The following is a conversation between Jake Smith, Executive Director, and Nadia Kist, Director of Africa Partnerships at Blood:Water, and Denver Frederick, the Host of The Business of Giving.
Denver: Blood:Water partners with African community-driven organizations to end water and HIV/AIDS health disparities through organizational strengthening and financial support. And here to tell us more about their mission and the work they’re doing are Jake Smith, executive director, and Nadia Kist, director of Africa partnerships for Blood:Water.
Welcome to The Business of Giving, Jake and Nadia.
Jake Smith, Executive Director, and Nadia Kist, Director of Africa Partnerships at Blood:Water
Jake: Thank you for having us.
Nadia: Thank you.
Denver: Let me start with you, Jake. Blood:Water was founded in 2004. Tell us how it got started and some of its history.
Jake: Yeah. Great question. So there’s a band that some folks will know, they’re called Jars of Clay, a Christian band that had their foundings in the late ’90s, early 2000s. But really the founding of Blood:Water came out of the desire to really engage, we would say, evangelical communities more in the conversation around the HIV and AIDS crisis.
At that point, that was a conversation that churches really weren’t wanting to be engaged in. As far as people could tell around the US, the AIDS crisis had somewhat subsided, and the band was asked by some larger really Christian organizations to go see the crisis, and then come back and share the need as they were touring around.
And as they were there, they certainly saw that that was still a crisis, but also just how that crisis was also linked with the water crisis and how they’re going into communities where folks were needing care for HIV and AIDS, but also drinking water out of what amounted to muddy puddles.
So at that point, the band said, “Hey, if we’re going to go back and talk about the HIV and AIDS crisis in churches and in communities, a really great entry way point for that is the water crisis because that was something that everybody understood, and it was an easy on-ramp for that.
So really, Blood:Water was born out of that desire to both serve those who were affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis, but also do that in areas where clean water was needed. And that was the genesis of Blood:Water’s mission at the time.
Denver: Well, there you go. And it seems that everything is interconnected. The term WASH refers to the global standard for water, sanitation, and hygiene, and each, Nadia, is central to your mission. And as Jake was just alluding to, they’re all connected. Tell us about the work you do with local partners in Sub-Saharan Africa around this.
Nadia: So the intersectionality of those two concurrent crises is really core, and kind of further to that is another level of intersectionality where local African-led and community-driven organizations are not having access to the kind of flexible resources that allow them to respond to the needs in communities in a way that is relevant and using sustainable, homegrown solutions that can be institutionalized and last for the long haul in their community.
So Blood:Water’s model is one where we pair programmatic grants for HIV/AIDS and WASH-related responses in communities with a separate stream of institutional strengthening investments that aim to see these organizations exist long after the Blood:Water partnership.
And our particular model is framed around an eight-year-long relationship, so we begin with the end in mind, having this growth trajectory where we are investing in the health and the visions of the leaders, the community members, their programmatic and missional fullness for longevity and operational health.
Denver: Everything is pretty holistic. And I think it gets back to what Jake said at the founding: So many folks, I think, in the NGO sector look at things in silos, and they try to solve problems. And you certainly are guys who were looking at it the way people live their lives and not trying to just fix a problem, but this is their day to day.
Talk a little bit, Nadia, about how these three are interconnected. We have the clean water, but that also then presupposes some sanitation solutions, which again is also then involving hygiene practices. Tell how all three of them work together to assure that there is clean water.
Nadia: So safe water is one very critical component, but safe water has different points at which it can become contaminated, in the collecting, in the storage, and in how it’s used. And so just creating access to a safe water point in isolation of affecting how water is handled and stored, and how people are maintaining a hygienic environment for a number of different reasons.
It could be in urban settings that look different than in rural settings– where there’s more urban congestion in highly densely populated, urban kind of shantytowns or informal settlements, which looks very different than sanitation and hygiene needs in a rural community somewhere in the region.
And so the idea of integrating the three together creates a continuum of safety, a continuum of reducing the likelihood of contamination for any kind of bacteria or infection that could make that water no longer safe.
And beyond that, there’s actually newer research that’s come out from a number of different sources around the improved health outcomes that occur when nutritional components are integrated into water, hygiene, and sanitation programs.
So our partners are actually now all doing integrated models of WASH that also works on improving biodiversity, quality of nutrition, and improving food security, so that that continuum, again, of longevity for health outcomes in communities is really being taken care of in a sustainable manner.
Denver: Very cool. The entire ecosystem. Returning to HIV/AIDS, Jake, although Sub-Saharan Africa is home to just about maybe 12% of the global population, it carries 70% of the global burden of HIV infection. This is a big area. What particular part of it does Blood:Water focus on?
Jake: Yeah, we really, and I would credit early in our founding, we really had a focus on Sub-Saharan East Africa and those are countries like Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Malawi, if folks are even trying to envision where that location is.
And we said early on, we want to be hyper-focused in that area for a lot of reasons. Number one, that was where the greatest burden was. And then we also, we talked about this ecosystem of partners. We felt like if we could have a really collective knowledge and partners working in countries in a close-knit area, that would allow them to learn from each other in better ways.
So we do a lot around partner and peer learning, and that’s easier to do if a partner in Kenya can travel to Uganda, instead of a partner in Kenya traveling to another part of the world, for instance. So we really keep it focused for two reasons. That’s a high area of need, and then we like having our partners close together to create really this sheer learning and cohort experiences.
And you’ll hear this in our interview. A lot of what we talk about goes back to the partner. There’s the crisis that we are working towards ending, but we are really hyper-focused on these partners and their learnings and their health. And so that’s a little bit of why that area has become a place where we’ve camped out.
Denver: Yeah, and you also look very carefully at community care, correct?
Nadia: Yeah. We saw a strategic advantage of being a partner that has access to flexible funding, again, that communities can position where it’s most needed in the HIV response. And so also overlaid in the Eastern and Southern Africa region for all the reasons that Jake had mentioned, in addition to that heavily focused investment from other global mechanisms like PEPFAR, like the Global Fund where health systems have been invested in significantly. And so hospital care is strong.
The provision of ARVs either for free or low cost is widely accessible. Testing and treatment, modalities for opportunistic infections, it’s the entire gamut of HIV medical-related services are accessible throughout the region through these national health system focused mechanisms. But the community component of it has reduced over the last 10 years, almost to a negligible investment because the health system is seen as these like critical health services for their expenses.
So Blood:Water has decided that community care is the place where flexible funding can have the greatest ripple effect, the greatest yield of ensuring that people in various contexts on the continent are having access to the health services that they might not otherwise be able to demand for, if it were not for the interventions that we’re addressing– their psychosocial support, their food security issues, income generating issues at the household level, stigma and discrimination, all of these things that ultimately create barriers to accessing the healthcare system and then staying in the healthcare system.
So we see ourselves really supporting these other investments by supporting partners’ ability to continue the demand for healthcare from the community context into the formal health sector.
Denver: Fantastic. I can even see you visiting people’s homes and seeing what their issues are because we often forget about that. We’re just thinking of the medicines, but it doesn’t do any good if people don’t avail themselves of all these other things.
Hey, what’s it been like… the impact of COVID-19, both on the water issues, and in particular, on the HIV issues, Nadia?
Nadia: Yeah, there has been a significant impact. I think one of the powerful experiences that COVID forced us as a world to face was how leveling it really was and brought us down to the same kind of basic level of the core essential need for clean water, hygiene, sanitation for just actual life-saving modalities, irrespective of where you live in the world. And from the context of just other restrictions… not being able to move around in the ways that we did; much of what the world experienced was without exception what we experienced in the region.
And from urban centers out to rural contexts, the demand for hygiene and sanitation amplified to an extent that I don’t even know if we can quite measure it… it forced our partners to pivot from more kind of routine, long-term development strategies to emergency responses of taking their water hygiene, and sanitation work out of just a routine kind of developments and long-term health view to: we need to adapt wide-scale access in our communities at a household level and in marketplaces, in schools, any place where there was congregating activities happening socially for the sake of preventing the spread of COVID.
In the context of HIV, there was significant concern across all of the leading health experts that just the period of intense lockdown, that it could potentially create reversals that we have made gains in the sector around prevention of mother-to-child transmission, just by virtue of people not having access to the healthcare system in the same way that they did prior to COVID… and the lockdown measures that came into place.
And also just the interruptions in supply chain that were happening around prevention, modalities, and treatments. And so in that case, our partners pivoted and adapted models where they were doing door-to-door health checks, delivery of their monthly medications to clients in their health system, adherence support, psychosocial counseling, and then also integrating with their HIV care… scaling access at a household level to hygiene and sanitation specifically around the messaging of COVID prevention.
COVID had a profound effect, and just I think making us really appreciate how integrated, how universally important it is for clean water, hygiene, and sanitation to be accessible. And how far more marginalized people who are living with compromised immune systems could be if we’re not considering that and also adapting to those needs. So in our context, it’s just so much more amplified.
Denver: And adaptive partners, I will add, doing whatever it takes to get the job done. And we can see how important the partners are, Jake. And I know that you focus on building the capacity of these partners because ultimately you want them to be strong enough financially and technically, and internally to exist long after your partnership with them has ended. Tell us about some of the things you do to strengthen them.
Jake: Great question. So before any partnership begins or, as we do, we have a process that we ask our partners go through, which is called the IDF, which is Institutional Development Framework. And this is a self-facilitated, self-led, excuse me, with a facilitator, but self-led exercise in which the organization looks at really top to bottom, and everything from HR to financial systems, to their technical services, to strategic planning.
And they bring everybody in the organization, as we say, from the CEO to the guy that’s guarding the gate. And they bring folks in, and they measure themselves and how they are doing in certain areas. And what inevitably comes out of that is they’ll have some areas where they’re strong in, and then they’ll have a few where they’ll say, “Gosh, we do need some work around our financial systems.”
Or maybe that’s some HR: We see some gaps in our HR. So then what Blood:Water will come alongside and do, as we in concurrently with the work that we’re supporting in the communities, is we’ll say, “Okay, we want to give you guys really flexible funding around this for you to develop some systems and strengthening around whatever those issues might be over the next two years.”
So there’ll be $10,000 that will be allocated to our partner for that. And we’ll allow them to use that as they see fit over the two years to help strengthen that system. And then two years later, they’ll come back and do that process again and remeasure to see growth in that. So every two years, they are remeasuring to see how they are growing in that area.
So that is one of the areas that we have, which… that’s more partner-driven and partner-focused. And then Blood:Water has another area that we call The Leader Collective. And I may actually let Nadia speak about this. This is her wheelhouse, and that’s been developed over the last couple of years.
Nadia: Thanks, Jake. So The Leader Collective is a community of practice that was born out of the last seven years of Blood:Water’s organizational strengthening model where we would create, through our community of partners, a range of organizational strengthening of resources, learning opportunities, networking, and investments that concurrent to that idea of process where partners were investing in very specific and individualized strengthening needs…
We were creating just a shared community of opportunities for learning and growth, collectively. And so The Leader Collective was born out of that seven-year history of creating a menu of activities and now exists as a community of practice that we envisioned to convene, to cultivate, and to amplify African leadership that’s driving health developments and social change on the continent.
And so it exists primarily for and is born out of the strengthening of our partners, but we are going to be making this available for aligned organizations to participate, almost like a public good where we can continue to convene African leaders and their organizations to share resources, to learn and to really influence the way that the practice of development is happening on the continent.
And so through that, we support our partners to participate in things like executive leadership coaching, mentoring. We host webinars and master classes on a range of topics that support broad organizational health and growth. We build out networking opportunities to support financial viability and diversity of their funding portfolios over the length of our relationship. Jake had mentioned peer exchange visits where they can go visit one another for this cross-pollination of best practices and models of care that work in different contexts.
So it’s a diverse range of things that exist to really see partners with shared learning interests, really support one another in that growth continuum over time.
Denver: Yeah. I’ve observed that you’ve gotten more and more involved in the African philanthropic community, Nadia. Tell me, how would you describe currently the African philanthropic community?
Nadia: It is vibrant. It is large, and it is not honored to the extent that it should be. There is a very avid community of either African-born philanthropic organizations and networks, or African-focused– so peers and collaborators like Blood:Water that are not born from the community itself, here.
However, we exist to really work as equitable peers in advancing African-led and community-driven interests to end health disparities. And so we’re part of a number of networks that we really enjoy just the community, the conversation, the ability to influence thought leadership around the practice of philanthropy and really shifting the conversation around.
Making it equitable as a theory to actually living out evidenced models that have data to back up and evidence of what equity looks like, how agency is showing up with our partners and in communities, and how long term we hope that will change the norms around philanthropic partnerships on the continent.
Denver: Cool. Way beyond good intentions. Well, sticking with philanthropy, Jake, tell us about your fundraising, your business model, and Blood:Water’s sources of revenue.
Jake: Yeah. We have, historically since day one, been funded by individual donors. And even early on, there’s a metric and that metric has changed over time, but it was $1 that will provide clean water for one person for a year. And the band, Jars of Clay, wanted to do that because at the time, there was a lot of… it was a $40 a month metric, or even more than that.
And just the average person probably didn’t feel like they could do something in this and really impact a community in Africa. So early on, we were really heavily grassroots, really highly individualized donors. And we really continue that to this day. Most, I would say 90%, almost 95% of our funding by quantity of donors are individual donors or families along that line.
So we’ve been that, we were founded by a band, so we are a creative organization, and we have always asked folks to be creative about how they want to raise money for the clean water crisis.
So we’ve seen everything, from the lemonade stands to house concerts. We have something called drumming for toilets, which a girl raises money for toilets by drumming in Africa. So it’s those kinds of things where we’ll take anything and everything, but it’s the individual donor which has always supported the work of Blood:Water.
“So that’s what motivates us. As a faith-based organization, we do not work with any communities or any places based on faith at all. But as a group, we collectively at Blood:Water would say that faith is what motivates us and drives us every day.”
Denver: Yeah, Jake, we started the conversation with the Christian roots of the founding of the organization. What role does faith play? How does it manifest itself in your current work?
Jake: Yeah. Great question. So we believe that all people are equally created in purpose by God, and that’s what drives us, and that’s why we get up every day. We understand that there are not systems around the world that help foster this in everybody. Here in the United States, we certainly get up every day, and we’ve got all the resources and tools that we need to live really healthy thriving lives. We can be really anything that we want to be every day because we’ve got the resources to do it.
But there are places that we serve, that’s just not a reality, facing a health crisis because they’re HIV positive, or they don’t have access to clean water and they don’t have access to education. They are not getting the opportunities that we are given here. And we believe that since all folks are created by God, they should have those same opportunities.
So that’s what motivates us. As a faith-based organization, we do not work with any communities or any places based on faith at all. But as a group, we collectively at Blood:Water would say that faith is what motivates us and drives us every day.
Denver: Fantastic. Nadia, let me ask you about… as a group and that is the issues of wellbeing. You’re on the front lines there and the work that you do is difficult work. And these past two years have probably been among the most difficult that any of us have ever experienced. What do you do with your team and the people who are on those front lines to assure their wellbeing?
Nadia: Yeah, that’s a really great question. So team has two different levels for me. A team is us as a Blood:Water team, which this year, we have expanded our team for the first time in our Kenya office. So we have some new hires that we’re building out as we scale into the fullness of our operations that were delayed because of everything that was happening over the last two years with COVID.
And then the second level of that would be the wellbeing of our community of partners. Through the immediate emergence of the COVID crisis and just all the implications that were unfolding, we set up weekly check-in calls with all of our leaders. We were doing that as a staff… Jake, correct me if I’m wrong… at the very start, we were doing that daily. And then scaled it back as things stabilized as we were recalibrating to what the new normal was.
And with our partners, it really became a space where individuals were coaching one another and almost foreshadowing from one country to the next, how things would unfold as they would, and what you need to think about as a leader for safeguarding your team, your organization, and your mental health as well.
And to that end as well, we invested. That was the first year that we made leadership coaching available to our partners. A lot of them that underwent it in 2020, in the midst of the COVID lockdown, initially really refer to it as being almost life-preserving, sanity-preserving, an organizational lifeline to really help them move through the initial crisis and recalibrate as needed beyond that.
So we still have check-ins. It’s not as frequent. We do a lot more individual relationship building and support as needed with our partners because they are so busy on the frontline. And we can’t sit on Zoom calls with them once a week just for the sake of, “How’s everything going?” But we do have modalities for supporting that. We do allow them to also visit one another through our exchange visits just to keep building community and relationship.
And now with the team that we’re building out in our Kenya office, yeah, we’re building out our own rhythms for weekly check-ins we do as a team across the two continents. We have our weekly meetings and a weekly devotional as well that we stay connected with one another and feed all parts of who we are and not just our professional and work functions, but really honoring who we are individually from a human standpoint, and the emotional and spiritual needs that are so deeply connected to the work that we do.
“And what COVID allowed us to do actually was really become more connected than ever before because we were cognizant of: people need this connection during this time. And we have really tried to create and continue that rhythm. So that also created a lot of ownership, I would say, with the organization. And we really foster that belief of : we’re small, we don’t have much more than 11 or 12 folks. So really, everyone has to take on that posture of, I use the term ‘act like an owner.’”
Denver: Yeah, no question about it. I think everybody’s seen that. You were able to go to the office before and just be a professional, but now we’re all in people’s homes, and their kids are coming in, and their dogs are coming in, and you’ll recognize you really have to, more than ever, honor the entire person because they are all interconnected. We knew that, we just never acted on it.
Jake, let’s pick up on what Nadia was talking about– leadership and leadership coaching. So let me ask you about your leadership. This has not been an easy time to be leading an NGO, and I think the expectations of leaders have changed. How do you think the nature of leadership is changing, and maybe what have you done over the last couple of years to adapt to this new world?
Jake: I came back as the executive director. I’d been with Blood:Water and been away for a couple of years. And I came back as the executive director in the fall of 2019. So about the time I was getting my footing underneath me as the executive director, COVID hit. And we really took a kind of a two-pronged approach in me as a leader, as an SLT in our leadership team, we wanted to protect our staff in our team, and then protect our partners.
And Nadia talked a bit about what our partners look like in terms of what do you need and when do you need it, and that’s what our posture was with our partners. What do you need? When do you need it? And let’s be there to do that. And then with our team, we really did take an approach of we wanted to make sure that people were being cared for on a very human level.
And then I would say actually on some level, because you have an international team, and we have an office in Nashville, we were always talking and communicating with each other as much as we were when Covid hit.. And what COVID allowed us to do actually was really become more connected than ever before because we were cognizant of: people need this connection during this time.
And we have really tried to create and continue that rhythm. So that also created a lot of ownership, I would say, with the organization, and we really foster that belief of: we’re small, we don’t have much more than 11 or 12 folks. So really, everyone has to take on that posture of, I use the term ‘act like an owner.’
But anything that you see and do and touch upon, really don’t expect that it needs to filter up, and that’s someone else’s decision. You should feel empowered and trusted to make those types of decisions as someone who is a really integral key part of it. We’ve really tried to foster leadership within our own team by creating that, that kind of concept that everyone is an owner of what’s happening at Blood:Water.
Denver: Or another way of putting it, a team of founders…
Jake: Yeah, team of founders. Yeah, that’s great. We have our founder who works for us. And it’s great that we’ve got folks that have been here for 17 years… since day one, and then I think there’s folks who’ve been here for two or three years. So we’ve got a lot of real institutional knowledge across the organization that I think really does help, but we continue to foster this trust in each other.
And it’s been a really great couple of… COVID has been hard for a lot of organizations, and I don’t want to ever sound like I don’t want to give that credence, but it’s been a good couple of years for Blood:Water in the sense of it has galvanized our team in a way that we had not been in previous years.
Denver: Yeah. I’d have to say, Jake, and I talk to a lot of people, that is pretty much the verdict for most of them. It has helped accelerate their progress and their growth and their impact. And one of them said to me that they felt like they had gone to sleep and awakened in 2030, because of all the things that would have taken us a long time to do, we did it because we were forced to do them.
And the communications is better. The technology is better; understanding and appreciation of the whole person, as Nadia was talking, all those things have really accelerated quickly.
Let me close with this, with a question for each of you. Same question. And that is starting with you, Nadia, what are you really excited about right now? What really gets your juices going, the kind of thing you can’t turn your brain off, even if you’re trying?
Nadia: Oh, it’s already going. It’s been going all day. Yeah, it’s just the conversations around really elevating the voices and the positioning of the leaders that we are working with… their vision for change, the work and the innovations that are coming out of their communities to end health disparities as they experience it.
Through The Leader Collective, I am really excited about creating a space for people that share this clear understanding of the power and the agency that exists in communities, a wealth of resources and expertise that has been there all throughout, that we are finally entering a time when there is enough momentum and enough collective voices to say that the old way of doing business in development partnerships is no longer acceptable or relevant.
And we’re moving forward with communities at the center as the rightful custodians of their development processes. So that is hands down, all day every day, into the wee hours of the night, it’s in my brain percolating and getting me going for the next day.
“And so really just operating with the rightful release of self-determination and decision-making to see a true end to health disparities in communities, that’s the only way that there will be a turn in the tide of the epidemic concerning HIV and all the other related health disparities that are coming out of the issues that we are navigating.”
Denver: Let me follow up on that, Nadia, because I think that giving up power is one of the hardest things for an NGO to do, not giving up the perception of power. That’s pretty easy, but really giving up power to the communities the way that you’ve done it, what advice or what insights would you have on that for others who are struggling, actually really doing it?
Nadia: This may be a little controversial, but I’m just going to say it. I think that even the thought that you have power that you were giving up is not rooted in truth. It should have never been and should no longer remain with that kind of a perception. And that power held is not power at all. It is not influence. It is not effective.
And so really just operating with the rightful release of self-determination and decision-making to see a true end to health disparities in communities, that’s the only way that there will be a turn in the tide of the epidemic concerning HIV and all the other related health disparities that are coming out of the issues that we are navigating.
Denver: Well said. Jake, what are you really excited about?
Jake: You know, I think for a lot of years at Blood:Water, we unfortunately, were banging the drum around this concept of community-driven organizations strengthening them and growing them. But we also felt this need that folks, when you’re fundraising, that’s just a message that’s hard… you can’t tweet that… it’s hard to tweet organizational strengthening, but you can tweet providing clean water.
And we had this aspect of our work that we just really loved about the partner-driven, community-driven approach, but we felt like sometimes just providing clean water was the message that everybody heard.
And I think what has happened over the last couple of years, and Nadia speaking to this, is the conversation and the tenor is changing both in the development sector overall, but just on the individual donor level where folks are saying, “If we want to have healthier communities in Africa, we’ve got to have healthier, stronger partners.”
And the only way that we’re going to have those healthier communities is by having these healthy partners that are invested in and grown, and as Nadia said, are being able to fully live into the power that they have to help change the community. So Blood:Water, really, we say walk alongside, we really see ourselves as walking alongside these African partners.
And we’re just glad that conversations like this, honestly, Denver, and with Classy and some of the things that have been highlighted this year that we feel like the conversation has changed and Blood:Water has been at the front of that for a long time. And we feel like, Okay, this is great. This is a moment that we can really fully step into in our model. So…
“…I think this really innovative model and putting the partners at the front and the center, and not the Western funder per se, has been the way it’s been done for a long time. And Blood:Water has tried to switch that narrative and say the partners are at the middle and the focus.
And they’re the ones that need to be the rightful owners and custodians of their own future. And it doesn’t sound innovative, but it is innovative.”
Denver: Yeah, say a word about Classy too because, again, you were one of their innovation prize winners. Tell us what makes the organization as innovative as it is, in addition to your partners.
Jake: Yeah. We’ve been a Classy partner for a long time, I think early days of Classy, which is really great. But yeah, I think this really innovative model and putting the partners at the front and the center, and not the Western funder per se, has been the way it’s been done for a long time. And Blood:Water has tried to switch that narrative and say the partners are at the middle and the focus.
And they’re the ones that need to be the rightful owners and custodians of their own future. And it doesn’t sound innovative, but it is innovative. I mean just…
Denver: Yeah, it really is.
Jake: …a pretty innovative posture. And Nadia has seen it more than anybody in the kind of seat she sits in over in Nairobi, but that’s just what the history has been, is it’s been the other way around for so long.
Denver: Yeah. And to your earlier point, I think donors are beginning to see the benefit of this long-term horizon. Too often, they wanted to give money and almost like Wall Street, see the returns next year before you got more money. And essentially, what you’re talking with this organizational strengthening and the partners at the center, hey, it’s going to take some time, but essentially there’s no shortcut to really finding the solutions. Finally, Jake, for listeners who want to learn more about Blood:Water, or financially support this work, tell us about your website and what visitors will find on it.
Jake: Yeah. Go to bloodwater.org, pretty quick and simple, and head there. You’re going to see a few things. You’re going to see ways that you can be engaged both from a one-time gift to: we have a program called The Fuel, which is our monthly donors, which is really critical because we talk about long-term lasting support.
We need folks that are going to be in it with us in the long haul. So that monthly giving program, like a lot of nonprofits, is really key for us. That’s one area. And then you’ll also see a lot of our partner profiles. You’ll see the work that we’re doing in these different areas of community, so I’d encourage you to click around and check that out.
And then, Nadia, this is where I’ll ask Nadia, leadercollective.org, am I correct in saying that?
Nadia: Yes.
Jake: Leadercollective.org, just as it sounds, and you actually see there what Nadia’s been talking about in terms of this amplifying African voices. And that’s a website that’s for our partners, but I think you would enjoy seeing it to go, okay, these are the things, the conversations that are happening, around how we want to lift up these voices and how that works. So…
Denver: Well, even with the websites, I can see how the two of you really complement one another. Thanks, Jake and Nadia, for being here today. It was a pleasure to have both of you on the show.
Jake: Thank you, Denver.
Nadia: Thank you for having us.
Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving serves as a Strategic Advisor and Executive Coach to NGO and Nonprofit CEOs and Board Chairs. His Book, The Business of Giving: The Non-Profit Leaders Guide to Transform Leadership, Philanthropy, and Organizational Success in a Changed World, will be released in the spring of 2022.
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