Nonprofits
Changing attitudes
Barbara Danforth had to find the profits to make her nonprofit a success.
By Todd Shryock
Smart Business Akron/Canton | September 2006
When Barbara Danforth took over as executive director of YWCA Greater Cleveland, she didn’t fully realize just how troubled the organization was.
“There were many sleepless nights the first couple years, and not coming from a nonprofit background, I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” Danforth says.
An early examination of the organization revealed buildings that were in disrepair, programs that were not at capacity and of questionable quality, and a growing deficit. She was also the sixth executive director in 10 years.
“The more I found out, the more panic-stricken I was,” she says. “But I had the belief that if I worked hard to do the right thing, everything would work out.”
She immediately assessed the situation and saw that the East Cleveland facility, while losing money, was providing valuable programs the community needed. Rather than take the easy way out and shut the facility down, Danforth pushed for $500,000 in renovations and sought out support from local foundations to pay for it.
“They said, ‘We appreciate your enthusiasm, energy and vision, but your organization is in such dire straights, we don’t think you’ll survive,’” Danforth says.
Undaunted, she went forward with the renovations as a commercial project. When it was done she went back to the foundations, which, impressed with the commitment they saw, paid for all but $50,000 of the renovations.
Another problem was the culture of the organization.
“We operated like a social service agency,” Danforth says. “We had a wonderful, dedicated staff whose sole objective was to do good. But if you don’t have revenue, the ability to do good diminishes.
“My predecessors had always developed a budget and handed it out. The staff looked at it and put it on a shelf.”
Danforth started transitioning the culture to one that paid close attention to costs by doing a bottom-up budgeting process.
“Part of their performance evaluation was holding them accountable to that,” she says. “Some people didn’t like that. They said, ‘All we want to do is good.’ We (had) some staff turnover because of that. As the new staff members came on, they understood the business purpose.
“(The cultural change) was very hard. They came kicking and screaming.”
Danforth solved some of the marketing and visibility issues of the organization by moving the headquarters to a stand-alone building on 40th Street and Prospect Avenue, which helped with soliciting donations from corporations and working with companies to offer services.
She and the board of the organization also started working with a turnaround consultant who helped them make some difficult decisions.
The consultant did a study and recommended the health and fitness programs be dropped, and the facility in Middleburg Heights be closed.
“It was one of the first stand-alone YWCA locations and was part of our heritage, but we needed to get rid of it,” Danforth says.
The consultant also worked with the organization to develop revenue streams to make the YWCA a more stable organization.
“We looked at the issue of gender diversity in top corporate leadership in Northeast Ohio,” Danforth says.
The statistics were telling: Not one public company in the region was run by a woman; of the 48 largest private companies, not one was run by a woman, and of the 115 highest-paid CEOs in the region, none of them were women.
“The stats said diversity was a problem, and no one else was dealing with it,” Danforth says. “We developed programs that started with providing women with the awareness and skills and strategies to climb the ladders more efficiently and effectively. It’s a fee-for-service program.”
The YWCA has continued to build on that niche idea and now runs monthly workshops and women’s leadership boot camps and works directly with corporations to provide women’s leadership programs.
“One of the places I almost got stuck and died was in the early part of the turnaround because I didn’t have a strategic plan,” Danforth says. “For about a year to 18 months, we were just in survival mode and it almost destroyed the organization. I was so singularly focused on the day-to-day crisis, I couldn’t see a way out. We lost a lot of energy and momentum during that period because we didn’t have a way out.
“The turnaround has been a wonderful journey that has taken us from rock bottom to coming back stronger than ever before.”
HOW TO REACH: YWCA Greater Cleveland, (216) 881-6878 or www.ywca.org
