Nonprofit Nerd®: Impact Unleashed
Jul 31, 2026 · 26 min · 10 segments
Nonprofit leaders should be thinking about collaboration as an ongoing strategic practice, not just during times of crisis. In this episode of Nonprofit Nerd®: Impact Unleashed, Kate Harris joins…
Kate HarrisGuest
Jarrett RansomHost
Kate, I always like to start off by asking what I think is a simple question, but it is open-ended.
Tell me about yourself and the work, sometimes the role, the roles, plural, right, that you play in this nonprofit space.
And what I've observed in different hats from being a consultant to being a frontline staff person to being a director of development is that the challenge is that nonprofits exist to solve.
You really only have to spend a day in the shoes of someone who's trying to access this fractured network of services, and it becomes immediately clear why collaboration matters.
And so the work that I do is squarely in that space of how organizations work together with each other.
And we can talk a little bit more about the collaboration continuum and kind of what I mean by collaboration.
But for me, it's really about keeping the people that we serve at the center and organizing our organizations to better serve them through structural changes, collaborative agreements, shared services, and even sometimes mergers.
I think that, you know, there's a lot of leaders that quietly wonder maybe when they're going to bed at night and all the things are swirling in their head, right? They're thinking, is a collaboration what we need to consider or maybe even a merger, as you said, or even closing, you know, dissolving the organization, right? But I also think, Kate, that some leaders, like they don't always know how to name what that feeling is when they lay down at night or taking a shower and really like, you know, getting back into the thoughts of the day.
So are there any early warning signs or signals, I should say, that you see that you tell a nonprofit leader, right, like, This is when you should start exploring or this is, you know, what a collaborative path might look like.
So here are the conditions that would make a nonprofit leader want to think about or explore potential collaboration.
Kate, I always like to start off by asking what I think is a simple question, but it is open-ended.
Tell me about yourself and the work, sometimes the role, the roles, plural, right, that you play in this nonprofit space.
And what I've observed in different hats from being a consultant to being a frontline staff person to being a director of development is that the challenge is that nonprofits exist to solve.
You really only have to spend a day in the shoes of someone who's trying to access this fractured network of services, and it becomes immediately clear why collaboration matters.
And so the work that I do is squarely in that space of how organizations work together with each other.
And we can talk a little bit more about the collaboration continuum and kind of what I mean by collaboration.
But for me, it's really about keeping the people that we serve at the center and organizing our organizations to better serve them through structural changes, collaborative agreements, shared services, and even sometimes mergers.
I think that, you know, there's a lot of leaders that quietly wonder maybe when they're going to bed at night and all the things are swirling in their head, right? They're thinking, is a collaboration what we need to consider or maybe even a merger, as you said, or even closing, you know, dissolving the organization, right? But I also think, Kate, that some leaders, like they don't always know how to name what that feeling is when they lay down at night or taking a shower and really like, you know, getting back into the thoughts of the day.
So are there any early warning signs or signals, I should say, that you see that you tell a nonprofit leader, right, like, This is when you should start exploring or this is, you know, what a collaborative path might look like.
So here are the conditions that would make a nonprofit leader want to think about or explore potential collaboration.
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