What Her First Job at a Food Bank Taught a Nonprofit Recruiter About the Organization of Charities

ENTRY LEVEL

Susan Egmont

Age: 48

First job: Associate director, Atlanta Food Bank, Atlanta

Current job: Principal, Egmont Associates, Norwell, Mass.

In the early 1980s, my church in Atlanta set up a homeless shelter and recruited me as a volunteer to plan the shelter’s meals. Another church, St. Luke’s Episcopal, had founded the Atlanta Food Bank, and I would go there on a regular basis to get supplies for our shelter. People at the food bank would say to me, “You ought to work here, your heart is here,” but I kept telling them, “No, no, I need to make more money.”

I was 30 years old at the time and working as the purchasing director for a manufacturing firm — I bought things like steel and gas turbines. My husband was working essentially for free for a nonprofit magazine, Seeds, which focused on progressive responses to world hunger, so my income was necessary. My dad is a minister, so I’d been raised with an ethic of service, but at that point in my life I was very oriented toward business.

The thing was, my company was not at all entrepreneurial and had a lot of restrictive rules. The food bank was different — it was a very creative organization and had all the potential in the world to grow. So in 1983, I took the plunge and began working at the food bank full time as associate director, a title I kept for the entire 11 years I stayed there. The transition was difficult, but we decided that my husband would go back into the for-profit world to make it work.

The Atlanta Food Bank had, and still has, an exceptional executive director named Bill Bolling, who gave me a ton of responsibility and was a fabulous mentor. When I began, there were three of us on staff working with a $200,000 budget, and by the time I left in 1994 there were 50 of us handling a $4-million budget. I learned how to do everything — fund raising, working with boards, volunteer management, public relations, public speaking, direct service, operations, moving food across the country, warehousing, pest control, you name it. I especially learned staff management, by emulating Bill’s behavior. He is a kind person with infinite patience for people. He taught me to cut people slack and to help them learn what they needed to know.

From the start we had a very holistic view of what we were doing. We saw the food bank as an excuse to organize the entire community. With 800 organizations coming there on a regular basis, the food bank became not just a place to provide food, but the hub of the community, where people could have discussions about affordable housing, public policy, voter registration, civic engagement, and other crucial issues.

One thing that became embarrassingly clear to me in my early years at the food bank was that nonprofit people often didn’t know about many of the operational issues involved in running an organization and interacting with board members. As I saw it, what I was doing at the food bank was essentially running a substantial business. So in 1990, I decided to go get my M.B.A. I realized that I would always be working with lawyers and investment bankers in the boardroom, and I needed to have the same education they had, so I could talk to them knowledgeably and think just as analytically.

I went to Emory University’s M.B.A. program, and I was the only nonprofit person in my class. People kept saying, “Why are you doing this?” At the time there were very few nonprofit-management master’s programs, and although I’ve really come to like those programs, I might still choose to go the route that I did. At school, at the food bank, and in my current role as a consultant, I still spend most of my time among business people, so the M.B.A. training was entirely appropriate.

As I became more and more connected to the Atlanta nonprofit community in general, I started seeing myself as committed to the sector, as opposed to one organization. I became a founding board member of a start-up called the Nonprofit Resource Center, and through that organization I got to see a little bit about how all the nonprofits were operating. After leaving the food bank in 1994, I moved to Boston and did a number of things: became interim director of a dance organization, then executive director for a foundation, then associate director for a group that works for high-school reform. I grew very deeply interested in how organizations work, how leaders are prepared, how boards work in conjunction with executive directors. Ultimately, I founded my consulting business in 1999 to focus on those issues.

In my capacity as a recruiter for executive directors, I tell boards that making a right choice in the beginning is what it’s all about. The wrong decision will come back to bite you thousands of times. Also, there should be a thoughtful process whenever an executive director leaves. Understanding the reason for the departure, preparing the organization’s vision for a new leader, conducting an intelligent search, and helping make the transition are all absolutely key.

I’m very grateful I got a chance to make the switch from business to nonprofits early in my career — it was infinitely easier to do at 30 than it would be at 40 or 50. I think the current wave of for-profit people looking for nonprofit jobs is primarily due to the recession. What I tell people is that if you are absolutely passionate about being a nonprofit director, then you must do this. If it’s a nice thing you’ve thought about doing on a list of 10 things you plan to do one day, then forget about it. There’s always volunteering.

–As told to Sandy Asirvatham

How did your first job in the nonprofit world influence your current career? Tell us about it at entrylevel@philanthropy.com.