In this time of overwhelm, where many staff and leaders of nonprofit organizations are leaving the field or those who have stayed are truly running on empty, I went looking for leaders who have figured something out.

The good news is: I found them! This series, How Smart Nonprofit Leaders Create Lasting Impact, shares the insights of amazing people who continue to navigate the ups and downs of nonprofit leadership to create lasting impact. This is one of the many ways our clients at Development Without Limits keep their amazing staff doing great work without wasting time, energy and money on quick fixes that fail.

It is always a pleasure to speak with Shawna Rosenzweig from Camp Fire, a relentless leader in her pursuit of equity and justice. In our conversation, Shawna reflected on her personal journey leading nonprofit, youth development organizations. She returned again and again to the key to success and a renewable source of energy for her:

💥relationships. 💥

Q: What has been the biggest factor in your success as a nonprofit leader who is creating lasting impact?

Relationships are what comes to mind for me… both the opportunity to build relationships with folks I admire in the field as mentors at each stage of my career and also the relationships with my colleagues and my peers at my own organization and across organizations as well. It’s through relationships that we get stuff done, how we are most creative, how we create the most change when serving young people, and how we create organizations that best serve young people.

Anything we’ve done that I’m most proud of has certainly been a team effort. I mean, it sounds kind of cheesy, but really, truly, it’s the relationships… and the different flavors, angles and lenses we each bring that really make us better together.

I also think about the relationships where I’m in the mentor role like with those that I supervise or with people that are just beginning their careers . . . I love the opportunity to watch them grow, support their success, and look for different leadership opportunities. Also, I think a lot about representation. And so whether it’s seeing a woman or someone who identifies as part of the LGBTQ+ community — to be able to have a relationship with someone or have a mentor that holds an identity you hold, or that holds a different identity, are all really important and certainly have been valuable to me. So any chance I have to return that favor is something I do. I’ve benefited a lot from that and believe it’s definitely a multi-directional benefit.

Q: How do you see those relationships really playing out in supporting you to make an impact in your work?

I’ve always really liked people. I’m also really intrigued by how you bring people with different experiences or different backgrounds together. In the different organizations I’ve worked for, I’ve felt very invested in their missions. They are supporting young people with different experiences or different backgrounds to come together and do something or act in a collective way.

I think we are our most creative when we are curating our different areas of expertise or different lenses toward a shared goal. This really helped me adapt my own leadership style to the needs of a given moment. It certainly keeps me energized in my work.

Q: What obstacles or challenges are you still working on?

I was recently at a leadership retreat with a colleague of mine and the topic of hope came up, and was immediately struck by the idea that hope is a leadership trait. We were talking about who on our team is that source of hope. And, we each were able to recognize in ourselves, and in each other, moments where we embody that. But I had this moment where I thought,

“There are moments where I embody hope, but how can I make this element of hope and instilling hope in the team, the organization, and the future be more present in my leadership? How can I be a leader that embodies hope?”

It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about, lately, and really want to figure out how hope can consistently show up in how I guide our team through strategic initiatives, in partnership cultivation, and in my overall presence.

Q: What would it look like if you did embody hope more of the time?

To me, it’s both painting a vision–creating a shared vision or collective goal–of where we hope to go. But I also think it’s helping and supporting folks to recognize milestones and achievements along the way. What are the little things you find along a pathway that provide you hope? I also think a lot about balance. If you’re exhausted, if you’re feeling burnt out, the last thing you’re probably feeling is hopeful. And so even just thinking about:

• How are we encouraging balance in our team?

• How are we encouraging folks to explore their hobbies, to take an afternoon if they need it?

• How are we able to have flexible benefits?

• What is the context that hope needs to thrive ?

At Camp Fire, we talk a lot about thriving, and certainly hope is an element of that.

“But if we’re not setting up an environment where hope can thrive, then we’re not doing our job.”

In times like this where things are rough, the political context is hard, there’s a huge range of things that are very polarized, . . how do you both be a realist and hopeful at the same time? I do think you can hold both of those, but there’s a real element of being able to be the “both-and” in that. It requires balance to keep from leaning too far one way or the other with it.

Q: I like what you said about balancing being a realist with also instilling hope and embodying hope. As you’re leading a national, geographically diverse network and so balance seems to really be essential here.

Yeah, never in my nine years at Camp Fire have I seen it this polarized. Just the geographic differences for example, to be a young person in Oklahoma is very different than to be a young person in Washington State now. In the broader national climate, everyone’s feeling it. So, I think it’s important people have space to process all that is going on.

Q: How are you doing that? How are you giving people space to process?

When I have individual check-ins with my team members, I always begin with just “How are you?” Not work-wise, not what’s on your to-do list, but truly, let’s check in and see how you are doing. And so that’s been one way — just to connect one on one with folks and hear how they’re doing. Hear what’s going on in their life, what are they finding joy in, what’s keeping them up at night and then thinking about if there’s anything in supporting that work-life balance that we can be doing to support them.

The other way is collectively as a team. Two years ago, we administered a climate and culture survey for our staff and one of the questions was: Is Camp Fire a place where you can talk about current events happening in the world? And, it wasn’t. It was a place where for the most part, you had to check what was was happening in the world and how it was affecting you, it was sending implicit messages that you had to check your identities at the door. That was something we really committed to changing. So, over the past year and a half, our full staff team started meeting every other week and the bulk of the time is talking about what’s happening in the world. Today’s conversation was largely focused on a number of the Supreme Court rulings in particular, Roe v. Wade. It’s a tough hour, but the fact that we have space to reflect, and at times celebrate together, support one another, cry…whatever it may be.

“As a team, we have a space to come together collectively and that has been a huge source of support.”

Q: How have you done that? Do you have protocols set up or what have you shifted to make it a place where you can talk about this knowing that everybody has very different opinions?

A few years ago, we were going through a CEO transition and saw a lot of staff turnover. I recognized that transition time as a moment where our team needed an opportunity to come together, to be able to engage in dialogue in a way that we weren’t doing. I picked Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy as a resource to facilitate that process. Voluntarily, folks could sign up and we’d read a chapter, like a book group but with your colleagues. And that was able to start a process of healing the harms of the past and create a new culture where folks were now becoming comfortable to share their opinions and to truly listen to the wide range of opinions and experiences on our team.

Now, we’ve done this same approach with all kinds of topics, ranging from grappling with the history of slavery in America and the narratives around it to processing a pandemic through poetry.

We have supplemented that with outside facilitators who worked with us for a few months and facilitated us through some hard conversations, some collective healing. And then from there, worked with our collective team of about 15 to map out our next steps.

My colleague, Nikki, had the idea to create a committee we call Just HQ and the team loved the idea and ran with it. There are five staff on it, and we were very intentional that none of the senior leadership team members are on it or dictating it in any sort of way. Just HQ meets weekly and sets the agenda for all staff meetings and other creative ways to bring folks together. And everyone shows up, everyone participates. They create opportunities both to grapple with what’s going on in the world and reflect on it, but also to build relationships. We’re currently exploring what our next phase of this team is.

We are reflecting on how we continue to build up Just HQ’s skills to support each department in looking at their equity lens on the work? How do we look at partnerships more equitably? From a leadership perspective, part of what’s important is being comfortable letting go.

It comes back to relationships. This is a team that I’ve got full faith in, to help us navigate equity and justice work. But, if we didn’t have the relationships, I don’t know, probably not. This team has really helped with a lot of small shifts that create big change like updating our benefits and changing our PTO policies, and also little things that also support work-life balance like creative writing workshops and other stress-reducing outlets.

Q: And how does that all trickle to your network of affiliates?

No one on the national team has quit in the past two years. The relationships our affiliates have with those they work with at the national office have stayed intact. A previous challenge was that they built a relationship with someone at the national office who then would leave. Again, so much of this work is relationship-driven between the national office and the affiliates. So the fact that this (national) team is staying is huge and it’s been a consistent source of support for the affiliates.

In some ways, it is also about being confident to lead by example, and more importantly to lead from our diverse set of experiences. We often have affiliates say to us they feel more comfortable sharing something that we put out as the national office than putting out their own statement. For example, re-sharing a statement, sharing ways to advocate, or offering ways to support young people in this moment. They can use the national statement to craft their own statement, or they can call the national office to be a thought partner on it. We have found a process that routinely creates opportunities for individuals on the team to bring their knowledge and experience to the forefront and connect it with the organization’s mission. I think that has been an added benefit of this work for our network.

Q: And so this is the crystal ball question. What does your next level of success look like?

I know the ingredients that I want my future to have: opportunities to be creative; transforming ideas and making them come alive. I know it involves people, influencing culture and creating positive spaces of belonging for people to be working in. I’m intrigued by this element of relationships and how I can apply it to grow new professional skill sets in myself and others. I love learning and I love learning about leadership.

And so I ask myself: What do I want my next growth area to be? And then how do I want to go about doing that? While my role or title will change as I grow, I know it’s in youth development and includes supporting the people who are

“Supporting young people to make the world that they’re going to inherit from us a much better place.”

Thanks, Shawna! Wonderful to hear your perspectives.

Shawna Rosenzweig (she/her/hers) is the Chief Strategy Officer at Camp Fire National Headquarters. Camp Fire is a national inclusive youth development organization founded in 1910. Camp Fire’s vision is a world where all young people thrive and have equitable opportunities for self-discovery, community connection and engagement with nature. Find out more at www.campfire.org

From the Middle East to Sesame Street, Shawna has spent two decades working in Positive Youth Development. In her current role as Chief Strategy Officer, she is responsible for development and implementation of Camp Fire’s strategic initiatives, manages affiliate support services, and diversity, equity, access, and inclusion. Shawna proudly serves on the Board of Directors for the National Afterschool Association.

Shawna earned a Master’s Degree in Curriculum & Instruction at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds a B.A. in Sociology and a minor in Education and Applied Psychology from University of California Santa Barbara.

She lives in Seattle with her wife, Stef, and their two children, Raffi and Crosby.