Learning for Good | L&D Solutions and Leadership Development for Nonprofits

In this episode of Learning for Good, I share how to find evidence that your staff training and development is working, even when you can't prove the training caused the result.

In L&D, we can get hung up on proof. We want to prove that manager development reduced turnover or that leadership training improved performance, and because we can't draw a straight line from training to organizational results, we sometimes stop looking...

How do you get your CEO to see staff development as central to your nonprofit's success rather than something that is nice to have?

In this episode of Learning for Good, I sit down with Elizabeth Cushing, CEO of Playworks, to explore how a nonprofit CEO thinks about learning and development and staff training and development.

In nonprofits, resources always feel finite, and staff development often loses out to more urgent priorities,...

How do you get your CEO, COO, executive director, or board to see why investing in staff is not just important, it's mission critical?

In this episode of Learning for Good, I break down how to get leadership buy-in for staff development in your nonprofit.

The first step is to stop talking about training. Leadership already has a goal in the spotlight, and training isn't it, so pushing it into the conversation just gets you tuned out....

One of the most challenging parts of our jobs as  nonprofit learning and development professionals is working with and through other people.  This makes our ability to influence critical to our work.

In this episode of Learning for Good, I sit down with leadership development consultant and relationship expert Morag Barrett to talk about how nonprofit learning and development professionals can build influence and strengthen the work...

How do you design training that actually leads to a job, not just a certificate?

In this episode of Learning for Good, I sit down with Amina Mohamed, founder and executive director of Cameras for Girls,  a Canadian charity advancing gender equality in media across Africa, to talk about  designing learning around the change you want to create.

So many nonprofits build training programs and hope people walk away better prepared, but ho...

In this episode of Learning for Good, I break down three practical shifts nonprofit learning designers can make to build credibility and grow their influence.

Many competent learning and development professionals feel like their recommendations don't carry weight. It's frustrating to know you understand a problem and can offer a better solution, only to have that expertise go unheard. That gap usually has less to do with skill and m...

What do you do when the pressure at work never seems to let up?

In this episode of Learning for Good, I sit down with peak performance coach Jay Abbasi to talk about what it takes to lead under pressure and how nonprofit L&D leaders can build resilience into how they lead themselves and others.

Nonprofit leaders carry a heavy load, with tight resources, shifting priorities, and a mission that never feels like it can wait. That pr...

Do you actually know if your training worked, or are you just hoping it did?

In this episode of Learning for Good, I break down the five biggest mistakes nonprofit learning and development professionals make when measuring training impact.

Most of us know we should be measuring our training, and we want to measure it, but somewhere between good intentions and actual practice, we get stuck. We settle for data that is easy to collect i...

In this episode of Learning for Good, I celebrate 200 episodes and share the five biggest lessons that have shaped my approach to nonprofit learning and development and nonprofit leadership development.

Two hundred episodes in, I have interviewed nearly a hundred guests, built a summit, and grown a community, and along the way, my thinking about staff training and development has shifted in ways I did not expect. This episode is a c...

How do you decide which trainings in your library still deserve a spot, and which ones are just taking up space?

In this episode of Learning for Good, I walk through five strategic questions nonprofit leaders can use to decide when to retire a training program. 

Many nonprofits build a training toolbox one request at a time, until the toolbox is packed with tools nobody stops to evaluate. That toolbox turns into an endless menu ...

Does your learning and development team spend more time responding to requests than shaping where your organization is headed?

In this episode of Learning for Good, I sit down with L&D leaders Kamaria Scott, Rachel Platt, and  Yogi Mueller for a conversation on why nonprofit learning and development teams stay reactive and what it takes to build stronger learning and development strategies.

Too many L&D functions have been re...

In this episode of Learning for Good, I sit down with nonprofit leader Melody Lam to explore how she built a coaching culture by training first-time managers to coach.

Coaching sounds like the obvious solution when new managers struggle to have hard conversations with their teams, but it often gets treated as a perk reserved for executives, and the cost of outside coaches can make the whole idea feel out of reach. 

Melody's expe...

Why does your team go right back to their old habits the week after training ends?

In this episode of Learning for Good, I break down how nonprofit leaders can design training that leads to lasting workplace behavior change instead of a short-lived bump in knowledge. Most training ends the same way. People show up, they learn something new, and within a few weeks it is like the training never happened. If this sounds familiar, you a...

Does your L&D team spend most of its time responding to urgent training requests instead of shaping strategy?

In this episode of Learning for Good, I sit down with Mark Nilles and Scot Vessell, two experienced learning and development leaders, to discuss what it actually takes for nonprofit L&D to operate as a strategic lever.

We argue that becoming a strategic partner starts with an internal shift, from seeing yourself as a ...

Do you have employee engagement data sitting in a survey report with no plan for turning it into action?

In this episode of Learning for Good, I sit down with Wilson Kirkpatrick, Director of People Operations at Waterford.org, to talk about how they used employee engagement data to design a coaching program that strengthened leadership trust and psychological safety.

Many nonprofit leaders collect engagement survey data every year, b...

Your staff already know what to do and how to do it. So why are they still not doing it?

In this episode of Learning for Good, I break down why explaining the why is one of the simplest and most overlooked workplace behavior change strategies nonprofit leaders have available.

Nonprofit leaders pour energy into teaching their teams what to do and how to do it, then feel baffled when the new behavior never sticks. It is easy to assume ...

In this episode of Learning for Good, I share 10 questions strategic learning leaders can ask to move beyond content creation and into real organizational impact, using learning and development strategies rooted in behavior change and performance.

Most nonprofit L&D professionals know that training alone does not create change. But without the right questions, it is easy to build solutions that miss the mark, overlook the real b...

Many nonprofit learning and development professionals know their work matters, but still find themselves executing requests rather than shaping solutions.

In this episode of Learning for Good, I sit down with global learning and development leader Mark Nilles to explore what it really means to shift from order taker to strategic partner, and how nonprofit L&D professionals can build the capability, opportunity, and motivation to...

You invested time and resources into staff training and development, but your team still isn't applying what they learned. Why? Many nonprofit leaders focus heavily on what employees need to learn and how they should learn it. While those elements are essential, they're only part of the equation.

In this episode of Learning for Good, I’m exploring why even well-designed training programs often fail to create lasting behavior c...