
Every week your host Maria Rio, or her guests, will share actionable steps to support you in finding clarity, raising funds, and leading with courage.
Our Latest Episodes

Embracing Advocacy with Cathy Taylor
Advocacy is in the DNA of our sector. Every day, whether it’s a front line social agency, or an arts organization, nonprofits are doing great advocacy work at the community level.
How can we as a sector lift each other up and support each other’s advocacy efforts?
Joining us today for this discussion is Cathy Taylor, the Executive Director of the Ontario Nonprofit Network.

Overhauling Your Fundraising Mindset with Yvonne Harding
In this special episode of the podcast, one of the students from our spring 2020 Flipside Fundraising cohort, Yvonne Harding, Resource Development Manager at Assaulted Women’s Helpline, to share the transformation she has experienced after she changed her fundraising mindset with the lessons learned in Flipside Fundraising.

“What I Learned From My Daughter’s COVID Wedding” with Nneka Allen
The guest on our podcast today, fundraiser and writer Nneka Allen, wants us to forget about all these loaded questions and simply reflect on how authentic and long term relationships naturally happen in our lives. She shares some beautiful examples from her daughter’s wedding and her personal eureka moments.

Real-life Succession Planning with Mike Prosserman
Michael recently published a book detailing his insights from the 15 years of building and leading the UNITY Charity from spark to succession. On today’s podcast, he shares his personal learning in building organizational culture and systems that will be conducive to great succession planning.

Managing Imposter Syndrome with Mimosa Kabir
On today’s podcast, I am excited to have Mimosa Kabir, Manager of Capital Campaign at Hot Docs Documentary Festival, share her perspective to help us unpack this conversation.

Managing Culture Change
When you’re ready to lead your organization through a change in how you work (perhaps because you’ve adopted new technology or approaches), it’s important to note that change happens over time, and not all at once. As Ovid put it, “Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence”.

Always Be Learning with Aaron Sanderson
On today’s podcast, I am excited to have Aaron Sanderson, SVP, Advancement & Chief Development Officer at Kids Help Phone about professional development and learning. Tune in to learn about how we can create space for learning so that we can understand how we can invest in ourselves and our organizations so that we can do better work and work better.

Surprise and Delight Your Donors with Matt Barnett
On today’s podcast, I am excited to have Matt Barnet, the founder of Bonjoro, to introduce you to their amazing personalized, one-on-one video messaging service and share with you some really doable tips to spark connection and conversation with your donors, all virtually.

Dare to Lead with Amal Elmi and Bailey Greenspon
Bailey Greenspon, acting Co-CEO of G(irls)20 and Amal Elmi, a Young Director of the Girls on Board program talk to us about their insights and experience of advocating for young and diverse leaders in the sector.

Shortcuts to Raise More Money with Dana Segal
What compel donors to say “yes”?
This is the million dollar question for us as fundraisers.
Understanding how people make decisions is key to our success in fundraising.
On today’s podcast, international fundraising and management consultant Dana Segal shares with us her deep insight in the psychology of decision-making.

Surviving Founders with Susanna Kislenko
This week's topic may be uncomfortable to some, but it's necessary. We connected with researcher Susanna Kislenko to talk about founders' syndrome and how that manifests in the nonprofit sector.

Mastering Your Theory of Change with Lisa Watson
Theory of change is one of those things that everyone seems to have a vague sense of what it is but can’t quite come to the same definition.
How does our organization’s theory of change play a role in our work? How can we ground it in our practice?
On today’s episode, Lisa Watson, co-founder of Openly, shares with us how she and her team help nonprofits to develop clear and effective theory of change. Lisa integrates the principles of design and design thinking in the process.

Community Development and Grand Writing with Stachen Frederick
Grant writing is one of those things that collectively give our sector a headache!
When we write a grant, we don’t know what to focus on and struggle to fit everything under word count limit. When we submit, we have no idea whether it will be successful, and we just hope for the best. And when we get a rejection letter, we never find out why.
But grant writing doesn’t have to be that painful or mysterious. On today’s episode, I connected with Stachen Federick to learn about her insights on how to build communities through the process of grant writing and maximize our rate of success.

Wearing Many Hats with Rachel Bearbower
We all wear many hats in our lives. And working in small nonprofits, we wear even more hats at work. All the time, our to-do-list is overwhelming, and we can’t seem to be able to get to the bottom of it.
How we do our work every day has such a great impact on our long term success.
On today’s episode, Rachel Bearbower, founder of Small Shop Strategies, shares her journey from starting a small nonprofit as a newbie to the sector to becoming a consultant that helps small nonprofits strategize and maximize their productivity.

See You On The Internet with Avery Swartz
For everything that we do at Camp Tech and in all the classes we teach, we are saying to the non-technical people: we're gonna teach you a bit about tech, which you might not know, but we don't think you're a dumb-dumb. We have mad respect for people that are subject matter experts in other areas. We ran these workshops across Canada

Make it Count! Client Service Evaluation with Jeff Couillard
Evaluation is often a pain point for a lot of us working in small nonprofits, as it often seems to involve so much work with unclear purposes for why doing it. Jeff Couillard’s insights shed light on how we can measure what truly matters and how to use the data we collect to inform our work.

Slay The Mic with Jam Gamble
Jam Gamble is one of Toronto's gifted leaders who pushes the envelope and encourages everyone to cultivate their own inner light and abilities. The multi-passionate media personality and speaker is on a mission to help people build their confidence and amplify their voice from the boardroom to the stage to your event with 1000 plus people. This Brampton raised speaker will inspire everyone to go beyond their limitations and grab hold of the life that they want.

Fundraising as Community Building with David Karvinchuk
Let’s talk about fundraising and community building. Often in our line of work, we hear people are hesitant to get involved in fundraising. But they are much more likely to get involved in community building.

Building Resiliency with Monica Bodurka
Resilience is not about being tough and holding in or burying one’s emotion.
Resilience is about bouncing back from things that happen in life. When you think of shocks in a car, the bumps are there on the road, right? What we're doing is we're cultivating strength in ourselves to be able to absorb these shocks. Great research has shown that resilience is not an innate trait, but rather something we can all develop. We develop resilience not by burying our emotion or plowing through it, but actually through wellness habits.

The Burnout is Real with Sam Laprade
We're going to start this conversation talking a little bit about mental health and balance and how to navigate when you do wear many hats. Which usually comes with a huge workload and a lot of stress