 Hey there and welcome, we're so glad you're here. It's another episode, another day, another nonprofit show conversation. Today we have with us Patty Russart joining us. She is CEO of Toolbank USA and she's got a lot of, I wanna make jokes here, but like she has a lot of utility information she's going to share. And today is about connecting innovation along with leadership and how toolbanks work, how you could possibly have one in your community. So Patty's bringing lots of information with us in this conversation. We also want to remind all of you who we are, Julia Patrick is here, of course. She serves as the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy and I'm Jaret Ransom, nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group honored to serve alongside with the help of our amazing presenting sponsors that allow us these opportunities that we're about to have with Patty. So shout out of immense gratitude 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 as well as nonprofit tech talk. These companies are with us day in and day out. We are so extremely grateful. If you missed any of our previous episodes along this almost four year journey, we have you covered our friends. Thank you, Vanna White. I like to refer to Julia as Vanna White. Fun fact, Vanna White is from South Carolina, which is my home state, but you can go ahead and scan that QR code, download the app for the nonprofit show. You can also find us on your streaming broadcast channels as well as your podcast channels. So Patty, that's it for our housekeeping. And so I want to welcome you to the show. Again, I'm viewers and listeners around the globe. We are honored to have with us today, Patty Russart, CEO, Tulbank USA. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to tell everyone about Tulbank. Yeah. You know, I love this concept. I love how this is, you know, how this functions and it's just so brilliant. If you can talk to us a little bit, Patty, and maybe for the uninitiated, kind of explain what it is, where you are, and how you work. Cause we're going to drill into this, but give us kind of this overall view. Sure. So really, Tulbank is designed to actually be like a business to business. So we actually service nonprofits. Those are our customers. And any nonprofit who is doing charitable work, even including neighborhood associations are allowed to borrow from our tool inventory. And so basically what happens is someone says there's a project they need to do. They need to quit volunteers with the right types of tools. They go online. They order their tools from their closest tool bank. And then they are able to come and pick them up. They are already put together for them. So they don't have to go pick them out themselves. They pay a really small handling fee for this. And they can borrow them from one week up to like eight weeks at a time. It's pretty nominal. So just quick example, if they're borrowing, let's say a shovel, they can borrow it for a week and they'll pay about 45 cents. And we charge that fee. So people believe it or not, will bring the tools back to us. I love it. I think this is great. Now this is something that was started in Atlanta. That's correct. Yep. In about 1991. Okay. 19 people. So then from Atlanta, which to the uninitiated, and I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but the blank family Home Depot based in Atlanta, correct? That's correct. Home Depot is a major supporter of tool bank across the nation. Okay. So then you move forward all these decades and you're going across the country or other people are coming to you and saying, we need this in our community. When you started, did the organization know that you would become an affiliate oriented structure or did you just think you were going to be working in the Atlanta area? So I started with Tool Bank 16 years ago in Atlanta, 2008. And the reason I got the job there as the executive director is because the person who was the executive director started Tool Bank USA. And the idea was they were getting so many calls with the Atlanta Community Tool Bank about, I want a tool bank in my community that they decided it was better to formulate a national office so they could easily replicate what Tool Bank was doing in Atlanta. So in 2009, they started recruiting where are we gonna go? And then the first city besides Atlanta was Charlotte in about 2000, I think it was 2011, 2012. And then since then, we are now, we have eight, pretty soon by the end of this year, we'll have 10 community Tool Banks along with our disaster services program. That is fascinating. And I just wanna say also, I have been a user of my local communities Tool Bank and got to experience this. And I just wanna call out what the tools that we used were tables and linens and chairs and event equipment that we needed. And so I just wanted to kind of let the cat out of the bag. It's not just wrenches and shovels and buckets, right? Like can you talk to us about what's in a Tool Bank? I can, and I'll tell you an interesting story about the event equipment. But first I'll let you know, I think currently we have just over 900 different tool types in our inventory. And that, so it's not just your traditional hammer, wheelbarrow, ladder, they're all, they're that special event equipment. And I mean, there's also some more sophisticated tools that we're starting to get in our inventory as well. In fact, one of the biggest things is we are getting a mulcher, a very large mulcher for our disaster services program to go into, we'll be in Colorado and we'll also be in California area to help for after the fires. And really just all that charred wood is to grind it up and get it out of there. But when I first started at Tool Bank, I was at a meeting, I was probably not even a year in, maybe two years in. And we had decided to get more tables into our inventory, folding tables. And there was this meeting and this lady stood up and she goes, I just have to just tell you all about the Tool Bank. She goes, I used to spend two days on the front end to go to five to seven different churches and schools, get the tables for this event. And then two days after to go get these, or to deliver the tools or the tables back. Now I go to the Tool Bank, she goes, it takes me about two hours total because I have to drive over there. They're all ready to go. I pick them up and then I take them back. And it's so much easier and it's just pennies on the dollar. So that just kind of gives everybody an idea of what we do. And those kinds of things are really important to a smaller nonprofit who doesn't have that big fundraising expense line on their budget. They're really looking for how can I do this small event in my community and get the things I need to do it. So yeah, it's very exciting. I love this. I think this is so amazing now. You sold us. I mean, Jared and I are fortunate because we have them in our community and we've been a part of it. But talk to us about where you've grown and what that growth looks like. I mean, because we're in the West and you're in the South, you've got tool banks moving across this nation. What does that look like? Yep. So besides Charlotte, which I talked about earlier, then we moved into Cincinnati and Baltimore. And then along came Richmond, Phoenix. We were in Portland for a little bit, but that tool bank struggled, so it closed itself. Hopefully someday we'll go back there. We're in Houston and we're in Chicago, which is affectionately known as the Windy City Tool Bank. And the two new tool banks that'll be coming this year is the Magic City Tool Bank, which is in Birmingham. If you don't know, Birmingham refers to themselves as the Magic City. And then our new Orleans operation, which we're doing under disaster services, will also turn into a community tool bank by the end of the year. Wow. So quick difference. When I say what's a community tool bank versus a tool bank disaster services, which we call TDS, TDS is operated under the national office. The community tool banks are operated within their local communities and they have their own board of directors. They raise their own money. They do their thing under the brand and under the guidance of Tool Bank USA. So that's the difference. To give you a quick fact, I've got it up because I don't have it memorized because it just came out, but for 2023, the whole network loaned out about $13 million worth of tools. So if everybody had to buy those tools they borrowed, they would spend about $13 million. There was 200,874 volunteers reported as using tool bank tools. And there was 1,822 unique nonprofits who borrowed from the tool bank and they did over 20,000 projects within their community. And that's just in one year. So just imagine every time we open another tool bank how that is gonna multiply across the United States. Amazing, I'm just like, stand by this and talk to us about this. You've mentioned this now, this disaster service hub. What is that doing? And it seems to me like nonprofits are being engaged more and more in disaster relief in our own country. What is this process and what are you doing? So we're looking to have a total of about five disaster hubs, maybe six. A hub is in a location. So right now a good example would be our hub was in Atlanta for our Southeast territory. We're actually moving that into Florida. You can, I probably don't even have to tell you why. We have a disaster hub in the Chicago area. We won out in Sacramento. We just opened one up in the Denver, Colorado. It's actually in Aurora. We'll be working there. And then at some point we'll get one up in the North area, the Northeast, working on where that might be. Could be the Philadelphia area, but that'll be in the future. But what our hub is is a location where we have a warehouse that we store different disaster tools. We also have trailers. We have trailers anywhere from 18-foot trailer to a 53-foot trailer. Those trailers are, the 53-foot trailers are almost always moved by our sponsor, UPS, and they get them to the disaster area where it's needed. And we loan tools right out of that as though we were a warehouse, like a community tool bank. The smaller trailers sometimes in an organization just fills that trailer up with tools and takes the whole thing. And they go out to more rural areas where people really need the work that probably aren't getting the volunteers like you would get in a big metropolitan area. So that's what our hubs do. And then we have sites as well. And sites are where there was a current disaster. So for example, New Orleans, there was a couple of hurricanes there a few years ago. We've been doing work there. And so we establish a hub there, I'm sorry, a site. The hope is now all these tools have been donated to that area to take those tools and turn them into a community tool bank so they can continue serving forever in that area. And then one of our other major sites that we have is in Puerto Rico. And we've been there since 2020, which if you recall was when they had the earthquake, but then COVID hit and everybody forgot about the earthquake. So. You're so right. I'm curious about the hubs and the sites and the organizations that have a desire and a need to borrow against the tool banks, Patty, is there a certain radius we need to be aware of? Like, what are some of the qualifications? I heard you say nonprofit or a neighborhood association. Are there any other qualifications we need to be aware of? To qualify as a member, you do have to have charitable intent. So you, and you have to be organized. You can't just be an individual. We don't loan to individuals. And that is because individuals are almost always served by another community organization that's doing work. So for example, if it's a seniors house that needs repair, there's probably a program within the community that is already servicing seniors. It would be too difficult for us to verify the need of an individual. There's a lot that goes through, you know, verifying someone's needs. So we lead that up to the specialists in that area to be able to do that. However, in the times of the disaster, there are occasions where we give tools to individuals because it's needed immediately. And sometimes we get those tools back and sometimes we don't and we're okay with that. But I will tell you generally, those people are so grateful. They borrowed one hammer and they bring that hammer back. It's just incredible. Yeah. You know, to follow up on Jared's question, it sounds to me like you're part of a lot of different organizations, you know, coming forward, arming themselves and moving into a deployment. Are you working with other organizations like the Red Cross or, you know, the Tides Foundation, things like that? I mean, it sounds to me like you've got to be part of a bigger ecosystem. We are. There's a lot of different organizations like VOADS. Those are volunteers organized to assist in disasters. They're everywhere. They're state chapters. There's local chapters. There's a national chapter. You know, we work with groups like that. We talk to FEMA where I'm meetings with all of that. But there's a lot of big partners out there and we're always talking. You know, we talked about the Home Depot earlier as being one of the initial supporters of Toolbank. Right. They have, their foundation is really great. They bring their disaster partners together all the time to talk about needs, what we're doing, where we are, how can we help each other? So I will say that world of disaster partners, they are wonderful and they're always coordinating and talking to each other, which is really important. Yeah. I mean, like, it's, you know, we hear this a lot from nonprofit leaders who will be like, you know, our community has been so generous, but they bring us things and they do things that we don't really need or that we have an abundance of and we don't know how to change the conversation. And I hear this a lot and it's a fascinating thing. I mean, you have people that show up or that want to work or that can see a need, but they don't necessarily have the organizational skillset. And so I'm so fascinated that you, obviously as an organization have seen this somehow with the disaster orientation. Yeah, I really think even in the disaster world, even with our community Toolbanks, the advantage that Toolbank has, and I would say this to any community leader, anybody, we know so much what's going on in the nonprofit sector because of people barring the tools. So we might be able to actually connect to nonprofits to do better work, more work, or learn about things that they didn't even realize were being done in their community. The same goes in the disaster world. We have so many different people who are coming to get tools from us. We're able to relay that information back other nonprofits, community leaders to companies that support us and get information back to them about who's doing what. I'm curious, Patty, I heard you say 900 different tools. Was that right? That's correct. What are just, I mean, I'm sure you have a spreadsheet that documents all of this, but like just off the cuff, what are some of the most popular ones that are being requested? The top one, believe it or not, are table and chairs. We ran a report. Drills come in very close. There are a lot of gloves, although a lot of people are making those disposable because it's pretty hard to keep them clean and sorted. Then I would say, then you start getting into like shovels and things like that and it just varies down. I would say of the 900, what we looked at is probably, I think the top 100 tools are the ones that we say go out like on a monthly basis, basically. They're gonna be utilized. I mean, there's some things that are in inventory that we might like next year go. Nobody's using those. Let's make those inactive. But really we leave it up to our community tool banks to see what they're need. I mean, imagine in Phoenix, you're probably not gonna need a snow shovel, but when you're up in Windy City in Chicago, you might need a snow shovel. So it varies, right? Yeah, it varies on the inventory where the tool bank is. And we pretty much let them go with what they need. We do have a real-time online inventory system that we run through Salesforce that we just developed, just implemented a year ago. It's been very exciting. So we're able to maintain that catalog of inventory for all of our affiliates. We operate it and manage it. And so that's why we're able to really maintain such a high level of tool types in the inventory. Well, I wanna give a shout out to the gentleman that started and really organized the tool bank in Arizona, Ian Hemp. And he was the first person that explained to me like what it looked like and how it could operate and even to the type of commercial space, warehouse space that they needed and all that. And to watch that journey that he brought to the city with tool bank USA, it's been amazing. So I've witnessed it, Jared's used it. What if you are in, let's say Dallas, Texas and you've got, I gotta get one of these in our community. What is the process? How would another community go about this and say, yeah, we're ready, we need this? So what we look at is, well, first of all, if you're very interested and you want more information, you can always go to toolbank.org and look and get information who should you contact. But really there are three things that we look at. First of all, is the community going to use a tool bank? So if the tool bank comes there, are there people, member agencies, people who are gonna use it? Second thing is we need warehouse space. Is there warehouse space that's available? And then we need tools, which generally tool bank, USA or tool bank can get. And then the next thing of course is funding. Funding is always important to be able to operate. It operates on a pretty small budget. Generally, you can look at a starting tool bank at about $300,000 a year or less. As it gets bigger, of course that budget goes up, but it's just anywhere from two to five staff maybe. Wow. And so to get one started, we really look at, look, the community needs to invest in this. So our goal is we're creating a top 10 city list. And then we as the tool bank, the board of directors is gonna focus on one city per year where they're gonna invest a certain amount of money. And then that city commits to investing the rest of it and a tool bank can get started there. So we've been working with our model how to replicate because we've learned a lot of lessons about how to do that and make it sustainable in the community. And so those are the things that we look at to get a tool bank started. So that's how Birmingham is getting started. Birmingham really wanted one. They had a community group. They were able to get a large block grant through the city to get that tool bank started. It's actually gonna be funded for at least two years. So love it. And they have the space, they have the people and they had the desire. Yeah. I was gonna say, I really commend you, the organization for this. There's so many times I'm in strategic planning conversations and I always hear the board, the CEO, the staff say, we are going to replicate our programming, our services in other states and across the nation. Sometimes it happens, right? Sometimes that BHAG, that big, hairy, audacious goal is just not quite in the blueprint, right? For the organization in that conversation. So I heard you say two more. Is that this calendar year? Is that your fiscal year? That's this calendar year. So our New Orleans site has been running as a TDS site, disaster services site for about a year and a half now. We're gonna wind down that operation and we're gonna turn it into a community tool bank. So that already has space, tools, member agencies borrowing and we've hired someone who will turn into the executive director and has been getting out there, raising additional funds and making the community aware. Now we're blue sky, come borrow the tools from here. And then of course Birmingham, I just explained that's why those two will get completed this year. And then it's also the bandwidth of starting a tool bank. There's a lot to teach everybody to make sure it's successful and sustainable. So you're really right about the lofty goals because when they first started, they're like, we're gonna do 10 tool banks in two years. Sure, mm-hmm. No, not quite. Okay, I have a really like in the weeds question. Sure. When a community decides they want to do one, do they also need to have a governing board or are you governed by the national organization and entity? I'm just curious how that's done. That's actually a really great question. So the way we operate is we have what we call affiliates and we have what's called a group exemption from the IRS. Group exemption means that when we decide like Birmingham is gonna be another tool bank, we write to the IRS and we say we'd like to establish them under our group exemption. And so they don't have to go through the process of applying for nonprofit status. They get an EIN number that's associated as a subcategory of ours. And then we have to comply with all the state regulations of incorporating and things like that. But it's a much faster process than them trying to go out on their own. And then what we do is we have an affiliate agreement which that organization and that board of directors signs and agrees to do the certain things like our logo that's above me using blue and how much they can charge for the tools and things like that. I love this. Well, it's really been a thrill to get to talk to you and have you on another episode of the nonprofit show. So many organizations across this country as you shared with us earlier have used you and used this concept. And I just think it's fabulous. And you know how these things go, the more you do, the more you get. And so I would imagine that more communities start sharing. Oh my gosh, we invested in this and the structure is there for us. I've gotta believe that your growth is gonna really start to ramp up which could be kind of scary, right? Yes, yeah. Managing that can be a little scary for sure. Yeah. Well, thank you both for having me and for what you do. This is great. I love it. And to be able to learn about all these different organizations and what they're doing is fabulous. Yeah, it's, we like, go ahead. Go ahead, Julia. No, it's never a dull moment. I was gonna say, we are also a tool in many people's tool banks, you know? Like, there you go, I like it. Which is fun. And I'm sure we're, who knows? I don't know if we're a hammer, a drill, an excavator, like who knows what tool we are. I guess it depends on what their child does. But Prattie, this has been fantastic. And again, I am just so thrilled to have experienced this as the end user being in my community here. For everyone watching and listening, you just heard from Patty Russert, CEO, ToolBankUSA, check them out. It's ToolBank.org. And as you heard, there are sites and there's, you know, all kinds of opportunities, including starting one in your community if you don't have one yet. So Patty, it's been a pleasure. Thank you both. I appreciate it. It's been really a lot of fun and it's been fun to see this journey of yours, definitely on the national level, but within our own community. So thank you, Patty. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, been joined today by my great co-host, Jared R. Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group, also known as the Nonprofit Nerd. And again, we're here today because we have the tools that our sponsors bring with them. And they are amazing people that help nonprofits throughout really the globe. They include Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Nonprofit Thought Leader, Staffing Boutique, Your Part-Time Controller, 180 Management Group, Fundraising Academy at National University, JMT Consulting, Nonprofit Nerd, and Nonprofit Tech Talk. These are the folks that join us day in and day out so we can be building things. Do you see them on a roll here? Shh. Good Lord. You know, I really did, I am wearing denim today and I was like, oh man, if I had a tool belt, I would have gone on my whole construction thing. Hard hat and everything. Hard hat, yeah. I mean, I have the hard hat hair, but that's another story. Hey, everybody, we end every episode with this mantra and it means something different every day and it means a lot to me today as I think about all the people that engage with tool banks across this country. And our mantra goes like this, to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you here tomorrow. Patty, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure.