Transcript for the podcast New Mexico Nonprofit Leader: Margaret Ambler Salamon, Center for Nonprofit Excellence

Below is the transcript of our podcast, “New Mexico Nonprofit Leader: Margaret Ambler Salamon, Center for Nonprofit Excellence.” 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. Learn more at Nonprofitcareermonth.org.

Today’s guest is Margaret Ambler Salamon, Research Specialist and wearer of many other hats at the Center for Nonprofit Excellence in Albuquerque, NM. The Center for Nonprofit Excellence is a collaborative effort of the United Way of Central New Mexico and the Albuquerque Community Foundation. It aims to strengthen the capacity of the nonprofit sector through building collaborations, educating donors, and increasing the effective management of nonprofits.

Her passion for nonprofit organizations began in 2000 with a ten-month Public Allies apprenticeship, a national apprenticeship and AmeriCorps program focused on building young leadership while strengthening communities.

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Amy: Thank you so much, Margaret, for coming on the show.

Margaret: Sure, I’m thrilled! Thank you.

Amy: I thought I’d ask you to introduce yourself and the Center for Nonprofit Excellence.

Margaret: My name is Margaret Ambler Salamon, and I am the Research Specialist for the Center for Nonprofit Excellence in Albuquerque. Basically, the Center for Nonprofit Excellence is a capacity-building organization for nonprofits in the state of New Mexico. We offer workshops, primarily, and web resources to help nonprofits do the work that they’re doing, hopefully better – so it’s serving more of their clients, more of their communities.

Amy: So in your role, what are your day-to-day responsibilities and tasks? What skill sets do you call on the most often?

Margaret: I’m the Research Specialist, and I don’t actually think my job title resonates with my position – I feel like I do a lot more project management. My main responsibilities: I put together an online directory of grant makers that fund in New Mexico or provide national opportunities that New Mexico nonprofits are eligible to apply for. We also are putting together a nonprofit directory right now that’s online. There’s no comprehensive information out there about what is in New Mexico, so we hope to use this nonprofit directory to build collaborations amongst nonprofits, so ultimately more nonprofits are working together and hopefully filling some of the holes that are needed in our communities, but also so that volunteers can find out more information – so donors or grant makers can find out more information of what’s going on in the nonprofit community. Also, it’ll be phenomenal for doing research on exactly what sort of impact all these nonprofit organizations are having in New Mexico.

I think one of the things with a nonprofit position, and that I really like about my position, is I get to wear so many hats. With both of the directories, I’ve been involved in the whole web development. You know, I’m not doing that specifically, but I’m working with a web developer and I’m making sure that all the details are in there. I get to work with my executive director on what our marketing plan is and how we’re going to get more information and more participation. I get to think about all the little details of a project, versus like if it was a very large organization, I might have one very specific role that I repeat over and over. I think this is true throughout the nonprofit sector – you get to wear a lot more hats, and that to me makes my work more interesting.

Back to sort of roles and responsibilities: the Center for Nonprofit Excellence has been very supportive of a young network, for young professionals in their twenties and thirties. We started out as sort of our own emerging nonprofit leadership network, and now we’re joining forces with YNPN, the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network that’s happening nationally, so we’re becoming a chapter, and so the Center supports my time towards that. Then I do a lot of stuff around database: trying so that we can pull together better reports, to evaluate our work and what nonprofits we’re reaching and who’s attending our workshops, so I get to do a lot of detail-oriented stuff and big picture stuff, and that to me is really fun. You know, my involvement with various nonprofits day-to-day is really behind the scenes – I don’t necessarily get to interact with a lot of them in a lot of ways, but I know that so many attend different types of trainings – maybe they’re looking at how to build their board and the governance of their organization, or maybe they’re just trying to understand financial statements better, or how to market their programs better – those are all things that the Center for Nonprofit Excellence does to support these organizations. So it’s a step removed from the actual direct service that the nonprofits do, but I like it.

Amy: Well, I think it’s important for people to realize, too, that I think a lot of people when they think of working for a nonprofit, they imagine working directly with clients, on the ground all the time, and there are actually a lot of roles in the nonprofit sector that are a step or two back from that.

Margaret: Every nonprofit has some sort of administration, whether it’s raising money or payroll or just office tasks.

Amy: So I want to ask you how you first got involved with the work of nonprofits.

Margaret: I know in high school I did a research project on utopian communities, so just wanting to know, like how people took ownership in making the world or the life they want. I think that that has been sort of a natural evolution into the nonprofit sector for me.

Amy: I know that one of the first things that kicked off your formal career was spending a year in the program Public Allies.

Margaret: When Public Allies came to New Mexico and it was Taos at the time, I had been working in a restaurant for four years, and Public Allies was my opportunity to move into the nonprofit sector and actually get paid for it.

Amy: Can you explain what Public Allies is?

Margaret: Public Allies is a national program. It’s a 10-month apprenticeship to help young people build leadership skills and strengthen their communities. I think there are 15 chapters around the country, and young people, I think 18-30, can apply to be part of Public Allies, and they’re basically matched with a nonprofit organization or government agency to build community. So four days a week you’re with your nonprofit organization, and the final day of the week you are with all the other Public Allies who are at different organizations throughout their community. You come together, you do leadership training, maybe some collaborating in regards to learning from each other’s experiences, and you do team service projects which is pretty common for AmeriCorps – Public Allies is an AmeriCorps program. So you do work in a group and some sort of group-related project to serve in your community.

Amy: So what were you doing during your Public Allies year, and how did that help you, or did it help you, with your next steps in terms of your career?

Margaret: When I went into Public Allies, one of the opportunities that was available was to work with the Taos County Chamber of Commerce and the Taos Business Alliance for Economic Development, which wasn’t exactly a perfect fit, but it was sort of interesting because I was intrigued to get behind the scenes for economic development. What ended up happening, specifically with the chamber, was that they were looking at how to bring the business community into the schools, and this is a little bit different because this is a very rural community versus a large urban area, so the business community was all very much specific people, and it was much smaller. It’s not like coming into a school and sponsoring the school.

What developed out of it is that we created a nonprofit called the Taos Business and Education Collaborative, and we brought in people from the community to talk about their lives and their professions in the schools, and then kids were able to go out into the community for job shadow days or for an extended internship. My own history with internships made the position really exciting.

It ended up turning into sort of a three-year position, and it was phenomenal because I got to do everything. You know, I got to take an idea that previously nobody had the time to expand on, and learn more about who was supportive of the idea and really hear people and what they wanted to give and how to connect the different dots and make it a reality. That was the most exciting part of my Public Allies experience, was to know that I could make something happen – you know, certainly with community support. But it did a lot for my self-esteem and for shaping my future in projects I want to get involved in.

Amy: For Nonprofit Career Month, we had a really hard time coming up with a tagline, so we came up with a lot of taglines that sort of rotate through our logo when it’s online. One of them is, for example, “Nonprofit work is work that matters,” or “… that makes a difference,” “Nonprofit work is work that pays,” “… that takes skill,” and I’m wondering if any of those taglines resonate with you, or what you would come up with as a tagline for nonprofit careers – being at the hub, as you are, of so many nonprofits and having experience with so many different organizations.

Margaret: Well, I definitely think it pays – for some reason people seem to think that the nonprofit sector pays pretty poorly, but there are plenty of for-profit positions that pay a lot worse. For me, it’s really valuable to be able to go home at the end of the day and feel like I love my job. So I definitely think it pays in ways that are not just money. I sometimes wonder whether people really get a good sense of how broad and diverse the nonprofit sector is. There are so many things that the nonprofit sector does, and actually, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Lynn Twist and The Soul of Money, but she sort of coined the term “social profit,” so while “nonprofit” is an IRS classification, we actually do create profit – whether it’s both money that’s reinvested towards the mission, or social profit in our communities, making our communities better. So I do think the nonprofit sector matters.

Amy: “Nonprofit work makes a social profit.” I like that idea a lot. And I’ve heard people refer to it as that, and whenever I hear that I think, “Of course!” It is a social profit sector – that’s exactly what it is.

Margaret: Mmm hmm.

Amy: Well, thank you so much, Margaret.

Margaret: I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about my position, and I definitely encourage people to consider the nonprofit sector as a really valuable area of employment.

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Learn more about the Center for Nonprofit Excellence at Centerfornonprofitexcellence.org. Read about Public Allies at publicallies.org. Listen to more Nonprofit Career Month podcasts at nonprofitcareermonth.org/podcasts.

Special thanks today to David McKinney, Michelle Dodd, Mary Lou Gonzales, and Joe Grant. This show was produced with the help of Sarah Royal and Douglas Coulter. I’m Amy Potthast. Thanks for listening. To find more good things to do, go to Idealist.org.

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