Clearity, Rachel Freeman - Scaling a non-profit to further their program reach
Description
In this episode of The Business of Non-Profits, we speak with Rachel Freeman from The Clearity Foundation about scaling a Non-Profit to further their program reach. We’ll learn about the challenges they’ve surmounted along the way, how change has transformed the team, and where they are going next!
contact information: info@clearity.org
Transcript:
Stacey Lund:
Hello. You're listening to the business of nonprofits.
With me today is Rachel Freeman from the Clearity foundation. Rachel is a seasoned human resources and operations professional. Today we're going to learn how Clearity scales to increase its program reach. We'll learn about the challenges they've surrounded along the way, how change has transformed the team and where they're going next.
Rachel, thanks so much for joining us. Why don't you take a few minutes and introduce yourself, your role at Clearity, and the impactful work the Clearity Foundation does?
Rachel Freeman:
Thanks, Stacey.
Hi, everyone. I'm Rachel Freeman.
I'm the director of HR and operations for the Clearity Foundation. I started working with Clearity in 2020, right at the beginning stages of the pandemic. I left the corporate scene just a few years before that and was consulting in human resources and project management. After helping the Clearity team for a few months, I was struck by the compassion and the passion that was displayed by each of the people that I worked with. To a person, concern, and thoughtfulness for the women they supported were at the core of every decision and conversation they had, and I just knew I had to be part of the team.
Clearity works to improve the survival and quality of life of women with ovarian cancer. It's one of the most difficult diagnoses to receive, especially since it's typically diagnosed in the late stages. We meet these women and their loved ones where they're at and walk through this journey with them on their terms. That might mean helping them understand the science behind their disease and treatment options, locating an appropriate clinical trial, or managing the stress and anxiety that can be overwhelming in their situation. All our services are free of charge. Our individual personalized support is driven by the needs of each of the teal women that come to us.
Stacey Lund:
It's such an amazing mission and in some cases, heartbreaking. So, I can't even imagine working in that environment and literally impacting lives. Every single participant you touch truly, truly has a change that you can see and measure just from your involvement in their lives. And that's so huge. So, thank you so much for the work you do.
Clearly, the Pandemic was a busy time. It was a busy time for everyone. But Clearity had some non-pandemic-related work that happened. You had a lot of things occur all at the same time while the Pandemic was happening. Tell us a little bit about that, about the landscape, kind of how you came in, the assessments you did, taking on another assimilating, another small startup like. How did that work? Tell me about that.
Rachel Freeman:
Most of the Clearity team was already working remotely and virtually prior to the pandemic, and so part of what I did was help them get set up to be as efficient virtually as they were in the office.
The biggest challenge that they were having at that point is they had reached the point in the growth of the organization where they weren't really a startup anymore, but they weren't big and stabilized. They were right at the beginning of a steep growth trajectory and the Pandemic just adds a layer of complexity to that for sure. But what we were looking at doing at that point was not only getting the team virtual for safety reasons but also looking for ways to find efficiencies and scalability in our processes and procedures so that we could handle the influx of participants that we were really expecting to see.
Stacey Lund:
Okay, so during the Pandemic you also it sounds like scaling was an issue and you had recognized that, but you were also acquiring and assimilating this another program. So, you had additional tech, you were also taking on board. Talk a little bit about that.
Rachel Freeman:
Just prior to the Pandemic, we had been working with a pilot program called Steps Through OC, which provided psychosocial support to women with ovarian cancer. And just before the Pandemic started, we brought them in as a full program of Clearity. And so, they had been operating on completely different technology platforms, and organizational structures, everything was separate because they had been operating as a separate organization prior to that point. And so quite a bit of the scalability that we needed to do was also finding the efficiencies and consistency in the way people are doing their work at Clearity.
Stacey Lund:
Absolutely. You're looking at the scale and you're looking at what you do internally and how they work, trying to come up with a happy medium. So how did you know? What was the trigger for you that something had to change? Was it something from the board? What happened?
Rachel Freeman:
It was a little bit of both. So, the acquisition brought in a number of new participants that have been looking for something different than our core services at that time were scientific support and education around the treatment decisions that women were focusing on. What we found was that adding this new service allowed us to give more holistic support to the women and their families, but it also increased the number of people that were being referred to our scientific program and vice versa. We knew that we needed to scale, and we needed to find these efficiencies because we were looking at such a steep growth in our projections for the participants that we were bringing in.
Stacey Lund:
Excellent. A lot of people will say getting started is the hardest part. So how did you start, what did you take on, and how did you parse the work? How did you approach this?
Rachel Freeman:
The biggest and most important pieces of these transitions is the change management and actually doing that prep work before you get started.
Because there were these distinct teams that had been operating independently from each other, it was really important to have the buy in of the leadership team and to make sure that not only was everyone accepting what needed to come up, but they really understood the benefits to it and they wanted this to happen. Because it's one thing to say, theoretically I'm on board, I want to grow this program by 500% in the next year. But when that means that now you've got to have a request that you put in for something that you just did quickly yourself, that gets hard very quickly. So it was really important that we had the why really established before we got started.
Stacey Lund:
Absolutely. And I think the more competent you are in your field, at your work, the harder it is to feel uncomfortable and sort of incompetent and make that shift. Nobody likes to feel like they're not good at what they do and this just compounded it over time, right?
Let's talk specifics about one of the improvements that you made and you did it fairly quickly, was centralizing sort of operational support. Talk about that specifically in terms of how did you get the buy in on that and how did you announce it, what did you do there?
Rachel Freeman:
So that was actually one of the simpler but most foundational pieces of what we did for the scalability and efficiency analysis was establishing this centralized operational support for the organization They were all operating independently. There wasn't any efficiencies between them. If two different departments were looking for similar support, they would have to be two different skill sets or two different people, or at least one person trained in two different processes. And so the buy-in was actually fairly simple. We're going to take some stuff off your plate. You guys are going to get to focus on the things that got you into this business to begin with.
It was the implementation of that that saw the challenges.
Stacey Lund:
Absolutely. I think that's a good segue into what were the challenges you saw and how did you work them out? Or maybe you didn't.
Rachel Freeman:
I think the biggest challenge is just that people have a different environment that they work in when they're working independently of each other. One department calls the women that we support participants and we have another one that might call them patients or that might call them teal women, or just the terminology all of the normal things that are just part of everyday work. And the challenge was really that they were all functioning well. There were no issues. And so we were really going in specifically to fix something that wasn't broken.
And so it's really important to bring it back to that big picture to remind of the why and just because you have to send in this request that you could do yourself in 30 minutes. If you send in a request and it takes somebody else 15 minutes and it saves somebody in a different department an hour, it's still worth it. And so really jus
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