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Gloria Feldt shares her experience as keynote speaker at the 26th Annual Nonprofit Conference on Sustainability Strategies
Original article, "5 Really Bad Strategic Mistakes Nonprofit Leaders Often Make," published in TAKETHELEADWOMEN.COM
October 28, 2018 - Last week I was privileged to keynote the annual conference of Arizona State University’s Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation by being interviewed by the Center’s Executive Director Robert Ashcraft.
(A shout out here to the Center’s Nicole Anderson who organized the conference masterfully. If I may take a point of pride, she was a participant in Take The Leads 50 Women Can Change the World in Nonprofits program last year.)
Thanks to our intrepid Take The Lead AZ Leadership Council member K Royal and alumnae of our 50 Women Can Change the World in Nonprofits (You can apply here for the 2018 cohort https://www.50womencan.com/nonprofit) Suzanne Sosnowski, Emily Denes, and Julie Euber, conference attendees learned about the transformational power of the program.
Ashcraft had meticulously prepared for the conversation. He wryly commented that he knew more about me than I knew about myself. That unleashed my inner audaciousness.
Filters off, I let rip some observations I’ve made over four decades of doing nonprofit work. I’ve had a variety of titles — executive director, CEO, president — in nonprofit organizations from small to middle sized to large, local to national. But in all cases, the buck stopped with me and that gave me a bird’s eye view of leadership and the nonprofit sector in general.
I could simply share the ASU Now article reporting on the lively discussion and be done with it. But after the conference, I kept thinking about the challenges I’d met, the mistakes I’d made, and the hard lessons I’d learned.
Read the rest here.