Talent-Investing is the Best Capacity-Building - with Tom Fuechtmann, Community Memorial Foundation

Fund the People: A Podcast with Rusty Stahl

Nonprofit people create and sustain the organizational capacity of nonprofits. So there’s a natural connection between organizational “capacity-building” and what Fund the People calls “talent-investing” (intentionally deploying capital to support and develop nonprofit workers). In our continuous effort to capture the value that talent-investing offers to nonprofits and their funders, in this episode you'll hear the perspective of a funder who actualized this deep connection between a foundation’s capacity-building efforts and talent-investing.

Rusty sat down with Tom Fuechtmann, Senior Program Officer at Community Memorial Foundation, a health-focused regional funder in the western suburbs of Chicago. Fund the People profiled this foundation in our online Toolkit. You can get this and other Field Stories for free by just providing your name and email address here http://fundthepeople.org/toolkit/field/community-memorial/.

This is the first in-person interview in the history of this podcast (since we began in fall 2020 during the depth of the pandemic). We were at the national conference of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) in May 2022 in Chigaco. At the GEO meeting, there was much discussion about burnout, sustainability, and thriving among nonprofit workers. This episode offers an important example of a GEO member who has proactively sought to support and develop grantee staff for many years before and during the current crisis.

This episode (S3:E6) examines Talent-Investing Principle Two: Nonprofit People are Bedrock. Dig beneath outcomes, outputs, activities, organizational capacity – underneath it all, you'll find nonprofit people. People are not “overhead,” they are the bedrock of organizational effectiveness. To learn about the Eight Guiding Principles of Talent-Investing, listen to Episode One of this season. 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 episode show notes page or at fundthepeople.org/ftp_podcast. Find all the episodes of this podcast and other resources on our website, fundthepeople.org.