Transcript for the podcast Job Seeker: Abby Flottemesch, a Mid-Career Nonprofit Development Professional

Below is the transcript of our podcast, “Job Seeker: Abby Flottemesch, a Mid-Career Nonprofit Development Professional.” 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 the nation’s nonprofit sector. Learn more at nonprofitcareermonth.org.

Today’s guest is Abby Flottemesch, a mid-career nonprofit professional and a Minnesota native who is currently engaged in a job search. Abby recently completed a year-long fellowship in Bogota, Colombia, with Atlas Service Corps where she worked with the Saldarriaga Concha Foundation — a Colombian foundation that provides resources to organizations that work with individuals with disabilities and with the elderly. Prior to her Atlas Corps Fellowship, Abby worked for five years in program and fund development in Minneapolis and in Washington, D.C. with The Campus Kitchens Project (CKP) — a national, student-powered hunger relief organization connected with the innovative DC Central Kitchen.

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Amy: Hi, Abby! Welcome to the show.

Abby: Well, thank you, it’s great to be here!

Amy: I thought you could start off, as I often have people start off, by introducing yourself, and where you live.

Abby: Great! Well, my name is Abby Flottemesch, I’m a Minnesota native, and I’ve just recently returned from Bogota, Colombia. I was there for a year as an Atlas Service Corps Fellow, so I’m actually back in Northwestern Minnesota. It’s good to be back in the U.S.

Amy: You’re currently in transition from your Atlas Corp position – the fellowship – so now you’re looking for work again in the nonprofit sector in Minnesota?

Abby: Exactly, and actually I have two outlets that I’m focusing my job search on, and that would be in the Minnesota area – specifically in the Twin Cities area – and then also in Washington, D.C. I’ve actually worked in the nonprofit sector in both areas, and they both were experiences I really enjoyed, and I really enjoy the nonprofit sector in those areas. So I’m looking to get back into one of those areas, and we’ll see what comes up in the next few weeks.

Amy: So I want to definitely talk about your job search, but I thought we could start with talking about before you were serving as an Atlas Corp Fellow, what were you doing -- what kind of jobs, and what roles did you play in the nonprofit sector?

Abby: Well, I’ve definitely come through the spectrum, I think, of nonprofit experiences – everything from volunteer management to project coordination to fundraising – and the last job I had before entering Atlas Corps was as Development Director of The Campus Kitchens Project. The Campus Kitchens Project is based out of D.C. and it’s connected with DC Central Kitchen, and it is actually a national nonprofit organization that is a student-led hunger relief organization based on college and high school campuses. It’s a relatively young organization that started in 2001, and so I came on actually in Minneapolis to start one of their programs at Augsburg College in 2003, and then two years later I moved in 2005 to Washington, D.C. to start the development department. A lot of my experience in the nonprofit sector is really focused on the fundraising, the communications piece, and growing of an organization and nonprofit.

Amy: In development work, what kind of skill sets do you use most often, and what are the day-to-day tasks of a development director?

Abby: I really see communication as so important, and “communication” meaning the broad spectrum. It really takes an individual, and with that even a team of people who can express very succinctly – I know oftentimes you hear that 10-second elevator speech – and it really is so important to be able to express what your organization does, but then also to be able to network – to get out there and be able to talk to people. I’m a firm believer that with development it’s all about relation-building, and just looking back on my experience with The Campus Kitchens Project – looking at the resources and the partners that we were able to develop – we had the most success when we had some type of relationship with the people that supported us, whether they were individual, corporate or foundation donors. Once they had an experience, whether that meeting one of us national staff and expressing our interest or our involvement with the organization, whether that be a volunteer experience, whether that be talking one-on-one with one of our student volunteers – it made such a huge impact. So I think that’s really important, that you’re able to really convey to someone what your organization does and really inspire in them the interest, so having that energy and enthusiasm – whether that comes out verbally, whether that comes out on paper, whether that comes out on a blog – it is so important. I think that communication piece just cannot be stressed enough, and so I think it is really important working in development.

And also organization, too – you really have to be someone who’s able to organize. For example, taking a grants calendar and being able to manage, “OK, these are the deadlines that we have.” In addition, maybe you need to have the deadlines of a publication – for example, a newsletter – and so need to be able to coordinate all of those aspects together. Many times it’s not just the person who’s in charge of development, but the other team members in the organization to be able to add their bits and pieces to those different parts, so it’s really important that someone can also be really organized and help meet those deadlines, and help others to meet those deadlines. So I think that communication and that organized part are two characteristics that are really important in development.

Amy: So I’m really curious after hearing about your career, which sounds like it was going along swimmingly, why you would leave that to go off for a year to do Atlas Corps? And maybe you could talk a little bit about what Atlas Corps is, as well.

Abby: Great, well, I would definitely say that one of my gifts that I think I possess is taking a concept that is relatively new and pushing it to that next level – growing it and helping it expand and taking it to that second level, where then someone else can come along and keep it running smoothly. I think I’ve done that throughout all my professional experience, and I look at The Campus Kitchens Project, for example: I came on in the second year of the organization and so I started the fourth program. I think now the organization has about 15 programs throughout the United States. And so at that time, as you can imagine, it was a young organization – it was really looking to its field staff to grow it and help put these systems in place, and I was part of that. I really feel proud to be part of that and help shape the organization that it is today, and then going on and starting the development department, where the development had been done partly by the executive directors at the time and some of the other staff, but no one had specifically led that department. So they take me and said, “Do you want to lead it? Do you want to shape and really create a department?” So I came in and I worked to really establish those connections, and like I mentioned before about putting the organizational pieces together and putting those systems in place to help forward the development.

And after doing that for three years, I realized that I’d taken it to a certain point and that was my gift to develop those essential partnerships, to develop those valuable systems that were kind of the foundation of the organization. I realized that, you know, I’ve done what my skill really is – to get things started – and I think I’m ready to move on, and I think I’m ready to have someone else come in and add their gifts, and kind of sustaining that and helping those systems really become embedded in the organization. One of my loves has always been travel and has always definitely been Latin America – and I really wanted to get back into that international sector. I loved my work with The Campus Kitchens Project and I really liked the challenge of it being a national network – I think that adds some unique opportunities there – though I knew deep down I wanted to really go back into the international sector.

I’d learned about Atlas Service Corps at a development training when I met an individual who knew Scott Beale, the Executive Director and the founder of the organization. So we talked about how The Campus Kitchens Project and Atlas Service Corps seemed to have a lot in common. It’s a lot about that social innovation, entrepreneurship, inspiring young leaders, and my interest grew in the organization. It seemed the first class of fellows come to the United States and help the organization, where it’s basically a nonprofit fellowship for individuals who have experience in the nonprofit sector. It’s for mid-level professionals – I think the average age of a fellow is about 30 years. What they do is they bring individuals internationally from outside the United States to Washington, D.C. and they place them in nonprofit organizations where they serve for a year, and in those nonprofit organizations they basically are the equivalent of a full-time employee and a lot of times they have a specific focus on what they’re working on. Last year, for the first year, they opened the fellowship for people to go to Colombia and to serve a nonprofit organization.

Amy: So U.S. citizens could apply to serve abroad?

Abby: Exactly, and so kind of keeping on my trajectory of loving new challenges and developing new concepts, I thought, you know, this is a great opportunity to re-connect with Latin America, get back with that interest, and to also pioneer this new concept and to be involved in an organization that I really firmly believe in the structure and their mission and what they did. So I applied, and from there, I guess they say the rest is history: I was accepted and I worked with a grant-making foundation in Colombia. The name of the foundation was the Fundación Saldarriaga Concha, and so I served with them for a year in Colombia. It was just a really great experience, I mean, professionally going from the direct-service side of a nonprofit that I’d been doing here in the United States to actually an organization that they called “second level,” and they really invested their resources in other organizations that were doing more direct service, and so really being able to see that side of the nonprofit sector and philanthropy and how it works and helping develop some of their systems and some of their activities and putting it out there.

The responses I received back were great, like people had said, you know, “I know this person who may be looking for someone in her organization,” or “He may be leaving his job,” you know I was really impressed by that response, and I think that’s a great way to network. It’s so overwhelming when you’re looking at all those resumes, and obviously you know there are going to be the few that stand out, but even looking through that few, how do you know when that’s the right person? So if there’s some additional connection, something additional that sets you apart, that’s going to be valuable. I think that’s real important to rely on those resources that are our friends, our families, colleagues, former colleagues – to help us extend the people that we can connect with.

Amy: I think that’s really true, as someone who’s been on a lot of hiring teams here at Idealist, when you have any extra reason to look at a resume or application just for a little bit longer.

Abby: And also looking back at college resources, because a lot of times they have job resources that come across their desk and for different levels.

Amy: Like career centers from your undergraduate?

Abby: Exactly. They have connections and they know people that are hiring. They can be a great resource.

Amy: I think a lot of times people forget about their undergraduate career offices, but a lot of times they offer career counseling to alumni, sometimes at a very reliable rate. You know, many career services offices have dedicated staff who just focus on alumni support, so that’s a really good point.

Abby: That is a really good point, you know, like you said – it’s kind of a forgotten resource. I mean, I’ve been out of college for quite a few years – thinking how much the technology has come along, and how the geographic distance isn’t as much of a challenge now because everything is so connected virtually. So regardless if you went to school in northern Minnesota and want to work in Florida, they can still be a great resource because they know how to connect to those networks maybe more so than you might know as someone who’s not as involved as a professional career counselor.

Amy: So my final question is for Nonprofit Career Month, we couldn’t come up with a single tagline for nonprofit careers. We came up with a series of taglines such as, “Nonprofit work is work that matters,” “Nonprofit work is work that pays,” “Nonprofit work is work that takes skill,” and I’m just wondering what your tagline would be for your nonprofit career – if any of those resonate or if you’d come up with your own.

Abby: I think I really look at nonprofit work as more than a paycheck. The nonprofit sector – it’s personal. And this relates back to one of my first volunteers when I worked at The Campus Kitchens Project and we opened the program. This was a freshman at Augsburg College, Janette Clark – the moment the program started through her four years of college, she was an outstanding volunteer. One time she spoke at the service learning conference that came to Augsburg College, and I invited her to speak as a service-learning volunteer and what her experience meant. One of the most profound lines she said in her speech was that so often people say, “It’s not personal,” when it actually is personal – it’s all about the people we work with, it’s all about the hundreds of nameless faces that we serve at the shelter in downtown Minneapolis, that do indeed have names. And she just went on to express why she was involved, and it was because she was getting to know these people, whether it be the people she was serving, the people she was volunteering with, the people in her classes, and so for her it really was personal, and I think for me it is so true as well.

It is all about the people, and whether we’re working on a spreadsheet on the computer, or whether we’re handing out clothes on the street, we’re doing it because we want to make a difference in people’s lives. And so I think working in the nonprofit sector is a great way to do that, and it’s also a great way to put the tools in place that no matter what sector you’re working in that you can be involved and you can make a difference in some way or another, and so if I can be a tool to make that happen, then that’s where I want to be. So definitely: “The nonprofit sector – it’s personal.”

Amy: That’s great – that is just a fantastic conclusion to this interview. Thank you so much, Abby.

Abby: Well, you’re welcome, and thank you! It’s been an honor to be involved.

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Learn more about Atlas Corps at atlascorps.org, and read about The Campus Kitchens Project at Campuskitchens.org. Find out more about Nonprofit Career Month at Nonprofitcareermonth.org. Special thanks today to Scott Beale. 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. If you’ve 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.