Proof of Impact | Podcast Guru

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Proof of Impact is the nonprofit podcast that actually asks the hard questions. The sector is full of people doing extraordinary work, and a culture that is very good at staying comfortable. No pushback. No tension. Just carefully managed conversations that leave the most important things unsaid. Host Elizabeth "E" Kitzenberg has spent decades inside the nonprofit world, leading major campaigns at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard, and now running The Kitzenberg Group, her own institutional fundraising consultancy. She knows where the guard goes up. This show is about what happens when it comes down. Honest conversations with nonprofit leaders. No filter. No apologies.

Recent Episodes

Food Shelves Aren't About Food, They're About Income | Matthew Ayres, Executive Director of Joyce Uptown Food Shelf

Matthew Ayres runs one of Minneapolis's oldest and smallest food shelves — two staff, three hundred volunteers, a 110-year-old Victorian house in Uptown. Over the past year, Joyce Uptown has bounced from crisis to crisis, and in the thick of it raised and spent its entire annual budget twice over, becoming a lifeline not just for its own neighbors but for other organizations across the city. In this conversation, host Elizabeth Kitzenberg talks with Matthew about what it means to spend everyt...

62 MIN

The Foundation That's Giving It All Away | Stephanie Sauer, Sauer Family Foundation

Most foundations are built to last forever. The Sauer Family Foundation decided to do the opposite. Started in 1996 as a 30th-anniversary gift between Stephanie Sauer's parents, the foundation has spent nearly three decades strengthening the well-being of children and families across Minnesota. Now, rather than existing in perpetuity, the family has made the unusual and deliberate choice to spend down their resources and sunset the foundation — betting that a big impact now matters more than ...

50 MIN

Urgency Without Being Hurried | Chanda Smith Baker, President & CEO of the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation

Chanda Smith Baker leads the largest community foundation in Minnesota — nearly $2 billion in charitable assets, more than 9,000 grants a year — and she came to the role with a career's worth of hard-won wisdom about how change actually happens. Her answer, again and again: not by rushing. In this conversation, host Elizabeth Kitzenberg talks with Chanda about the discipline of protecting time to think, what it means to lead a team through crisis without becoming reactive, and why the most im...

52 MIN

You Don't Win by Looking Needy | Steve Grove, CEO of The Minnesota Star Tribune

Steve Grove left a career in Silicon Valley to come home and take on one of the hardest jobs in American media: leading a nearly 160-year-old newspaper into a future it isn't guaranteed to have. As CEO and publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune, Grove is trying to do what almost no one in the country has pulled off: transform a legacy newspaper into a thriving digital media company without losing the culture, the credibility, or the mission that made it matter. In this conversation, host Eli...

35 MIN

Is Gun Violence Actually Solvable? | Maggiy Emery, Protect Minnesota

Maggiy Emery leads Protect Minnesota, the only statewide, independent gun violence prevention organization in the state. Her work sits at the intersection of the most contentious politics in America — and she approaches it with a clarity that's hard to look away from: this is a solvable problem. In this conversation, host Elizabeth Kitzenberg talks with Maggiy about what most people get wrong about gun violence, why she doesn't spend her energy trying to change the minds of her fiercest oppon...

54 MIN