The Journey to Nonprofit Leadership as a Woman

A well-respected executive director once said to me that we may not have the exact same experiences as the communities we serve, but we have an experience that makes this work personal and connects us to the issues we advocate for. At that moment, I knew I could lead a nonprofit one day. 

I was a professional ballet dancer for over a decade before I decided to pursue a degree at New York University Stern School of Business, marking a new chapter of my life. I was ready to embrace the world of business, leadership and organizations with the unique lessons I learned in the nurturing yet rigid world of ballet.

Dance is a topic, an industry and a culture full of contradictions. On one hand, it expanded my thinking, empathy and imagination, and on the other, ballet can be elitist, exclusive, harsh and isolating. It’s a profession full of women yet mostly run by men and operating mostly within a gender binary.

The dance industry raised me to be strong and resilient, and I always thought my background as a professional dancer would be my greatest selling point.

While in business school, I was told that every year, the employment rate for graduates of the program was 97%. We were almost guaranteed a prestigious job after the completion of our degree, but life doesn’t seem to always go as promised. I graduated as one of the 3% with no job offer.

In actuality, my background as a dancer — a stereotypically feminine profession often less respected than athletes and artists — discredited me as a woman in business. No one saw me as a peer or as a colleague they could trust. An interviewer thought it was appropriate to tell me that he had once dated a Rockette. I became very aware that while I knew my value, my former profession carried with it many feelings of shame and societal misconceptions about its seriousness.

As I started to gain opportunities, I tried to hide where I came from and rarely talked about my past. I was treated as an entry-level employee often lumped in with interns 10 to 15 years my junior. Superiors were surprised by the positive results I would achieve for clients and often confused by the process I took to get there. It would take about five more years, plus the kindness and feedback of mentors, before I could really understand the game — how to show up at work, how to use the right tools and right words, and how to manage up, down and across. 

Looking back at this time now, I recognize that what was holding me back was a larger societal issue — a fear of embracing difference and valuing nonconformity.

I was furious at myself for trying to conform, but I also needed to survive. Still, I was not going to bend. I vowed then to make the nonprofit industry work for women.

As I began to break through these barriers and rise to leadership positions, building a truly equal work environment became my biggest priority. Paradoxically, my dance background had turned into a big asset in this stage of my career. I drew a lot of inspiration from choreographers, like William Forsythe, who choreographed groundbreaking pieces alongside and directly for the dancers who were to perform them. 

I don’t subscribe to rigid structures and viewing people as commodities. Rather, I strive to create systems where people feel a sense of ownership and accountability for their contributions and design systems around the people I work with. Everyone should get to feel inspired by their own work process and be the directors of their own learning and development. I have seen firsthand that building around employees’ strengths and providing support not only benefits the employees — it benefits the organization and the bottom line. 

As the current executive director of the feminist independent publication The Conversationalist, I was lucky to step into an organization that fully aligned with my values. Founder Anna Lind-Guzik created a nonprofit that is not bound by outdated ideas or traditions, explicitly pushing back on systems that are not beneficial to the team and replacing them with new, more inclusive systems. She doesn’t believe in chasing clicks — she believes in creating space to tell stories that highlight marginalized voices while valuing employees as human beings and compensating writers and artists for their work. 

At The Conversationalist, we ask what it means to be a company that puts people first. What does it mean to run a feminist organization today? What does feminist management look like? I think back to my 30s and the type of support and environment I wish I had as a woman in the nonprofit world, and together with my team, we honor the experiences of our past in order to create a feminist work future for all identities. My advice to managers everywhere is the same — continue to be critical of the spaces you occupy and create, continue to ask questions without a rigid obligation to answer them and never forget the people who make this work possible. Humility and empathy should always be at the center of what we do.

The preceding post was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.