Disclaimer: The views expressed by our interviewees are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of GradSimple. We only edit these responses for clarity. All opinions remain those of the interviewee.
- Year Of Graduation: 2018
- College/University: University of Louisville
- Major: Public Health
Table of Contents
What do you do for a living, or how are you supporting yourself right now? Can you share what a typical day in your life/at work looks like?
I’m currently working with the YMCA of Greater Louisville, and I’m now transitioning out of that role. My last day is in mid-June, so right now I’m in the transition period of taking everything in my brain and passing it on to the team, creating playbooks, instructions, and documentation. I’m definitely feeling the anxiety from the team, because it’s like, “Oh my gosh, our most precious resource is about to leave, so we need to get as much out of her as possible.” That’s kind of where I am right now.
My work has been in financial development, which in the simplest terms is fundraising. For the YMCA specifically, financial development means providing resources for the community. That might look like financial assistance for people who want to participate in YMCA programs, like sending their kids to camp or putting their kids in youth sports. Fundraising dollars are what fund those financial assistance programs, but financial development can also mean grants, sponsorships, endowment, and ensuring the longevity of the organization.
I wore a lot of hats. Sometimes that’s typical, and sometimes it’s not, but I had the unique role of overseeing annual giving, which is really a baseline level of fundraising for nonprofits. It’s casting a wide net into the community and asking people for gifts. That can look like peer-to-peer fundraising, where someone sets up a personal page, sets a goal, and shares the link with people in their network.
A lot of my work has been training volunteers, advisory board members, and board members who fundraise on behalf of the organization. These are not professional fundraisers. They are people who volunteer their time, so part of my responsibility is teaching them the basics and fundamentals of fundraising for the YMCA: how to build a prospect list, how to identify potential donors, how to make the ask, how to follow up, and how to say thank you.
I also oversaw a lot of our larger community-facing events. We have a Thanksgiving breakfast with about 300 people, including community members and community leaders, and it is co-hosted by the mayor of Louisville. I oversaw logistics for events like that, including registration, booking the venue, booking catering, communicating with the mayor’s office, working with our marketing team, choosing a theme, and making sure we had the collateral we needed.
For the longest time, I was not a direct fundraiser. I was not directly asking people for money. I was doing it through more indirect channels, like sending mass emails or direct mail pieces. What our organization really wanted to shift our department toward was having people like me become direct fundraisers, taking off a lot of the administrative tasks and moving me toward being a frontline fundraiser. I think part of me leaving was having to be honest with myself that this is not actually what I wanted to do, especially not long term.
Why did you choose your undergrad major?
I went to the University of Louisville here in Kentucky. I started in 2014 and graduated in 2018. My major was public health, and I was actually part of the first class of undergraduate public health students. Previously, they had only offered public health as a master’s program, so my freshman year was the first year they offered it to undergrads.
It was a learning experience both for students and for staff as everyone tried to navigate what undergrad public health looked like, but it was a really great experience. I actually don’t think I really picked my major myself. I think my mom ended up helping me pick it because when I was getting ready to go to college, I was very undecided and had no idea what I wanted to do.
Public health seemed like it was not entirely healthcare, but still community-focused, and I was very much a community-minded student coming out of high school. I was part of clubs in high school that were focused around community service, so public health seemed like a pretty good path to go down. I had also never heard of public health until my mom sent it to me. My mom is always sending me stuff, so I was like, “Okay, I’ll try.”
Can you tell me about your experience finding a job after graduation?
Once I graduated, the focus for me was really just to get a job anywhere. I was not immediately looking to land something in public health. I’m originally from a small town in Kentucky, which is where I live now, but at the time I was planning on staying in Louisville with my fiancé (now husband), finding a job, working there, and living there.
I started using some connections from my volunteer days. When I was in middle school and high school, I was part of a YMCA program around youth and government, so I used my connections with that program. I knew there were people in the Louisville area I could reach out to, not only to help me land a job, but also to learn about opportunities to get involved in the community that might eventually lead to a job. Through those connections, I got connected to people at Humana, the health department, and the YMCA of Greater Louisville.
The YMCA connection was initially meant to be more of a mentorship relationship. The person I met with was supposed to help me decide where I wanted to go. He had me do assessments, and I visited him every week as I tried to figure out what I wanted to do. He was not intending to give me a job at that point.
Over time, I think he realized there might actually be a place for me at the Y. He ended up having two part-time positions open. One was an administrative assistant position for our Black Achievers program, which is a college and career readiness program for multicultural youth. The other was an annual campaign coordinator position, which was focused on annual giving for his branch of the YMCA. He combined them into one full-time position and said, “Here you go. I think this would be great for you just to get your foot in the door and get your feet wet.”
I came into it knowing I had an administrative background. In college, I had worked as a tutor for the athletics program, and I had also been an administrative assistant for the School of Public Health, specifically the public health administration department. That background definitely helped in the role, because a lot of the work involved student registration, paperwork for field trips, documentation, processing donations, contacting donors, and providing resources for volunteer fundraisers.
I did that for a couple of years, from 2018 to 2020, and then COVID happened. In March 2020, the YMCA put the majority of people on furlough, and a lot of positions were eliminated. I was furloughed for a couple of months and then was able to come back. My position was elevated to more of a full administrative assistant role for the whole site, because they had eliminated some roles and needed additional administrative support.
Then September came around, and the Black Achievers director decided to retire. I got married on September 12th, and the following Tuesday I found out I was getting laid off. They were eliminating the administrative assistant role across the whole organization, so it wasn’t just me personally. It was everybody with that title.
What I remember most, and what I’m grateful for, is that when my boss told me I was being laid off, he already had a backup plan for me. He had the official letter, but he told me he didn’t even want me to look at it or worry about it. He had three new job descriptions lined out on the desk in front of me and said, “Look at these three. Pick your top two, update your resume, apply for the two you want, and we’ll go from there.”
I really appreciated that this person, who not only brought me into the organization but also saw my potential and my worth, came prepared in that disastrous moment. He knew I didn’t have a backup plan and was not prepared for it at all, but he was ready to find a way to keep me there. I ended up applying for a financial development role, which is how I transitioned into fundraising, as well as an administrative assistant role. The financial development one felt the most right for me, and I ended up getting that job.
For the first two years in that position, we were trying to understand what financial development, philanthropy, and fundraising looked like during and coming out of COVID. A lot of that time was rebuilding and trying to understand our organization again. After that, our boss abruptly left the organization, and it disrupted our working dynamic and made us feel very unstable as a department while we were still trying to come out of COVID.
We had temporary support from someone at a neighboring YMCA who shared her time between us and her YMCA for about two years. Then we got a new CEO, replacing a CEO who had been with the YMCA almost his entire life. I really felt the effects of that because even though our temporary leader was temporary, she was stable leadership for me in a time when I needed it. I had been elevated to a supervisor position, which meant I had to supervise my peers. That was a challenge because I had to balance holding them accountable while also knowing they were my friends.
At this point, you can see there has been a lot of change along the way. It’s almost like a two-year cycle. Every two years, something major came along, and I had to adjust. I was leaned on a lot for institutional knowledge as new people came in. People higher than me looked to me for guidance and direction. Our new CEO leaned on me a lot to understand the culture of our Y, and my new boss leaned on me a lot in her first year to understand what she calls the “sacred cows,” or the things the organization has always done that we absolutely cannot touch without it blowing up.
We are now about a year and a half in with this new boss, and she has provided really great leadership and mentorship for me. But as an organization, over the last year, I feel like my values and how much I’ve poured into the organization have reached an ending point. I don’t feel like I can pour much more out of myself anymore. I feel like I’ve been relied on for way too long, and I’ve always been waiting for the point where I could sit back and be led instead of being leaned on.
It has gotten to the point where the burnout is beyond repair if I stay there. I know some people in our organization have taken sabbaticals before, but I don’t think a sabbatical will be enough. I think this is one of those seasons of change where I’ve been here for so long that I don’t know who I am outside of this organization. It takes up so much of my life.
What’s your biggest struggle right now? What led to it, and how are you moving forward?
My biggest struggle is the fear around this transition because I have been with this organization for so long. I’ve been with them since before my frontal lobe developed. This is all new to me, stepping back out into the job market. To be frank, I didn’t really apply for the job I initially got. I was presented the opportunity, not really expecting to work with them, but I took it. Along the way, my leadership growth came from being promoted based on what I was able to show and what I was working toward.
A lot of the struggle right now is that sense of fear and apprehension. There’s also a fear of failure, like what if I end up jumping into another company that is just as toxic or just as stressful? I’m trying to remind myself that this is the biggest leap. Anything after that is not going to be nearly as terrifying or as hard, because I know I have the freedom now to say that if something doesn’t serve me or I don’t like it, I can just not do it. I think that also comes with turning 30. I turned 30 this year, so I’m having a lot of those reflective moments.
What would you tell someone who is considering nonprofit work?
The “many hats” thing and being underpaid are definitely real. Especially now that I’m looking at other jobs and seeing what my skill set can translate to, and how much more I could be getting paid using those same skill sets somewhere else, I can see that I’ve definitely been underpaid. With an organization like the YMCA, there are so many different types of roles. You have association-level staff like me, and those roles are very different from the frontline people in a YMCA branch who are offering fitness classes, swim lessons, sports, and camps.
For anybody considering joining a nonprofit, I would definitely look at the specific role within the nonprofit you are considering and see what people in that role are saying about their experience. It really differs depending on the department and role you have. Those of us in the association office have very different struggles and challenges than people who are more frontline, community-facing, and public-facing.
I think the overarching result is that in nonprofit, you burn out very easily. I’ve been told that it’s all about what you are willing to sacrifice and what you are willing to endure. If you really value the mission of your organization and the good that you’re doing, and that is enough to keep you there, then by all means, go for it. But just know you are going to struggle with caring for yourself, caring for others, and finding time. Based on my personal experience, I would say proceed with caution.
How do you think AI is impacting nonprofits and fundraising?
We definitely use AI, probably a lot more this last year than we ever have. For me personally, I use AI more to handle administrative tasks in my day-to-day work. If I need to send mass emails or a series of emails over time, I use it to make those emails sound nice and work for the audience I’m sending them to. I also have newsletters that I send around annual giving and things like that, so I’ll use it for those.
We also use AI a lot for automation, which I’ve seen grow much more in the philanthropy space. That has saved us a lot of time on things we were spending hours, days, weeks, or months on previously. Now, it might take a couple of hours upfront, and then we don’t have to do it for the rest of the year. That has been really interesting to see.
I also attended a conference for Blackbaud, which is the donor database we use. They talked a lot about AI and its function within our donor database system. They launched a lot of new AI tools, and some people were a little skeptical or uncomfortable. They had some AI assistant features, so we could definitely feel the pressure of software companies pushing AI onto us.
I honestly could not see AI replacing nonprofit jobs, at least not in the near future, because nonprofit is so people-first and relationship-driven. It runs on relationships in the community with individual people. I don’t see nonprofit even allowing AI to get to that point. I could see it continuing to help with administration and automation, but I don’t see it taking over people’s roles because nonprofit is about people, and you need people to serve other people.
Were there any resources, tools, or support systems you wish had existed when you were younger?
I consider myself to be very privileged when it came to the resources that were available to me as a young person, especially in a community this small. When I was younger, this city probably only had 20,000 people. We probably have almost 30,000 or 40,000 now. To be an African-American and Asian kid, one of the only ones at my school, and to have that type of resource and support system, I knew that was not something everybody was getting, especially in a town like this. I knew that was not the norm, and I did not take it for granted.
I think less about what younger kids should be looking for and more about what adults should be providing to those kids. Who should adults be looking for? How do they spot potential? I think we really have an opportunity to do a lot more of that. I am so fortunate to have people, not even within my school, but through connections that my family members were fortunate to have in the community. A lot of them helped me get the full ride to college that I got. Otherwise, I probably would not have considered college, at least not immediately.
A lot of those resources looked like individual adults providing advice and connections. Many of them provided community service hours when I needed them. There were times when I went to leadership camps or leadership conferences based on their recommendations or nominations. I consider myself fortunate, and even to this day, I know that is not something that typically happens in a community this small.
For young people now, I think they have access to technology much more than we did back then. I would say any groups or resources like GradSimple that they can tap into are valuable. I find so much value in networking and connections. Even when I go to conferences, like the one we just went to, I barely went to sessions. I talked to people because I wanted to know what their challenges were and what their advice was.
What’s the biggest lesson or piece of advice you wish you’d known earlier?
Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone, and don’t be afraid to fail. Growing up, I was definitely a “play it safe” person. I got so used to being comfortable in my situation, and I was so scared of what was outside because of the what-ifs. What if I don’t make as much money? What if my family and I struggle? What if I’m not good at the next job I go into?
I think it’s about not being afraid to take those risks. I’m so glad that I came to a lot of these realizations now, but I also think back on what my quality of life would be like now if I had made some of these decisions a little earlier.
Connect With Brianna
- LinkedIn: @BriannaODaniel
P.S. If this interview hit a little too close to home, you’ll probably like what we do every week. We share raw, honest stories from grads figuring life out in real time. If this was forwarded to you, you can join us here! It’s free.
