018 Pulling the Plug on a $22 Million Program | President and CEO of Missio Nexus Ted Esler

018 Pulling the Plug on a $22 Million Program | President and CEO of Missio Nexus Ted Esler

Ted Esler launched a partially self-funded health insurance program for the staff of Missio Nexus member organizations. It grew from zero to $22 million in about 18 months. Then COVID arrived.  Claims went quiet while people stayed away from the doctor, so the program looked healthy when it was not. The bills landed all at once when they came back, and the losses grew large enough to threaten an association running about $2 million a year.  His consultants told him to ride it out. He decided to pull the plug.  Then he laid the full numbers in front of his members, against advice that this was too much transparency, and asked them to help cover the debt. Every one of them agreed, each paying an extra month's premium to keep the group whole. The conversation opens out from there. Ted has watched many CEOs make these calls up close, and he names the inability to say no as the most vexing problem he sees capable leaders face.  He talks about strategy as choosing what you will not do, and the pruning season his own team is in right now. He also holds a quieter conviction: a CEO with no life outside the work will not last in it. His standard icebreaker asks leaders to name a hobby, and rules out family and reading, because he wants to know who they are when the job is not in the way. Ted Esler is President and CEO of Missio Nexus, the trade association for the faith-based mission agency world. The organization is  109 years old and serves 340 member agencies whose staff work across the globe, including active conflict zones. Ted has led Missio Nexus for over 10 years.

017 Speaking Calmly While Holding a Powder Keg | President of the Alliance to End Hunger Eric Mitchell

A member publicly demanded to know where the Alliance to End Hunger stood on the Gaza conflict. Half of Eric Mitchell's coalition supported one side. Half supported the other.  Silence was its own answer. He held off as long as he could, then decided to speak.  Before the statement went public, he pulled leaders from both sides into crafting it. He talks through how he kept the consultation tight, who he brought in, and why staying strictly in the lane of food access let the Alliance say something true while helping people on both sides of the conflict. Eric also leads a bipartisan organization in a city that wants to sort everyone onto one side of the aisle. He is candid about the gap between the job he trained for and the job he got. He came up on Capitol Hill. He now spends half his time raising money. Eric Mitchell is President of the Alliance to End Hunger, a 107-member coalition spanning corporations, faith groups, universities, and nonprofits working to end hunger in the U.S. and globally.

016 Should I Take This Shortcut? | Founder, President & CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life Michael Wear

Michael Wear had a clear vision for the Center for Christianity and Public Life: deep formation work, deep investment in cohorts of twelve to sixteen fellows, commitments measured in years. Some potential funders kept pointing to cheaper models. Other organizations were reaching thousands for less. The constant temptation was to take a shortcut, starting with something splashy and backfill the real work later. Michael kept asking one question: a shortcut to what? A shortcut would have built something else entirely. He launched in October 2022 without a full year's budget, watching financial thresholds with the runway ahead quickly running out. His first hire came on two weeks before launch. He talks about what it took to know the moment was right: a board that embodied the mission rather than just orbiting it, the intuition that comes from knowing something inside out,  the pressure of asking someone else to divert their career to join you in something unproven, and and why he framed CCPL as a 30-year mission from day one. Michael Wear is the Founder, President, and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, a nonpartisan institution dedicated to the formation of Christians for the sake of public life. CCPL's flagship Public Life Fellowship Program is now in its fourth year. He previously served in the White House directing faith outreach and writes regularly for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post.

015 The Path of Humiliation | Harrison Center for the Arts Exec. Director Joanna Taft

Joanna Taft proposed starting a charter high school out of the arts nonprofit she was leading. She had no background in education.  Her artists were leaving Indianapolis because nobody was buying their work, and she decided the fix was to grow a new generation of art patrons. (Talk about a long-term vision…) She raised the idea to a city commission expecting someone else to run with it. They just looked back at her, waiting for her to take it on. But right after the hearing, a board member pulled her aside and told her she was not the person to lead this school, and asked her to step down from the new initiative. However, nobody else would take her place. So she got to work.  Joanna says her biggest fear is humiliation, and her specialty is starting things she knows nothing about. Sounds like a lot of fun, right?  But that willingness to go forward through her fear keeps doing great things. It built an art center inside a near-empty church. It launched the charter school, now with more than 3,000 graduates. It also conceived of a neighborhood cultural preservation museum and opened in only fourteen months, using assemblage art and augmented reality she had never worked with before.  Joanna describes the only thing she believes she knows how to do: weave other people's ideas into something worth caring about, something fundable and sustainable.  Joanna Taft is the Founder and Executive Director of the Harrison Center in Indianapolis, housed in the city's oldest Presbyterian church building. She has lived four blocks from the Center for nearly 40 years.

014 The Decision After the Decision | World Relief President & CEO Myal Greene

Myal Greene inherited an organization with a mission statement that everyone loved. World Relief had run on that mission statement for fifteen years. Internal staff admired it. External donors knew it. Myal knew it needed to change anyway. This conversation is about the eighteen-month, discerning, board-engaged process. Myal walks through how the decision surfaced during strategic planning, why he never saw himself as the decision maker but as the person facilitating the board toward a good decision, and how he handled staff who were terrified of the process. But while Myal thought he was deciding about a mission statement, he was actually making the decision after the decision. A single upstream choice forces a cascade of downstream effects not fully grasped. Strategy. How the organization raises money. Who it hires. How it allocates capital. Years later, World Relief is still living into the consequences. We also talk about hiring for culture addition rather than culture fit, and why Myal considers capital allocation the most underrated decision a nonprofit CEO makes. Myal Greene is President and CEO of World Relief, a global Christian humanitarian organization founded 80 years ago that works around the world and across the US as one of the major refugee resettlement agencies. He spent fourteen years at the organization before stepping into the CEO role five years ago.