02:06 Mallory: Welcome everyone. I am so excited to be here today with Arosha Brouwer. Arosha, welcome to What the fundraising. 

02:13 Arosha: Thank you so much, Mallory. 

02:16 Mallory: I was thrilled to stumble across your work and Quan recently on LinkedIn, which led to our conversation today. Why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about you and your journey and what brings you to our conversation? 

02:29 Arosha: Of course. So, Arosha, it’s an Australian accent that you can hear. I’m based here in the Netherlands. I’ve got about a 15-year work history in the topic of digitization and team performance. I guess that’s what led me to Quan and founding Quan. Quan is a SaaS solution. And in one line what we do is we help busy teams create healthy rituals. And wellbeing is a really, really important topic. And the mission of Quan is to make wellbeing a strategic priority, and we’ve developed software to help organizations to do that. 

03:01 Mallory: I love that you used the word rituals. Can you talk to me a little bit about what rituals are, what that means, and for Quan particularly? 

03:09 Arosha: To answer that question, I’ll probably need to focus in on why rituals are important. When it comes to wellbeing, something that can determine if you’re in a state of being well or not is your habits and how you behave. And you know, rituals are essentially habits. And we recognize that in the topic of especially wellness or wellbeing there’s lots of solutions out there for the individual, but there’s something that really influences an individual’s behavior, and that is the context to which they belong. Where there’s thousands of applications aimed at supporting an individual on their journey, Quan is about how can a team have healthy rituals so that everybody in that group are encouraged to work in a more healthy way. 

03:57 Mallory: Hmm. Wow. And in general, in the mental health wellness space, there’s a lot of terminology that gets thrown around. And I’m not always so sure how well folks understand what different groups or companies are talking about when they refer to wellness. So, can you start by telling us, what do you think are some of the common misconceptions when people think about mental health or mental wellness that maybe we throw out those myths right away, and then talk a little bit more about what you mean and what that looks like? 

04:29 Arosha: I literally woke up one morning with the idea. The idea was based on a question, and the question was, what is wellbeing? I couldn’t answer the question, and so I spoke with, I think, six people, including some of the founding team members. And I asked them, what is wellbeing, what is wellbeing? Nobody had a distinct answer for it. And what Quan set out to do from the very, very beginning was, can we actually identify what it is and then make people more self-aware. And then should that not lead to people then being able to take the right steps to course correct. And so, Quan’s definition of wellbeing is a very holistic one. And that is, we consider five dimensions; body, mind, meaning, self-fulfillment, social connectedness. And then underneath that we have sub-dimensions. So, for example, with the body, it’s fitness or exercise, it’s even body image. Under mind, that’s the mental health component that is like concentration, anxiety, burnout. Each of these dimensions have sub-dimensions and underneath that there’s predictors. So, it is a very, very complicated topic. And the reason why people couldn’t answer it was because it is very complicated. And so, I think one of the myths and one of the myths is that therapy apps are going to fix an individual. And organizations can sort of push these sorts of perks to people and then sort of say, okay, well you know, we are giving you all the access to all these things, you should be able to fix it. But context has a huge role. Individuals may need to work on themselves but you also need to think about the context to which you belong, your family structure or your work structure. That is one. Therapy alone is not going to fix things. It’s a good start for some, but it’s not going to fix things. 

06:10 Arosha: The other thing is that mental health seems to be the flavor of the year, but wellbeing is much more complicated than that. Right? And so, a sense of meaning is important. A sense of self-fulfillment. You’ve got to think of other areas besides just the mind or just the body. And then it is really important to consider both personal life and work life and realize that it’s a continuum, and that you cannot just look at one or the other, but you need to consider all. So, when you’re thinking about improvements, consider both. Those are the three main things I’d say.  

06:49 Mallory: Okay, I want to double click on that last one because I’m a certified executive coach and I work with a lot of nonprofit professionals, fundraising professionals. And I hear often in my coaching calls, well, can I bring up something related to dating or my marriage? And I hear a lot of resistance or desire to compartmentalize what’s happening in the different areas of my life. And of course, they’re so interconnected and the patterns that we see in our work are very linked to patterns that we see in our home life. And so, like in my work, I want them to talk about everything because it’s all connected to some root causes. In addition to the fact, of course, that context exacerbates certain things or creates different conditions for different things to maybe come more alive. That last point I think is so important around like, how do you address wellness holistically? And I’m curious as an app that is particularly designed for professional teams, how do you talk about that or think about that, especially when you’re getting folks integrated into the product?

07:57 Arosha: Firstly, Quan is made up of two parts. So, one is our holistic assessment, which covers all of those dimensions, sub-dimensions I referred to. An individual completes it, they become more aware of the three things that are working well for them and the three things that they need to work on. And then we aggregate those results at a team level. As long as it’s minimum of five, we can aggregate it. And then we teach the team to do one thing really, really well, which is to have a team retro, which takes two hours every quarter, and you go from unpacking those insights to then identifying and committing to a couple of rituals to improve that. And then you repeat this process every quarter. What it is, it’s a habit in itself by doing this. So, you’ve got a metric and then you’ve got two hours structured conversation to discuss things that you typically don’t discuss. And earlier on, before we moved to the platform, we facilitated with coaches and psychologists, we observed teams. And what happens is, when you provide data and structure, and it seems that anxiety in personal life is the topic that connects this group, and it’s there in black and white, people open up. It’s a safe space now, it’s a shared topic. And simply by having the vocabulary and the data, then people can say, actually, this is what I feel. And then somebody else builds on that. And that is how you create this kind of psychological safety to address topics, which you typically wouldn’t.

09:19 Arosha: And then all that the session has done is literally created the platform. The real value is in the conversations and the way people treat each other after the session.  Because then the manager can lean in on that and say, hey, is there anything else I need to be more aware of? Like your traditional one-on-ones that you have with your team members, it should not be going through your to-do list. Right? At Quan, I ask my team three questions. One, how are you? What’s giving you energy? What’s draining your energy? What can we change? That’s how we have a really good relationship and understanding. And my team can tell me when there are things happening outside of work, which might impact work, which means we can readjust work so that they’re okay. 

10:04 Mallory: Yeah. I really appreciate that answer. And I think a lot about in the nonprofit sector, these folks are working so much, they are not being compensated well for their time. They are not provided with a lot of support, professional development support, or community support. Often, it’s a very isolating experience, especially for fundraisers because there’s lot of stigma around fundraising, talking about money is this very vulnerable thing. Even within organizations other folks don’t want to be sort of associated with fundraising. Not that they don’t want to be associated with the fundraiser, but they’re like, well, I don’t do fundraising, I don’t ask for money. And so, there’s just this real isolation sometimes that can happen around a fundraiser. And in the sector in general, the solution to fundraiser enablement has long been skill development, professional development, more solutions or tech that’s about the donor, how to make the donors giving easier, more frictionless. And there hasn’t been a lot of attention given to fundraiser wellness, like the nervous system of a fundraiser. And I think about these people who are dealing with constant rejection, constant feelings of isolation, lack of belonging, all these things. And there must be a strong business case for taking care of these people, taking care of fundraisers in a different way. And I know you’re demonstrating that with Quan in a lot of different ways. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

11:37 Arosha: Really, there’re many functions that experience call centers, call center staff. There was a research piece that our team did into call center staff, and I think there are many jobs for sales teams. It’s interesting that you mentioned that there’s so much focus on skill development as the answer. It’s a little bit like how everybody wants to talk about performance and how to increase performance. And everybody likes the sports analogies of like, athletes. And they talk about the performance of those athletes, and they don’t talk about the fact that performance is actually 10% and 90% is recovery. And that’s why the athlete can perform during the time that they need to because they’re actually taking care of themselves for the remaining 90% of the time. And that goes to this like, you’ve already got a job where they’re a very clear target. Rejection, I don’t think anyone likes rejection. But if all you are doing is the art of closing a deal, and you don’t actually think about how it makes you feel and how not to deplete the resources that you need in order to do that thing, that can close the deal, it’s just going to be a vicious cycle, right? So, it is not about shaking yourself off and just game timing and pushing through. Sometimes it’s more about recognizing when things are not okay on other parts of your life, so you can attend to that, so that you can rejuvenate. And so, that you’re in a good state to go back and do the performance.

13:09 Mallory: Wow, I’ve never thought about that before in terms of athletes. You’re right, so many of the like motivational quotes that we hear are all around a moment of push through in a game or in some type of physical exertion moment, and yet around that is so much recovery, so much self-care that allows for those moments of push that are very strategically placed in these moments of performance. So, I think that’s such a good thing for folks to reflect on. I’m curious, when you all are working with companies and you notice elements inside the business that might be leading to an overarching lack of wellness, like I was thinking about in the non-profit sector. Do you all ever find something within the operations of a business that comes out in this assessment and it’s really clear like, yes, this needs to be addressed in the group sessions and in terms of the individual wellness, but also company, this is perpetuating a lot of the stress that your folks are feeling because it’s clear they’re all reporting this being an issue for them?

14:13 Arosha: Yeah, the company gets an overview team by team across the sub-dimensions. We see anxiety at work, stress at work, uncertainty, low levels of creativity, whatever it is, we see, and there’s percentages to it. And you can not only just see it for that quarter, we see it quarter by quarter. So, we can see if it’s negatively trending. All the while we know that we have supported the team leads to have the conversations that they should. But from a central perspective, you can now see, not just a high-level wellbeing metric, but a deeper level of what the actual sub-dimensions are. You can actually see, is it actually more home related than work related, right? During COVID, we were surprised with some companies that their work life was good, it was their personal life, which was the issue. And so, work was actually almost a saving grace for them. These are the things that you become acutely aware of when you start to measure it at a deeper level. Absolutely. You can see that, it explains these.

15:05 Mallory: So, you were naming a few of the subcategories before, like anxiety, lack of creativity. Have you noticed any interesting correlations between symptoms, like things like stress, anxiety, overwhelm paralysis, and desired behaviors, things like not being able to be creative, or not being able to feel embodied. What have been some of the surprising or, yeah.

15:32 Arosha: Yeah, that’s been a big one. So, we’ve seen, at least for now, a correlation between like creativity and then like stress. So, higher stress and low levels of creativity. If we look at sort of the trends from this year, stress at work, uncertainty at work was pretty high, and creativity has been an ongoing topic for many teams. And people have heavy workloads and they’re just doing, doing, doing. And what does creativity require? Space. You know, I always say like the greatest artists of our time and greatest writers would often escape somewhere to write their masterpieces. Say they could not do a to-do list day in day out, and then write the books that we so cherish today. Why did Google have the 20% rule? Gmail was created when their employees had time to think of things outside of their to-do. There’s so much research, insights, anecdotes about how some of the greatest insights were when somebody was in a state of flow doing something else. And that is a true cost of workload pressure. If you’re just constantly doing, doing, doing, you are not stepping back to have those moments of insights. That could be the inflection point to do something drastically better. If for no reason other than that, realize the quality of your decisions, and the quality of your insights are impacted by how much you’re trying to squeeze into that day. 

16:54 Mallory: It’s such a chronic issue in the nonprofit sector. There’s so much pride in the sector, misdirected pride around how much we can do with how little. Some of that is related to systemic issues around conversations about overhead and how grant funding works and all these things that lead to this. The only thing that isn’t valued is our time, because even the way that funding happens is like, we want it to go to programs and we’re like, we’re the ones doing the programs, but okay, you know. And so, there’s this constant like, well, you could just work more to do that, or you could just hustle more to do that. And then folks wonder why there isn’t space for innovation. I’m curious if you’ve noticed any correlations around resistance to change or fear of change and the way that gets correlated with sort of overarching work pressure, anxiety, stress? 

17:46 Arosha: Yeah, that’s a super interesting one. Resistance to change. I think it was Peter Drucker with that amazing quote about a corporation’s immune system is built in a way to just resist change, even biology. And when you become pregnant, pregnant ladies get really sick is because our natural immune system just kind of stops working so that we can grow this foreign thing. We are all just resistant to change, it’s just the way we are. But what is interesting is innovation. And this is a topic that I’ve been researching for many, many years. I’ve been researching why some companies are better at innovation than others, and I’ve been specifically looking at the people functions and the product functions of those companies. And it is true, they are much more open to change, and they are changing a lot more faster, but they’re doing in a very systematic way. They use data, they use psychology, they use continuous experimentation. That whole thing about failing fast. Yeah. They fail very quickly, but they learn even quicker. That’s the part, it’s the curiosity, it’s the learning from it. And so, all those topics we’re seeing out in the news around growth mindset and all that comes from that. And so, you want to learn and it works or doesn’t work. That’s the moment. It’s not from doing the same thing over and over again. And that moment to try something else requires you to step out from whatever it is that you’re just doing. And we need to create an environment where people can do that. 

19:09 Mallory: Do you find that those companies have a higher level of resilience to that failure, to that quick feedback loop because they have other elements of wellness in place? 

19:24 Arosha: Resilience is such a hot topic. There are so many like managers and leaders that come to us and they’re like, yeah, we just need our people to be more resilient. I’m like, wow, okay. You know, they just need to be more resilient and then everything sorted. And I’m like, yeah, that’s the buzzword of 2022. Some of us come from the school of hard knocks and we learnt resilience because that’s the medal you get just for dealing with the life that you were given. I don’t wish that particular path on anyone, but there is a proven and tried way to get resilience. But besides that, you need to create moments where people do get a chance to fail, to learn within a safe context. That the organization needs to create conscious moments where people are encouraged and able to go broader to try different things, get the feedback, learn. So, you need to create the construct for that. It’s not an e-learn, it’s not a webinar. You need to create the context in which people can demonstrate those skills, and you need to continuously create a context so that they can get better at it. And that’s how you build resilience in the absence of them having gone through a school of hard knocks growing up. So, that would be my short answer to that. 

20:43 Mallory: No, I think that’s really interesting because you’re right, resilience is such a hot word at the moment. And so, I think about resilience that gets built with the hard knocks and the constantly sort of getting pummeled and getting back up, and then this belief that we’re strong and we can handle anything. And I also feel like for nonprofit leaders, the ice is so thin between them being okay and being not okay. And it’s so thin because of how much they’re working, how much context switching they’re doing, how lack of access to flow state, the rejection, just their nervous systems feeling so fried. And I’ve been thinking about resilience not as much as like, how do we build it in an individual, but how do we create spaces like you were talking about ways we create spaces to build individual and then team resilience as a result. And I’m also wondering about what does it look like for us to create conditions around someone that allows them more resilience. Not like internally, but like when they get a hit, it’s like, it’s okay because all these other things are there to support them or to protect them, or it’s not like everything’s holding on by a string so, when one of them gets cut, the whole thing crumbles. 

22:05 Arosha: Yeah, I get it. But I think there’s an important thing that we need to address here, especially when it comes to this particular, say demographic. And I have been in contact with many social enterprise and NGOs. And there is something that I’ve noted, which is they take it very seriously that they exist to support others, they should not need support themselves. And this whole thing of upholding that maybe they’re Achilles here, right? Because that means that you’ve got to uphold this, and there is no room for vulnerability there. That needs to change because resilience and vulnerability, I believe, go hand in hand. Because then when it’s tough times and bad times, you can actually call it out and you can have an open discussion and you can be honest about it. And then you can get up and continue. But if you are just continuously fine when you’re not fine, and when you are fine, then you break because just everything gets fossilized. So, it needs to start with, you know what, I’m not okay either. 

23:10 Mallory: Ooh. Yeah. I talk a lot on here about the martyrdom in the sector, and I say that as someone who 100% as an executive director, that was me. And I think there’s a lot of culture inside this sector that grooms for that. And there’s a lot of validation when you enter the sector that gives a lot of positive feedback for that type of attitude, for that in service of attitude, which also leads to a lot of really other toxic elements in the sector like, white saviorism and all these other things that are incredibly problematic to the nonprofit sector are all rooted in some of the same underlying beliefs and thoughts. And so, I think your point is so well taken and so important that that has to be the first shift for folks to be able to say, okay, my wellness matters. And I’m just so glad that you said all of that. 

24:08 Arosha: Absolutely. It’s because super important, so you know what, we work a lot with team leads and when we talk about this two-hour retro, that happens every quarter, it starts with, you know, contracting, creating a space. But then it starts with the team lead opening up with their own insight. Like whether it’s good or bad, this is the insight about myself. Even they have huge role modeling job. Because you can’t expect everybody else to take care of themselves if you don’t take care of yourself, because then you set the ceiling. And I’m obviously really into this topic of wellbeing, but also, I’m a parent, I’ve got two children, I’ve got a seven-year-old, a two-year-old. And I also have developed the vocabulary with my seven-year-old, that mama doesn’t know everything and sometimes mama just has bad days. And you know what? Mama is honest about it. To the point that if I have had some kind of outburst, my daughter literally says, did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed? Are you hungry? Sometimes she walks away, she comes back and she says, you know, I didn’t appreciate when you do that, but I understand because I was late with blah. My daughter’s doing that because I have been honest about when I was not okay. And you know what? It’s nice. It’s nice that I don’t have to always be right. It’s nice that I can have an honest conversation. And you know what? It means that she respects me when I do say something because she knows I can fess up when I was wrong.

25:26 Mallory: I love that you shared that story, and I have to tell you a funny story. So, I have ADHD, and I have a three-year-old. I have been talking with her about it sometimes when I forget things and I have a pretty open dialogue about dealing with that in front of her. And yesterday I picked her up for ballet. I picked her up from school early and she said, mom, did you bring the snacks? And I said, yes, I did. And she goes, did Daddy help you remember? And I was like, yes, he did. 

25:58 Arosha: Ah, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. There is no work life Arosha that treats her team like one way and then goes home and is like, mother knows best at home. No, there is one Arosha and she behaves the same. And that is the example. That’s what we’re about. Like, this is lifestyle habits across both personal and work life. And if we can encourage people to be more self-aware and do these little steps throughout the day, they’re more aware of the pressure, where the pressure’s coming from. They’re able to communicate, and the teams create an environment where people, when they say something, they’re heard and you readjust. This is how we collectively create better environments so that people can operate happily, right? That’s what we want.

26:48 Mallory: Yeah, the original way I found Quan was that you all were doing a webinar on how to support neurodivergent employees in your workspaces. So, can we talk about, for a moment, the intersection of wellness and wellbeing with Neurodivergence?

27:05 Arosha: Oh yeah. It is a topic of huge personal importance for me because my daughter has not been diagnosed yet, but we can see the signs. One of the things I’ve noticed over the last few years, especially as I’ve gone more into the tech world. The tech world does a pretty good job because so many developers are on the spectrum. The tech world really has done a good job of identifying the difference between managers and makers and the fact that certain developers, like once they go into a certain stream of thought, like you should not schedule meetings, we are acutely aware of how meetings can really put off people with, say, autism for example. So, we try and do a synchronous communication, lots of stuff. So, the tech world is very acutely aware because some of the most talented people are on the spectrum, and so they create structures for that. What has been surprising for me with my daughter at school, how little the school system is catering for children that are different. And I don’t blame it on the school, I blame it on the system. But for most of the world we’re geared for the middle of the bell curve. And if you’re not in the middle, they do everything to push you into the middle. And yet the true brilliance is outside of that. The true genius of someone like that. The people that have shaped the world, right, they’re not in the middle of the bell curve.

28:20 Arosha: It’s important for us to be aware that what we consider to be the norm might actually be making it really difficult for certain people to shine. You need to be aware that individuals have different constructs to which they need so that they can shine. And as a manager, as an organization, you need to be aware so that you can enable to create the construct so that they can shine. And that is their neuro divergence or any kind of, you know, you give cognitive diversity. But how do you create flexible structures and how do you create a modular approach so that people can pick and choose what works best for them so that they can shine for the time that they work for you?

29:03 Mallory: I love that advice because I was about to ask in the absence of necessarily knowing what an employee is dealing with and not being allowed to ask certain questions, how you can create an environment that allows for folks to have access to the types of structures or modalities of doing things? And I think that modular approach that you talk about is so important. And what I love about that is I think for nonprofit leaders who are listening to this, and I have 100% been guilty of this as we’re talking, I’m realizing it, designing things around how I, as the leader needed them designed, what I would have liked. And one thing that I did once that I’m now realizing maybe helped with some of this is, I had different people on the team plan different meetings. And didn’t hold them to structure or time. It did allow for more of that sort of creativity, and it wasn’t actually always meetings. I think it was like, there was a certain thing we had to accomplish each week and every staff person had a week where they were in charge of getting it done however, they wanted to get it done. And I had one staff member who did this whole like poster thing on the wall, what you think about that? If there are other strategies that you would recommend for folks there? 

30:21 Arosha: It starts with psychological safety. You really want to create an environment where people that are diverse, different, whether it’s different backgrounds, cognitive diversity, or whatever, can speak up and can say, oh, something’s not right, or make suggestions. And so, best way to do that, and there’re proven methods, but if you can create an environment where someone makes a suggestion and you put it into practice like you did, that’s a great way. Because then you’re going to get other suggestions. I remember like the first time, like we were interviewing certain developers and they wouldn’t switch on their camera and I thought that was exceptionally rude. And sometimes we’d have team meetings and then they’re there and there’s no camera and everybody else has it, and I was like, we should enforce that. And it was my cofounder Lucy who was like, we should not because there’s a reason why. I had not considered that actually there’s a reason why that I didn’t understand. But just enabling them to do so was enough. And so, you want to create an environment where people can do that, they can come in at 10:00 AM on Wednesdays because they like to take their dog for a two hour walk on Wednesdays. As a leader, when you are encouraging it and you give space, then it naturally happens. 

31:30 Mallory: I love that. Is there a question I’m not asking you that I should be asking you? 

31:35 Arosha: Ooh, that’s an interesting one. No, I really enjoyed the conversation. No, I’d love to answer whatever you were thinking of asking. 

31:42 Mallory: One of the things that I love about your platform and just what I saw on your website is your commitment to really using science and behavioral science behind the work. I was just curious to learn a little bit about how you decide the role that science and testing and experiments have played in your work? I thought it would be really interesting to hear. 

32:04 Arosha: Oh, that’s a wonderful question. I always joke around; I want to be a psychologist. 

32:09 Mallory: Me too. 

32:10 Arosha: Yeah. So, I couldn’t be one, so now I surround myself with them and one of the founding fathers I say of Quan is an org psych and I always say that he’s the consciousness of Quan. And we have a deep, deep commitment to science because the study of wellbeing is fairly young, it’s a hundred years. And so, we feel that as Quan becomes more and more successful, we want to share our learnings and we want to impart that so that the science also improves. And so, that’s why we’re looking for every excuse to do scientific validation, but also collaboration. And we’re about to announce a collaboration with a leading UK University, which is very, very exciting. And how we identify scientists, I mean, there are so many. So, we work with cognitive psychologists, organizational psychologists, behavioral scientists. It really depends on the topic and which element you’re trying to tackle. For Quan obviously, we look at teams and organizations, so organizational psychologists are the best. When it comes to individual interventions, we get the council from clinical psychologists. It really depends on the topic. And because we look at the very broad spectrum of wellbeing, we then call upon individual therapists, counselors, coaches for unique insights. And so, one of the things that Quan is doing is, we are growing a partner network where we actually work with specialists of burnout, specialists of mindfulness or whatever, because we want to disseminate research, we want to disseminate knowledge. And Quan itself will be the platform that will collect the data and point to rituals or interventions. But we want to get amazing brightened minds and give them a way to further spread that knowledge. That’s our commitment and how we’re trying to do it. And Quan is a movement wrapped in software. We are all about how do you get wellbeing at the heart of success, how do you make wellbeing a strategic priority. And we know that creating a measure and a way to manage is one way of getting that done. That’s what we do. But we want to work with leading minds and scientists, and other software providers. 

34:19 Mallory: Amazing. Tell folks where they should go to learn more about Quan to connect with you. I’m so grateful for this conversation. 

34:26 Arosha: Thank you for the opportunity. So, to connect with us, it’s very simple. It’s www.quanwellbeing.com. If you search for Quan and Arosha Brouwer, I think there’s only one Arosha Brouwer in the world, so you’ll probably only come across me. 

34:42 Mallory: Very good. 

34:46 Arosha: Connect with me on LinkedIn and I’m always open to meeting great people and my team is always open to meeting great people.

34:53 Mallory: Thank you for joining me for this conversation. 

34:56 Arosha: Likewise, thank you.

35:04 Mallory: Okay. There is so much inside this episode that I love, but here are my favorite takeaways. 

Number one, compartmentalization does not serve us in building a healthy life. Our mental and physical wellness are interwoven with our personal and professional lives. 

Number two, athletic performance involves recovery and self-care. The foundation for those go time moments when we need to push. Fundraising needs to be thought of similarly. We cannot always be go, go, go. We need time in between to rest and regulate our nervous systems. 

Number three, heavy unrelenting workloads may satisfy some productivity metrics in the short term, but not without having a downstream impact of not having the space necessary to create and innovate. Resilience and vulnerability are mutually reinforcing. Where there is openness, there is room and safety for flexibility change, and growth. 

Number five, wellness is not either or. Nonprofit workers can care for and honor others while also acknowledging the need to care for themselves. I thought her insight around noticing the way nonprofit leaders don’t want to acknowledge that they need help because they are also helpers was really fascinating. 

And lastly, when designing workplace systems, we need to take a pause and ask, do these structures embrace and offer latitude to people with the full spectrum of styles, needs, and approaches? 

Okay. For additional takeaways and tips inside this episode, go ahead on over to mallory erickson.com/podcast to grab the full show notes and resources now. You’ll also find more information there about Arosha and Quan and our amazing sponsors Feathr. Thank you for spending this time with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, we would love it if you would give it a rating and review, and share it with a friend. I’m so grateful for all of my listeners and the good, hard work you’re doing to make our world a better place.

And if you miss me between episodes, stop by and say hello on Instagram under whatthefundraising_  Have a great day and I’ll see you next week.