The Nonprofit CEO Podcast

When Jonathan Reckford became CEO of Habitat for Humanity in 2005, Habitat had more than 2,500 entities, no common logo, no legal agreements with its affiliates, and no standards. It was helping about 125,000 people a year.

And Habitat was losing ground. "The gap between what it costs to create a unit of housing and what people can afford today is the worst it's ever been," he says. "So we are not winning."

The decision was to change the question Habitat asked itself, from how many houses can we build to "what would it take to actually address the housing need in all the geographies we serve." That question took Habitat into advocacy, policy, and work with governments, then housing microfinance, building materials, and an innovation center. There was resistance. "If you threaten something they're doing, it's not just a small threat, it's a foundational threat," he says.

By spring 2026, Habitat had about 1,000 entities worldwide and had helped over 3 million people the previous year.

This conversation covers how the new question changed Habitat's work, why Habitat's old rule on government money was "a policy we weren't following and actually a policy that didn't make sense," and how the tsunami response and Hurricane Katrina, which hit days before he started, opened space for change.

He also talks about the 51/49 decisions that reach the CEO, why he can't recall ever moving someone out of a role too soon, the CEO peer group he chairs and the coach he has met every two or three weeks for 18 years, and why he prefers pull to push across a federation of about 1,000 organizations.

Jonathan Reckford is CEO of Habitat for Humanity International, the global Christian housing organization, and has led it since 2005. Habitat for Humanity International reported $370 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025.

In 2023, Ramsey Alwin had to decide when to bring the network of organizations on aging issues back together in person.

The National Council on Aging's annual Age+ Action Conference had drawn more than 1,200 people at its peak, and it had gone virtual during the pandemic. The field wanted to come back. Aging network professionals had lost clients, colleagues, and family members, and they wanted to grieve together. They also work closely with older adults, many with multiple chronic conditions.

Other aging conferences had outbreaks in the months before NCOA's, and some of Ramsey's own team caught COVID at them. "That weighed heavy on me," she says.

With about a month and a half to decide and secure space, NCOA ran two conferences in one, virtual and in person, to test the waters. Attendees were tested and masked, and they used name tags, sticky notes, and dots to show how close they wanted to get. There was no outbreak. The next year, the conference went fully back in person.

"I wish I knew ahead of time everyone was going to be safe," she says.

This conversation covers how she decided without all the facts, weighing conflicting information from the field and from other conferences, the CDC data NCOA had from its $50 million vaccine outreach work, and the coalitions of national leaders she drew on.

She also talks about why the people part is the most complex part of the CEO role, what only the CEO can do, how she thinks about the power of the role, and the goal NCOA met ahead of schedule: improving the health and economic security of 40 million older adults.

Ramsey Alwin is President and CEO of the National Council on Aging, which works with senior centers, area agencies on aging, and community and faith-based organizations to help older adults age well. NCOA reported $77.9 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025.

When Rick Santos became CEO of Church World Service, it was a homecoming.

He had spent his first 13 years in international development there, left for more than a decade, and returned to succeed the leader he had once worked for. That leader had led the organization for 27 years.

Some of the furniture was the same. So were some of the systems, and so was the CFO. The organization “had been functioning really well for about 20 years, but it hadn’t really changed much in those 20 years,” he says.

He faced the question every new CEO faces: “What do I keep? What do I change?”

He spent six months listening. Then he brought the staff and board a package of strategic priorities: one program team in place of two silos, a more nimble organization, a broader funding base, and transparent collaboration.

Rick brought in outside consultants so his leaders would share an understanding of the problem, and he gave the leaders facing the biggest changes control over the pace.

One answer never satisfies him when he asks why something is done a certain way: “'That’s how we’ve always done it.' For me, that’s never the right answer.”

He also talks about the merger he previously led at IMA World Health, why nonprofit mergers are more complicated than corporate ones, why a 1% overhead rate would worry him, and the underrated work of being the bridge between the board and the staff.

Rick Santos is President and CEO of Church World Service, which works in refugee resettlement, disaster relief, and long-term development in the US and overseas. Church World Service reported $279.9 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025.

In 2021, YouVersion’s Bible App passed half a billion devices. The team celebrated. Bobby Gruenewald knew growth was barely above flat, and the milestone “felt very hollow.”

He decided that if he wasn’t going to steward it well, someone else should. He started looking for a CEO who had led at that scale.

When he asked one of his closest advisors who it should be, the advisor said, “Well, it needs to be you.”

Bobby pushed back: “We need a real CEO.”

But two other people he trusted agreed with the advisor. So in January 2022, Bobby stepped into the CEO role full time, “reluctantly and uncomfortably.”

Then, in his words, “nothing actually went well that year.”

The right candidates didn’t come, the numbers stayed flat, the team was in flux, and for the first time the ministry was spending money it didn’t have. By December, the leaders he needed arrived and the numbers began to turn.

This conversation covers why he labeled YouVersion’s first website a failure three months in, why he re-risked the work, and why he believes organizations lose speed and flexibility unless a leader pushes for them.

Bobby Gruenewald is founder and CEO of YouVersion, the ministry behind the free Bible App, which launched with Apple’s App Store in 2008 and is now on more than a billion devices. YouVersion is non-commercial and supported entirely by donors.

In six months, the Community Food Club grew by 47 percent. AJ Fossel had six people on staff. She was stocking onions in the back because there was nobody else. A trusted teammate told her she was going to leave.

AJ sat in her office after hours and cried.

She knew she needed to hire. She also knew that meant dipping into reserves, having a hard conversation with the board, and asking for help in a way that felt like admitting she didn't have all the answers. She took her board chair — who came from grocery — out to breakfast, because she couldn't leave the store at lunch.

This conversation covers what she brought to that board meeting, why being transparent with donors about exactly where the food club stood built more trust than a polished plan would have, and what the board authorized that finally let her lead without second-guessing every dollar.

She also talks about a member advisory council that makes calls she would not have made herself, and why charging a monthly fee matters — it turns members into customers.

AJ Fossel is Executive Director of the Community Food Club in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a nonprofit grocery store serving households across Kent County, with $4.5 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025.

Three days into his tenure, Will Jones was asked to sign a letter moving $150,000 from Thompson's endowment to cover a $200,000 payroll.

Two weeks later, the same letter was back on his desk.

Thompson was spending about $5 million a year more than it brought in, and its leaders were telling staff the model could not work any other way.

Will concluded the organization had more people than work. On a three-day beach trip with his family, he told his wife, "I know what I need to do." He would take a reduction in force to the board, and if they would not back him, this was not the right mission for him.

A board member asked whether it could wait six months. Will said it could, but in six months the number would be 50. The board backed him.

This conversation covers what it cost him to be "the heavy" in a leadership team that was "okay with the mission shutting down," and how Thompson innovated to serve more kids that were falling through cracks in the system elsewhere.

He also talks about why he stopped his executive team from voting on decisions, why leaders who can grow but don't want to are the worst fit for a growing organization, and why nearly all his peers are for-profit leaders.

Will Jones is President and CEO of Thompson Child & Family Focus, a 140-year-old youth-serving organization in the Charlotte area that works in five states. Thompson reported $49.4 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025.

The hard calls, the ones that are 51/49, are supposed to land on the CEO's desk. Romanita Hairston warns that without a clear escalation framework, you'll be doing the wrong work.

"You can be making 51/49 decisions, but not the most consequential ones," she says.

One of her first moves after becoming CEO of the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust in 2022 was a strategy decision. The Trust affirmed its identity as a capacity-building institution and cut the sectors it served in half, from about 80 to 38. A second review narrowed that list by roughly half again.

Her reasoning runs through the whole conversation: "Strategic intent always exceeds strategic capacity, no matter how large you are as a foundation."

We talk about how she builds strategy from principle-level choices down to business plans, and why decision speed depends more on business rhythm than on layers of management. She also explains how her team deals with a question that no guideline covers, and why feedback runs all year long.

She also shares what she tells new CEOs, and what books she re-reads.

Romanita Hairston is CEO of the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, a 50-year-old foundation that invests in nonprofits across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. She has also led her own consulting practice and previously served at World Vision.

The Fellowship of Christian Athletes had worked the same way with high school and college athletes since 1954.

Then someone asked a question in a leadership meeting that nobody could answer well, and it started a decade of change.

Shane Williamson became the CEO in 2017. The reset came down to three words: engage, equip, empower.

I was surprised that the vision and the mission then changed to match, not the other way around. And it was a radical expansion of their work to new age brackets, and many more types of sport. They began working with leagues for six-year-olds, as well as surf camps and motocross, radically different from their first 60 years.

That smells like mission drift to some people.

Shane says the why never moved, and the how and the where are supposed to.

Shane Williamson is President and CEO of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which has 3,500 staff and about 1.5 million volunteers. FCA reported $262 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025, up 138% since the reset.

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.