Investing in New Executive Directors, Part 2 - with Jane McDonnell and Irving Washington, Online News Association

Fund the People: A Podcast with Rusty Stahl

In this episode, you'll get a rare glimpse into the inside story of two people who have, together, gone through the unique crucible that is an executive transition.

Jane McDonnell is the former Executive Director of the Online News Association and is now an independent consultant. Irving Washington is the current Executive Director of the Online News Association, and a longtime association professional in the journalism field. Jane and Irving went through an executive transition in a thoughtful, proactive, ethical, and effective fashion, with respect for one another, for their colleagues, for their funders, and their organization. We all know that executive transitions are critical inflection points for organizations, and too many funders are not yet proactively investing in healthy transitions, and not supporting outgoing and incoming executive directors to succeed in the transition.

This episode is Part 2 of our mini-series on supporting new executive directors. It’s the companion to Episode 2, the previous episode, which was a conversation with Bipasha Ray and Joey Lee, former and current staff at Open Society Foundations. In that episode, we discussed OSF’s New Executives Fund, a program that supports new executive directors in nonprofits around the world, especially “historic firsts” in their organizations. (Irving participated in the OSF New Executives Fund. A few months after we recorded this interview, Irving announced that 2022 would be his last year with ONA, after six years as CEO and 11 years total of service to the organization.)

Here we explore Talent-Investing Principle #4: Talent justice is essential. This principle says that racism, sexism, classism, and other inequities are baked into the deficit of investment in the nonprofit workforce. Thus, the solution must advance intersectional racial equity. To hear all 8 Principles of Talent-Investing, listen to Season 3 Episode 1. And we invite you to learn from all the amazing past guests of Fund the People - A Podcast with Rusty Stahl. All resources & links mentioned in the show can be found on our show notes page at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast.