Collaboration Over Competition in Nonprofits - Resilience & Relationships (R&R) - Stephanie Olson and Rebecca Saunders

In this conversation, Stephanie Olson and Rebecca Saunders discuss the competitive nature of the nonprofit sector, particularly in the realm of human trafficking prevention. They explore the challenges of collaboration versus competition, the importance of trauma-informed care, and the need for nonprofits to specialize in their areas of expertise. The discussion highlights the emotional toll of competition and emphasizes the importance of collaboration in creating a greater impact in the community.

takeaways

• Nonprofits often face unexpected competition rather than collaboration.
• The nonprofit sector can be as cutthroat as the corporate world.
• Collaboration is essential for effective service delivery.
• Trauma-informed care is crucial in nonprofit work.
• Not all organizations are equally effective or trained.
• The hero mindset can hinder effective service delivery.
• Organizations should focus on their strengths and collaborate with others.
• Learning from each other is vital for growth in the nonprofit sector.
• Specialization allows nonprofits to excel in their missions.
• The emotional toll of competition can detract from the mission.

Sound Bites

• "It's about who gets the glory."
• "Not all organizations are equal."
• "We need to stop being competitive."

Chapters

00:00
The Competitive Landscape of Nonprofits

02:59
Collaboration vs. Competition in Nonprofit Work

06:13
The Importance of Trauma-Informed Care

09:06
Assessing Nonprofit Effectiveness

11:52
The Need for Specialization in Nonprofit Work

14:50
Learning and Growing Together

18:38
The Role of Collaboration in Addressing Human Trafficking

21:40
Closing Thoughts on Nonprofit Dynamics

30:39
R&R Outro.mp4

Transcript

Stephanie Olson (00:08.805)
Hello and welcome to Resilience and Relationships R &R. I'm Stephanie Olson and I'm here with... Yay! All right. So let's get to it. We are going to talk today about something that I think you only really find out about once you're in a nonprofit, but we're going to talk about the competitive and dog-eat-dog world.

Rebecca Saunders (00:17.622)
Rebecca Saunders.

Stephanie Olson (00:38.405)
of nonprofits. It really is. And I think so many times people think nonprofits like we're sitting around holding hands, singing kumbaya, which would be, doesn't it sound great? It sounds lovely. But that is not how it is. Yeah. And in fact, Rebecca, you recently

Rebecca Saunders (00:40.514)
And it really is.

Stephanie Olson (01:03.801)
joined our nonprofit recently within the last year and a half, I guess. Yeah, yeah, last year. So tell me your thoughts. Like, what did you notice and what surprised you?

Rebecca Saunders (01:05.39)
Uh huh. Not in the last two either.

Rebecca Saunders (01:17.998)
Well, I definitely came from this perspective that, you know, I was new to, well, I say I was new to nonprofit work in a way. I was working in a church before, so a different type of nonprofit, but that's a little different. But I was new to human trafficking prevention and all of those things too. And I just kind of figured that there were a lot of organizations and they all had the same goals and the same way they wanted to get there and that we would just call each other and work together. And it was sunshine and rainbows. And it's not that way.

Stephanie Olson (01:26.445)
Right. Right.

Rebecca Saunders (01:47.372)
It's not that way.

Stephanie Olson (01:48.309)
It's not that way. And so what was it that you saw that maybe surprised you?

Rebecca Saunders (01:56.686)
Yeah, I think that there is sometimes some competitiveness. And I don't know if that has to do with funding or maybe just wanting to pursue different avenues of how to do this work. But there's competitiveness sometimes. There could be two organizations who are both, like in our case, human trafficking prevention focused and yet may not want to work with you.

Stephanie Olson (02:24.931)
Yeah. Yeah, it's been an interesting journey because when we started, I had not been in this type of nonprofit world. And I had also been in previous to that, previous to my kiddos had been in the business world. And that is competitive, of course, but it's expected. I think you expect that to be a competitive area and field.

So when I started the nonprofit work, and first of all, I will say that when I started this work, I didn't want to do this. And that sounds really bad, but I came from work with women and things like that. And so when my co-founder said, hey, let's start and let's work with sex trafficked victims, that was a quote.

I wouldn't say it like that today, but that was an actual quote. And I thought, yeah, we can do that. We can just be a part of other nonprofits and do what they're doing. when we really found out what was going on, we started our own curriculum and we thought this is, I don't think I thought it was going to be easy by any means, but I thought that other nonprofits,

doing this work would want to work with us because we're doing this piece, they're doing this piece. And we were one of the very few organizations that were doing prevention work. And we are still one of the only organizations in the nation that is only doing prevention work in this area, in human trafficking prevention. But people were like, no.

you get, I kind of think about it like survivor and I want to vote you off the island. It was insanity and people want, it was like people wanted to do this work and they wanted the glory and if you were getting a piece of the pie at all, yes, yeah.

Rebecca Saunders (04:41.464)
There's no room for that.

Stephanie Olson (04:46.073)
And it wasn't even really about funding, which is the other thing that I thought was so interesting. Because, yeah, nonprofits are competing for funding in a sense, but the people who prevent or who prevent, the people who fund restoration and human trafficking aren't necessarily the same people who have a heart for prevention and human trafficking. And exactly, exactly. And different things you're kind of striving for.

Rebecca Saunders (05:08.75)
sections really.

Stephanie Olson (05:16.559)
But it's about who gets the glory, I think.

Rebecca Saunders (05:22.21)
which is so unfortunate because whenever that is our focus, it just ends up wasting, I think it wastes our potential to be effective. Because really, I mean, as you said, there are different organizations doing different things. We don't do direct services to survivors. So we need those organizations who do and we need to have good relationships with them.

Stephanie Olson (05:33.967)
Yes.

Stephanie Olson (05:40.206)
Right.

Rebecca Saunders (05:46.54)
And just like someone who may not have any resources invested into prevention, they would need us to come together. And when we do come together, I mean, we have with some, some organization, it's a beautiful thing. And we're able to be so much more effective. And it's just unfortunate to see that not happening everywhere.

Stephanie Olson (05:52.515)
Right.

Stephanie Olson (06:07.393)
It is. It is. And frankly, as an organization that does prevention education in human trafficking, I would like to put myself out of a job. I would love it if human trafficking wasn't a thing and we could do so much work in the area of prevention and other people could do so much work in the area of restoration and other people could do so much work in the area of recovery that we could say to our

Rebecca Saunders (06:35.884)
No problem.

Stephanie Olson (06:36.887)
Yes, we used to have this problem, we don't anymore, and now I don't have a job because of it. That would be, it would be great. But it is, it is weirdly competitive and people are fighting for not even just funding, but the ability to say, that's my curriculum, or that's my restoration house, or

Rebecca Saunders (06:44.622)
would be great.

Stephanie Olson (07:06.093)
It's yeah.

Rebecca Saunders (07:07.726)
Well, and do you think that some of that is that hero mindset of like, you know, I'm the one doing the saving.

Stephanie Olson (07:12.197)
Mmm

Stephanie Olson (07:16.037)
That's a really good point. Yeah, talk about that a little bit.

Rebecca Saunders (07:20.62)
I know that I've seen that in some areas where an individual might get into human trafficking or counter trafficking movements or anything to save people. I want to rescue them. I want to save them. And there's a lot of problems with that line of thinking that make it not very effective. But I'm wondering if that's part of the problem here is that when we're so focused on being the savior,

Stephanie Olson (07:31.87)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Stephanie Olson (07:39.258)
Yeah.

Stephanie Olson (07:47.525)
Mmm.

Rebecca Saunders (07:47.8)
We're not actually thinking about the people that we're serving. And a lot of time, it's doing them a disservice because we're not able to meet those needs in the timeliest way, in the best way possible, because we're too focused on our own selves and what that makes us.

Stephanie Olson (08:01.635)
Yeah, that's such a good point. So we actually had the pleasure of talking to an organization yesterday that does amazing work in this area, in the prevention and education area, the recovery and I believe direct services. But we do some of the same stuff, not in the same area. We do different stuff.

The last thing I would want to do is stop an organization from doing the work in communities if they're good at what they're doing. And if they're doing it in a trauma-informed way, and if they're actually saving lives, why would you want to stop that?

Rebecca Saunders (08:53.45)
Exactly. Yeah. And I want to, I'd like it if you would expand a little bit more on something you just said, which is if they're doing good work, if they're trauma-informed, because we love to collaborate with other organizations that WeFree Project does, but we won't collaborate with just anyone. And I think that's important to address too. Why?

Stephanie Olson (09:00.286)
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Olson (09:10.233)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point. So we do, we love to collaborate with organizations that are not only doing this work, whoops, did I freeze? I think I, okay. Okay, we love to collaborate with people who are not only doing this work, but also the other areas and not only just in human trafficking prevention.

Rebecca Saunders (09:25.314)
You're here. It was gone for a second, but you're here.

Stephanie Olson (09:39.001)
But we work with families and so we want to hear who's doing really good work in the area of the unhoused and the homeless population. Who's doing really good work in the area of providing food and food banks and things like that and other organizations that are doing that work because then we're able to be a warm handoff and a referral.

to anybody we might be working with or anybody who needs resources, we can say, yes, I know this organization and they're doing good work. yeah, unfortunately, not all organizations are equal. And so you've got organizations that probably have a really good heart.

They want to do this work and they desire to make a difference, whether it's in counter trafficking or any other nonprofit, but they're not trained to do it in an appropriate way. And we've talked about trauma on this podcast before and how when you are talking to somebody or when you're working with somebody, you have to do it in a trauma-informed

way so that you don't cause more harm, that we're not actually causing harm. And I think that is a big key to everything that people are doing. Unfortunately, there are a lot of organizations, I shouldn't say a lot, but we've certainly run into some organizations that have a good heart, but

because they're not trained, they do it in a way that actually can create harm. And those are the organizations that we really pull away from, or we really encourage them, go get more training, that we would love to work with you. Yes, or we can provide that, exactly. So that's really what we mean. We do vet organizations before we partner with them and before we work with them.

Rebecca Saunders (11:46.178)
can provide that. Yeah.

Stephanie Olson (12:00.389)
And I would say the majority of organizations are doing good work, but there are certainly some that are just not ready to provide services.

Rebecca Saunders (12:13.816)
So from our end doing this work, we kind of have an internal view, right? We might be talking about programs or having these calls to talk about organizational things. How would an individual be able to assess? I think about, and this is a trickier question, but I think about maybe someone who is listening to this podcast, who has gone through maybe one of our online courses, and they are trying to learn and they see something, and they need to turn to someone for help.

How can they determine if someone local to them would be trauma-informed and able to help?

Stephanie Olson (12:48.153)
That's a great question. Wow. So, I mean, I would assume there are a few ways and one way would be, they, well, okay. Let me say it like this.

When people are trauma-informed and they're providing services, regardless of what those services are, that you, as someone receiving services, gets a choice. One of the things I tell people when we're doing training,

that is really hard to do when you have a heart to help and when you desire to see change in a positive way in a person's life. One of the things that is really hard to do is give someone the opportunity to choose to not receive your help. And that's really important. When people are serving, a lot of times you will hear things like,

you need to do this or you need to do that. But really what you should be hearing is what can I do to serve you? What are some of the things that you think you need to further what it is you're doing? And I would say that's a good start. Are they telling you what to do? Are they making you go against

your value system? Are they making you go against your religious beliefs or whatever the case may be? And it's not to say that somebody who is serving isn't going to challenge you, but are you feeling coerced or pressured to do something that's not? It's kind of the same thing we talk about with trustworthy person.

Stephanie Olson (14:58.669)
Are they asking you to do something that you just, that goes against my moral compass or that doesn't feel right for me right now because whatever. I don't know. What are your thoughts?

Rebecca Saunders (15:10.048)
No, I think that's a really, really good measure, measurable there to kind of consider. And I think that sometimes we see that, well, they mean well, and they might mean well. I mean, I think most people in this work mean well. But yes, if you are trauma-informed, if you've gone through that training, then there's definitely a difference in the way that you speak.

Stephanie Olson (15:33.209)
Yeah. one of the things, okay, so when we talk about nonprofit, and I actually did a podcast on, you want to start a nonprofit? Don't. And I say, right, it's not. I think a lot of people want to start a nonprofit because they're passionate about a topic, which totally makes sense. I've said it before.

Rebecca Saunders (15:49.07)
Not a deal.

Stephanie Olson (16:01.925)
I'm a survivor of S violence and domestic violence. have said that before. Domestic violence is something that I know intimately about my story, right? I know I have lived experience and I'm an expert in my story. That does not mean I should start a domestic violence shelter. I know nothing about running a shelter.

I have no desire to run a shelter and I know people who do it and do it well and I can't do that. And I think that's one of the things I don't see or I think when you're dealing with somebody who is really not collaborative is they want to be everything to everyone in whether it be human trafficking or whether it be in

You know,

Rebecca Saunders (17:00.206)
It's just not possible.

You know, it makes me think of one of our collaborative partners that got certified on our curriculum, I think earlier this year. But there were a group and...

Stephanie Olson (17:17.253)
It's okay, kids are healthy. That means that we've got healthy children in the background and I love it. It's all good. You know what? I have to tell you something actually, and this is hilarious, but I was doing a podcast and all of a sudden I saw a green snake fly over my head and I was like, what the heck was that?

Rebecca Saunders (17:19.245)
Okay.

Rebecca Saunders (17:27.502)
Thank you.

Stephanie Olson (17:46.243)
And I totally kept it in because it was hilarious. So don't even, yeah, I think we're good. As long as people know we're human and we have kids, mine are adults, I'm, and I, that doesn't mean they won't start yelling and screaming. So go ahead, please.

Rebecca Saunders (17:53.474)
you feel better.

Rebecca Saunders (18:05.23)
and are very much not adults. Yes, so one of the partners that we had trained on our curriculum. So in this group, I want to say it was three out of four were survivors of trafficking, if I remember right. And one of them had said something to me that was just so, it was so cool to hang out with them and hear their perspectives. But she said, you know, I didn't know most of what you told me today.

Stephanie Olson (18:19.309)
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Olson (18:26.361)
Yeah.

Stephanie Olson (18:31.395)
Mm.

Rebecca Saunders (18:31.508)
I only knew my situation. And for her, it was a familial trafficking situation when she was a young child. And so she's like, you know, I didn't know about that grooming process for other people. I didn't know about online interactions. I didn't know about that stuff. I only knew what happened to me. And I think that takes a great deal of self-awareness because she's absolutely right. Yes.

Stephanie Olson (18:50.743)
and humility, actually a lot of humility too.

Rebecca Saunders (18:56.334)
I found that really cool because she is someone who has lived this. She is someone who's talked to other survivors, other survivors that she even worked with, and she could still learn. And I think that's really all of us. I mean, no matter what your experience has been, no matter how long you've been doing this work or personally involved, you can always learn something, and we need to be open to that.

Stephanie Olson (19:19.929)
Gosh, that's really good. so, okay, so here is what I have experienced in my work. And I think it's so interesting, because I will be the first to tell you what I'm good at and what I'm, but actually, I'll be the last to tell you probably what I'm good at. I'll be the first to tell you what I'm not good at.

And I'm not good at a lot of stuff. And so that's why I surround myself with amazing people who are incredible at things and also collaborative partners and whatever. But I think that the people I've talked to who want to be the everything for people do so much more harm

Because like you said, you literally cannot be everything for everyone. And I think that's one of the reasons we're really streamlined focus because we want to be excellent at what we do. You can't be excellent at everything. And so if you're not excellent at everything, then you wind up being not. You wind up maybe being good at some things, so so at other things.

really bad at some things and I don't think you can give all of that time and energy to the thing you do well and that's what collaboration is all about. So I will tell you this too and I'm not going to name any names and I'm going to be very hypothetical about this

situation, this very personal situation, but let's just say there was a non-profit. There was another non-profit who actually tried to take this non-profit out by yikes, by lying about what they were doing and the reason was is they didn't want to compete.

Rebecca Saunders (21:23.948)
Yikes.

Stephanie Olson (21:33.835)
at they had this opportunity to be something in that field. They wanted to be the only one. And so they tried to take this nonprofit out. Who does, you know, when you're both doing incredible work, why would you want another person to stop? Because

Rebecca Saunders (21:55.79)
Honestly, there's plenty of brokenness in the world. We don't have to fight to fix it.

Stephanie Olson (21:59.225)
Yeah, we do not. There's plenty. it's just, it's maddening. And so the nonprofit world becomes as competitive as a corporation. Actually, one of our former employees who is now a board member came to the nonprofit work from the corporate world. So she had worked in the corporate world for

20 plus years. And she came to the nonprofit world with a tremendous skill set and just amazing stuff, which is why she's a board member now. But she said in her first month being here, she was like, Whoa, I am shocked at how competitive this work is. She said it is actually I came from the corporate world, which is

very cutthroat. She's like, this is almost worse. And I think she's right because it's emotional. Yeah. And people don't expect it to be cutthroat. And so I do think it can be worse sometimes because people expect us to have a mission. So our mission is to stop human trafficking before it starts. And this was always our philosophy.

Rebecca Saunders (23:04.073)
functional.

Stephanie Olson (23:26.401)
If someone is out there doing it better and they can come in and take over and do it better than I, this was, okay, let me say this again. My philosophy was always if someone is out there who can do my work or my job better, let them take over. And I still really believe that. I do think that there,

I mean, we're talking about a nation. Frankly, we're talking about a world who needs prevention education on human trafficking. And not one organization is going to do that. I don't care what organization you are. There are different styles. There's different learning styles. People connect to different things. And so what we do in our organization, although I think

we do it extremely well and I'm very proud of what we do, maybe it's not gonna connect with somebody else in another area or maybe someone in another area has an organization that's doing that similar work and doing it really well. We don't wanna go in and usurp them if they're already getting that training. And so you think about when...

Rebecca Saunders (24:48.29)
Because at the end of the day, what we really want is that information out there. It doesn't matter whose mouth it comes from as long as it's accurate information told in a trauma-informed way.

Stephanie Olson (24:52.559)
Yeah.

Stephanie Olson (24:57.881)
Thank you. I couldn't have said that better myself. Yeah, that's exactly it. And so I think that's thing. Like if you've got a restoration house or a food bank or I don't know, name it. And another one opens up down the street. Hey, what if you got somebody who is doing, I don't, you don't want to reinvent the wheel. I think that's important, right? If somebody is doing the work, you don't want to go in and

put up a building next door to them and say, okay, now I'm going to do this work in this area. Because that's not effective. Even though I think that's what CVS has always done to Walgreens.

Rebecca Saunders (25:43.555)
But they always are very close together. Yeah.

Stephanie Olson (25:46.105)
like across the street or next door. I've always wondered about that. And I don't know what's first or who does what, but yeah, it's like a, it's just kind of like their model of, yeah, I don't know. But I think in the nonprofit world, you really wanna kind of partner with people and work together.

Rebecca Saunders (25:55.278)
I'm gonna have to look into that now.

Stephanie Olson (26:13.795)
and then figure out how you can best serve your community and this community and who was doing that there. And yeah, it's just a really interesting dynamic. And I think if most people really understood how competitive it was, they would be shocked.

Rebecca Saunders (26:32.974)
I think so too. Yeah, I'm glad we talked about this today because it is very counterintuitive.

Stephanie Olson (26:40.217)
Yes, it is counterintuitive. So here's what I would say kind of in closing in this conversation. It is a competitive world, but it shouldn't be. We really should be collaborative with each other. Now, I mean, if somebody comes to us and says, hey, give us all your secret sauce, we're not going to say, here you go, here's our secret sauce.

But if somebody says, let's work together and figure out how we can do this effectively and do it well, we are going to say, let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. yeah, that would be my challenge to nonprofits would be don't get competitive. Learn from each other because we don't know everything. In fact, we actually have other nonprofits come and train us on certain things.

Rebecca Saunders (27:13.582)
100 %

Rebecca Saunders (27:34.605)
Okay.

Stephanie Olson (27:36.579)
because we don't know everything. And I think it's important to hear perspectives. We've had people come and train us on things like suicidality or addiction and substance misuse. Because those are things that interlope, interlap, intertwine, intersect. That's a good word. Those are things.

Rebecca Saunders (27:59.084)
intersect.

or something.

Stephanie Olson (28:03.915)
that all intersect with what we do, but we're not experts on those things. And so we want to learn from those experts. And I think people are afraid for that for some reason. I don't get it.

Rebecca Saunders (28:20.344)
Let's just all play nice and work together.

Stephanie Olson (28:22.548)
Let's play nice in the sandbox. I agree. I agree. Nobody needs to be throwing sand. Nobody needs to be kicking or hitting. yeah. So yeah, we love to collaborate. We love to work with other organizations because there's other organizations doing incredible things. Do we want people to benefit from our organization? Yes, of course, because we're proud of what we do.

But yeah, I think we need to learn not to be so competitive. Yeah. Any words of wisdom to close us out?

Rebecca Saunders (29:00.618)
I think you covered it all. Let's make the world a better place. And in order to do that, we need to work together. Yay.

Stephanie Olson (29:05.955)
Yeah. And let's all learn how to sing Kumbaya. Okay, I'm just kidding about that. We don't need to do that. But yeah, let's make the world a better. Let's work together and let's yeah, that sounded very pie in the sky.

Rebecca Saunders (29:17.536)
You

Rebecca Saunders (29:21.23)
And then there'll be sunshine.

Stephanie Olson (29:23.909)
Yes! And flowers! No, but I think that's true. We need to work together. We need to fight this together and learn from each other. Let's stop being competitive and let's play well together. Yeah, I agree. So with that, thank you for joining us. We want to know what you want to talk about, so do not hesitate to...

Please let us know. And if you are listening on your favorite podcast, please give us a five star rating. That helps with us so much. And if you're listening on YouTube or watching on YouTube, subscribe, but also like, because that helps us with the algorithms. And yeah, we appreciate you being here. We'd love to hear more. And with that, get some R &R.