Former Ad Executive Finds Nonprofit Work Comes With Modest Pay but Rich Benefits

At my second interview for the job I hold now — development director for a small, nonprofit hunger-relief group in Vermont — the other staff members wanted to know what had prompted me to leave a lucrative career as a creative director at large, big-city advertising agencies to interview for a position offering low pay, long hours, steep stress, and heavy competition for dollars that guaranteed no job security whatsoever.

I told them the story of a subway ride I took while living in New York two decades ago.

In the mid- to late 1980s, New York’s homeless population was all but impossible to ignore. But we did our best to look past the bearded men in blankets and the ladies pushing broken grocery carts filled with boxes and rags. We tried hardest not to see the children.

When the subway stopped somewhere between Midtown and my station in Greenwich Village, a disheveled homeless man — huge, I remember — stepped on. He was draped in a filthy blanket in spite of what I remember as summer’s stifling heat. Alongside him was a girl of no more than 7. She looked up at him trustingly as they found seats far from the other passengers.

I don’t know how many other passengers watched them as intently as I did. I was fearful for the child: Was this her father? Her guardian? Was one of us supposed to be rescuing her? Alerting authorities? However the man had adapted to life on the streets, what could her life be like without a home, school, friends, or the security of knowing a meal awaited her when she was hungry?

In the end — the culmination of all of three minutes’ thoughts churning in my head — I copped out. I didn’t ask questions or alert the authorities. But I reached into my purse and pulled out a $20 bill. Handing it to the man, I meekly said, “For the child.”

That night I repeated the story to my fiancé, now my husband. I told him that if I had it to do all over again (meaning my choice of careers), I’d do something “for children.”

He looked at me incredulously and said the words I now try to live by: “Well, you’re not dead yet.” Prophetic. Plus, it reaffirmed my notion that I’d found the right guy. My husband and I moved from New York to Chicago in 1994, where I followed increasingly higher pay and benefits packages to write ad campaigns for cosmetics, fast food, beer, and other products. But we began to reconsider the way we were living. We decided we wanted to raise a family, and we fell in love with the idea of moving to Vermont. We loved the state’s small-scale economy, its focus on social activism, its natural beauty, and its politics. Only much later would I realize the amalgam of all those factors composed the vague picture of the person I was wanting to become.

Still, old habits die hard. Although we had relocated to a vastly different landscape, I gravitated to my comfort zone and linked up with a small advertising agency that served the ski industry. There I moved up to become creative director and partner.

And that’s where the epiphany part began.

To keep it relatively simple, there were more than a few things that had begun to nag at me, and the nagging was growing louder. Was the work serving any purpose that mattered to me?

True, I loved Vermont, and keeping Vermont’s industries and businesses viable was key to keeping neighbors’ jobs alive. I also had the invigorating experience of creating ad campaigns for youth-services groups, charity coalitions, day-care centers serving low-income families, and more. I felt proud of those contributions. But were they real contributions, or was I just equivocating by thinking that a clever headline about preventing teen drug abuse was tantamount to a financial donation, or serving meals to older people, or mentoring a child?

I hate to admit that the egg finally hit the windshield over a series of disagreements with my business partner regarding our agency’s future goals. Out of that eruption came the option of a small buyout. In any case, I didn’t need any more thunderbolts to direct me.

An opportunity arose to use my marketing expertise to help the capital campaign of a small health-care facility serving low-income uninsured and underinsured Vermonters, and I grabbed it — at roughly 50 percent of my previous salary, which was, in turn, 60 percent of my salary in Chicago 10 years earlier. But it had become clear to me that compensation comes in lots of forms. When I was earning well into six figures at age 33 in 1994, I paid for it dearly in lack of fulfillment. I’ve come to believe there is such a thing as being compensated in karma.

I was high on idealism for months. My predecessor generously offered her guidance, ideas, and time to shepherd me through — and I was impressed by how dedicated my colleagues were. They thought nothing of working the craziest of hours to find affordable solutions for neighbors who needed health care.

Yes, there was way more work than I could handle. I came to visualize my responsibilities as confronting an ever-rising mountain with a teaspoon and being directed to shovel. But I had learned pacing and time management from my first career, and I knew I would do what I could, then reserve a little bit of energy for the next day. That’s how my colleagues seemed to tackle it.

After I completed a year’s contract work on the capital campaign, the facility expansion began, thanks to generous donors and a big federal grant resulting from a proposal I helped write along with an amazing team. The ribbon cutting will take place in November, and I’ll be there with bells on.

Since May, I have been working at Food Works at Two Rivers Center, in Montpelier, which fights to prevent long-term hunger through activities such as developing local food systems, teaching gardening and nutrition to disadvantaged people, and linking small family farms with new markets like schools or mental-health facilities.

Challenges in the nonprofit world are big. Operations are tough when you’re flush with ideas and idealism and low on staff and resources. My to-do list may take me years instead of weeks. And, ironically, now that I’m working for a hunger-prevention organization (at 30 percent of what I was earning 15 years ago), I’m having trouble affording the rising cost of groceries. The food crisis, which is far from cresting, is affecting me firsthand for the first time.

However, there are fringe benefits I never counted on. I feel almost mystically reconnected with the person I once, long ago, thought I was going to be. One reason I ended up writing headlines for fast-food chains was that I’d wanted to become a poet. When I left advertising and started writing grant proposals and public-relations pieces about doing good, the poetry came back after 30 years. I do it regularly, and with enough “good works credit” banked up, I might get published one day.

As an advertising executive, I came to embrace consumerism. Call it an occupational hazard. I haven’t been able to fully let go of it, but at least now when I shop, I’m hunting for new charities to donate to rather than for an addition to my handbag collection.

If you want to enter the nonprofit world, you can look forward to an amazing ride. But be warned. The work is tough. In fact, it is immeasurably harder than writing pithy, catchy TV commercials for squads of marketing executives who scrutinize every punctuation mark and want something new on the air yesterday.

My new job makes my previous work look like a tea party. Writing a federal grant proposal can easily involve 150-plus pages of research, documentation, letters of support, and line-item budgets — and under tight deadlines. It’s strenuous enough to have convinced me that I’m ready to take on my dream of earning a master of fine arts degree in poetry.

At one point I envisioned a new reality TV show, “Extreme Nonprofit,” in which beleaguered visionaries competed to see who could do the most with the least. “Can I have the pen?” “Are you remembering to recycle the Post-its?” They are working in an office with its own weather system due to broken furnaces in a subzero climate and lack of air-conditioners on sub-Saharan days.

Some of these details come out of actual experiences of mine. And yet, at age 47, I am propelled along by some otherworldly energy source. Call it karma.

Anne Loecher is development director of Food Works, a hunger-relief charity in Montpelier, Vt., and lives in nearby Maple Corner. She can be reached at annel@tworiverscenter.org.