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
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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, underemployed, maybe working multiple employment, but still living in poverty because they are not paid well, or they're not in a career that has a profile, meaning one where there's growth and opportunity? And I think herein lies one of the challenges of, like, we have a lot of women who they can do this because there's a significant, you know, they can be volunteers or they can even be a staff member of a non-profit because there's maybe a significant other who's bringing in income to the house. And why is that like why? Why, why? I was the primary income earner in my household until I took a nonprofit job and, and took a 70% pay cut because I didn't think that what I was doing in my volunteer work was having enough impact. So I want it to be on the inside and yet at the same time, like, why , like, why, you know, do I have to take a pay cut? Why? When I came on board, why is it that our mission is to support women achieving economic independence, but we had some women on our staff that were being paid below the poverty level for Seattle? And it was one of the first things I did was a comp. analysis. And of course at first people want to say, Oh, well, you're used to work in corporations. I'm like, No, I did a comp. analysis with seven resources that that corporations use and non-profits use, and I did put in all the things of, like, it is a non-profit, the types of roles the responsibilities the kind of experience required, but also the region, and I'm going to highlight the region, and I raised right away to our board that this is unacceptable. Like, this is incongruent. And so I started talking to other Dress affiliates, because you know, we're a global organization. And I got a lot of like, oh, yeah, oh, that's so cute that you want to get on a soapbox. Ya know, most of our staff are only volunteers or yes, we're underpaid. And fortunately, I've got, you know, fill in the blank significant other helping to pay my bills. And so I bring that up to say that these things are all intertwined and it's very complicated of how do you unpack this, but I think that there's an inherent excepted mindset, that it's attracting people who want to do good and so I don't have to get paid well to do good. Really? So, oh, you don't have bills like you don't need health care? You don't need to maybe put a child through college? Really? Like, okay, I disagree. Now, maybe the salaries aren't going to be the same as, you know, working at a at Microsoft, and yet at the same time, like, well, why not? Like, why can't a mid-career program manager at our company make at least somewhere that, you know, even if it's the lower half the range, but the same range that a similar yours and career and talented program manager at Microsoft makes? Like, I mean, yes, we can talk about how Microsoft makes money, and we are spending money to be in service, but then, so then give us the money to pay legitimately to then be in service, which for us is how can we get more women out of poverty and into economically viable futures? Right. So again, super long, complicated answer, but herein lies a lot that people just accept. Oh, but I'm doing good work, except, well, then, are we even attracting the right talent? Because we're only attracting the talent of those that can accept being underpaid, and overworked? Getting benefits from a significant other or not having benefits? And I'm talking about medical dental vision. Yeah, that's unacceptable to me.
Kayla Quijas
Thank you so much for unpacking it like that for us and for our listeners. Something we hear repeatedly from non-profit sources is "resources is a problem", whether it's people or money specifically. It's just it's something to be very aware of. And you just gave us a really deep, insightful view into how it's not just about money or resources in and of itself, but it's really, it's very, very complicated. There's a spider web of problems that kind of, kind of contributes to this issue.
Tonya Peck
And if I could just build on what you brought up, Kayla, is that herein lies where a business is a business as a business, whether you are a for-cause, your business is for-cause, so in this case, how can we help unemployed and under-employed women have an exit, you know, be financially independent, or you're, you know, just trying to sell more widgets to make more money, you're still a business and there is a formula, there's expenses. And, and some of those expenses are, you know, wage and occupancy and all that, as well as the expenses of producing, you know, whatever it is you're producing, it's still the same formula. A p&l is a p&l And so one of the things that that I've really been stressing with our community of, from volunteers and champions to board members to staff members, and grantors especially, is that the formula right now for non-profits is broken. And so while I am increasing the money and so I've been growing our, you know, the revenue that we can generate in, in service to growing and expanding our programs to serve our mission, but as part of doing that, one of the places where I've had the biggest increase, I've continued to run very lean and very frugal, but I have regularly continued to bump the compensation while keeping any other expenses down that I can't including, you know, we lost our lease during this. And I still was able to find a new lease within the monies that I said we had to stay on, even though everyone said, Oh, that's never going to be possible in Seattle. I'm like it is possible, we're going to make it happen. Because I'm not going to spend more on occupancy, I need to put that towards employment, and, you know, wages and benefits. So it is feasible and it's still the same formula. You may be working with less money, but the formula of a business is you know, the p&l formula is still it's still the same formula.
Kayla Quijas
Yeah, definitely. I mean, you're just showing there your creative problem solving, and you've spoken to it a couple of times, like, you like to get in there, solve problems and be creative. You're clearly showing it there. Are there, besides your, your brain, are there any resources that you're utilizing, could you point others to, that help you get through these day-to-day challenges in running a non-profit?
Tonya Peck
Absolutely, I mean, the very first one that comes to mind are other friends and colleagues. So I have a great network of other executive directors. I just rolled off a call with another one who runs a school and, you know, I mean, her, she runs a school which is really challenging through a pandemic. I'm running a social services organization. I mean, you know, we could really empathize and it really helps refill our cup. But then also other conversations with my fellow ED network might be how are you doing this? How are you doing that? Like what I find and having a really strong network of other executive directors and CEOs is that we all understand each other's problems. And we all come to the table with different successes and different failures, but also different talents. And so I might tap someone that I know is an amazing fundraiser. And while I'm talking to her about, you know, how are you doing this, especially during the pandemic? She's asking me, Wow, but you're doing such an amazing job on grants and the programs that you've been able to add, and, so, how are you going about that and how are you making that happen? So that's first and foremost are my other fellow EDs across the, they're mostly US and Canada. I have a couple in Europe, which becomes a little harder with time. So, but, that has been my number one resource. I would say the second then is, of course, the community around us, our team, our board, our volunteers, and even our sister clients. I mean, it's a give-get, right, like we're all in this together. So that's definitely been a great resource. But the third one that I really want to highlight that's been an incredible resource, there's kind of two halves of it. There's our program partners, so other people who have programs that we can tap into for our sister clients, so this would be like Microsoft, Google, Accenture General Assembly, Amil Aveda, like, I'm sure I'm forgetting some really, as well as other Dress for Success affiliates. You know, I'll see what someone's doing and twin cities or San Francisco and be like, Oh, we also recruit our ladies to join you. Because so many of our programs are online, which comes to when you asked me what resources I would say this is here lies where the biggest resource is the majority of the money that I've been going out and those who are helping us in fundraising, you know, board members, teammates and other volunteers is we have increased growing our the number of laptops and software and hardware that we are able to give to a woman and not just give to her but give her a setup experience where she really gets set up and makes it her own with her own ID safely and securely. Because the challenge that we're facing is we're all using all these technologies for even having this podcast, but it is we've probably already had all of these technologies even before the pandemic, what the pandemic surfaced is that even in this tech-rich region in the Pacific Northwest, 40% of the women we serve are not connected. So if they're not connected, how are we recruiting them? How are we saying, Oh, we have a laptop program? We have a financial literacy program we have we have a Salesforce administration certification that an entry-level job if you go through that certification is $65,000. That actually is a livable wage in Seattle. But how do they know about that? If they're they don't have that least a smartphone let alone also Internet access and, and a laptop to participate in these networking and learning experiences, as well as then just the application process to get into the programs or to get into, you know, the jobs that they're applying to. So we're further, you know, women are getting even left further behind in this era, if they are not digitally connected, and so we are still having to be out about connecting people face to face. So I know I gave us some, some pretty big ones there. But it's really both people are my biggest resources, but then technology, but then there becomes this barrier to entry, because technology is only a resource if you have it. Without it. It is a huge deficit to not have it.
Carmen Leung
Definitely. I totally agree with what you said about tapping into your network. There are so many friends and maybe weak ties that you have met from so long ago. I feel like they can also be a great help. I just want to thank you for sharing everything, your knowledge and information. And for Tonya, what kind of legacy do you want to leave as a non-profit executive director?
Tonya Peck
That's a big question. I want to leave this organization ready for the next ED to apply her time and talent and creative problem-solving experience to take it to the next level. So for me you know my legacy I dress for success Seattle is already, you know, well underway and yet will never fully reach what I want, no matter how many things I've ripped, replaced, remodeled, rebuilt from our banking to our general ledger to our fundraising, to the programs and services that we've grown to serve more sister clients year-over-year. No matter how much I can feel really proud of that I've put in place here and I'm, you know, leaving things even better than I found it and, you know, and I was getting to step on the shoulders of the previous giants. There's still I'm gonna leave and still go Oh, if only this one more thing and this one more thing. But I also believe that I'm leaving a legacy that the that the next set of leaders and leadership will take forward and build upon it. So in that sense that feels really good. And I have to just, you know, tell myself that that is good enough and, and then continue to be an ongoing champion for, for Dress and for women's equality,
Kayla Quijas
And even hearing you talk about that also harkens back to your original point, non-profits seem to really draw in female support systems here, and you talked about you wanted to grow, nurture it, just, help it blossom into something great, and it's really, really inspiring to hear you talk about that. So thank you very much for sharing with us a little bit more about you personally and your journey, your entrepreneurial spirit. It's been really great. I feel like we could talk to you all day - maybe we're gonna have to have you on again! This podcast is proudly brought to you by Puget Sound Project Management Volunteers. Puget Sound Project Management Volunteers helps impactful non-profit organizations achieve their objectives by connecting them with skillful project managers who can aid them in crystallizing their visions, leading project teams, and deconstructing their goals into achievable milestones. This service is absolutely free and can help your non-profit organization get the extra help it needs so that you can spend more time making a difference in the world and less time on administration. Visit PM-volunteers.org to request the assistance of a project manager 100% free of charge. No gimmicks, no catches just one non-profit helping another. We are going to switch a little bit more to focus on the organization itself. You already, you mentioned high-level the mission of dress for success but can you expand a little bit more upon the mission and the vision and what it really does?
Tonya Peck
Yeah, and hopefully my dog will play along, too! Our vision overall globally. This is for Dress for Success worldwide, that we all share the vision of a world in which no woman lives in poverty. And the thing that's that's so powerful, if, if you really reflect on what that means, is it's really not about just women. When, when a woman is lifted out of poverty, when she perseveres and also, you know, the community around her supports her out of poverty, that also lifts many others out of poverty. So our mission is we are here to support women achieving economic independence and that is through a series of development tools and support tools and a network, you know, a career wardrobe, unlimited career coaching, the skills and tools to be successful in an economically viable career. And to do that, you know, when a when a woman is lifted out of poverty, it also lifts many others around her out of poverty, including children and, and that starts to break the systemic issue of intergenerational poverty. So that you know, broad stroke vision is a woman, no woman lives in poverty, but really that has a systemic impact that really no, no children are living in poverty, families are living in poverty.
Carmen Leung
That's very empowering. I know the pandemic has brought a lot of toll on organizations, especially non-profits. ess for Success Seattle has really grasped onto this opportunity to offer virtual workshops and virtual tours, even during the holiday season. Can you dive a little deeper into how the organization has pivoted during this time?
Tonya Peck
Absolutely. Yeah, fortunately, one of our male allies, my husband, is our, we call him our free-TO, free Chief Technology Officer. He and I were already working on growing what I would call the back office, right, like growing our digital security, our file management, our document creation and sharing and, you know, just all those things that you know, oftentimes you take for granted. So we were already moving and migrating to Office 365 before the pandemic hit. And we weren't completely done, but we were really fortunate that we had a headstart in a way that some of my peers that other non-profits, including other Dress affiliates, weren't there because we were already underway of starting to offer more programs and services virtually so whether that's one-on-one career coaching or some of our cohort programs, as well as how even just the organization was operating. So that the moment we had locked down in March of 2020, which is, you know, it started here in our own backyard here, you know, across the water in Kirkland. Our staff was already, we never actually literally closed I mean, our front door might have been locked down, but we were already able to continue to collaborate and work because we're fully set up on Microsoft 365 and working in Teams and, you know, had a pretty robust system already underway, and we could continue to flesh that out while bringing our volunteers online. So we got our career coaches, all with Dress IDs and Microsoft IDs. And so we started to expand our coaching program through Teams, and of course, recognizing pretty quickly that even though we were already starting to do the laptop setup experience, we needed to hustle to do more of that including in the early days. We were even managing distributing hotspots and subscriptions for internet access. And so we hustled to grow that capacity of how could we get more women connected, keeping them connected, so that in that connection, they could now find jobs that could now be remote because all the, any woman in a service-based job lost her job immediately, so we could support women in finding what jobs were now available remote for jobs that got converted to remote. They now had the means, you know, we were hustling to give them the tools to be able to say Oh, I can do that. We also were supporting women and even just that transition of that skill set. Because anyone who had kids, now all of a sudden your kids were at home, and, you know, did you have enough internet bandwidth for you to be online doing something to get a job or keep your job while your kid was also doing their schooling online? Did you have enough machines, like, did you have enough laptops and whatnot for everyone to be plugged in when they needed to? So there was a lot of skill-building,like, you know, just real-time adapting to, you know, how do we support a woman to be connected, stay connected, grow in their connection? And then of course, we've continued to grow and expand our programs, especially our cohort program around financial education and being able to grow an emergency savings fund around digital education and how do you get on a Teams call versus a Google call versus a Zoom call? What are the etiquettes? What are the norms? There's a whole lot of cultural, unspoken norms that if you haven't been working in that space, you just you don't know what you don't know. And then a lot of our women aren't in safe or stable situation. So, then, how do you join a virtual call? Yeah, there's, there's a whole level of complication there. So, yeah, so we did what we could to grow our programs and do things our, you know, curbside as it related to career wardrobe. Obviously, for setting up on a computer we still had to bring people in so we, you know, masks and sanitizers and distancing, but we still had to take our chances. I mean, our staff all got vaccinated as soon as they could and then boosted as soon as they could. And we just continued to do what we could to be in service as much as possible. And of course, again, you know, there's still so much more that we want to do and want to be out there in reaching women.
Kayla Quijas
Yeah. You talk a lot about expanding your programs, expanding your offerings, reaching more women who desperately need your services, and, at the same time, we've not that Dress for Success Seattle has some pretty impressive statistics as far as volunteers that you guys get in the door. It's well over 200 volunteers at 125 referral partners across the Pacific Northwest. I mean that's very impressive. So how are you guys driving traction with that?
Tonya Peck
You know, I appreciate you saying that. I would say there's there's kind of two sides to that because I appreciate that. It sounds impressive, and I'm definitely going to share that with my staff that you you so graciously gave us that compliment, but I will tell you it's been really, really hard. In fact, we just had a call with with our new CEO of dress worldwide, and she's doing these regional calls. And so it was all the other Dresses that are in, sort of, this relative time zone, and so let's just say 10 affiliates on this call. And one of the things that we all aligned on were was actually this topic was how hard it is right now for us to retain or add both volunteers and referral partners. So, so let's just look at those numbers. And what's behind those numbers. So we do have over 125 referral partners, they have had a huge turnover. And the thing about having a referral partner, and I don't want to name names, but let's just say you know referral partner X, well if they have a high turnover, our referral partnership with them is not really with the agency as much as the people we're specifically working with. It's a very people relationship-oriented service, right. And so when folks in those roles that are our referral partners move on, they may not say oh, you should make sure, let me intro you to Tonya and her team before I take off. Or even here's their address or, or even to know, hey, Dress up the street offers this and this, don't forget, you can send that to there. So we have to do, we're constantly, constantly, constantly re-onboarding our referral partners, which is really hard because of those 125. We might have anywhere from one to five relationships at each of those. And right now, I would say the majority of referral partners sending sister clients to us for programs that we're recruiting for or programs that are just open all the time. They're not ones that necessarily have like, you know, time-bound elements. I would say out of those 125, there's probably a dozen that are regularly sending us folks. And it's not that the others don't need our services. But they've had to change over people or they were an organization that wasn't already in the 21st century of big fully integrated in, you know, the cloud experience of running an organization. And so their employees, when they're working at home, don't have the whole you know, Microsoft 365 setup and aren't able to engage in the same sort of way. So, so there's just sort of a lot of mud has been added to the system to get this person to this person to get a person to us. There's just a lot of mud to get through to get there. on the volunteer side, different but similar, so many of our volunteers, we had a combination of those guys, you know, maybe volunteered once or twice and never again because they did something, like, maybe with a team, their team came in and they did it, you know, team effort, community service day, and then others who were coming in regularly, like when I was a volunteer before coming on staff, you know, I had a regular schedule. I was a career coach, volunteer, and I worked you know, the same two hours every other Tuesday, you know, ongoing. Some volunteers volunteer that way some volunteers, every once in a while, they'll say they're available, but it's you know, it's a wide variety of a couple of hours once in a while to a bunch of hours on a recurring schedule. Well, when we went and moved everything online, we could only engage those volunteers who could do the things that we needed virtually. So career coaches who are willing to meet virtually some of our career coaches said, that's beautiful, lovely, I don't I can't work in that way. I'm not comfortable working in that way. Whatever the various reasons are. So we had to do a whole lot of recruiting of new career coaches, including some career coaches that now as we start to open up, doing them in person again, they're not gonna want to come in person. That's why they're now a career coach because they live hours away or they don't have the bandwidth to drive in to do them or bus in or train in. So we've had to constantly be recruiting volunteers, and then for the things that are in person. There's very few things, so, much of what we've done is to adapt it to this, where we are now and where we're going in the endemic world, and some of those in-person needs are not ever going to be the same, which means some of those volunteers, you know, it's hard for them because they're they're missing wanting to come in and we just don't need as much of that in-person volunteer support, but that's the way in which some volunteers, that's the only way in which they can volunteer. So it's been a lot of constant recruiting of not just the sister clients for the program, but our referral partners and our volunteers. And I would say our biggest source of volunteers are actually other organizations that come also with their community of volunteers. So like Financial Beginnings, we do a lot of work with them and they get the volunteers who teach those financial education class or Capital One when we do that produce those programs with them. Capital One is getting their staff to be the volunteers and so that's why we have such an enormous volunteer community is one we're constantly tilling the soil and we are constantly building partnerships that come with communities and people that want to participate. So it's it's a huge ultra-marathon, constant muscle building behind those numbers that you shared and I am really proud of my team and our community of what we've made happen, but it is exhausting.
Carmen Leung
Yeah, it sounds like a very huge challenge and a big effort from your end. And for our listeners who are interested to contribute to this impactful organization, what are some of the ways that they can help support?
Tonya Peck
First I will say every, there is a way for everyone to support meaning, of course, I would love to say money, money, money, of course. But it's really, you know, comes down to time, talent and treasure. And treasure isn't just writing a check. Treasure might also be introducing us to a program partner or to somebody else who might be able to make a sponsorship, you know, a significant donation. So of course, money, unrestricted money for us to continue to invest, invest, invest in growing and expanding our programs, but then also talent, the community of professionals have a range of skills and talents that they bring to the table that they might not even realize is a talent that they could provide, whether it's as a coach, or as a mentor, or teaching a class on how do you show up on a zoom call? How do you do that professionally? How do you switch careers? Have you switched careers before? What was hard about switching careers? So, leveraging the talent and people, having an opportunity to give their time and that sort of way of sharing their talent with our community. Or specifically with our organization, maybe it's not sister client-facing, but it's a talent that they could bring in helping us with marketing or fundraising or, you know, fill in the blank. Again, we are a real business running a real business. And then of course, time. And time could be volunteering. It could be making introductions. It could be teaching a class or coaching or it really could be following us, like, the biggest thing that you know, I would wish is that anyone listening here walks away and follows us on at least one social media platform if not all of them. So whether it's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, follow us because when you follow us, it adds to the engagement because then you, you know, you might start by liking something but then maybe you add a comment and your comment gets picked up by your network who then says what what is Carmen commenting on? Oh, wait, let me check that out. And then you share it - sharing gets the most amplification, that exponentially helps grow things for us in terms of attracting other time, talent, treasure or even other sister clients in need of our services. That is probably the biggest and the most accessible and free things someone could do for us is to LIKE, SHARE, COMMENT across one or all of our social media platforms.
Kayla Quijas
That algorithm. Yeah, is really, really powerful. So, So what are all your social media platforms and what's your handle? How can people follow you?
Tonya Peck
Instagram it's @DFS_Seattle. So we're Dress for Success Seattle, so there's always going to be some variation of that. So @DFS_Seattle. For Twitter, it's also at @DFS_Seattle. And then for LinkedIn, you know, you have your backslash, and it's dress-for-success-Seattle and all of them should be even searchable. So where that gets complicated is we have 144 affiliates in 23 countries so if you just put Dress for Success, you will get a pretty long list of search results. But if you do get in Dress for Success Seattle I'm confident people will find it even they didn't have our, our correct handle.
Kayla Quijas
Great. Well, we will put those in the show notes anyway, just so that we'll have them. And is there anything else that we didn't ask you about you or about Dress for Success Seattle that you want to share?
Tonya Peck
Thank you and yes and I want to say this in an inspiring way, but it is a tough-love message. Next time, you know, you see something whether it's something you're seeing out of a non-profit or let's use the word charity, something that you're seeing at a charity or you're seeing someone that you believe is in need of charity, I would ask you to just hold or be aware of that moment, what judgments you might have, of what you think they are or are not doing and why are they not doing this and not doing that. The fact is, we are all doing the best we can. And sometimes I think that is really hard for people to retain and it's sometimes really hard for us. It's sometimes some of the most challenging experiences running this organization. They're not the heart-wrenching sister client situations because we expect those like they're, you know, women who are facing a lot of trauma and a lot of hardship and are working really hard like we expect that. I think the part that gets really hard is when those that believe they are champions of ours, volunteers, donors, amplifiers don't necessarily know the real real and say and do things that are coming from a place of just unconscious bias and judgment. And those are sometimes the hardest days for the staff and me. Yes, I would just say just keep that in mind that everybody is doing the best they can. And if we don't call you back as fast as you want, or we don't want to take your clothing donations, because that's not what we need right now. It's not an insult on you. It's not what we need to deliver on our mission right now. And when you see someone that's looking down and out and you're questioning what they have or haven't done to land, they're just remember, no one wants to live like that. No one wants to live on the street without secure housing without regular meals. So just remember that they're doing the best they can. And it is the best one can is sometimes still really hard and still doesn't allow them to live in a stable home and have a regular meal and a full refrigerator. So that's that's what I guess I would offer in the most positive and intentionally inspiring way as I can.
Kayla Quijas
Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. And in cultivating empathy, I think it's something that we can all work on it. I think we tend to see the universe through our own lens. You know, I would do this so why didn't you do that? So yeah, I I definitely hear you there and it's good. We like the tough love that you have to offer. It's very inspiring, very cool wisdom. So thank you. Well, gosh, thank you so much Tonya, for being with us today and for dropping all those wonderful nuggets of wisdom for our listeners. And we're really excited to see what's next for you and for Dress for Success Seattle and we really hope that more women could be elevated and uplifted by your services. So thank you so much.
Tonya Peck
Thank you, Kayla and Carmen, you were both so thoughtful in your questions and your curiosity. And I really, really appreciate that this is important to you and was interesting enough to spend the time to have this conversation, so thank you.
Carmen Leung
Thank you for tuning into this episode of Everything Non-profit. If you don't already, please follow us on Spotify, subscribe to us on Apple podcasts, leave us a rating and review and share this episode with your friends. Thank you for listening. Until next time.
