Nick Grono is the CEO of the Freedom Fund, a global anti-slavery organization working across 10 countries on a roughly $20 million budget. They work alongside and on behalf of the estimated 50 million people trapped in forced labor, trafficking, and forced marriage. He is the author of How to Lead Nonprofits, and he steps down at the end of 2026 after 13 years.

Carol Bremer-Bennett sensed there were meetings before the meeting and meetings after the meeting. The initiatives she was pushing kept stalling, and she couldn't get people to say what they really thought. So about halfway through her tenure, she brought in a culture coach and ran the Lencioni five dysfunctions assessment. Trust came back yellow. Every other layer of the pyramid came back red. Not one green. (That's bad.) It took her breath away. But Carol decided to be thankful for it. This conversation covers her decision to build a culture of psychological safety from the top down, starting with herself, and why treating complaints, concerns, and hard feedback as gifts instead of threats became the most consequential choice she made as a leader. It's also about what the roughly year-long delay cost her before she found the courage to act. Carol also talks about the structural change the culture work required, how a flat organization once left her supervising as many as 18 people directly (that's also bad), and why she told staff to not be loyal to her. Carol Bremer-Bennett is U.S. Executive Director of World Renew, a Christian relief and development organization working in more than 20 countries, with $18.3 million in U.S. revenue in fiscal year 2025.

Sami DiPasquale put three border properties under contract in the same week. Abara had received its 501c3 status the month before. He had no money, but he moved anyway. Abara is a nonprofit in El Paso that works on both sides of the US-Mexico border, in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, creating spaces for connection, belonging, and peace across deep divides. The three properties sat right against the border fence, on a piece of land Sami calls one of the most historically significant in the Americas, five and a half acres of historic buildings that could become the physical hub of the work. He'd wanted the land for years. It had never been for sale. Then, a month after Abara finally became its own legal organization, all three parcels listed within a week of each other. This conversation covers how Sami structured private loans and LLCs to close the deals before Abara could even legally receive tax-deductible gifts, why he was nearly certain before the moment ever arrived, and the leadership lesson he wishes he'd learned earlier. He also explains why a book about leading without authority in a WWII internment camp is the most formational leadership read he can recommend. Sami DiPasquale is founder and executive director of Abara, a border peacebuilding nonprofit in El Paso, Texas. He has lived and worked in El Paso for more than 20 years, and much of Abara's work grew out of an organization he led there previously.

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 made the same shift before her. In the Philippines, a pastor who partners with World Hope sat her team down and told them, without any prompting, the exact thing she needed to hear. Then she had to tell the sponsors. Jenn talks about the hardest moment of the transition: a 96-year-old man who came to a church service with oxygen in his nose, handed her a check for his sponsored child, and left her wondering how they could tell him at all. This conversation covers why donors accept the logic of a change like this and grieve it anyway, what it took to move her team from fear to ownership, why she walked people through the change slowly instead of ripping the bandaid off, what she calls the messy middle, and what she has learned about her own identity in the seat. Jenn Petersen is President and CEO of World Hope International, a Christian relief and development organization working in clean water and sanitation, global health, and protection. She came to the role from International Justice Mission, as well as pastoring a church in NYC.

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 stage at their keystone event. This conversation covers his decision to bring a Republican and a Democrat senator before the community at the same time, what the calculus looked like, and why he tells newcomers he can almost guarantee they will hear someone at the conference they strongly disagree with. He also talks about why trust is meant to be spent rather than hoarded, why feedback from people on opposite ends of the spectrum is how he finds his way back to center, what he wishes he'd understood about the board relationship before his first time as a CEO, and what Ernest Shackleton has to do with leading a nonprofit. Josh Kwan has led The Gathering since 2019. Before that, he co-founded Praxis, a creative engine for redemptive entrepreneurship.

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 at risk. What happened next surprised him (and me). This conversation covers how Dan decided what he was willing to risk, why the honesty he feared would end the partnership was what saved it, and what he learned about holding the line when his team wanted the organization to speak out on current events. He also talks about waiting too long on his first firing decision and what it cost him, why he stayed in performance mode with his first board chair for two years, and what changed when he stopped trying to show that he was crushing it. Dan Vogel is founder and CEO of Flourish Fund, a collaborative philanthropy fund launched in 2023 that pools capital from high-capacity givers to tackle problems too big for any one organization to solve, starting with the foster care system. He previously led the North America team of the Center for Public Impact, a nonprofit founded by BCG that grew to 40 staff and a $10 million budget.

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 conversation covers how she chose a process built for quiet, lasting change over public declaration, and what it felt like to hold that decision as a white woman with institutional power and no personal experience of what she was trying to address. She also talks about the decisions a CEO has to carry without being able to explain them, the mental test she set for herself years ago to stay grounded, and what she wishes she'd understood about technology before taking the job. Ann Graber Hershberger has served as Executive Director of Mennonite Central Committee, a relief, development, and peace organization that has worked through Anabaptist churches for over 100 years in approximately 45 countries.

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 front of his members, against advice that this was too much transparency, and asked them to help cover the debt. Every one of them agreed, each paying an extra month's premium to keep the group whole. The conversation opens out from there. Ted has watched many CEOs make these calls up close, and he names the inability to say no as the most vexing problem he sees capable leaders face. He talks about strategy as choosing what you will not do, and the pruning season his own team is in right now. He also holds a quieter conviction: a CEO with no life outside the work will not last in it. His standard icebreaker asks leaders to name a hobby, and rules out family and reading, because he wants to know who they are when the job is not in the way. Ted Esler is President and CEO of Missio Nexus, the trade association for the faith-based mission agency world. The organization is 109 years old and serves 340 member agencies whose staff work across the globe, including active conflict zones. Ted has led Missio Nexus for over 10 years.

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 both sides of the conflict. Eric also leads a bipartisan organization in a city that wants to sort everyone onto one side of the aisle. He is candid about the gap between the job he trained for and the job he got. He came up on Capitol Hill. He now spends half his time raising money. Eric Mitchell is President of the Alliance to End Hunger, a 107-member coalition spanning corporations, faith groups, universities, and nonprofits working to end hunger in the U.S. and globally.

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 the runway ahead quickly running out. His first hire came on two weeks before launch. He talks about what it took to know the moment was right: a board that embodied the mission rather than just orbiting it, the intuition that comes from knowing something inside out, the pressure of asking someone else to divert their career to join you in something unproven, and and why he framed CCPL as a 30-year mission from day one. Michael Wear is the Founder, President, and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, a nonpartisan institution dedicated to the formation of Christians for the sake of public life. CCPL's flagship Public Life Fellowship Program is now in its fourth year. He previously served in the White House directing faith outreach and writes regularly for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.