Transcript for the podcast South Carolina Nonprofit Leader: Mac Bennett, United Way of the Midlands

Below is the transcript of our podcast, “South Carolina Nonprofit Leader: Mac Bennett, United Way of the Midlands.” Huge thanks to new media intern Sarah Royal for work in creating the transcript. Listen to the show here.

Welcome to the Idealist podcast. I’m Amy Potthast and this is the Nonprofit Career Month podcast. October is Nonprofit Career Month, a month of activities to promote the diversity of career opportunities in our nation’s nonprofit sector. Driven by the collective contributions of the nonprofit community, the campaign dispels common myths about nonprofit work, provides you with entry points to the sector, and allows current and aspiring nonprofit professionals to share their expertise. Nonprofit Career Month is powered by Idealist.org and funded by the Kellogg Action Lab. Learn more at nonprofitcareermonth.org.

Today’s guest is Mac Bennett, who shares his experiences and insights from 30 years of nonprofit leadership. Since March 2005, Mac Bennett has served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the United Way of the Midlands in Columbia, SC. Prior to working at the United Way, he served as Executive Director of the Central Carolina Community Foundation in Columbia for 14 years, and from 1980 to 1991, Bennett held a variety of leadership positions with the University of South Carolina. Mac Bennett is also a founding director of the South Carolina Association of Nonprofit Organizations. Throughout his career, Mac Bennett has been instrumental in efforts to improve training and education for people working in the nonprofit sector.

Amy: I’ll start by asking you to introduce yourself. What is your name and your title?

Mac: My name is Mac Bennett, and I’m the President and CEO of United Way of the Midlands, which is in Columbia, SC.

Amy: And what is United Way of the Midlands?

Mac: United Way is [part of] the national United Way movement. Each United Way is incorporated locally and autonomous from our national office, but we all have common goals that we work toward in the community around health and human service needs. Primarily, United Way of the Midlands is about identifying and prioritizing needs in the community and then going out and raising the resources in order to respond to those specific needs.

Amy: Is it like a foundation?

Mac: In a sense it is like a foundation in that we engage local agencies with the resources that we raise in the community – we engage them to do the work that we think is important to do. United Ways have changed over the last 20 years. It used to be that we raised money and then we just carved up the pie to the number of organizations that we supported year in, year out in the community. Now, more United Ways are moving toward a model that does look a little bit like a foundation model where we have specific things that we’re trying to accomplish, and we engage through contract agencies and organizations in the community that can fulfill the work that we see that needs to be done. Those contracts may run for one year, three years, five years, or even longer. Most of ours tend to run about three years.

Amy: What are your day-to-day responsibilities and tasks as the President and CEO?

Mac: Well, each day it’s a little different. You know, the great thing about making it to this level in an organization like this – we employ about 45 people, a few more than that during campaign season, which is… you know, we do have sort of a seasonal business – it’s about managing people. I’m kinda like a coach, Amy. It’s about getting the right people in the right places to really benefit your organization in the community, and that’s primarily what I do. So it’s about managing people, interacting with people on staff, but then being a spokesperson for the organization in the community, and working with community leaders and civic leaders to make sure that we are doing the right things for our community, and making sure that people are aware of what we’re doing.

Amy: So the skill sets that you call on the most often, you would say, definitely people management and people skills?

Mac: You know, if I look back I wish I’d have taken sociology classes when I was in school, but it really is about how you interact with people to get work done. So, yeah – people skills, kind of having a sense of how to motivate people, how to get people to move things forward in a progressive way.

Amy: You connect with what they need to hear, and the way that they need to hear it, to get them to do their best work.

Mac: That’s right.

Amy: How did you learn that – practice?

Mac: I don’t know. In order to learn skills you watch people that are successful with those skills and try you try to emulate them. I mean, that’s really not something you learn in school – it’s about observing and picking out good role models and trying to take from them both good and bad characteristics. I’ve got a friend who says, “We can all be examples – some of us are good examples and some of us are bad examples.” So, you know, it’s watching people that you perceive to be successful at different things and then trying to emulate what makes them successful.

Amy: How did you first get involved with nonprofit work, either as a volunteer or as a board member or a professional, and what was the very beginning like for you? Was it in grade school or college…?

Mac: I never thought about it that way, but in high school – well, the family always had a tradition. We went to church, we did things in our community that responded to other people’s needs in the community, so from a very early age there was an expectation and a tradition set in my home that if we had things given to us, that we had a responsibility to share with the broader community. And so, I guess my first actual, formal involvement was Key Club in high school, sponsored by the Kiwanis.

Amy: And that’s a service organization?

Mac: It’s a service organization, and we would do fundraisers, and I was kinda introduced to service and raising money for those activities in high school. Then in college I was in a fraternity and we did some of those same community projects – maybe not as much out of altruistic reasons, but because, you know, we were always competing for some campus award, and in order to get those awards you had to do something good!

Amy: What did you study in college?

Mac: My degree is Finance and Management.

Amy: And a lot of people would think that if you have a Finance and Management degree that there wouldn’t be a need for you to work in the nonprofit sector – or they don’t connect that career trajectory with that degree.

Mac: That’s correct, and even I figured I would be working for a bank or a financial services company, and when I got out of college I took what I thought would be a one- or two-year stint staying on with the University of South Carolina. I thought I’d be there for a year or two and ended up staying there 11 years. That really exposed me to a wealth of experience that I’ve applied in my two subsequent jobs. Amy, I’ve been in the workforce 30 years but I’m only on my third job.

Amy: And then the next position you had was in a community foundation?

Mac: Yeah, I left the University after 11 years and just happened to be in the right place at the right time. That was the early ’90s – a wonderful time to be in that kind of philanthropic organization, because the ’90s were a real go, go year for the stock market and real estate. People were looking at how they’d preserve their capital gains and they had philanthropic interests, and nationally community foundations really served that market very well. You know, I went in and I was the only full-time staff person, and we had about $5 million in assets when I got there, and 13 ½ years later when I left we had about $70 million in assets.

Amy: That’s amazing!

Mac: Yeah, and a staff of about seven or eight people.

Amy: I bet your Key Club advisor in high school was sure proud of you!

Mac: Ah, they’re scratching their head – they’re saying, “We never would have thought he would have amounted to anything.” You know, it’s been fun. I’m not motivated by financial gain and that’s not why I do what I do. You know, that’s great for some people, and we need people that are motivated by those things, but…

Amy: It’s not for you?

Mac: No, I really wouldn’t do well in that environment.

Amy: That leads me to another question I had for you. The term “nonprofit” often misleads people to think that nonprofits are staffed by volunteers completely, or that you can’t make a living for your family working in a nonprofit. I’m wondering as someone that’s been at the hub of nonprofits in your community for so long, how would you respond to someone who had that idea?

Mac: I’ve got a great story – I taught a course for junior achievement a few years ago out at one of the local high schools. You know, 10% of the workforce in the United States works in the nonprofit sector.

Amy: Yeah, it’s much more than I think most people would think.

Mac: I’m teaching a course about the differences between for-profits and nonprofits, and they’re like, “Well, you don’t really get paid to work in a nonprofit field, do you? I mean, we thought all of those people were volunteers!” No, It’s a growing part of our economy, and at the end of the day the only difference between a for-profit and a not-for-profit is what happens with the retained earning. We have to balance our books, we can’t operate in the red, we have risk management and insurance and marketing and finance and administration, just like the local car dealership does.

Amy: Right, exactly, all the same roles. I mean, there are a few roles that don’t exist in the nonprofit sector.

Mac: Yeah, but at the end of the day, the car dealership – whoever owns that franchise – gets to decide what happens with the profit, and in the nonprofit field that money can’t get dispersed to shareholders or to an owner, per se. It gets dispersed back to the community’s needs, and usually that is investing it back into the organization so that we can do more or so we can provide more services or resources to the people that we’re trying to serve.

Amy: I guess the name “nonprofit” makes it sound like the nonprofit organization can’t turn a profit, but that’s absolutely not true – it’s actually important to be able to do that, but the profit just doesn’t go into someone’s pocket.

Mac: That’s right.

Amy: And so you talked a little bit about what doesn’t motivate you, which is the sort of idea of earning more income, but what does motivate you?

Mac: Well, let me be clear: I like to make enough money to feed my family, and the nonprofit career has been very comfortable for me from a financial standpoint – but you know, I’m kind of at the top of the tray. I think there are great opportunities for people to get into and to sustain a career in the nonprofit field. What’s motivated me through my career has been helping others, feeling like you’re making a difference – the spiritual aspect. God’s given me certain talents, and if I can use those talents effectively to make our community better, make lives better for people who live and work here…

Amy: Well, it just goes back to what you were saying – that those reasons you got involved in the beginning with your community were things that you learned in your family…

Mac: Sure.

Amy: It’s the same values that are still motivating you today – that’s pretty powerful.

Mac: And you know what’s great is I get to work with people who are motivated by other kinds of incentives, like financial incentives and other things, but they also have a sense that they’ve got some time and some resources that they want to share with the community, too, and they’re looking for people to help them do that. United Way provides a platform for people to volunteer and advocate and give. They don’t have the time to figure it all out on their own, but they come to us and we’re like, “Yeah, we can help you with that!” So we get to work with the business people, the elected officials, and we get to work with the schools and educators to try to pull some of these things off, and, you know, every now and then we hit a home run.

Amy: And so I think the lesson of that might be that nonprofit careers aren’t the answer for everyone. It’s a rewarding sector to work in, but there’s lots of other ways to be involved if you’re in a different kind of a career, like a business career or working for a company or even a small business.

Mac: Absolutely, yeah.

Amy: And United Way – I think you guys are a great connector for a lot of different kinds of things, plugging people into wherever they can serve or they can feel like they can best serve, either through being a contributor financially to an organization, or connecting people to become volunteers or even leaders of an organization through board service…

Mac: All of the above. We’ve got volunteers who want to volunteer four or five hours a week, Monday morning every week, and then we’ve got some that say, “I’ve got one day a year I can give you – I want to work on a house, or I want to help some elderly people that day,” and we can get them connected. Whatever they’re willing to give, we can figure out some way to connect.

Amy: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else that you wanted to add?

Mac: Bottom line, especially for younger people that are looking for options – I don’t know if you’ve read Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great,” but he came out with an addendum for the nonprofit area. I think there are a lot of things in that that were really encouraging to those of us that work in nonprofits, to say, “Hey, we’re not second-class citizens – we’re taking on and performing important community work, and things would not be nearly so good in our country without the work of the not-for-profit sector.” It’s not something to say, “Well, if I can’t do anything else I might consider that.” We try to get people in here while they’re in college to do internships and to do work with us so that we can introduce them into this field in the hopes that, not the people who don’t have any other options, but the people with all the options will consider working in the nonprofit sector.

Amy: Absolutely.

Mac: We want the best and brightest, just like IBM and Publix and some of the best retailers and manufacturers in the country – we want to compete for them. People shouldn’t feel reticent about looking for a career in the nonprofit field, because it certainly, as it has for me, can meet not only a family’s financial needs but it can give you a good feeling at the end of each day.

Amy: You’re working hard for your community, making it better every day.

Mac: Yup.

Amy: Well, thank you so much.

Mac: It’s been my pleasure, Amy.

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Learn more about United Way of the Midlands in Columbia, SC at uway.org.

Find links to the resources mentioned on today’s show and more information about Nonprofit Career Month at nonprofitcareermonth.org.

Special thanks today to Mason Hardy, Beth Baldauf, and my aunt, Kathy Moreland – all of Columbia, SC. This show was produced with the help of Douglas Coulter. I’m Amy Potthast. Thanks for listening. To find more good things to do, go to Idealist.org.

If you have enjoyed our podcasts, please show your support by going to iTunes and leaving a review and a rating of this episode or others you’ve liked. You can also send us feedback to podcasts [at] idealist [dot] org (podcasts [at] idealist.org.)