I've got two guests here one is a good friend of
mine Maria she invited Reed to come along and talk about process Improvement and a lot of different
unique applications good to see you again Maria do you want to give us a quick intro those that
don't know you and you're a process Improvement background and then I'll go to Reed hi Brian
uh I'm Maria ganka my background is really in Supply Chain management but I got into process
Improvement more than 20 years ago through work met Brian throug
h a group here in Portland called
lean Portland I've met Reed by way of volunteering for another group called minds matter and uh
connected with Brian because we were a group of people in lean Portland that wanted to take these
process Improvement skills and bring them to some of our volunteer work out in the community so now
I'm a independent consultant doing process and facilitation and training and some coaching
um but I also volunteer as a co-chair of my neighborhood association which i
s not the same as
a homeowners association but it's part uh kind of a supplementary part of the city government here
in Portland Oregon awesome Brian am I leaving out anything Key not yet but I'm sure we'll we'll
get into some of the details that's a great intro yeah happy to introduce myself as well thanks for
having me on Brian and good to see you again Maria um so my background like Maria is in Supply Chain
management I worked at Columbia sportsware for about five years and Adidas uh her
e in Portland
for about five years doing kind of inventory management and warehousing Warehouse optimization
and flow and basically just making sure boxes are getting to the to the right places um did some
lean6 Sigma work as a part of that at Adidas and had been volunteering at minus matter Portland um
where I'm now paid executive director and sort of made this pivot away from supply chain and into
the nonprofit space professionally uh just last year actually so minds matter Portland is a
it's
an academic mentoring program we work with high school sophomores Junior seniors who come from
low-income backgrounds and know that they want to go to a four-year college so we take them
through this three-year program where every week they meet with us and we basically guide
them through the process of getting into college and they're incredible students and just really
quite rewarding Reed you and I first connected on process Improvement while I was a mentor at
mindes matter and I t
hink there was some kind of committee going on and then we both realized
that we had because at that time I think you were still at Columbia or may Adidas and we had
some cross over and what we were doing outside of our volunteer work that sounds right yeah our
organization has about a hundred volunteers at a time amazing volunteers like Maria and just the
sort of cross-pollination of ideas and interests is pretty amazing how did you get involved Maria
with this organization I think I saw a
flyer in my neighborhood to come to a information session
about what the program was about and they were looking for volunteers prior to that I had been
volunteering was smart and so I would show up at a school and read books with young much younger
children and that was fun and it was maybe a couple hours a month or something like that and
I was looking for something a little bit more um extensive so I went to the info session and
ended up being a mentor for three years every Saturday Ree
d how did you end up getting into the
executive director role so I started volunteering with mindes matter Portland in 2011 and started
as a a mentor just like like Maria so working with sophomores who are you know kind of shy but super
intelligent and super ambitious just fun kids to work with and inspiring to to get to help did that
for a few years and then I was the person sort in the classroom leading the activities and then the
founder and executive director at the time Graham Covingto
n um saying hey I I think uh I think you
would be good at this executive director role and it's probably easier than what you're doing now
managing the club classroom the the latter has not come to to be truth but I worked with him
for about a year and of understanding getting to know the financials and the foundations and
the the donors to the organization um and then he has stepped back and now the chair of our board
so I was volunteer executive director for about four years and then last
year we made a really
exciting step to go from an organization with zero paid staff to now having two or having had
two paid sta staff for the last year um and just means the world in terms of capacity and ability
to write down something that you want to do and then actually do it instead of kind of perpetually
add things to this like to-do list yeah so then you were when you were volunteer you were working
somewhere else and then spending free time kind of trying to manage and run the org
anization um so
that's yeah that's a big transition had you had any other nonprofit experience before that I had
been a big brother with Big Brothers Big Sisters and then had just been kind of community involved
um but not typically not through a a long-standing relationship like had done some work at the food
bank and things like that not a board member or any other board position and another nonprofit
no yeah so that's pretty big jump too not only to uh to almost like running an organizat
ion
but it's a nonprofit with its own you know structure and system that maybe similar to what
you've experienced at work but could be a little different too yeah quite different I mean for the
longest time so Minds matters was started in 2006 this is our 18th year it's a very wellestablished
organization it continues to be just miraculous that we have 50 students who are willing to invest
time on Saturdays to come in and put the time in all with this singular Focus around getting
into fou
r-year colleges and then it's equally miraculous to have again volunteers like Maria
who come in every Saturday work closely with those students every week for three years there's a lot
of people and parts moving around and I think for the longest time it just sort of worked because
you gave it a a rough amount of structure and it went but I think once we started to formalize it
and started to have two people and staff first you realize all the things you you could do and then
all the thing
s you should have been doing I think more than anything it's just making the experience
really positive and highly effective and efficient and leverag for the students and the volunteers
is 98% volunteer run and the most important part of the organization as with many organizations non
profs especially is just being good at recruiting and retaining and leveraging your volunteers
either one of you want to talk through that big picture process map of kind of what the student
goes through over
those three years think that might be helpful yeah sure I mean the uh the
basics are that students start their sophomore year in the fall they come in on Saturdays for
two hours in the mornings we're we're meeting at a location in northeast Portland the students
work with tutors specifically on math and writing support they have a curriculum that they go
through the goal is to get more comfortable and fluid in their writing and math skills we feed
them lunch for 30 minutes and then they co
nnect one-on-one with mentors in the afternoon and those
afternoon mentoring sessions are a lot of things around career exploration College exploration goal
setting some professional skills networking uh interview skills and interview prep and then the
kind of cherry on top for the students each year is that in the summer those sophomores all will go
to a two to three week oncampus immersive college program or a number of them will fly across the
country and go to Brown or fly down to USC o
r Stanford and they take these classes where they
stay in the dorms they eat in the cafeterias they get to live college life for two or three weeks
they come back in the fall ready for the next year minds matter they're hopefully reinvigorated
about the prospect of college feeling like it's a place that they belong and then especially for
the seniors when they come back they're really motivated to get into the college application
process so over a three-year period each of our students will
go through two of those immersive
oncampus summer programs that's actually one of the bigger parts of our of our budget we find it
to be really transformative and something that sets us apart from a lot of other college access
programs and then I guess fast forward to the very end we take our students through a really
intensive college application support process they all get into four-year colleges they get
an average of probably 96 to 97% financial aid covered U from the sticker price of
college and
then we have a graduation ceremony in the spring where the the volunteers and their students get
to reminisce about what their Journey has been like and there are a lot of fears and hugs and
celebration um and it's it's definitely the most emotionally impactful part of the whole experience
so Brian we reconnected in May for the Suare event and there were several students that had gone
through the program who are not students at at this point anymore or there some of them were
in college I think some were finished they told a lot of their stories at that event and um there
were some people that I had volunteered with like 10 years ago that were also attending um so it
was really cool to see the whole thing go full circle and you know continue to hear those stories
you know you do volunteer for something 10 years ago and um just to get the invitation to attend
this event from Reed I could tell from invitation itself that they must have done some process
Improvemen
t internally to being able to send out these messages because it wasn't always something
that I heard of or was aware of after the fact yeah it has been a busy year yeah sorry right go
ahead no I was just Maria your was talking about said 10 years ago you had started and then so
when you start volunteering there it's like the preferences to stay with the program for three
years so that you're seeing that you're staying with the same students from their sophomore year
to their senior year so
metimes it's like a two to one mentor to student but I we had some mixing up
of the groups at that point so I think I finished in 2013 so it must have been around 2010 when I
had started and I still kept in in touch with some people but we move on to other volunteer projects
so I wasn't as connected before but um it was just easy to connect and attend this particular event
this year how does the connection with like these other schools work um is there a bigger network
of schools because th
at seems like a pretty big logistics thing to kind of coordinate you said
it's a big budget item too so um so minds matter of Portland is one of 14 mines matter chapters so
there are Boston New York Southern California Bay Area and a number of places in between um so New
York was the first chapter the the chapters all have the same mission statement you know Common
goals we're all trying to get our students into fouryear colleges with little to no debt um
and then the organization manages a
number of Partnerships with some schools like brown and
Harvard and and many others where they will have their existing summer program Partnerships
or opportunities and then we can leverage those relationships to either get some discounts or some
some Reserve slots so there's some there's some Central operations that are managed out of uh the
New York National department or national function U but there's also a lot of autonomy between
the groups um and really the goal is just to kind of e
xperiment and and evolve in you know
the college access landscape is certainly Ever Changing U but probably the most consistent thing
that the chapters work together on is just around volunteer recruiting and retention and just the
the basics of managing humans both the students and the volunteers and how you can make sure
you're appreciating and and retaining uh both the students and the volunteers because that's
it's ultimately just a it's a human to human organization um we sort of joke
sometimes that
if you get a student who is motivated and wants to get help and a volunteer who's motivated and
wants to give help to students that want help then you just sort of put them together for for a few
hours each week and you let the the magic happen I remember a big French of like lists of summer
programs that I think people had gone to before and we sort of knew like what what kind of areas
people were interested in and going through that spreadsheet in those Saturday sessions to
help
students kind of Select or navigate that list and check out different programs at different schools
or look up different programs that weren't even on the list based upon what they were interested in
I think we've successfully killed that spreadsheet and have recreated some others but it brings up
an important Point Maria which is that we had a person who was running the summer programs work
for about 12 12 years and it was kind of a black box and she did all of this work and it wasn'
t
really written down but she was great at it and then a couple years ago she said I can't really
do this anymore and we're realizing that we were not in a good position to transfer that knowledge
or even know what that knowledge was we're trying to be honest with ourselves about the fact that
we shouldn't really be expecting people to do more than two to three to four hours a week at any
point we should be able to design roles that are that size we should be able to design roles that
are
really clearly laid out and should be able to design roles that don't have a ton of ambiguity
to them and that that's not only just practically beneficial but it makes the volunteer recruiting
process simpler it makes the volunteer retention process simpler and that if we're not if we don't
have almost like a emphatic approach to writing down at least a few basic things that we do then
we're not doing our job and that's I think similar or familiar in many volunteer run organizations
so for
examp like the neighborhood association the neighborhood associations in Portland were
established in I think 1973 or something and my particular neighborhood was annexed into the city
around 1980 it could be 86 I might be wrong and for a long time there were stretches of somebody
running the neighborhood association for you know 7 to 10 years and that knowledge you know they
had the time or were just very invested in in getting everything done and like you're saying it
was this mysterious
box of I don't know how that thing runs well that creates a process problem
because we have you know all of the knowledge in one box and as volun these are volunteer roles
as they turn over people's you know life changes and you need to move on to something else it's
very difficult to pass it on to the next group of people so like our board on the neighborhood
association is consistently changing but that's kind of what my focus has been on making it so
that when the board members change ov
er it's easy for somebody to step in figure out what's going on
decide what they want to focus on and be able to run with it how did you get involved with that
neighborhood association it's something that I kind of knew existed maybe just from hearing about
neighborhood associations in the news here I like put it on my calendar when their meetings were
and I never ever went until Co happened there was a lot going on politically at the time and I
felt this kind of inability to have an impact
at a higher level and the first thing that came to
mind for me was like um a gima walk you know if I'm walking around to part of my jargon the gble
walk or actual place where things are happening you know I can walk around my block or around 10
blocks in my neighborhood and see what's really happening and the meetings were now on Zoom so I
just zoomed in one night and met these people that were working on things that were happening in my
own backyard so um from there I kind of became a boa
rd member and like the other organizations
I'm part of uh just try to help organize some processes and I I'm sure you often find yourself
being the only one who's sort of beating that drum Maria I know I I find that sometimes what seems
to be most successful for me is to not like if I say the word process people get scared so I
try to find other ways to describe what I'm doing without saying the word process why don't
we write this down so that next time we have to do this we remember how w
e did it I don't want to
make it up again like that when Maria and I had lunch a few weeks ago I was telling her that I'm
also part of the the PTA team at the elementary school or my kids go and we've there's probably
not an organizational type that is more sort of specifically transient than a PTA just like
there's there's no one who's been on a PTA for 10 years it's the same kind of thing where if we're
not almost laughing at the amount of times we're intentionally building process or wri
ting things
down so that we know how to do them next time then we're probably not doing enough of it so we're try
to use the same format that we use at minds matter which is just a single page of somewhere between
two and maybe eight checkboxes just to say if you start with this before you do some spaghetti
dinner or a minds matter graduation then you're going to be in a better spot um and then when I
was describing this to Maria I was also saying the hope is to do this for now and then to
have some
really robust version of a process document later and then she said something like do you think
you'd ever do that more robust process document later I said probably not so I think if we had the
discipline to just say we don't want anything more than just a comprehensive broad collection of
these simple somewhat shallow documents and we just Define that as like outrageous success in
from a documentation perspective then that kind of makes it feel achievable and a lot more
excitin
g so that's that's my new mindset in process or writing things down so you don't have
to start from scratch next time I like the idea of it being comically simple I'm gonna take that
back to our processes that we're trying to write down you know I think that's a really good point
because I think that's where it scares people off even the people creating the documents it's the
overwhelm of oh my gosh the detail I'm gonna have put into this is I don't even want to start or I I
got to have car
ve out a whole weekend to to build this thing out and if you're starting with just
a simple checklist one page no more than eight or ten items that doesn't seem so bad you can
almost rattle it off the top of your head and someone can write it out and now you got a form
you know that probably has more applicability to even the for-profit businesses that get kind of
overwhelmed by this documentation and I've seen some really massive documentation efforts that I
don't know if those were helpfu
l think you're yeah I mean when I came from Adidas we we all of our
departments had some sort of objective to this is the quarter that we're going to process improve
and write it down and it was like every quarter we were going through the the end of quarter
goals with my boss and she would say yeah it's fine we sort of knew we weren't going get this
and it would just happen quarter after quarter at Intel they do an amazing job because they have
these SS that are immensely detailed we have
a lot of Intel volunteers at MES matter so it's it's
interesting to occasionally interact in process approvement dialogues with with those folks we
almost always just say okay that's too much and you have to have a culture that is really mature
to enforce that or you know drive that discipline and you have people that maybe are there 20 years
or more built you know working in that culture and showing up every day and because they're paid to
be there you know so I think you can do that in so
me organizations like that but yeah with a very
transient group of volunteers and yeah I can see that's going to be very very difficult to get even
that level of detail and even the flexibility that you need seems so rigid I think that scares people
off a bit with it's so detailed I must not have the freedom or ability to do anything different I
have to follow it step by step and I don't we lose some of that creativity and some flexibility with
that as well yep right you could put in the ch
eck checkbox do this use your best judgment as to the
the way to do this but do this or this do this or this or this yeah and and I think that also points
to like different a mature organization like with with Intel but I think it also depends on the
the product that they're making right so there in a highly technical manufacturing process those
that need to be very detail oriented is I imagine a very strong part of their culture and Reed was
just describing like some of the volunteer and s
tudent interactions as being the main thing you
put somebody who really wants a student who really wants to succeed and is very motivated with a
volunteer who really wants to help they sort of figure that out well that's not as detail um
driven necessarily as a high-tech manufacturing process so I think that's something to think
about in terms of like well what are you making what is the right amount of process understanding
that goes along that is going to be supportive of that particular
thing that you're producing yeah
there's almost a right way to do things at Intel but you know you've got two people with different
approaches with different needs that change every time you can't have a right way to do something
uh because it's gonna vary it's it's too much uh uniqueness from the teacher or the mentor and
the students so and if it it's not done exactly the same way like downside is all right maybe
we learn something maybe it figures something positive maybe it's it's a lit
tle inefficient
but we'll get back on track soon but at Intel they might lose a million dollars if you skip a
step the the the consequences are that you know almost like there is a a set way to do it here
it's there's not really a set way it's going to vary and so we need that flexibility and I would
even go a step farther in saying You must do it differently with every student in terms of the
way that you build these relationships I mean the the whole organization is dependent on these
st
rong bonds that are formed between the mentors and the students the students gain trust to the
point where they're willing to disclose some of the challenges that they're facing so that the
mentors can actually help them out or they can the students of let them into behind the scenes of
their families and then the mentors can understand what are the most important consideration factors
When selecting a college and if they don't know all of that then they're not going to be let in
and they'r
e not going to be as helpful so we just had our our Mentor orientation session where where
we're talking about how to form relationships and the mindsets and skills and knowledge for how
to form these relationships the loudest clearest message is you have to just be open to whatever
students tell you you ask open-ended questions and then you listen intensely and compassionately
and you build your approach based on what they're saying and you build the pace of your approach
based on what the
y're saying and this is not you saying like oh I've got three different methods
for forming relationships let me figure out which one's going to work with you it's just like
I'm going to build a method for how to form a relationship based on what you either say or
signal it's an outcome that happens through the relationship but the relationship is like the
primary thing we have the privilege of being able to step back and say okay we're trying to get
humans to connect with each other for so
me other goal how to do that speaking of that does I would
imagine that sometimes the student realizes that's not what they want like if the goal is to get into
college they might through this process realize I don't don't know if I want to do that anymore
I thought that's what I was going after as I'm talking through and understanding career choices
and options and getting feedback and mentoring from somebody maybe I Chang my mind I don't I
don't know if that happens very often going back
to your point of the relationship and whatever
they're trying to accomplish is really the outcome because they're figuring out and they're getting
some guidance along the way and most of the time it sounds like it's going to end up trying to get
into college but because that happen at all it happens a little bit there are some students
who realize partway through their three-year minds matter Journey that either college or minds
matter isn't for them some students who instead of going strai
ght to a four-year College go to
a maybe two-year and then aspire to transfer to a four-year College some students will take a
gap here with the again intention of going to a four-year College after that it doesn't always
happen I think I don't know if you heard the daily episode from a few weeks ago was like really
questioning the fact that college is becoming a less aspirational destination especially along
party lines and just really breaking down the different Returns on investment for
different
demographics and for different sticker prices for college it's not an obvious decision um but
again it starts with really that relationship with the student and their parents if the students
happy with the outcome I think that's really could be the measure of success you know is really
are they getting what they wanted and happy with the choices they're making and feeling
like this is the right thing for me now that I've gotten all this support help so yeah you're
right I think t
hat is a something that was never stouted I think when we were growing up it was
kind of like a no-brainer if you want a good job you go to college though but it was much more
affordable and so the return on investment seemed much more clear maybe share a few examples of
some of the things I'd like the the the process kind of checklist or overviews one thing that
comes to mind again it hearkens back a little bit to the the human element of this in the past
before we had paid staff we didn't
really have the ability to stay on top of potential issues
with students and families and home life as we could and we've Now set ourselves a really strong
e expectation of saying if we notice something or hear about something that seems concerning in
terms of attendance or student not speaking up as much as they used to that we will take the step
and have chat with their mentors and chat with the student and their parents and just have a really
open-ended dialogue about what's happening a
nd whether any help is needed and make it abundantly
clear that that we're there to be a resource um so that's in some ways that's kind of a like a soft
thing right but we've we've built this attendance tracking spreadsheet where if somebody's late
or if they leave early and we have little notes documenting why they weren't there or if they
told us they weren't going to be there and then we have this once a week process where our
program director and I sit down and we go through and we say
what happened in the last week what
happened in the last couple weeks what trends do we see it's Monday who do we need to call who
do we need to talk with by the end of the the week sometimes you're pulling a string that will
reveal other issues or interpersonal issues with volunteers and students um so it's this just
kind of applying this process framework again not complicated but intentional to the idea of hey
our students should all be present and engaged and we should be able to see th
em looking like this a
valuable and productive use of their time I almost think about it as like root cause analysis like
there's something happening at the surface level and because that trust is built now there's an
opportunity to try and go into the next level wise of what's really going on what is happen happening
at home what's happening at school what's happening with their friends something is blocking
their progress or their ability to make the next step or progress or they're not a
cting right
and getting to that root issue so that it can be removed or addressed if possible so they can
kind of continue moving forward again um I think that's so key because you could just keep going at
it without knowing that deeper issue never uncover that you know when there's struggles with they
can't get a square meal it's gonna be a hard time for them to learn and memorize and make progress
on things so then you help get that resolved and all of a sudden progress picks up again so
yeah
I see that that's almost like critical to their success yeah I think you know our our core metric
is getting students in matriculated into college with a high amount amount of financial aid and a
very low out-of- pocket cost so we sort of we have this number to say if a student's total out-of
pocket cost is five or $6,000 or less and they're into a great school and we sort of say check they'
they've met that the lagging indicator of success is whether they then persist and graduate thr
ough
college and that's most of them do we're about 90% graduation rate which is great um but if something
if something goes wrong there you're you're not really in a position to to affect change um and
I think that attendance engagement is really the leading indicator of then those two subsequent
success points yeah very cool and so that was something you kind of implemented recently was
like maybe more rigor into that attendance and tracking that and using that as feedback and
reviewing
that metric yeah last last fall yeah because I think a lot of times people will
look for things to track but it's you know very lagging indicator of progress like how did they
do on this assessment but the early indication of the attendance may be what is a key success
factor that you can see that heading in the wrong direction and address it before it gets the point
of the scorers coming in and they're not showing up and the and the lagging stuff so yeah that's
great yeah and and the diffe
rence two students can miss a session and one of them could miss it
because they're part of a Statewide mock trial perform or activity and they've told us about it
a month and a half in advance and they're working with their mentor to catch up on what they miss
and another student could get up in the morning and just say eh I don't want to go to mindes
matter and not tell us and the fact that sometimes those two outcomes used to be that we didn't
really know the difference between the cause
s of those two outcomes in the past was scary so BR
you queed in on root cause analysis what was going through my mind when Reed was describing this was
a daily management system so you know how are we doing today what are the things that we need to
follow up on how are our processes all working I kind of think of that like gima walk around my
neighborhood as part of that although I still have a lot of continuous Improvement to do uh
here one of the challenges in in this particular organiza
tion and all of the neighborhoods in
general it's like we should be representing all the people that live in the neighborhood that's
13,000 plus people and I probably only interact with dozens on a regular basis and still trying to
navigate how to be effective at that and you know I have certain entry points we have like a couple
of meetings per month so we have a board meeting that's open to the public we have a general me
member meeting that's open to everyone as well and a lot of it like
sometimes it has to do with
local politics sometimes it's a noisy business business that a neighbor needs help with a lot of
times environmental issues we have a industrial area that um is on one side of our neighborhood
sometimes it has things to do with the schools and so you really know never know what is going
to Bubble Up at the time and that's where I think these like one pagers would be helpful and we have
somebody who their area of expertise is in like land use and transportation a
nd understanding
city ordinances like where can we actually do something or sometimes it's you know just in
some ways making a lot of noise about something because there is a issue going on and if we can
band together to approach that people are more willing to listen so trying to capture my daily
management system is trying to capture all of those issues that are going on and apply some kind
of meaningful filter to say here's where we should be focusing our attention right now and it does
shift a lot with you know sometimes whatever's in the paper something as I thought about politics I
know it's not like you're in politics but you kind of are because it's a representation your area but
you're voicing concern for a larger group and you may not have all their voices how do you get those
12,000 people voices all the time to know is this really a big deal or not is this a concern is it
a few vocal people that are carrying the weight of this what do most people think is you know
then
you get into sampling and randomize sampling or is it a skewed inconsistent sample of people and
we're going a lot through a lot of effort here because uh five people are really upset about it
but most of the people in that neighborhood are not that concerned I think that would be really
tricky of thinking through the data and the voice of the customer part of this it's hard because
most of the data collection on a Citywide basis is like distributed with the census so you've
got eith
er brand new data and this last one had a lot of different footnotes on it because of
the collection process or you're working with 10-year-old data The Collection you know they
do like listening sessions when they're about to do a project in the city somewhere so we try
to participate in those but a lot of times you don't see the results for of that project for 10
20 years so there's a lot of like looking to you know especially if it comes to Street Improvement
sidewalk improvements traffi
c rerouting all of these kind of things are way down the road
projects so to speak it's hard sometimes to be very specific about things but to know that
our main purposes are really around livability neighborhood and Civic engagement so there was a
bit of like long-term thinking and you know I try not to get over excited about noise that bubbles
up in the short term and try to keep like a longer range picture on it to know that you know we do
have an important voice with the city and let's
use it for good I was also thinking I might be in
your data still Yes 2020 because I think yeah the census came through 2020 I was still living
there in your neighborhood so I still have a voice somewhat yes which is my little neighborhood
sheet yeah on the on the survey topic that that reminds me of some of the work that we've done
recently at mind's matter so we we've always had an end of year survey that we sent to students and
volunteers and it was sort of partially taken we wouldn't gi
ve it as thorough a read through and
it wouldn't be as thoroughly addressed as um we might want and we implemented a pretty simple
and and effective especially in hindsight pivot to say students and volunteers you're going to
do the surveys while we're in session so we just carve out 15 minutes everybody's in there doing
the survey and anyone who's in the room looking around is thinking okay this is the time that we
do the survey uh and then we had gosh probably three 90 minute review perio
ds with our leadership
team where we went through and just pulled out the trends and talked through all the responses
to each little section and just TR to break it into a handful of actionable things and by the
end of it it felt just very appropriate as the as a response and kind of like a du obviously you
should just listen look at all the feedback figure out what's most consistent and actionable and then
do it but it's it's hard until you have a process around it and it's probably other
organizations
worked with don't have that structure either one client I'm working with right now that was
the thing let's get a survey going it's been a couple years it's not regular process yet it's
not something we're building on to say this is our annual time to kind of status where we're at
and then let's make sure that we're coming back to these questions and saying are we making progress
incrementally at least in that data to see that we're listening and showing our employees if it's
employee survey or customer survey that we are listening and doing something and they should
notice that things are changing and see kind of that system working like you said that it's
intentional a lot of organizations struggle with that more than I had realized yeah we even have
some Grant applications so we'll we'll filling out a Grant application for a foundation and some
of them go as far as asking us to describe our surveying or feedback Gathering proess how handle
it and respond to
it I think that's that's sort of a nice nudge where if a foundation wants to
encourage that sort of behavior even just asking the question allow forces people to think through
it a little bit and they're of course welcome to spread their dollars more to organizations that
have at least a process that they describe as more robust than than others even talking through this
right now I'm like oh we could just administer our own survey and leave that as like a Google
form that people could that
the next board and the next board and the next board could continue
to gather data on so I'm going to steal that and the one pager piece and it's also reminding me too
of when you were talking earlier Reed you know I do proc Improvement professionally I've worked as
an employee mostly for for-profit companies but I also learned a lot you know just by bringing
myself to a volunteer experience and having that process Improvement mindset you really end up
learning a lot about how to apply the
se different kind of principles in different situations by
having this conversation here I'm thinking of even more ideas of ways to simplify what we're doing at
the neighborhood association or in lean Portland it never stops yeah totally agree uh the actually
the job I had even before Colombia was working for a in an industrial supply distribution warehouse
It's a sort of optimizing process there you wander around and you and you see it and think you you
build this mindset around being able
to tell when something isn't going right either observing it
with your eyes reading through an email and sort of reading the pain that someone experiences if
you just bring that to any organization even if you don't instantly know how to fix it just
being able to tease out something that is not going right is is pretty important and you know
for us that typically means some volunteer that is either unclear on what is happening just
not their fault it's the lack of a process um or some inte
rpersonal conflict that ex is existing
because of again a lack of clity somewhere that's a part of it that's nice that like any process
Improvement that we're putting in place the goal is to make someone happier or less frustrated or
feel like their work is more rewarding or that the outcomes are then better it's not a far leap
from we need to dig into this to work on it like exactly why are we doing this very cool anything
else you wanted to share or I guess another thing that comes to min
d is that we as a PTA we have
tons of of PE organizations who are doing the same work as mindes matter Portland we have tons
of peer organizations that are doing the same work we never do enough best practices sharing it's a
shame and it seems like it's something we should be able to just overcome with a little more
willpower but there's not a process for it so no amount no amount of willpower is going to just
make it happen it's just something we need to at least fully recognize and then t
ry to Define some
really simple ways to pick pick a topic or pick a specific even decision point maybe that that
might be the easiest possible thing to engage and then connect with some other organizations who
are always eager and happy and friendly to share ideas I know we were talking Maria about how do we
connect in some of these nonprofits doing process Improvement and so they can connect and talk to
each other and we can kind of get out of the way and let them just say you know figure
out just
like we've been doing today oh that's a great idea I want to try that or how do you handle this
situation it's not specific to their organization really it's just the common things of how do you
do surveys how do you get feedback what do you do with volunteers that's working well how do you
recognize volunteers like some of those things are just generic across the board and they're
also really applicable to employees managers at for-profit so there is a lot of General stuff
that p
eople struggle with and finding other people who are going through that struggle and have
tips and ideas is really really powerful and everybody loves sharing the ideas also just start
with that as you don't need to feel guilty about extracting ideas from people two comments I want
to make on that I think and this is not specific to nonprofits but when we get a long list of
things to do and we kind of put our blinders on and and stay in our own lane so to speak
about I need to get these don
e it's harder to get out there and connect with other people so I
think you know making that a priority and part of your regular walking around checking in with other
groups can be really helpful and the idea around best practice sharing you know we used to do that
inside of large companies sharing you know best practice sharing between different departments or
maybe different sites and the same thing like you said read with the ptas or the different minds
matter chapters for us it's the ne
ighborhood associations there's a lot more that we could
do to share but we have have to pick up our eyes and not only make time for it but also make that
connection and carve out a channel to the other organizations because in some cases we've just
had our head down for a long time working hard Vol at volunteering on top of whatever else it is
that you're already doing we had a community of practice that when I was working in corporate
and we had a whole a person dedicated to just coordina
ting that whole system and it was like
Community Practice around industrial engineers and some around some technology and then others
were around process areas and they would meet monthly and they fund it with like free lunch
and so people would come in person or virtually like the headquarters had it in person but then
the offsites would call in you know remote into it and then someone would give a presentation
or topic on something and then the networking part was you know the really valu
able part to
so you know hear what other people are working on and then how are you solving that what have you
already learn what resources out there what person do I need to talk to about this or we already
fixed that five years ago this is what we did I think there's a white paper somewhere you know it
was hard to describe exactly what the outcome was going to be but it shortcut a lot of the process
and the struggle people had because they finally could figure out who's here's the people
that
know stuff are and who to connect me with and what's going on in in the organization and I don't
have to reinvent this I thought that was a really cool system but they they really focused on making
this a priority and and it paid dividends probably a year or two after doing it or you could argue
that unless you do that then you will never have you'll be in a constant time deficit like process
Improvement right if you don't carve out some time to do it you will always be reacting so yea
h
very true well awesome um I don't want to take up too much more of your time um anything else you
wanted to share maybe advice for people working in a nonprofit or potential volunteers what can
they do to bring to the table um maybe help with documentation that sounds like one takeaway here
any other advice we we'll we'll talk specifically about nonprofits either as volunteer or working
as a board member or executive director or a volunteer in an organization I think I would just
say it'
s all it's all people right and yeah trying to keep things as simple and clear as possible
our new National CEO has a phrase Clarity is kind and I think that goes a long way if you think
like oh I want to be a kind person then okay be a clear person in everything you do think that
transcends a lot of different functional areas for sure I would just say that there's a lot of
organizations that are looking for volunteers so if you have a special interest in any particular
area probably an on
online search could help but also just like walking around your neighborhood
looking at signs and people's windows that's how I got connected with M's matter and the first
place or the bulletin board at the coffee shop the neighborhood newspaper those are all great
places and if you're interested in process Improvement I'm sure that that organization
wants your help agreed how can people get a hold of you I'm pretty easy to find on LinkedIn
Maria ganka or um my emails Maria ideam Maria g r
z n k a yep the best way to get in touch with
me is probably going to the minds matter website Minds matterport land. org and then we have a
like connect via info minds matter portland.org that goes right to me apply to be a volunteer on
the all right awesome thank you both so much I think that's been very helpful and useful and
look forward to reconnecting seeing you all sometime yeah let us know when back in Portland
okay definitely won't yeah love to get a beer BR thank you for having me
on Maria great to see
you again you too okay thanks all right bye bye
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