Join us for our conversation with Tonya Peck, the Executive Director at Dress for Success Seattle.

Tonya’s background is a blend of global technology & design and organization development. She has extensive experience growing teams, leaders, and organizations at Fortune 500. While she has decades of volunteer & board member experience, working as the Executive Director was her first non-profit staff role. Beyond her day job, she’s civically active locally and nationally, with a strong focus of empowering women, creating inclusive environments, and preparing organizations for the future.

Stay till the end to hear a tough love message from Tonya.

➡️ Find out more about Dress for Success Seattle

Website: https://seattle.dressforsuccess.org/

Twitter @DFS_Seattle

Instagram @dfs_seattle

LinkedIn @Dress-for-Success-Seattle

➡️ Connect with Tonya

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HOSTS:

➡️ Carmen

➡️ Kayla

Email: puget.Info@pmv.org

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TRANSCRIPTION

Carmen Leung 

Welcome to Everything Non-profit, a podcast where we reveal the secrets, tips, and tricks for leading a nonprofit. My name is Carmen.

Kayla Quijas 

And I'm Kayla. As non-profit founders, we know firsthand how challenging and overwhelming it can be to build a non-profit from the ground up. This is a podcast for non-profit executives by non-profit executives. If you need advice on starting your own non-profit organization or are looking to expand your knowledge of non-profit operations, stay tuned.

Carmen Leung 

For today's conversation, we have with us Tonya Peck. Tonya is the Executive Director at Dress for Success Seattle. She was recruited in the fall of 2019 to come on board as the Interim Executive Director to grow the organization's capacity to scale for the growing number of women living in poverty in this region.

Kayla Quijas 

When the pandemic hit in 2020, Tonya was asked to stay on as the executive director where she led the organization through the crisis of growing, strengthening, and expanding their organization's capacity to serve more women through these challenging times. Tony's background is a blend of global technology and design and organizational development. She has extensive experience growing teams, leaders, and organizations at Fortune 500s like Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce. While she has decades of volunteer and board member experience, this was her first non-profit staff role. Beyond her day job, she's civically active locally and nationally, with a strong focus of empowering women, creating inclusive environments, and preparing organizations for the future. Welcome to the show, Tonya,

Tonya Peck 

Thank you. And thank you, Carmen and Kayla, for having me.

Carmen Leung 

Tonya, I think it was a year ago that I connected with you on LinkedIn. It's crazy how we're finally sitting down to chat. I'm very excited. At a high level, can you give our listeners a quick snippet about yourself?

Tonya Peck 

Absolutely. And I love that you reminded me that we met through LinkedIn. It's been such a great platform for connecting. Well, I really appreciated your intro I guess I would just say that I consider myself a designer in every way whether that's designing physical products, digital products, organizations, supporting people in designing their careers, or making a meal. I just think everything is a design problem. And I really enjoy that creative problem-solving mindset and approach.

Kayla Quijas 

Great, yeah. You seem to have an extensive background in quite a few different sectors before landing in your role. So where did your non-profit journey begin?

Tonya Peck 

Thank you for asking. Actually, this is my very first staff role, meaning paid employment, on a non-profit at a non-profit organization. But I have been working with non-profits for three decades as a volunteer, as a donor, as a board member. And I didn't realize how much I did not know about the real real of non-profits until I was on staff. It's very different. It's kind of like that moment on the Wizard of Oz where the curtain draws back and you find out, like, all the ribbons and rubber bands that are holding everything together and you think I can't believe they're making all of these things happen with just a couple of strings rubber bands. So yeah, I've only been on staff for almost three years, but I've been working with nonprofits for 30 years.

Carmen Leung 

Wow, that's a long time. And it's inspiring to hear about your path to being at your current position right now that you didn't start out in the non-profit sector. And now you're working in the staff role, at Dress for Success. If you were to think back to when you began your term and 2019 to until now, what would you say has been the biggest takeaway to leading it?

Tonya Peck 

Probably building on what I shared, that the work that I've been doing in the non-profit pro bono space for the last three decades has been in service to women in transition. And that, you know, has ranged in the way in which I've been involved transitions could be transitions out of unstable housing into stable housing, transitions out of being a full-time mom and getting into the workforce or back into the workforce. It could be, you know, coming out of incarceration, so some sort of transition, including switching fields, you know, I'm working in this field and I want to work in that field. How do you support someone to transfer those skills and secure a job in a new field? The thing that has been so surprising is what I mentioned earlier is that I was even a volunteer at Dress for Success before being on staff. And yet there was so much that you just you just don't know about the inner workings of just the challenges of running a small but mighty organization, and service, in this case in service to women's equity, which is already has a pretty significant disparity. And that was pre-pandemic. So I would say just recognizing that, as someone whose day job has been in the corporate world, that a non-profit is still an organization, and we need to provide the same investment and rigor and support of a non-profit as we do in for-profit businesses. The difference is we are a cause-based organization. But we are still an organization. And I think sometimes there's, there's some disconnects and misunderstandings of what it means to be a non-profit

Kayla Quijas 

You mentioned a couple of times now, the complicated organizational structure of a non-profit and just how much goes into it. And part of our, our purpose in having this podcast is to help individuals who either aspire to be a non-profit executive or work for a non-profit executive or start their own non-profit, understand what it is to get one up and running. If you could give some advice as to if you're going to do something like that, here's what you might want to think about to help you be more successful.

Tonya Peck 

You know, not knowing who your audience is, but knowing I'm talking to two professional women. What comes up for me is that the non-profit career so let's just call it that the non-profit career, and I don't have facts and figures in front of me, so I'm going to make some gross generalizations here, but based on my own observable data, non-profits attract a lot of female talent, meaning whether as volunteers or as paid staffers, non-profits tend to attract a lot of women. And I think there's a whole bunch of reasons. So again, I want to fully own this is, you know, Tonya's opinion and of one from my observable experiences, but it does attract a lot of women and I think that's partly because women are, you know, in general, social impact minded, like, we think about like, how are our friends, our neighbors, how are we caretaking? Even if we aren't mothers of children, we are still the can be sisterly and motherly. And so I think non-profits attract a lot of women. And I think inherent in that, given that we are specifically are an organization in service of supporting more women achieving economic independence. Like, why is it so many women are underpaid, underemp