The Key behind the Success of a Non-profit in Ellensburg

The Youth Services of Kittitas County is a local nonprofit in Ellensburg. They provide mentoring programs that equip the youth of Kittitas County with nurturing one-to-one relationship and mentorship, so that those individuals can develop with full potential and become great members of the community (Home). The organization consists of a team of employees, board members, volunteers, and Crystal Church as their executive director.

Crystal Church was born and raised in Ellensburg. Before joining the Youth Services of Kittitas County, Church was working for another agency called Kittitas County Community Network & Coalition. She was doing prevention work to educate the community about ways to keep the youth substance, drug and alcohol-free until the legal age or until they are 25.

During that time, Church learned about a mentoring program on the west side. After learning about the program, Church talked to her director, who just became the executive director of Youth Service of Kittitas County, about bringing the program to the organization. Church’s director told her to present that new idea to the organization’s board members. That decision was understandable because according to Bruce Hopkins (2003), the nonprofit governing broad members are “fiduciaries of the organization’s resources and guardians of its mission” (p.1). Unfortunately, the board declined Church’s idea because they didn’t think the community would engage with the program. Nevertheless, to Church, the mentoring program was her passion, and she was persisted to make it come true. She asked them for an opportunity to develop the program and was happy to do it voluntarily.

Church first started with a team of one person – herself. She sorted through all resources and tried to come up with a plan. She renovated her workspace from a place filled with clutter, Rephidim wall, and broken windows to where the organization is now stationed at. At that time, a Central Washington University’s student named Reality walked into her office and asked for an internship. Recognizing that it was also the student’s passion, in the next year and a half, Church worked with her to put together a complete program for the organization.

They first worked for free. As time went by, Church started doing fundraising to support the nonprofit. From that, she began to be able to actually pay herself. She still had a fulltime job at that time with a forty-hour workload, and only worked for the nonprofit for five hours a week. However, as the community began embracing the program, she gradually increased her work at the nonprofit up to twenty hours. At some point during this process, her director decided to resign from the organization and recommended Church to be the director. Church was afraid and worried at first since she had never been in that position. But with the director’s trust for her, Church agreed to take the position and became the new executive director for the nonprofit.

There was a lot of shifting and changing in the beginning. Church’s first struggle was the board, which started falling apart. They were used to working with a budget of $10,000 a year. But since the nonprofit is a 501(c)(3) – public charities – organization, it was able to earn a lot of funding from grants and donations from local business owners (Worth, 2017, p.28). Since joining the organization in 2003, Church has increased the budget number to $200,000. Because the board had never been in such a situation before, they didn’t know how to deal with it. This was a big problem because as Howe explained, the board is responsible for “everything the organization does and how those things are accomplished” (Howe, 2002, p.30). So, them falling apart might have caused a lot of problems for Church in her new position. Not only did Church have to build the program, she also had to rebuild the board. She had to wear all the hats and worked in all positions at first. After being able to get funded, she then switched from working two jobs with extensive hours to fully working for the Youth Services nonprofit.

Within five years, Church was able to make her dream a reality. During that time, there was a lot of hardship, tears, self-doubt, and failures. Not to mention, Church is a single parent with three kids and used to have to work up to sixty-hour a week when she had jobs in both agencies. However, no matter what she did, Church always finds a balance in between her personal life and work life. She makes sure to participate in all of her family’s activities and not burning herself out. Church considers self-care to be very important, not only to her but for anyone that she works with.

Besides that, when being asked about nonprofits, Church thinks that they are always changing, but despite all the changes, in the end, they are all about giving from the heart. This idea is widely believed by many, including Worth, as he said that “nonprofit exists to serve a social purpose” (p.7, 2017). For Church and her team, their purpose is to provide mentorship for the younger generation. This goal is what has been driven them to work through all the hardship during the way. It is their dreams and passion. Especially for Church, who had a rocky teenage-hood. During college, she got involved in alcohol and got pregnant early. She came back to college at the age of 23, after having her first daughter. Growing up, the mentors that she had – her grandmother, coaches, and teachers – were the reasons she decided to keep moving forward when she wanted to give up on life. They had provided her with a lot of mentor and support. This was the reason why Church became deeply passionate about the mentoring program. She understands the impacts one could have on another person genuinely.

In the book, Worth raised a question of whether managing a nonprofit and a for-profit organization is the same (p.3, 2017). To answer this question, Church says for-profit and nonprofit are run exactly the same. She thinks they have the same employees, the payroll system, bills, and so on, except that they don't sell a product in order to gain money back. Judy Vredenburgh also agreed to this as she said, “every time we in nonprofit satisfy customers, we drain resources, and every time for-profits satisfy a customer, they get resources” (Worth, p.6, 2017). Not only that, Church also stated that all the areas that concern human such as hunger, kids, pets, and so forth, are addressed by nonprofit organizations. As a result, she suggests everyone to re-educate themselves to look at nonprofit workers differently. The CEOs and employees of nonprofits deserve to be paid and earn money because they are doing hard jobs just like any other workers, not to mention they are bringing a change for the society.

Last but not least, to make the Youth Services nonprofit become sustainable in the community for a long-term, Church is rebuilding the board again to move themselves to the next level. She wants to create a program where it can stand by itself, not attached to her so that whoever walks into her position next will be able to continue doing it. In the future, after resigning from the nonprofit, she is going to be a consultant consulting people to dream and make dreams happen. She wants to teach people to believe in themselves and that they can achieve whatever they desire. To Church, the most important thing to her is making connections and being able to influence people.

References

Home. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.youthserviceskc.org/

Hopkins, B.R. (2003). Legal responsibilities of nonprofit broads. Washington, DC: BoardSource.

Howe, F. (2002), Nonprofit accountability: The board’s fiduciary responsibility. In V. Futter (Ed.),

Nonprofit governance and management (pp. 29-38). Chicago, IL: American Bar

Association and American Society of Corporate Secretaries.

Worth, M. J. (2017). Nonprofit Management: Principles and Practice. Los Angeles: SAGE.

- Written by Lidaily