 we are so glad you're here with us today for the nonprofit show. We have an interesting conversation and I am so excited for this. So keeping nonprofit staff and talent in particular the subject of parental leave coverage. And to talk to us about this today we have Lacey Kopinski joining us from Ontario. Thrilled to have you here as founder and CEO of Balance Good. And in just a moment I'll ask you to share a little bit more about yourself as well as your company. We also want to remind you if we haven't met you yet Julia Patrick is here. Julia Patrick is the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy and I'm Jarrett Ransom your nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group. We are so extremely honored, grateful to have the ongoing support from these amazing partners. So thank you to our friends over at Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, Nonprofit Thought Leader, Fundraising Academy at National University, 180 Management Group, Your Part-Time Controller, Staffing Boutique, JMT Consulting, Nonprofit Nerd and Nonprofit Tech Talk. Do us a favor do yourself a favor and these companies a favor check them out. They are here for you. I like to say their mission is your mission because they want to help you do more good in this world. And again if you have missed any of our previous episodes here's where you can find them. So we've got you covered. Go ahead and pull out your phone, scan that QR code right there. You can download the app. You can also still find us on streaming broadcast as well as podcast platforms. So wherever you like to binge watch or binge listen to your entertainment go ahead and queue us up there as well. So Lacey we are thrilled to have you with us today again for all of our viewers and listeners around the world. Lacey Kepinsky has joined us. Founder and CEO of Balance Good. Welcome to you Lacey. Thanks so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. Yeah well tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Balance Good. Who are you? Where are you? What is the good thing you put into this world? Yes thank you I love that. So as you said my name is Lacey Kepinsky. I'm the founder of Balance Good which is a very niche consulting agency focused on the nonprofit sector. We actually provide parental leave coverage and support for the nonprofit sector. We really want to change how the nonprofit sector supports working parents starting from when the journey begins as a working parent and when you welcome your child. And we'll get into that for sure in our conversation but just a little bit more about me personally. So I'm calling from Northern Ontario where we are getting loads and loads of snow. So I said fingers crossed my internet connection maintains because it's it's like a blizzard out there which is super fun but it also means I have my three kids seven five and three at home with me today. They are rowdy and they are playing quietly upstairs for now so hopefully that maintains as well. I have about 15 years of fundraising experience from major gifts to annual fund to supporting events to kind of that jack of all trades. When I had my after my second son and you know journey with postpartum depression and anxiety I knew I wasn't going to be able to come back to the traditional workforce in the traditional way and I knew I didn't want to because I wanted to continue to give to my sector but I also wanted to show my children how you can give to the sector and how you can be involved. So I launched Balance Good. What started out is kind of like generalist consulting turned into this very niche program where we're specifically supporting parental leave coverage in the workplace. So yeah I'm really excited to be here and talk to you more about that today. I love this and you know Jarrett Ransom the nonprofit nerd herself mentioned this and I know push up your glasses. Man you have me trained when I see you do that. But you know Jarrett mentioned Lacey when we were talking in the green room chatter that you know we've had a really strong relationship that we've built with the Dave Thomas Foundation that supports adoption and foster care and they have educated so much and talked about this and it's really been fun to see the movement of this discussion and how we need to be thinking about this for a multitude of reasons. Not just that it's the right and good thing to do but that it does impact you know the ecosystem of your organization. So let's dig in and talk about employee staff burnout and turnover. This is one of the biggest issues of our time and how does parental leave factor into this? Yeah I think that's a great question. I think as fundraisers and nonprofit professionals we all hear the stats about turnover and the impact it has on our sector. Trying to keep someone in a role for over two years almost seems impossible these days which has its own impacts on our sector and you know I won't get into that. But when we talk about working parents and working moms specifically we can I've done the math and it's loose because I'm not a mathematician but there's about six and a half million women in the American nonprofit sector and in Canada where I'm from it's about 1.5 million women in the nonprofit sector that are working moms. So this is incredibly impactful when we actually look at the landscape of the people who are working at our organizations the maturity of them are working moms or you know on top of that then there's working fathers. So it's really important anecdotally like how many times have you heard that people use their parental leave time to look for new jobs to you know they don't return to their current job because they know it's not going to be a supportive environment and then I think about the impact that has on our donors and the actual mission work that we're doing right when we are in a field where relationships are key and you're continually turning over that that's really challenging right and we know that parental leave and unsupported parental leave is a factor in this turnover problem. You know Lacey all of I'm just like itching to to dive deep into all of this just some conversations I've had with some colleagues you know jokingly not jokingly where they're like oh I planned my due date based off of our fundraising calendar right like I cannot be out of the office in a year right yeah all of this kind of yeah it just stacks on top of the conversation yeah and then I think okay well one there's so much wrong with that right because families should be first and here's the thing like in our sector we are so passionate about the work that we do which is fantastic right we are changing the world we are solving some of the biggest problems in the world um but we also like to martyr ourselves to the cause right you know like I'll work 12 hours because who else if I don't do it who will or I will plan my my first born around our annual fund campaign because nobody else will be there if I'm not there and those messages that we put out there are not good and they're not good for setting up the next generation and how we're going to work and balance all of this right so you know when I think about the work that Balance Good is doing and the work that we need to do in the sector I often think about like how do we take parental leave from this like feared kind of employment gap to like a celebrated life milestone what if we actually had thoughtful plans prior to parental leaves that would say hey it's no big deal Lacey just announced she's expecting but we already have a plan so it doesn't matter if it's in the middle of our campaign but for some reason we haven't thought of that yet we haven't pushed that forward yeah no we haven't you know we think think of the impacts of burnout impacts of turnover I mean one of the stats we share is especially for that development staff really looking at 18 months might be the max tenure of you know someone staying in that position so that's a constant turnover you know looking at this I have to ask the question is this just for newborns are we thinking the only time we can talk about parental leave is when we are expecting no 100 so the actual parental leave yes and so coming from Canada like we are very fortunate we have 12 to 18 months of paid leave off after having a child which is incredible and amazing but also like so important and valuable and needed because that's the time your body physically recovers if you do you know give birth that's the time you bond with your child and then for adoption and stuff that's also an extremely critical time to bond with your child so that time is really important but then coming back to work like your child still needs you they don't disappear after those 12 to 18 months or for you know my my friends in the States they don't disappear after six weeks three months six months whatever your length of parental leave is so our balance good we think that it's the first step it's like if we can get organizations to understand that we need to do this and we need to embrace a working parent and we do this with that first step then we can continue walking thinking about parents in all aspects so because parental leaves don't just impact the person that's going on leave they also impact the employer that employer might be a parent of three teenagers and they're dealing with all sorts of other things so if we can take that worry off of their plate too and say hey we've got you we've got this workload you focus on your workload and your family life in a sense like we're supporting all working parents then so lacy let's dig into that a little bit more and and share with us what the challenges are I mean the first thing that I think of is you know salary and benefits I mean that's a huge financial piece of the pie talk to us a little bit more about this and how how does that actually work yeah I think like there's so many challenges with supporting working parents right and making sure that you're doing this in a thoughtful way but I think if we come at it from a human first lens where we think about whether you're a parent or not you should have access to a living wage you should have access to extended health benefits and again that looks very different depending on where you live but these are things that you just need to have access to but then when you're supporting a working parent or you have a working parent on your team making sure that you have these things are even more important because they have dependence right so thinking about those things but I think beyond that it's about thinking about just the tangible things about how you work in your organization how you can create a workplace with autonomy a supportive workplace a workplace that understands that you're not just development officer x that you really are a whole person and that whole person that you bring to the organization is actually what's going to allow you to excel in in the world like how many times I've spoken to donors about their family life because that's what motivates them to be philanthropic like it makes connections right if we can bring our whole selves to work as well yeah we've come such a long way and Julia I'm gonna out you a little bit because you outed yourself with with Lacey and I but you know even when we look at this 20 years ago the landscape of how we show up as a person in our profession how we talk about our families and and dare I say I shouldn't say dare but might I also add the family looks very different these days right like my son we call we call it team Tanner but there's four very involved parents you know and so that's when we think of parental leave and we think of the family unit and we think about how far this conversation has come over the decades and there's still so much to go right 100% and Julia like I'd welcome your your comments or thought thoughts on this too but for me it's like these I this idea of a supported parental leave like a not just like a oh Lacey's going on leave let's just ignore that fact and continue as usual like if we actually are supportive about it this is like the next evolution of how we engage working parents and especially working women in our sector right we know we're a sector that's dominated by women so this is kind of to me like the next step it's interesting because I feel like their organizations that I see who are like wow okay Lacey you're going on leave you better get your ducks in a row and figure it out versus other organizations that like work as a team and say okay what is that we're going to do and how how is it that we're going to structure and that to me I think it's a fascinating look into how an entire organization is being run right because it's almost like you're punishing the woman for for doing this or the father and I and I don't want to miss that that piece of it too because if you could before we go on talk to us about are these leaves the same for the the mother versus the father what if it's the same gender you know family like how do we look at this so that we're not only thoughtful but we also have some you know equality here and in the in the landscape 100 percent and so that's why we really focus on this idea of parental leaves not just maternity leaves like there are some logistical differences right like if you are the birthing parent you in Canada anyways you have access to additional leave because there's like biological recovery that needs to happen right but if you are you know a parent or in a same-sex relationship you still have access to parental leave and again this is different in Canada and the states and I know in the states it's state to state there's so many nuances to this but the bottom line is I think it comes down to this looking at who the parents are and what they need in their journey because everybody is different but yes like we actually just wrapped up covering a leave for parental leave a man who took three months off when his first born child was born and it was incredible to be able to support him and this is in in Texas actually right so just to be able to support a working dad in Texas covering his leave it was an incredible experience and so it's yeah it's not just women right it's everyone in our sector that needs this support yeah you know all of this is just so fascinating and let's talk about the impacts you know a little further the parental leave on the team because yeah I interviewed when I was pregnant and it was a virtual interview right so no clue that I was pregnant and and then when I got to the final interview and I was very pregnant Lacey I was like just want to tell you in advance before I get there so there's a lot of conversation that goes into this right so that impacts on parental leave I can only imagine so many of us are afraid to say yeah we are pregnant or expecting or you know our family plan includes adoption foster in the near future how do we even go about talking about this with our employer and our team it's so tricky right because it really depends on the culture that you're like in the organization you're in I know when I first started around family planning we had to do a lot of fertility treatments so I was going to fertility treatments prior to work at like six in the morning and then people are commenting oh you look so tired I can't say anything right I'm just like yeah not a good night's sleep but really it's because I've been up so early and doing all of these things right and so this is like not a unique journey so many people have that journey or other more challenging ones so I think there's this piece where if you have a supportive culture being able to to talk about these things right and again if there's a plan in place for parental leave it shouldn't be this taboo topic it's just a reality of life right but I also think and I do want to circle back on like the impacts to the team because there can be a lot of resentment that builds in teams yeah like I've heard parents say like oh I was asked how my vacation was when I returned back from parental leave right or you know or you know on the other hand I've seen team members when somebody goes on leave now they're doing two full-time roles right and they might be a working parent at home or not right and just because you choose to not be a parent doesn't mean you choose to have double the workload that's also not fair right so I think again having this supportive structure to coverage changes how we look at parental leaves in our organizations yeah but how do we get there I mean it seems to me like it's almost a hard thing for an organization to figure out unless they've gone through it or they're in the middle of it right I mean because we haven't been talking about it and we haven't been really planning for it what would you advise for an organization that's never looked into this but yet they feel like they need to do it are they want to do it maybe that's the better way to phrase it yeah I think the first thing is to look into it right to think about okay what are my you know like-minded organizations doing in this are people you know are there thoughtful ways people are supporting parental leaves and you know at balance good we're really trying to build out this kind of understanding of here's what parental leave can look like in a different you know in a variety of different ways making sure you have a parental leave policy in place and that I know that's really hard because when we talk about small non-profits like I've worked with some they don't even have a donor recognition policy in place or you know so that how are they going to prioritize a parental leave policy but you have to prioritize the people that work in your organization because they're the people that are serving your mission so if you prioritize those people then the work happens and the mission you know you drive forward the mission so I think it's those kind of pieces and having these discussions and people being willing to speak up and say this was my negative experience or this was my positive experience this is how we can learn from it but that's also a place of privilege like I can speak up because I'm a consultant and have my own agency where when you are at the whim of an employer it's very different and it looks very different and I understand that yeah that's really good call out I appreciate you mentioning that Lacy overall we're really talking about supporting working parents and you know encompassing that parental leave which I gotta say when we talk about the nonprofit sector there's just so many things where people are like oh I can't work for nonprofits because I don't make enough money so we're trying to sweeten the pot or the deal with like these ancillary benefits the flexibility of schedule so what else could we consider when it comes to supporting the working parents in the sector yeah so this is really interesting because I've actually just posted a couple job positions for balance good thinking about what would be the ideal role for a parent right so what are the things that are needed for a parent to excel and so some of the things that I included was complete autonomy and schedule a reduced reduced working hours so at standard 32 hour a week four weeks paid vacation plus extra time off for school shutdowns because a parent you shouldn't just have to use up all your vacation because your kids aren't in school like that's not fun right vacations are also for recharging so I think building out some of those things and you're right Jarrett that like maybe the nonprofit sector doesn't pay like as comparative obviously to the for profit sector but there are things we can do that make this more welcoming so for me autonomy is key allowing teams to have autonomy in their schedule and I always say that you have to weigh this autonomy against performance metrics like you can't just give like freedom and autonomy and not manage those expectations right the performance still needs to happen you need to still be meeting your goals but some organizations don't even have performance metrics in place they're not tracking them they're not monitoring it so if you set up these systems and then you report back on them and lately then you should be able to trust your team with autonomy right because they're doing the work that they're meant to do yeah I have to ask this curveball question Lacey and I hope you're okay with it but I'm hearing more and more resentment from the working professionals that either don't have children or have chosen not to have children and really hearing the like so and so doesn't have to do all the extra hours because they have the excuse of picking up their kid or you know having their kid at home it's a holiday how are you seeing as you implement these parental leave policies how do we consider everyone in this decision it's a good question yeah 100% and I think when people meet me they think like oh she's she only talks for working parents but no for me it is about like the working person because we all have lives outside of of work right so whether it is your children or it is volunteerism that you're passionate about your animals travel whatever it is you're entitled to have that and you're entitled to have that fully so I think again this is where this autonomy piece comes into play it's not about I need to leave early because I need to pick up my child it's I've gotten my work done I've met my goals and you know I'm meeting my goals and getting done what needs to get done and I will be leaving early to pick up my child but my co-worker who doesn't have children should also be able to leave at three if they've completed their work because they want to go for a run or they want to do whatever they want to do it really doesn't matter but what matters is that we have happier more engaged healthier people in the work environment doing the hard work that we do in our sector yeah I feel like we're scratching the surface on this don't you have yeah because I think it's a whole it's a whole discussion about how we perceive work right and it's like if you think back to you know the the factory line to the office line right this concept of what is it you're doing and if you're sitting at your desk you're working and we all know that that's not true just because you're sitting there looking busy doesn't mean you're being productive and yet we haven't really come to that point where we can say yeah you know you don't have to be looking busy in order to be productive as we all understand it but I think Lacey you said something very interesting and that is is that this this takes the onus of understanding performance and metrics back onto the plate of of the organization and I don't think we do that enough no not at all right like yeah just really like how many people even in position descriptions are they actually reflective of the work that we're doing do they have other duties as assigned because then how do you track it then that right so having a very specific goals for the rules you have in your organization is critical in supporting all of your team members including working parents I think you set people up for failure if you don't have these clear expectations right I think it's to me this is like such a core piece of this discussion and we are missing this so often I mean Jared and I see this all the time organizations that are like you know they just pick these random you know growth metrics that they want to you know oh we want to improve by 25% it's like well wait a minute what does that mean yeah and this I think goes into the psychology and the psychosis if you will of how we look at the performance and the structure of our nonprofits it has to be meaningful and it has to be well thought out and we are not putting that that energy up front yeah and I think sometimes when it's sorry Jared I think sometimes when I talk like I do sound like just very optimistic and we can just do this right and I don't mean to be frivolous about it it's a lot of work right it's a lot of work to do all of these things but if we don't start talking about these things and advocating for change it's not going to happen and we have a sector that's ready for change right so I think we just we need to start pushing some of these things through and for me my focus is parental leave but that means so much more I love it I do too one final question as we pull up your contact information how often should we review our parental leave policies good question yeah I like that um I think it could be part of like your whether it's annual or bi-annual like policy review procedure that you should have as an organization are all of our policies reflective of the work that we're doing sure is that are they still serving us and stuff like that so I would say but I mean in reality most organizations have policies they sit there they collect us they're not actually you know so this is sort of the bigger question of how are you you know looking at all of your policies and really being thoughtful about when somebody does come back from parental leave asking them did the policy serve you right did it meet its goals did it help and then as the you know leader did the policy serve our organization and our mission and our team members wow this has really been fascinating I really enjoyed this and um it's part of the discussion of of how we evolve as a sector and and this is just the beginning um Lacey Kemsky Kepensky excuse me Kepensky no it's not okay you've been so brilliant I don't want to speak your name founder and CEO balanced good balanced good.com check them out really a beautiful website by the way really thoughtful and thought provoking and again Jared and I have really started on this conversation because of the Dave Thomas Foundation in so many ways and so this is a conversation that we need to keep going and moving forward check out balanced good.com I mean you'll get some great information and to start with your organization and looking at some of these things again I'm Julia Patrick CEO of the American nonprofit academy been joined today by the nonprofit nerd herself Jared R. Ransom together we have produced more than nine hundred and fifty shows and those shows have been supported by amazing partners and they include Blumerang American nonprofit academy nonprofit thought leader staffing boutique your part time controller 180 management group fundraising academy at national university jmt consulting of course the nonprofit nerd herself and nonprofit tech talk oh yeah you got me pushing up my glasses Jared it just works that way yeah it just works that way so grateful to have all of their support so grateful Lacey thank you even during a blizzard in Canada in Ontario that you're joining us with your own children at home today so thank you for you know bringing your expertise to the conversation and to all of you that have joined us today we are so glad that you're here and as we wrap up every episode we end with this statement and you know what especially with today's conversation with Lacey I think it's going to sound different I think so and the statement is to stay well so you can do well thanks everyone we'll see back here tomorrow