How Millennials Lead

Liz Hafalia/San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris

Rey Faustino has a résumé any nonprofit leader would envy.

Harvard Kennedy School graduate.

Echoing Green fellow.

Founder of One Degree, a tech-based organization that connects families with the tools and services they need to help pull themselves out of poverty.

One Degree is supported by big foundations like Kresge and Knight. It serves the entire San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles County, and Gainesville, Fla., its work reaching more than a quarter-million people thus far.

And at age 36, he’s already thinking about his succession plan.

“I made a personal commitment to the mission for at least 10 years,” Mr. Faustino says. He intends to keep his pledge, but other social-change projects tempt him. “I’m the kind of person who has a running Google Doc with lots of ideas.”

Mr. Faustino’s focus on what’s next is a marked contrast to older generations who have often run the nation’s nonprofits for decades at a time. Now millennials like him — people in their 20s and 30s — are starting to take top leadership jobs at charities nationwide. And with their ambition, tech savvy, and willingness to rethink leadership, power, and even the very notion of an “organization,” the nonprofit world can expect a shake-up.

“Older CEOs sit around and complain about millennials too much,” says Susan Tomlinson Schmidt, 46, and president of Nonprofit Leadership Alliance, which runs college-level certificate programs for people interested in charity careers. But she’s upbeat about the rising generation’s future as leaders. “How exciting is that, if they could all take over and actually do the things we’ve been trying to do forever?”

As changes at the federal level threaten the budgets and missions of many charities, millennials will get more opportunities to prove themselves as leaders and fundraisers, says Frances Kunreuther, 65, co-director of Building Movement Project, which generates research and creates tools to foster leaders at social-change groups.

“There’s going to be far, far less money from government to address social issues,” Ms. Kunreuther says. “We’ll need the millennials to think about who they’re going to tap to help solve those problems in a new way. They’re going to be the ones to do it.”

No Waiting for the ‘Big Game’

Young people often find leadership opportunities early at small or grass-roots organizations. “This idea that we’re all just waiting to be called up to the big game is not entirely accurate,” says Jamie Smith, 33, who leads the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network.

But many millennials who are already leading nonprofits are founders. One reason: It can be difficult to move up in traditional organizations. About 30 percent of leadership jobs at nonprofits are filled internally, compared with about 60 percent of comparable positions at businesses, according to the leadership-development nonprofit Bridgespan Group and other sources.

Stereotypes about millennials — such as that they feel entitled or that they seek change for the sake of change — are too often used against young nonprofit workers who advocate for themselves and their ideas at traditional nonprofits, Ms. Smith says.

She calls that state of affairs a threat to nonprofits. “There is a lot of potential in this generation, in the sector, that’s going untapped,” she says. “It is tragic to be leaving vast amounts of resources untouched. Not just for those organizations but ultimately for the communities they are trying to make better.”

Leadership experts and millennials who lead nonprofits suggest changes that are likely to follow as the rising generation takes over the charity world:

Traditional hierarchy will change.

Mr. Faustino, from a working-class family of Philippine immigrants, arrived in America at age 8. His background, he says, shapes how he thinks about traditional nonprofits. “A lot of the best practices we are using — the royal ‘we’ — have been passed down to us from for-profit corporate structures,” he says. “Which are inherently colonial. Extracting resources. Growth for the sake of profit-seeking.”

Many millennial leaders like Mr. Faustino say they’re not interested in perpetuating that approach, worrying that it chokes off innovation and encourages the hoarding of information and power at the top.

At Young Women Empowered, in Seattle, which provides mentors and creative projects for teenage girls, co-founder Jamie-Rose Edwards, 33, serves as a co-director of a nine-member staff. The charity’s board is also run by co-directors.

“We do solicit and receive a lot of feedback before we make decisions,” says Edwards, who prefers to be identified with the gender-neutral pronoun “they.” “I find that even though the decisions take longer to make, by the time the decision is made, you have buy-in. The decisions tend to be more sustainable and set up for success.”

Co-directorships are becoming a popular way to share power at nonprofits. In 2013, Ms. Kunreuther invited Sean Thomas-Breitfeld, now 38, to help run Building Movement Project. The arrangement has drawn the curiosity of millennials, she says.

For his part, Mr. Thomas-Breitfeld says the track record of shared CEO roles at nonprofits is “mixed, honestly.” But the idea of distributed power remains influential, he says: “Look at United We Dream or Black Lives Matter, where there’s very strong national leadership, but there’s less attachment to empire building.”

Pressure to produce impact will increase.

Just as young nonprofit leaders are questioning traditional hierarchy, they’re also asking tough questions about charities’ work.

“Millennials need a very clear idea of why an organization exists for them to feel deeply committed,” says Mark Lipton, professor of management at the New School’s Milano School and an expert on nonprofit founders.

Like young donors, young leaders demand to see impact. They care less about how many meals were served to the hungry than about what is being done to prevent hunger in the first place.

“One big thing I’ve seen is millennials are shifting from outputs to outcomes,” says Philip Dearing, 24, senior associate consultant at Bridgespan Group. “They’re not satisfied with doing the work and having a feel-good story.”

The serial entrepreneur — rather than the social worker — seems to be a model for many millennial nonprofit leaders. Young leaders, like Generation Xers before them, are more inclined than boomers to jump in, work to accomplish a goal, and then take up a new challenge.

“Founders from the 70s and 80s, they would hunker down and not leave,” says Mr. Lipton, describing “founder’s syndrome,” when an organization’s creator struggles to pass the baton gracefully. “The younger people now, they’re moving on: ‘This needs someone with deeper skills.’ "

Expect much more transparency.

Because millennials grew up in an era when information about everything was a mere click away, they resent when their bosses hoard information about their organization. Younger leaders often make it easier for more people to see how the sausage is made.

At Third Sector Capital Partners, a nonprofit that develops innovative financing for social-good projects, CEO Caroline Whistler, 31, believes she can keep employees on the job longer by making sure they are always in the loop. She’s seen friends leave jobs in part because they felt they weren’t trusted with information about the big picture.

“They’re not down for being a cog in a machine,” says Ms. Whistler, who co-founded her organization. “That’s the worst thing you can be: someone who just comes in, does their part, and goes home.”

So she shares compensation data with the entire staff: “Everyone knows everyone else’s salary.” And after every board meeting, she says, “I share the entire board deck with the entire team and talk them through it. I think it’s valued by my team but also expected.”

More partnerships will bloom.

For traditional nonprofits, more collaboration — among other charities or with government and business — is likely as more millennials take the reins. Today’s problems demand an all-hands-on-deck approach, leaders say.

“Millennial leaders are looking to each other,” says Suhad Babaa, 32, leader of Just Vision, which works to increase visibility for Palestinians and Israelis who do nonviolence work. “They’re really eager to connect across sectors — business, government, nonprofits. Also across movements. We’re realizing that all these issues are deeply linked, and we need each other.”

Noah Berger, for The Chronicle

At California’s Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Zahra Billoo, 34, the affiliate’s leader since 2010, often works with other charities and views them as partners, not competition. She doesn’t feel the need to scrap over credit. “I’m not always rushing to put CAIR’s name on something, because I get that the work can speak for itself.”

And besides, she says, donors “like collaboration because it’s more efficient. We’re not trying to drain their resources.”

At the Kresge Foundation, Michael Shaw, a 35-year-old program officer, has noticed that the vast majority of the social-service charities that seek grants through his division have at least one millennial on their senior leadership teams. The young leaders, he says, approach him differently than their elders do, in a less transactional way. They ask him for advice and cultivate the relationship before asking about funding.

He predicts the grant maker-grantee connection will evolve into “more of a partnership model.”

Already, he says, “our own funding practices have changed — more unrestricted support, more renegotiating grants midstream. We know the world is evolving quickly.”

It’s all about equity.

Many millennial leaders instinctively turn to matters of equity in their work. “I feel like for the majority of nonprofit leaders it’s new information: They are open to it, but they are often new to having their eyes opened,” says Jamie-Rose Edwards, of Young Women Empowered. “But for my generation, we grew up with that language already. I started with those trainings right out of college, when I was an AmeriCorps member.”

Seeking community feedback to help shape programs designed to serve them is a hallmark of millennial leadership. Young Women Empowered, whose clients are overwhelmingly immigrants or people of color or both, started a program modeled on Big Brothers Big Sisters, with one adult mentor assigned to each girl. When the girls complained about the lack of choice, the program changed to allow them to select the adult they wished to be paired with.

In fact, Edwards says, the girls usually picked more than one adult mentor: “They liked to go to one mentor for family advice and another for school and career advice.”

Mr. Faustino, whose One Degree serves many immigrant and minority families, leads a staff that reflects the people the group serves. Sixty percent are people of color, for instance, and 40 percent have firsthand experience with poverty.

“We know that’s a strategic advantage,” he says. “When we have people on our team who are from the community, we know we can build tools for the community. It’s not ‘in theory.’ It’s from our lived experience.”

Philanthropy will grow more diverse and inclusive. Or not.

About 80 percent of nonprofit CEOs are white — and that’s been more or less the case for the past decade, according to data from the Building Movement Project. About 47 percent of nonprofit CEOs are women, according to the latest compensation study by GuideStar, but the largest organizations are still usually run by men. Will the most diverse generation of Americans change that?

It might, but only with a lot of effort that starts now, say young leaders and other experts.

Bryan Thomas, for The Chronicle

“We’re a generation that’s been raised with the idea that equality is supposed to be, and it’s just a matter of time,” says Rye Young, 31, executive director of Third Wave Fund, a grant maker that supports projects by young LGBTQ people and young women of color. “But what our generation shows is that it’s not a matter of time, actually.”

Philanthropy is still not investing sufficiently in developing minorities as leaders, says B. Cole, founder of Brioxy, a social enterprise that builds online and in-person networks for young professionals of color. And obstacles for them remain.

“The threshold for expertise is much higher for young leaders of color, and the tolerance for risk is much lower,” she says. “Part of the problem is that people aren’t betting on this generation of leaders to do things the way they want to do them.”

She has a message for grant makers and nonprofits: “This is the moment and time to start backing millennial leaders of color. We have a window of about seven to 10 years to do that well.”

A fight to raise wages looms.

Slightly more than half of millennials have student-loan debts or expect to incur them, according to Ernst & Young data, and many endured financial setbacks during the Great Recession. For those reasons, along with skyrocketing housing costs in major cities and the increasing professionalism in the nonprofit world, young leaders and their staffs will be less likely than their elders to put up with traditionally pitiful nonprofit pay.

“People say you don’t go into nonprofit work to get rich,” says Jordan Vernoy, managing director of network development at Feeding America. “Well, I didn’t go to college to get a degree in nonprofit management so I could be poor, either.” (His current compensation, he says, helps keep him on the job.)

Low wages represent a significant barrier to making nonprofits more diverse, says Ms. Billoo, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “People need a second income or independent wealth to sustain careers,” she says. “Until wages get better or there are shifts in how wealth is concentrated, diversity is a longer-term objective.”

Ms. Billoo has seen her office grow sixfold since she started as director. But everyone in her office is a fellow millennial, and compensation is a key reason. “If someone comes in the door with 10 years’ experience, I probably can’t afford them.”

Paying nonprofit staff a fair wage is “a justice issue” to Aubrey Thonvold, 35, executive director of the St. Paul charity Reconciling Works, which works to get LGBTQ people more involved in Lutheran communities and organizations.

When she first sat her two full-time staff members down for their annual reviews, she was startled that they weren’t asking about raises. “I said, OK, we’re going to do some coaching,” Ms. Thonvold says. She directed them to research what their nonprofit peers were making in the local market and come back to her in a couple of days.

“The next year,” she says, “both of them were ready with their documentation to say, ‘This is what I think I’m worth.’ " (The employees got raises both years, she adds.)

Brick-and-mortar offices are doomed.

Ethan Hill/Redux

A hallmark of the organizations already run by millennials is a fervent embrace of telework.

May Boeve, 33, has led the environmental group 350.org for seven years. The organization, co-founded by Ms. Boeve, six other millennials, and activist Bill McKibben, a boomer, now includes about 120 staff members, spread around the globe.

“People will ask, where’s the headquarters? Well, there isn’t one,” says Ms. Boeve, who’s based in Brooklyn, N.Y. The biggest cluster of employees lives in Oakland, Calif., where seven staff members work together in person some of the time.

In a largely all-remote organization, she says, creating a shared culture takes creativity: “Someone just suggested today that people have lunch together on a video call.”

Alix Dunn, 33, incorporated the nonprofit she leads and helped create, the Engine Room, in the United States. But Ms. Dunn, an American, lives and works in London. Other members of the staff, which helps social-change groups make better use of data and technology, are spread out: Abuja, Nigeria; Berlin; New York; Rome; Santiago, Chile; and other points around the globe.

“The internet is our offices,” she says.

Being all-remote widens the candidate pool exponentially when there’s a job opening, Ms. Dunn says. “We’re able to recruit a much more diverse staff,” she says, “We’re not worried about visa requirements or getting anyone to move somewhere.”

The system, she says, helps the staff of 13 not only live where they want but develop close ties with nearby nonprofits the Engine Room works with and, in some cases, grant makers and other donors.

It can be difficult to explain to donors the group’s budget for staff travel, which allows occasionally for working together in-person. But over all, she says, supporters seem intrigued with the Engine Room’s virtual setup. “I can tell some of our funders are excited by it. It shifts power away from the global north.”

Personal lives matter.

Many of the tradeoffs previous generations made in the workplace — long hours in exchange for job security — have been wiped away, especially since the Great Recession. At the same time, laptops, tablets, and smartphones have ensured that people are available to their bosses and others seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Millennial leaders, experts say, are likely to prove better than their elders at protecting their personal time.

“They’re saying, I want to have a quality of life,” says Akaya Windwood, 61, president of Rockwood Leadership Institute. “I want to have experiences. I want to have friendships. I want to be a human.”

Rockwood, she notes, shifted to a 32-hour workweek in 2009. “We’re more productive than we’ve ever been, and our budget has close to tripled since we started this,” she says.

At Third Wave Fund, Mr. Young’s staff now also works a four-day week, with no drop in productivity. It’s preferable to, say, the traditional sabbatical to help staff members recharge.

“Sabbaticals tend to benefit people at the higher levels of an organization,” he says. “What feels more equitable for our staff is to have time off and wellness time built into the organization so that everyone has access to it. Rather than, ‘Here’s your reward for burnout!’ "

At One Degree, Mr. Faustino turns off work-related notifications from his cellphone to maintain some boundaries. And he’s instituted a very flexible vacation policy. “The policy was, you need a vacation, take a vacation. We don’t have a set number of days. And that worked well for a long time,” he says.

But now, Mr. Faustino says, “we’re starting to see the blurred lines: Is it OK for this person to take two months off?” His organization is still figuring out how best to strike a balance.

It’s “almost a given now” that job candidates negotiate work-at-home days as part of their contracts, says Abe Taleb, 31 and vice president at Koya Leadership Partners, an executive-search firm that works with nonprofits. “We’ll especially see that now as more millennials are becoming parents.”

When not on the road, Mr. Vernoy is hunkered down not at Feeding America’s Chicago headquarters but at a shared office space in downtown Waterloo, Iowa, where he is raising a family. He is passionate about his organization’s mission, he says. But his dad was very consumed by his job and absent a lot, and he wants to be around more.

“I think there’s a lot of pressure on millennials to not care about work-life balance, because there’s still a lot of boomers in the workplace. I think telecommuting has made it easier for me,” he says, adding with a sharp laugh, “because I don’t see the baby boomers staying until 10 o’clock at night."n