For nearly 24 years, it has been my privilege to live and work with all of you. Year after year, the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management and the Covestro Center for Community Engagement have worked to support you as each of you worked to bring more justice, more decency, more hope, more opportunity to everyone living in our region. You’ve fed the hungry, taught the children, loved the elderly, comforted the lonely, cleaned our water, encouraged creativity, celebrated the worthy…you’ve built our struggling and challenged community, moving it toward improved conditions and lives changed for the better. Who could not love you and rejoice at the opportunity to help you grow and prosper?
And the staff – the people who chose to work at our Centers – are remarkable. From the very beginning, when Yvonne Van Haitsma and Lisa Kuzma joined me in a dream, an idea for a comprehensive center to provide management support and technical assistance to the large and growing nonprofit sector in southwestern Pennsylvania, we had some great people working for you. Other stars in our crown were Jeff Forster, Cindy Leonard, Jennifer Chubinski, Sallie Wormer, Lulu Orr, Evie Gardner, Garrett Cooper and many others. Each brought their best ideas, hardest work and contributed to the enormous amount of work we’ve done. For the last four years when our staff was reduced and reduced by the long hiring freeze at RMU, Carrie Tancraitor, Jen Pease along with our stalwarts, Carrie Richards, Shelby Gracey, Yvonne and me kept our programs and services vibrant and available. These people are my family and I am so proud to know them.
I also owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the funding community and all of you who were our clients, our students – all of you were our investors. Through the years, we have had terrific advisors, especially Rebecca Lucore of Covestro, first though at Bayer…hence the Bayer and Covestro Centers. Rebecca’s thought leadership, advocacy and friendship is unparalleled. Other long time advisors include Scott Izzo, Lisa Scales, Jim Denova, Trish Gadson, Angela Garcia, Paul Homick, Jack Owen, Ellen Estomin, Peter Lucas, Court Gould, Bill Stein, Lizz Helmsen, Doreen Boyce, Bill Meyer and many others. Their ideas, their knowledge of our community, their good humor, their access to wealth were valuable. I do thank each person who served.
Without Ed Nicholson when he was President at RMU, there would never have been a Bayer Center. We owe many other people at RMU our thanks, as well.
I first came to Pittsburgh in 1999 for a job interview with the then Robert Morris College. I had started two other centers for nonprofit management – one in Austin, Texas – the other in New Orleans, Louisiana. I had recognized that this work was my calling. But I didn’t know a soul in Pittsburgh so I interviewed 166 people in my first six months and fell in love with the city and its people. In our first business plan in 2000, we stated our intentions to be a comprehensive, affordable resource for all types, sizes, ages and missions of nonprofit organizations. We built a four-legged stool – education, consulting, research and convening. And we got to work!
Throughout our work, we were blessed in our friends. From its inception, our education program was built on the expertise of the larger community. Over time, more than 500 people volunteered to teach our classes…attorneys, our former Mayor, CPAS, foundation personnel, marketing gurus, nonprofit executives sharing their lived experience…many of you reading this letter made it possible for nonprofit people to learn and grow. Because of your generosity, we were able to keep our classes inexpensive enough to be possible for the tiny professional development budgets of most nonprofits. Boy, did we talk! I cherish many memories of being in classes with many of you.
In 2005, The Executive Service Corps joined the Bayer Center. ESC has made many programs possible. ESC volunteers have provided technical knowledge to our consulting practice, facilitated board retreats for BoardsWork!, done project management for SkillShare, and helped us in so many ways.
Our research on the lives of women in nonprofits garnered national attention and attracted more than seven million media impressions. We celebrated twenty years of consistent wage and benefit data which helped to change compensation practices for the good. We did research on retirement as we boomers begin to exit the scene and leave it in capable hands. We contributed to the knowledge base and helped you make decisions based on evidence.
With so many allies and so many smart people, how could we not accomplish a lot? Since we began our work in the year 2000, we have done 2,737 consulting projects for 1,543 organizations. That’s a lot of strategic plans! 19,228 people took our classes representing 4,911 organizations. At the Covestro Center, 1047 people were trained by BoardsWork!. 379 retreats improved their governance. We worked with 174 businesses on 124 SkillShare projects, tapping the expertise of 581 employees to build sturdy bridges between our nonprofit community and their business partners. To finance all of this work, we benefitted from philanthropic and corporate investment, fees and contracts. From all sources, we generated $24,243,714…investments to build a strong community through its strong nonprofits.
What’s next? Please join me in expressing our never-ending gratitude to the staff, advisors, students, clients and volunteers who made all this possible. Most of the staff have moved on to other adventures. RMU is still considering how best to serve the nonprofit community going forward. There will be some educational programming in the fall, but we hope that our other programs may be relocated in the community. I am opening my own consulting practice, Excelsior Consulting and hope to see many of you in the community hard at work.
For so many years, through wars, a pandemic, systematic injustice, too little money and too few hands to do the work, the work unceasing and endless, you have persevered. You have been diligent, intelligent, curious and hopeful. You have lit the world and made it a better place. May you continue to put your whole self in because we are a long way from completing the work of justice, kindness and fairness for our beautiful community.