Clara Reynolds compares crisis funding to insurance: nobody wants it until they need it. She fights staff burnout with safety plans, EAP support, and a lighter culture. Funding swings force pivots and hard calls on off-mission money. Her biggest leadership shift: dropping the need to have every answer, which built more trust and better team problem-solving.

The interview centers on collective responsibility as Jessie's core donor pitch: "if not us, who?" reframes giving away from single-program preference toward trust in the Federation to steward the whole community.

A second theme is proactive infrastructure over crisis fundraising, most visible in the SCN security partnership, built before threats materialize rather than scrambled together after.

The conversation also threads personal resilience, grit from juggling grad school and work, rejection as a formative rather than defeating experience, into her leadership style.

Finally, there's a strong thread on context sensitivity: her assumption that skills would transfer cleanly from New Orleans to Columbia didn't hold, reinforcing that donor culture and regional dynamics have to be relearned locally rather than assumed.

A conversation with Rich Armenia, Executive Director of Feeding Charlotte.

Nearly 40% of the U.S. food supply ends up in a landfill. In Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, roughly 120,000 people are food insecure. Rich Armenia calls that "the dumbest problem we could possibly have," and he built an organization around fixing it.

I sat down with Rich on the Funding the Future Now podcast to talk about food rescue, volunteer retention, and why he refuses to tell donors he is ending hunger.