 Hello and welcome. So glad to have you here. As I take a deep breath and introduce for our speaker today, our guest is Sunny White, co-founder and executive director of Mindfulness First. She's here for today's episode of The Nonprofit Show to talk to you, to talk to me, to talk to all of us about prioritizing mental health at nonprofits. And you have such a critical mission and I'm excited. I'm super excited for us to jump into that conversation. Julia Patrick is taking a mindful moment off today, which we are able to grace each other with that time. So she serves as the CEO, American Nonprofit Academy. I'm so very honored to sit alongside with Julia and serve day in, day out as the nonprofit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group as the co-host. We also wanna give a shout out of gratitude to our friends that allow us these opportunities like the one we're gonna have here today with Sunny. But I wanna give a shout out to our friends at Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique as well as nonprofit nerd. These companies are here to pour into you, to pour into your mission to help you do more good around your community. So do us a favor, do them a favor and check them out. And again, without them, we wouldn't be able to produce so many episodes that we've produced since March of 2020. And you can find all of them on Roku, YouTube, Vimeo, Fire TV and for those of you that are podcast listeners, go ahead and queue us up there too, wherever you stream. Your podcast is where you can find the nonprofit show. So today I am just elated to introduce and have what, who I consider a dear friend, a previous client, a current client, probably a former client, but Sunny White, co-founder, executive director at Mindfulness First. Welcome, Sunny. Thank you, Jarrett. I'm just, I'm thrilled to be here. I've been looking forward to it for a while. So thank you. I am so excited that you said yes. You know, it had to be the right timing. And speaking of timing, we have a treat for our viewers and listeners. So Sunny, I'm gonna ask if you would kick us off for a mindfulness moment and then we'll jump into, you know, mindfulness first, the organization, your mission, but get us started and like, let's get us centered. Let's do it. Thank you. Okay, so I'm gonna invite everyone to just sit comfortably on your chair, feet symmetrical on the ground. If you'd like to close your eyes, you may. I'm gonna lead you, it'll be very brief. We're gonna lead you through three deep breaths. So if you want to close your eyes, go ahead or just focus ahead and let's breathe in all the way to our belly, breathe in and then out. Relaxing your shoulders, softening your shoulders and breathing in again. All the way to the belly, fill it up. And as you breathe out, take the tongue away from the roof of the mouth, relax your shoulders more, relax your hands. And one more deep breath. In we go, all the way. And then as you breathe out, just release any tension that you might be feeling in your arms, your hands, your legs. And then we'll open up our eyes or refix our gaze onto the computer. Hello. Hello, Sunny, thank you so much. For those of you that might have joined us during our moment, again, Sunny White joins us today, co-founder, executive director at Mindfulness First. Sunny, again, so glad to have you here, but tell those watching and listening a little bit about Mindfulness First. We have our episode about mindfulness, but a little bit about yourself and what we just experienced. Yeah, what we just experienced was we sent biological messages to our nervous system, to our brain, that everything was safe. And so our body was able to relax and sort of any stress that we brought to the room just now, hopefully we sort of released that and gave ourselves a bit more presence. And at Mindfulness First, we teach trauma-informed, mindfulness-based, social-emotional learning to kids in schools and to adults in businesses, but I want you to imagine starting a lesson with that mindful moment. That's what we do. We help teachers to learn how to give kids tools to help them relax and be in the smart part of their brain and be able to be present in their classes. And we can do the same for adults too. And the reason we started Mindfulness First was because in 2009, I experienced a stress-induced breakdown and that led me to understanding trauma, mindfulness, and social-emotional learning. And I was kind of like, wait a minute, why didn't you tell me this? You guys knew this? This was an existing fact. And I didn't understand it until I was 35. And so I thought, well, maybe we should be teaching this to children. So that's how we began. What a wonderful mission and purpose. Really understanding mindfulness is where we're gonna start. I love hearing a little bit about your story. I'm sorry that that was the impetus for starting it, but love how you're sharing this with so many and serving that mission. So let's talk about really understanding the journey to understanding mindfulness in the nonprofit sector. Can you talk to us about that, Sunny? Yeah, I have to say, when I first was sick and I'll keep it sort of surface trauma-informed here, I won't talk too much about being unwell, but when I was unwell, I know a lot of other people were sort of leaving corporate America feeling sick. This was around 2009, 2010. I wasn't the only one leaving corporate America feeling very unwell from pressure, stress, all those big, we all know, I don't need to tell you, we all know how we feel. And wanting a change of actually physically needing a change for their own health and wellbeing. And so when we opened Mindfulness First, there really wasn't a lot of this work being done. It was, we found a couple of other organizations like ours who were teaching in schools and a couple of university organizations that were teaching mindfulness and mental health wellness as well. But it was really the early stages. And I have to say, people thought we were a bit weird back then. They were like, what are you doing? But there were people who really believed in us. And people like the Boltz School District in South Phoenix, where we've been for seven years and really made a significant impact on that district. And local corporations like the Whiteman family who owned the Caterpillar Company locally, they believed in us from the beginning. They saw it. They knew that people were doing the same thing and they saw it. They knew that people needed good mental health wellness. And I think as we've seen over the last, while we opened in 2013 and over the last nine years, we've definitely seen that people understand this all a little bit better now. And there's a lot more of us and that's good. That's really good. Well, and definitely going through this global pandemic and we refer to it as pandemic's plural because there's a lot going on in our world. And I think also for the nonprofit community, Sunny, and you and I talk about this often, but it's like, how much can we do with so very little? And we do so much, we day in and day out, pour our heart into everything and often deplete ourselves. So I really think understanding mindfulness in the sector is extremely important and how you're providing the services. Now, you talk a little bit about, and I love this image for those of you that might be looking, it's kind of like what I would refer to as a moped, but it looks like the world is just flashing by them. So the lesson of slow down to speed up, how is that a mindfulness practice and how might that show up for us? This is literally one of my favorite phrases to do with mindfulness first, so to do with our work. So I can definitely speak to this and I can tell a little story a few years ago. So my very close friend, Kimberley, who is the co-founder of mindfulness first and I, it was probably maybe 2018, I think it was the summer of 2018 or 2017. We were burnt to a crisp, we've been doing this work and you know, everyone out there knows, you all know, it's hard work working in a nonprofit, especially when you're building it from the ground up. And we reached the beginning of the summer, I think 2018 and we just said, we need to slow down to actually make progress. We were moving too quickly. And so what we did was we took the whole summer off. We just took a break. We said, that's it, let's take a break. We need to rest and restore. Our bodies need to feel better because we've been pushing, pushing, pushing and there's been a lot of pushback because people didn't quite understand what we were doing yet. And when we came back in the fall that year, we were so replenished and so healthy and so ready to go. And that's when things really started to change for us. And we've held onto that notion of slowing down to speed up and we try to catch ourselves. When we start to snowball again, when we start to do too much, put too much on our plates, we remind ourselves that actually slowing down helps us to do better and do more. You know, that makes me think a back of the day, I used to do half marathons and there's a Jeff Galloway method and it's all about running in intervals and then walking in intervals. And so that slowing down actually helped me to maintain the steadiness of the timing and that's what really just connected with me. And I think when we look at the scarcity mindset for nonprofits and we talk about, well, how much can you do with so very little? It's like, hey, maybe it's time we take a pause and we do replenish and restore ourselves. I think that's so, so very important. And I love that you live this. I feel like in corporate America, sabbaticals were a thing. And I don't know that I hear that very often. No, I hear too much people getting sick. That's what I hear more than anything. And I think people want to change, don't they? And I think embracing the knowledge of mindfulness and mindfulness is really very biologically grounded. It's learning to understand yourself as a human. And if we can look at our nonprofit as its own little nervous system, as its own brain and body that needs to be kept well and regulated as a group, right? If we look at ourselves as a group that needs to regulate together, then we can make these decisions as a group to slow down when we need to and it'll be for the better of everyone, especially the people we serve, right? Especially those we serve. So there's three approaches that you're gonna talk about here. What are these three? I'm gonna ask you to say them. What are these three and how do they show up in mindfulness? Yeah, so these are three important ideas that we have used over the last nine years to help build mindfulness first as an organization. Now, sociocracy is where we have a flat organization. So it's non hierarchical. And what that means is everybody's really, really accountable. So they're accountable to each other. They're accountable for their own work and it really puts people in their own power and it helps people to get to feel ownership over their work and for us, it was a way of modeling mindfulness. It was a way of modeling wellbeing because all of us had brought trauma from working in the corporate world. We all bought that trauma with us and so we needed to make a change. And also we're a predominantly female organization which isn't on purpose, it just is. And we want to be a safe place for women to work. We want every woman's voice to be heard, every person's voice to be heard. So sociocracy helps with that. And then also we have the worker self-directed nonprofit model, so that means that we don't necessarily lean on the board to set the strategy. We are the people who are working on the ground. We are the ones who say, hey, you know what we noticed this needs doing? Well, that needs doing. And we help to set the strategy in a much stronger way than the board does. And that makes things happen so much more efficiently. And again, it models mindfulness. It puts everybody in the place where they want to be. And then being trauma-informed, I think, well, so that's been a huge part of who we are. But I have to say at this moment in time, it's something we should all be doing because we've just come out of a global pandemic. We have collective trauma. And if we look around, if we look at the people around us, the people we work with, we look at our children, we look at what's happening in schools, the new behaviors, the fear, the stress, it's all a result of pandemic trauma. And so we as an organization, we try to work with our own policies and our structures to make sure that we're trauma-informed from the inside out, so that we can provide trauma-informed services. So for those, again, watching and listening, mindfulness first is providing these services to a low-income population. Is that correct? Like in schools? Mm-hmm, it's true. Yes, at the moment we have, so when, as the pandemic started to come to a close, at least it seemed to, the government really realized that we had trauma. We had trauma for kids because kids' brains don't stop developing until we're 25, 30. And so if you can imagine the developing brain that developed during a time when we were isolated, there was scarcity of food. We didn't see our friends, we were frightened for our loved ones, we didn't know what the illness would do. The breathing, a lot of losses. The breathing, yes, so much. And our children's brains developed in that time. That's why we're seeing these staggering statistics about depression, anxiety, and difficulties for kids, and also for adults, by the way, too. Well, you bring up a great point, Sunny, that there's so many statistics when it comes to the support of this work, there's a lot going on globally impacting so many. So these three approaches, it's very enlightening to me and how these lessons are performed. Now where I want us to go next is how do we make this a mainstay, right? How do we continue to prioritize the wellbeing in a nonprofit? But I also heard you say it's really like for ourselves, prioritizing ourselves, which again, this image off to the right, for those of you watching, looking, self-care isn't selfish, which is such a great, yeah, words there are words. So how do we prioritize this for us? Well, I mentioned just a moment ago, the structures and policies, that is a great place to start. So if we can start with, I'm gonna quote Dr. Nadine Burke Harris here. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris is the surgeon general in California. She is probably my favorite mentor to look to for trauma-informed understanding. And she said that this moment in the global pandemic is the perfect time for us to implement trauma-informed structures everywhere. And she says, strike while the iron is hot. And so that's my biggest piece of advice for anyone who wants to have mental health be prioritized within your organization, is start by educating yourself in trauma. And if you're here in Arizona, you can go to the Arizona ACES Coalition. They do offer great, they're a great nonprofit, offering superb trainings in trauma. And then work together to create policies where everybody is cared for first within the organization because it's like the whole oxygen mask first, right? You put it on yourself first before you help anybody else. There'll be nothing left for us to help our community with if we haven't taken care of ourselves. So I recommend looking at your policies, getting some trauma-informed education or trauma responsive as we're calling it these days. Look at how you're caring for the people who work for you. How are we caring for each other first? That is so important. We've talked so much over the last four, coming up on four years here for the nonprofit show, Sunny. So Julie and I, we've heard from so many guests that have talked about the quiet quitting or the silent quitting. We talk about the burnout. We talk about the workforce, not being there. And when you bring this up about making sure everyone in your organization is well, that really hits home, I think, on so many layers. Where do you think we can start? Cause I feel like there's so much to do. And I know we started today's episode in conversation with that mindfulness moment. And I'm just sitting back here thinking, imagine if every single meeting was started that way, right? Like, so where are some tools maybe that you can give us to tap into? There, you know, we use, there is a, we went onto YouTube actually and found someone who was offering mindful minutes that take just 60 seconds. So if no one in your organization knows mindfulness yet, you can click and play on YouTube. There's some beautiful little 60 second mindful moments that you can use to start your meetings and also to end your meetings. So transitioning in, transitioning out and also if you're sitting at your desk and you really need a mindful moment, you can just click and play and also inside timer, inside timer is free and really good. It has some really great mindful moments that you could use. This is the easiest place to start. Oh, that is a good tip. Now I know a little bit about mindfulness first and I'd love for you to talk to us Sunny about your trainers because these trainers come from all walks of life, even like Fortune 500 companies. So when I think of mindfulness and the mission, you know, that you're delivering, you're delivering this mission, you know, to title one schools, low income, vulnerable, you know, populations, but your trainers, many of them have lived very, you know, well to do corporate America lives, which just, it's really interesting to me. So mindfulness finds its way to so many different people. Would you talk about your trainers and the level of expertise? Yes, yeah, that's so interesting that you notice that it is amazing. Our group of people who, we have 25 people who go out and train for us, but we also have members on our board who volunteer to do our training because they're experts too. And what you're saying makes me think of Tony Williams on our board who is from General Motors and very, very, and before that, he was with American Express. He always teaches mindfulness wherever he works. And what a wonderful thing to bring to such enormous organizations that need that kind of help. And yes, we have all kinds of people. We have K-12 teachers, we have social workers, we have yoga instructors, we have all kinds of people from all kinds of walks of life, yeah. It's so important. Tony is exactly the one that I was thinking of because I can only imagine working in such a very large organization like that and still being able to center myself to prioritize well-being, not just for a nonprofit, right, but everyone. I just think this is such a very important topic. What you are doing, Sunny, as co-founder, Executive Director of Mindfulness First is so very important. I love hearing that there's statistics around this, there's science around that, there's so much legislation now happening because like you said, this was a collective trauma for our entire globe. So looking at that, I would be remiss though if I didn't ask you while you're in the hot seat, Sunny, completely out of left field for you, but I know you're ready for this. What is the future hold for Mindfulness First? Thank you for that question. Yeah, I'm actually so excited about the future of Mindfulness First because we've been doing this for nine years and we're not the only ones doing it, thank goodness. There's lots of us out there across America doing this work. As we've done it, done the work, we've partnered with people like the Arizona State School for the Deaf and the Blind and other organizations. And what we've discovered is there are some big gaps in the mental health education field, the mental health wellness field. And so our future is really full of filling those gaps. That's what we want to do next. And we're going to be revamping all of our services so that we can serve all people, so that all people see themselves in our services. And we will be starting with very special programming for the low vision, hard of hearing in the deaf, blind community, which is a very low incidence community. And so I'm immensely proud of our team members who have brought that to fruition. And I look forward to serving everybody with trauma-informed mindfulness and social-emotional learning in the future. Well, so very important, there's 1.8 million registered nonprofits in the US, all of them with very critical missions and Mindfulness First definitely has a critical mission as well. For those of you this might have piqued your interest, I encourage you to check out Mindfulness First, their web address is mindfulnessfirst.org. Sunny White is there, also active on LinkedIn, so many good resources that your website provides and the organization provides. So thank you. And again, for all of you watching and listening, if you were here in the very beginning, we started and opened in a way that we've never done here at the nonprofit show, but having that mindfulness moment, three deep breaths, really getting into the present and kind of shaking off, if you will, kind of like everything else that might've happened before. So Sunny, thank you for being here and for all that you do. Julia is enjoying a mindfulness day, I hope, which is wonderful. And I'm so glad to be here alongside for the journey. Hey, I also wanna say thank you to our presenting sponsors. They allow us to have these conversations, which are so very intentional and needed, the one that we had here with Sunny White. So thank you. And also to our presenting sponsors, shout out of gratitude, to Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique and the non-profit nerd. These companies are here elevating these conversations around the globe. And today's conversation, Sunny really hits home for me for many reasons, but especially as we talk about the nonprofit sector, the burnout, the scarcity, the compassion fatigue, right? There's so much going on. So again, thank you. And for those of you watching and listening, I hope that you'll share this with your board and your team. And yeah, we can all learn and dive deeper into our practice. So I think this is a perfect mantra, although we say it every day, it really rings true in home today more than probably ever, but we encourage you, we invite you, we remind you to please stay well, so you can do well. Thank you so much, Sunny. Thank you. Thank you, Jared. This is really fun.