How to turn your vision into impact (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Anne Morriss: Welcome back to Fixable everyone. I'm your host, Anne Morris

Frances Frei: And I'm your co-host Frances Fry

Anne Morriss: Frances. We have a great guest today sent to us by our dear friend, Curtis Sittenfeld.

Frances Frei: Oh, our dear friend and rockstar novelist…

Anne Morriss: Yeah, right. Dear friend, rockstar Novelist. Former Fixable guest listeners, if you haven't heard that episode, go back and check it out.

Curtis sent this caller our way. After working with him at a very cool organization, he started called Free Writers, W-R-I-T-E-R, Writers, uh, which goes into county jails in Minnesota and gives inmates opportunities to express themselves through creative writing. So the founder, Free Writers himself, Nate Johnson will be joining us today.

Wow. What a worthy mission. Absolutely. So let's hear his voicemail and find out what he's up against.

Frances Frei: Let's

Anne Morriss: go.

Nate Johnson: Hi Ann and Frances. My name is Nate Johnson and I'm the founder and executive director of Free Writers. Free Writers is a Twin Cities based nonprofit, and what we do is we bring mindful

Meditative writing and performing classes into county jails here in the Twin Cities, and we find that this practice provides healing or an easing of pain and lifting of spirits for people who really desperately need it. My question for you is how do we scale up this really great idea and bring it to cities other than Minneapolis, St.

Paul, and what should my role as founder and visionary be? In that scaling up process and then afterwards, thanks so much.

Frances Frei: Well, he's asking the right questions. Oh, he is. And I am not doing enough good in the world. Today is really what?

Anne Morriss: I just feel like I'm not worthy. Is that where, where you are right now?

Frances Frei: That's where my head went to. I was like, whoa. I mean, just in all of the not-for-profit, but also the audacity. Mm-hmm. Like bringing mindfulness and meditative practice. I mean, yes. Totally needed. And oh my gosh, I probably wouldn't have started with such ambition. Really wonderful.

Anne Morriss: Yeah. And then what are the mechanics of growing and scaling that ambition and designing a role that you can do and want to do as you start to realize that ambition is, is exactly where I think his head should be in this moment.

Frances Frei: I feel like if we can do it here, we can do it anywhere. So let's go.

Anne Morriss: Nate Johnson, welcome to Fixable.

Nate Johnson: Oh my gosh, it's an honor. Thank you so much, Anne.

Anne Morriss: We like you so much already, we could not be rooting for you more and more impressed and excited by what you're building at Free Writers.

Nate Johnson: Well, to hear that from you guys is super humbling, so thank you.

Anne Morriss: So the way this typically works is we're gonna spend some time getting to know you, getting to understand the problem you're having, and then the three of us together will co-produce come some kind of solution, and then hopefully we'll send you back out into the world with.

Higher confidence that you can do whatever you're aiming to do.

Nate Johnson: Brilliant.

Anne Morriss: Can you give us an example of what you have seen people get out of it?

Nate Johnson: Yes. And this is my favorite thing in the world to talk about. So the day that I decided to like definitively quit practicing law and um. Make a 501c3 and try to put a board together to make this free writer's thing go.

Was, uh, about two months into the work and um, I had been advised by the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office not to do Free Writer's classes. When the inmates are on lockdown. But then one day I was going up to a quad that supposedly folks with the highest criminal score, and I heard the deputy say on the CB radio, Hey, we're on lockdown in quad 14.

And I said, yeah, but it's 4: 30. And he said, yeah, but we're short staffed today. I wanted to see these six or eight guys who'd been coming week after week. So I thought, let's just give it a try. And the prompt that we used that day was the blood in my veins, which I had stolen from an inmate the previous day from a class.

And as soon as I said go, it was dead quiet. Everybody scribbling furiously. And the deputies were peering into the classroom, like, what in the world is this? Oh, because they thought it was gonna be a total shit show. I'm like, overjoyed that this is working. So I read my free write just to let them know it doesn't have to be a piece of perfection.

And then this older black gentleman read the most beautiful five minute free write about. Racism and God and Africa and US history and spirituality and family. And the whole room burst out in applause. And then everybody raised their hand to see who could share what they had written next. So by this time, these deputies who thought they were in for trouble and that I was in for big trouble, were just in awe.

And since that day, I've had guys tell me. I just finally grieved the loss of my three-year-old son whose funeral I couldn't go to because of this free write today, or this other guy came in and said, I feel like a 50 pound weight just got lifted. And when I'm trying to teach new teachers what the essence of the benefit that we provide is, I always say that every so often.

This happens to me probably once every two weeks. You see somebody break down in tears because they share something that's like tragic in their lives or just some serious pain. And then the everybody in the room rushes to comfort them, and then five minutes later, somebody else shares something funny.

And then that person who was bawling is laughing hysterically. And so that's what we do.

Anne Morriss: First of all, amazing story. Um, the impact. Uh, I'm just thinking about the impact of this on all of the stakeholders in the system, and I'm, I'm reminded how everybody wins when this, this, like beautiful sequence plays out so powerful.

Well, Nate. Frances and I are wildly motivated to be of service to you today. And so if we are successful, I want you to dream really big right now. If we're successful in this conversation as thought partners to you, what will be different for you? What are you really craving in this moment?

Nate Johnson: So what my vision is that.

Free Writers can establish the right sort of business model for a startup nonprofit that's trying to become a sustaining nonprofit. Mm-hmm. So that we've got, like, what we don't have right now is HR protocols, for instance, or you know, teacher training materials or marketing materials. I have kind of been doing everything.

For Free Writers, the grant writing, managing teacher schedules, teaching most of the classes, all the public relations stuff. If we could solidify our operations. Right now it's me, it's a part-time operations director and a part-time communications director. S some really valuable senior volunteers and a moderately active board.

If we could develop. Some short term strategic goals. I feel like we could shore up our business locally and then I could start to go from city to city to spread the word about this. We always knew that there was a need for us to grow and expand to other major metropolitan areas because whatever's going on in the Hennepin County Jail, probably going on in Cook County, Illinois, in Los Angeles County.

Rikers Island. The ultimate human impact that I think Free Writers can achieve is if we can turn these healing writing classes in county jails into recruiting stations to train justice involved people, to become teachers of free writing, I think, and maybe even pay them money to lead Free Writers classes on the outside, then we will have really made a difference.

Frances Frei: Wow. So. I'm so moved by everything you're doing. Um, you have very broad, I'm not gonna call it global ambition, but very broad, at least national ambition for now. In doing that, and you're doing a pilot and you're doing something very smart about the pilot one you did, proof of concept that the thing you're creating is extraordinarily powerful, like amazing.

You. It's also replicable beyond you. There are other people who can teach it, and you can teach people who teach it. And you've developed a way to have empathy at scale, right? You can do, you can do quick empathy, and empathy can occur in your absence. So you did all of the very hard things. You created the thing that's necessary, but not sufficient.

Now we have to figure out how to build an organization around it so that it can scale. What we're gonna help coach you through is the thing that every organization has to do, and not every organization can have the genius inside that you do. So this is gonna be an honor and I think the easiest part of the journey.

Nate Johnson: You're gonna make me cry.

Anne Morriss: Let me start at kind of a high level, Nate, and see if this is a, a useful thread. So, as part of my job, I think I've been to all of the, like self-help at scale experiences. Including like spending six days with Tony Robbins in, in a Palm Beach parking lot. , one of the frameworks from that experience that I've held onto, and I'm sure this is not the right attribution, I'm sure he, oh, I'm sure he borrowed it.

He's a beautiful borrower of, of ideas is this idea that in any relationship with a business or organization, there are three main roles which are. Owner and that's like shareholder. And then in the not-for-profit model, that's it's kind of funder fits in that owner category. There's the artist, there's the kind of doer of the thing, and it gives us actual income, but also psychic income and spiritual income.

And it's a source of sustaining energy for us. And then there's the operator.

Nate Johnson: Hmm.

Anne Morriss: And these are pretty distinct roles with pretty distinct motivations and pretty distinct daily activities. And I wanna give you permission to put artists at the top of the list for you.

Nate Johnson: Okay.

Anne Morriss: Now what's also beautiful about what's gonna end up on your list is you're an incredible communicator.

You're an incredible visionary. You refuse to just take the world on its own terms and accept it. You're gonna reshape. The planet we're on. So you're like a super artist, right? But what I'm craving for you is a real operator to partner with because a lot of the things on the list that you described are things that you don't have to invent.

You don't have to come up with Nate Johnson's version of strategic planning. Like you came up with the, as Frances said, the hard part, like. Nate Johnson's theory of change at scale. I mean fucking amazing. And then you piloted it and you're like, yes, I am truly onto something. Okay, so now there's this whole separate animal, which is how do we build an organization and there's a job for you.

Telling this story, getting funders excited, continuing to do the actual work. Um, but this whole other category, I want you to have a really strong executive director or CEO, whatever we wanna call it in this system, whose job it is to figure out all of that stuff,

Nate Johnson: right?

Anne Morriss: You're not gonna worry about like the benefits plan and the HR protocol.

Even the training manual. Yeah. That's not your job. And yeah, someone else is gonna systematize and it's gonna be someone who loves that work. Particularly at this stage, you need people who are gonna create. Chaos out of order, which is what you're doing. You, you know, you are refusing to accept the structure of the world that's been handed to you, right?

And that's gonna be your operating partner. I want you to start with a single, very serious. Operator who knows the not-for-profit space, and they're probably working at a nonprofit now. They're probably underutilized. You know, they're like in a number two or number three job. Like they want the ball and the, some of these challenges are gonna be very familiar to them, and then they get to pair up with you.

Super artist, visionary, and you guys together get to blow this out. But this is not a burden. That it lands solely on your shoulders anymore. And I think that's job one.

Nate Johnson: Well, thank you Anne. And, um, just, I've got great board members and really talented staff and volunteers, but one of the reality checks that I've been through is like, I've had like really brilliant lawyers.

Social justice advocates, educators on the board. And I think, okay, great. So now I'll have help with contracts or I'll have help with, and then, and then I realized these people have have 60 hour a week jobs and young children, and I don't pay them anything.

Anne Morriss: I. That's not the board's job. And, and you want people on your board who have other jobs because those are the people who are gonna be able to connect you on the fundraising side.

And those are the people who are, are, are gonna be able to give you great advice because they're, they're doing interesting things out in the world, but they're not gonna put, they're not your operators.

Nate Johnson: Mm-hmm.

Anne Morriss: They're not your operators.

Nate Johnson: Okay.

Anne Morriss: What, what is your emotional reaction to the idea of a real partner in this.

Nate Johnson: It's what I've been praying for. We had a bunch of people from a bunch of jurisdictions around the country saying, how do we do this here in Texas? Or how do we do this here in Northern California? And that was when I realized that myself and my talents and then the part-time staff, um, and even a consultant that we hired, that we just weren't set up.

To meet this need and to effectively communicate with new potential partners. And so I immediately started to try to picture myself as like founder and to show people what we do. Yes. Yeah. To like the people without MBAs have been working as hard as we can. to try to build a business model. And our progress has been limited.

Anne Morriss: I don't think, yeah, I don't think you need an mb just so you know. So I, anyone who is used to being the person who creates order out of chaos is also used to being undervalued in, in, in, in every world. I'm, I'm not gonna beat up the nonprofit world, but in every world, we overvalue the visionary. Like pretty talking CEO at the front of the room, so.

I'm gonna give you my suggestion for when you go recruit this human, and I'm curious what Frances, what you would say is I want you to give them the biggest title you can give them. So not director of operations or director of programming. This is your executive director. You are gonna keep the founder title.

You're gonna, you are going to be the director of programming, or the founder and director of programming. This person is in charge. This person is number one, like this person has all of the decision rights and obviously you are gonna partner, but I want you to go a little bit. I, I want you to push yourself a little bit because I think that's gonna be part of the value proposition to recruit someone at this stage is to say, this is your baby.

Or maybe it's, this is our baby, but it's really about like you are. The fucking man, or woman or anyone in between like you. This is your baby and I have taken as far as I can, and then together I want us to build this into something that has bigger impact than you and I could ever dream.

Nate Johnson: Yeah, that sounds fantastic.

As, as I'm sure you can imagine, like I've already experienced some of the symptoms of founder syndrome, where when I think about somebody other than me. Communicating on free writer's behalf or applying for grants on free writer's behalf. It's made me very uncomfortable, but there's been enough pain of us not being able to meet the need that's out there that I'm ready to like to mm-hmm

To seed control to somebody who's good at these things.

Anne Morriss: It's so I know it feels like you're doing this six months too late, but you're doing it at exactly the right time because without feeling that pain, you wouldn't cherish the

Frances Frei: executive director enough, and now you are going to cherish I. The executive director you are going, it will not be performative in any way.

You will value them. And to Anne's point, these folks that create order out of chaos are typically undervalued. And you're going to give the most precious thing you can, which is you're going to cherish them and you're going to, because you know what it feels like in their absence.

Nate Johnson: Indeed.

Anne Morriss: So Nate, if you were gonna just imagine where you might start to look for this.

Person. And first, we're getting a lot of, uh, information from your body language, but our listeners don't. So give us a sense of whether you think this is a good idea or not a good idea. Well, yeah,

Nate Johnson: I don't disagree at all. The, here's where I get stressed. We are not flush with cash right now. And, and so how am I gonna pay?

I, I guess like maybe this is just. A symptom of perfectionism. But I think if I don't have like a perfectly neatly packaged thing to hand over to the executive director, it's like I would almost be ashamed to even initiate the process. And then if I,

Frances Frei: wonderful. Let us take it from there. So that's your response.

So now let us meet you where you are. Yeah. And one, remember, you create. Chaos out of order. Your job is not to hand over neatly packaged.

Nate Johnson: Yeah.

Frances Frei: Even though your perfectionism comes in, our perfectionism is typically more harm than good because it doesn't come in in the right places. I want you to have perfectionism in how much chaos you can create in how we typically do things in the justice system, but you should not have perfectionism in this thing.

Anne Morriss: That's not your core competency. So that, and in the art itself. Be perfectionist about what's happening in, in that room with the inmates. Yes. Yeah.

Frances Frei: Yes. So that's that part to, to alleviate the shame associated with it. It's not your role. The second one is, yes. So funding, and I think that's what we have to address.

So I, I'll say a few things about that, but when I went to Uber back in 2017, I went and helped them turn around their culture at the time, every time they went to a new city,. They hired a general manager whose sole job was to go out and create demand. Now, they had an easier job than you do because demand was coincident with revenue.

I. If they found demand was a paying customer,

Nate Johnson: right

Frances Frei: for you, as in most not-for-profits, you have the people that are gonna consume the service. That's one form of demand, and the other is the people that are gonna pay for the service. You have to create paying demand. So. I think we have to create a fundraising machine that will dictate where we get to go to.

I know you want broad application, but the sequence of places that you go to, let's do it where you can generate demand and we're gonna do that one time without the executive director only one time. And that's for the salary of the executive director, but then. All of it is gonna be done in partnership.

Huh? And you wanna just figure out, well, what's the number I have to get? Not for all of your ambitions, you're the number you have to get to fund the executive director. Yes. Whatever that number is, that's our fundraising goal. And I think you will get lawyers with a conscience. You will get writers who have already sold a few books, and then those are the two natural places.

And then there are many others. And then we only go to geographies where. We have the lead scout of the equivalent of the general manager where we can create funding and then that's the one that we are gonna then go and figure out how to raise. And what I hope, and you, I'd love to hear your words for this, is that feels quite a bit more manageable than perhaps what you've been thinking about for fundraising, which would be in a longer term, sustaining way.

Nate Johnson: It does Frances, and I've got friends, you know, who are in, um, high finance and pr and they, and they've all said, Nate, what are you doing? You should be dealing with foundations who, like, what you do. Where I get stuck and frustrated is I think, okay, so I have to convince the Ford Foundation or the McKnight Foundation or, or whichever foundation that this is a really valuable thing.

But I don't have any like branded materials to do it with.

Anne Morriss: Yeah. So I think this is the equivalent of a friends and family round. Just pick a number. So let's say you're trying to raise a hundred thousand dollars for this. This is 10 people writing $10,000 checks. So it's calling their, your friends in High Finance back, who've been giving you this advice and be like, I'm so pleased that you're so engaged.

Here's what's act actually would be helpful right now is for you to write a $10,000 check right now, and here's what you get in return, which is, um, a more just and hopeful world and a moment in time when we are desperate for it. And he, because the here the challenge right now, this is the good news for you because

You are a storyteller, and the place where I would start in your shoes is to go back to the beautiful board you have built. Mm-hmm. And say, good news devoted board members. We have made. So much progress and our pilot has been so wildly successful that we are now at a stage where we have earned the right to bring a serious operator into the mix.

And here's what it's gonna take, and I'm gonna need your help. It's gonna be a short term fundraising sprint to raise. A hundred thousand dollars, 150. She's $50,000 raised. Raise that number. She always does. I raise, I actually love the signaling value of this person's salary being the same as yours.

Yeah.

Anne Morriss: And then you get to, in the recruiting process, say you are, you and I are doing this together, and I am not being paid a cent more than you are. Once we get this, here's the theory. Of growth here is that once we bring that person on, then we get to methodically build this out. What your reaction to that?

Frances Frei: Um, have you asked your board members for money before? If I could just ask one diagnostic question.

Nate Johnson: That's, and Frances, that's sort of another of the, our issues. I've gone to friends and family the past five years, and I've always felt guilty thinking I'm asking these guys to pay my mortgage and to pay for my groceries.

And the friends and family board that I've put together, Frances, most of these people are not in a position to write checks. I wasn't, I guess, savvy enough when I brought them on to say, part of your job is gonna be to go out and raise money. It'll

Frances Frei: also help you think about the next people you bring onto the board.

So there are, it's a sweet spot of people who can be, give you great advice, and people who can write checks if you have both. But otherwise you have. Yellow ones and purple ones on your board.

Anne Morriss: And and the board, the board you have right now, this is the army you're going to war with, right? This is the army you have.

And so it what you, what you're coming to them is, I need your help to go raise this money. If you can write a check, that's a beautiful thing. But the people who are best at raising money for this may not be the ones who can write the check. And some of those people may already be on your board.

Nate Johnson: Yeah.

Because

Anne Morriss: Because here's the alternative, right Nate? It is the status quo. Right. It's you absorbing a lot of pain and like having a thousand ways you can move this organization forward and not knowing what to pull off that list. How to sequence this, but somebody else does know how to do that, and someone else loves the challenge, loves it, of doing that, right?

And so it's gonna be really hard for you to take steps to realize the ambition of this incredible thing that you've built without someone like that next to you.

Right. I'm gonna go with impossible. Impossible to build it. Yes. Yes. So this

Anne Morriss: is you honoring the dream, honoring the mission. And of course it's gonna come with some discomfort or you would've already done it, right?

Frances Frei: And if, if Nate, if it helps you are not raising money for you this time, right. You're raising money for an executive director and I somehow, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, think that's gonna be more liberating for you in the ask.

Nate Johnson: Absolutely. This is so helpful.

Anne Morriss: I. We are so rooting for you , Nate Johnson.

Nate Johnson: Umm, if you, if you know anywhere in the, where we can pull together an audience, but if you guys know of folks I can talk to, I would love to talk to 'em.

Frances Frei: You just modeled exactly what you should do when you get in front of people like us and we would be honored to do so and we will do so.

Nate Johnson: Wow, this has been incredible. Wow. Thank you.

Anne Morriss: Wow. What an incredible human and vision for the world. Yeah.

Frances Frei: Thank you Curtis Sittenfeld for that gift. Frances, what do you hope listeners take away from that? So many things. One is , like add audacity to whatever our highest invested dreams are. , totally. I mean like just let's unleash audacity in one another.

That's the one. The two is that really beautiful prize inside that you gave us that you got from spending the time in the parking lot with Tony Robbins on the owner operator artist. And I recall you saying from that. You could pick at most two. Of that, and that was a huge unlock that he, if he's the artist, he then only has to be either an owner or an operator, but not both.

In fact, if Tony Robbins says, you can't be all three, and that man is a beast, right? And is training beasts, well then we don't, the mortals among us don't have to do it. So have great ambition and then realize who do we need to partner with to get there? And so that's the second thing. And then the third thing, it's just putting one foot in front of the other and having the, the goals that we need that are the stage gates and that we don't have to be terrified of all of it.

We just have to do the next thing.

Anne Morriss: Yeah. I love the idea that you can't get there on your own. To, to me that is one of the fundamental gifts of working with organizations is you cannot indulge the storyline that, A, you're alone, in this world, or B, that you can do much on your own because you need all of these functions.

So it's, it's a daily reminder. And the other thing that, that I. Think about in this conversation is at the stage and at the stage where he is, you can indulge the fantasy for. Some amount of time that you can kind of do it yourself, but then you hit a certain amount of pain. And I think that's a, that's pain he's been absorbing and it, it's gonna bring me back to my favorite takeaway, which is that emotions really are data.

So you can. Absorb that pain and beat yourself up for feeling it. Or you can figure out, okay, what is working and not working for me about this situation? And, and where do I go from here? And I, it's, it was a privilege to kind of meet him at that point where he's willing to pick his head up and acknowledge he can't do this on his own.

And then figure out how to channel that emotion into a productive path forward. All right, Frances, that's our show Fixable listeners, thank you for making the show possible and for being part of this ride with us. We wanna hear from you too. If you wanna figure out your own workplace problem together, send us a message.

Email [email protected] or call us at two three four fixable. That's 2 3 4 3 4 9 2 2 5 3. This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Izzy Carter, Banban Cheng, and Roxanne Hai Lash. This episode was mixed by Louis at Story Yard.