121 - Empowering Teams in Fueling Success in Health and Hunger Advocacy with Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida's Dawn Koffarnus

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional, and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Don Kefarnas, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the Chief Health Systems Officer and the CFO Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Yes, that is correct. And thank you for having me on the show today.

Absolutely. So the Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida is basically a massive food bank for Central Florida. Is that correct?

It is. We have a 7-county service area and we distribute about 300,000 meals a day to our food insecure population here.

You would not think in Central Florida— I live in Central California— or anywhere that we would have that kind of need here in the first quarter of the 21st century in America, right?

And the need has changed so much over the years. Um, at the beginning of food banking, there was an understanding of what food banking was and, and who was hungry and who was in need, and we developed a traditional food banking system, General Food Distribution of resourcing donate, primarily donated food with some purchased food and using our network of currently 625 agencies to distribute that food to the food insecure individuals in our community. And over the years, our economy ebbs and flows and economic issues shift and we have inflation and we have job losses and recessions and supply chain—

pandemics.

Who would have, who would have imagined a pandemic in our lifetime? Wow. But those are all variables that have created a perfect storm right now of significant need for food.

And this isn't something that we read about in the newspapers or in the media. It's, it's like it's an ignored problem for whatever reason. And yet they're—

well, it's misunderstood, I think. I think a perfect example of it is in March of 2020, what happened? Pandemic breaks out and businesses are closing. We live in a heavy service industry in Central Florida. Job losses, no tips, no gigs, no live band music, everything's shut down. We're going home. Well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that your neighbors across the street and down the road who work in those industries are being very negatively impacted. So the community knew, and they stepped up. They stepped up in a big way, because that's a basic essential need— food. So we received more financial support to help our neighbors in need than we ever did before, because they knew. They knew about the problem.

That's amazing.

We're still having the same problem, the state— same level, but the understanding is the economy is rebounding, right? And people are going back to work and there are opportunities. So why is the need still there? Well, when something like that happens, it's a long-term impact where it can take years for individuals to recover, paired with inflation, supply chain issues, right? Health and hunger-related issues.

So you have not been in the nonprofit arena your entire career. You were in corporate finance for a long time. Tell us a little bit about your backstory.

I grew up professionally in corporate finance. You are exactly right, financial services. Um, started out undergrad degree in accounting, disliked accounting, imagine that. And I think there are a lot of really great aspects of it, but I preferred the finance side. I preferred the financial planning and analysis. And eventually moved into capital markets and doing mergers and acquisitions. And I loved it. I loved it. It was so much fun. It was really— I feel like I was trying so hard to prove my business acumen and strategy work, and I could fit into a corporate finance environment like that. But there was a real disconnect for me, and that disconnect was because it was a bigger priority for me to raise a happy, healthy, functioning family than it was for me to be professionally successful. So I segued into nonprofit at that point.

This is a challenge that our society still hasn't figured out, and especially in corporate finance, which is male-dominated. It, um, it saddens me that really talented women have to fight that work-life balance. Maybe men do too, but maybe, maybe the cultural stereotype is they work hard and the women are the caregivers. I don't know. I— it—

there may have been a shift since the time that I left. I left in 2005. Okay. So, um, you know, I think there, there are some differences between working in that environment today than when I did it. And, and of course everybody's individual, unique, and they have their priorities and—

right.

Different family situations.

I will say that the shift that I see is I'm the chair of the Board of Trustees of our local law school, and I watched a massive shift from being male-dominated to now, I think, in our graduating class of last spring, less than 10% of the graduates were men. And we're seeing more and more— this is our local state university, uh, the enrollment is 70% women, 30% men.

That's surprising. Wow.

Massive shift. Now I live in a really disadvantaged— I live in Central California. I live in the mountains. It's nice up here, but down on the valley floor, it's all agricultural. And with agriculture comes poverty because ag workers are very at the bottom of the food chain. So we have a lot of poverty here. But the thing that's encouraging is that young women are pushing themselves out of that poverty, getting educated, going to law school, going to med school. And we're gonna see a real dramatic change in the next 20 years of the shift from being male dominated to probably being female dominated. And I smile at that.

Yeah, that's remarkable. I would not have guessed that the shift was that significant.

Yeah, it's amazing. So you moved into the nonprofit world for work-life balance. What was that shift like for you, moving from high-pressure, high-stakes, exciting M&A work to serving people?

Yeah, it was really overnight changed my life. So I went into, uh, a YMCA environment, which is kind of a pretty corporate nonprofit organization. A lot of people don't know that YMCAs are not-for-profit, but they are in fact, and there's a whole mission model around that that makes them a nonprofit organization. But it's still program revenue, aquatics, after-school programs, sports. It's earned— it's a business. And so we were also expanding here in Central Florida at the YMCA, and so it was a lot of building new brick-and-mortar facilities. And so I could take my finance experience and help find financing using tax-exempt bonds and other means in order to enable them to expand at the rate they were expanding. So it was a really great experience. And then like any business, uh, in, in 2008 when we had the Great Recession, what's one of the first things that has to go? Well, a YMCA membership. So we were experiencing a lot of attrition of membership and program revenue. I was overseeing the, the finance side of it, in forecasting and planning. So there were some significant reductions that needed to be made, and I ultimately ended up leaving the YMCA and took on my first CFO role, and that was at Coastal Community Action. So Community Action Agency, which is the other end of the, the spectrum, is in terms of nonprofit work that was almost 100% federally funded programs with very little community support. It was, it was federal government funding. So imagine somebody with my corporate finance background moving into nonprofit. Technically I've got nonprofit, but it was still very much business-minded operation, right? Going into grant-funded, um, community action work. So you, you get to see a different population and way of living and way of surviving in that kind of an environment. But I preferred an environment where there was more or less concentration of individual funding sources. So I really wanted the community buy-in. I really wanted to work for an organization where we could blend program revenue and we can blend government support with a huge community buy-in and support of the, of the work. And then I ran into Second Harvest Food Bank. They were looking for a CFO, and I thought, yeah, I think that's a good blend. I would really like to work in that capacity, and that's such an essential basic need that we can all know and understand and relate to. So I, I made it. They brought me in as their CFO. That was in January of 2013, and I've been their CFO for over 10 years now. And the, the odd thing that happened is my life perspective, uh, outlooks. My family grew up and changed. My 3 small children are now fully grown and launched. And the, the transformation that happened to me professionally, uh, was, was significant. And so I'm still the same, uh, business-minded individual that I always have been. It's, you know, it's just a part of who I am and how I think and how I operate, and it's brought me great success in a lot of ways. But I also came to an environment that enabled me the autonomy to be compassionate and understanding and patient and really learn how to be a leader and a servant leader by understanding that compassion and empathy, uh, really goes away further than, than you would think coming from a corporate finance background.

I can see you glow when you talk about this. Yeah, because those— the idea of compassion and empathy in corporate finance are anathema, it seems like. Not a lot of, not a lot of that. And yet you can take your education, intelligence, and experience, combine it with compassion and empathy and caring, and amplify the work, right?

And at first I was giving all the empathy, caring, and compassion to others. And realized that, oh, I have an opportunity to be my more authentic self here. That goes both ways.

Yes.

So I could put down that, that guard a little bit to let people know me and really gain trust in who I was as a leader. So that was a nice transformation as well.

So you've been doing this with— you've been CFO of the, of the, uh, Second Harvest uh, food bank for 10 years. What gets you excited in the morning now to get you up and get you going?

Well, it's mission-driven work. So I know that I have the, the knowledge and the skill set to lead a large complex organization that fights food insecurity in so many different unique ways that I don't have to worry about their financial sustainability. I, I have a strong finance background and, and business planning background, so I get excited that I can help an organization with the depth breadth of impact in 7 counties of Central Florida, get the work done and change people's lives in a mission-driven environment. And then, of course, my title is also Chief Health Systems Officer, and that's fairly new. And I had the opportunity to learn about the social side of it and the programmatic side of it. And what really jazzed me was wanting to fight food insecurity, not just from pumping more food into the community, but really looking at some of the root causes of poverty and hunger. One of the most significant root causes is nutrition, health outcomes. We need our kids to be focused at school. We want them to be well-rested. We want them to be able to learn. We want their mental health to be as good as it can be. We want them to be alert and we want to fight childhood obesity and we want to prevent development of any chronic illnesses. And one of the most powerful ways to do that is through using nutrition as healthcare before it becomes food as medicine.

So the title of, uh, Chief Health Systems is using nutrition as a modality for feeding healthy kids and healthy families, right? And preventative in nature as opposed to reactive in nature, which is where allopathic medicine is at.

Yeah, and you can imagine my CEO's reaction when I said, you know, I'd really like to lead the health and hunger work, and just kind of looked at me like, what about being CFO? I said, oh no, I'm keeping that, I'm keeping that too. I, I can do it all.

You've probably got the CFO stuff dialed down now so that— I'm not going to say you do it in your sleep because you've got a, what, a $200 million operation, something like that?

Well, and, and, you know, I tell you what, I couldn't do the CFO role without having developed a very strong team. So I strongly believe in professional development and making sure that there's succession planning in place. And I've got somebody that I'm working with in order to succeed me one day, potentially, and, and making sure that we have a team that I empower them to do the work and know what they're doing and why they're doing it, and not just go through the motion, but to really understand it conceptually. So I, without that team, there's no way I could, I could have taken on the health and hunger work as well.

So, and you like the health and hunger work?

I do. I really, I love the health and hunger work.

Yeah.

I mean, it seems that, that, that really is floating your boat.

Can you imagine being told that you have a chronic illness and that you are in a situation where you don't have enough money to even buy food and being faced with, well, what do I do with this if I'm I've got hypertension or I've got diabetes. And I know that shopping the outer aisles of the grocery store with the lean proteins and the produce and the whole grains is way more expensive than going in and get— getting the heavily processed food.

Right.

So what a conundrum we're in when, when we look at 19% of GDP is healthcare costs and how much of that is dietary related chronic illnesses.

A huge amount.

And how much of that is food insecure population. We have a lot of work to do, and imagine how powerful of an outcome that would be if we could all understand that, learn that, and work together to push healthy food out there where it's needed the most.

Quite a journey from being an M&A specialist to doing this kind of work, right? Don, what is it you think that's unique that you bring to the table as you reflect back all these years?

Well, just who am I? You know, if we look back at my trajectory, I'm, you know, there's this expression, born on third base. You may have heard it before. There's an old, I don't want to say old, but there's a gentleman named Barry Switzer. So he was a college and NFL coach who used this in his speech. Maybe back in the '60s, I wanna say, born on third base. Well, we're not all starting in the same place. We all start in different wealth disparities or racial backgrounds or family environments. And for me, I grew up in an environment that, you know, I really didn't think very highly of myself for many, many years. And it took me decades in working professionally to get there. So what's one of the most guarded protective ways to do that without opening up your kimono, so to speak, is to work in a tough environment like corporate finance. So I was able to really use those strong skill sets of business acumen and strategy without really being authentic or letting my guard down at all or letting anyone see any kind of insecurity. And then over the years, just that transformation of why I switched the type of work I was doing. I did it for a, a very selfish reason, for work-life balance. I wanted to be there for my kids, and I didn't want to feel like I was coming in short at work if I was going, you know, taking care of a sick kid or going on a field trip. And I didn't want to feel like, you know, I was not there for my kids when I was at work, and, you know, vice versa. So I, so I made that transition. And then, and then listen to me talk about the health and hunger work that we do. And the mission-driven work. So it's that uniqueness of me is watching myself grow from a very guarded, protected, insecure individual to somebody who's learned about who, who am I. And I could never have done that without being a leader to others and learning just as much, if not more, from them than, than being— than letting them learn from me.

It's so interesting to hear you tell your story because that, that would describe my journey as well. I mean, I hid a lot of insecurity I had with arrogance and intelligence and highly educated, um, but it really wasn't until I started working in prisons training inmates to be peacemakers that I had this huge humbling experience. That really shifted who I was as a human being. Imagine somebody like me, I'm 6'1", 215 pounds, white hair, lawyer, walking into and looking at my very first students in 2010, 15 women all serving life or long-term sentences. Every one of them had killed somebody. And they're looking at me saying, "Who are you and what are you doing?" because I was evil incarnate to them. Every bad thing that ever happened to them looked like me. Yeah. And that was, um, that was pretty eye-opening. And to your point, going through experiences like that and the experiences that you've gone through teaches you about yourself, and you learn to open up and be authentic and be vulnerable and be powerful and all of a sudden you start living life. Yeah, it's amazing.

You start building relationships and trust. Wait, what? I can let some— I can let someone in?

That's right. And I, and I bet if you look back and look at your colleagues from 20 years ago or longer who are still in corporate finance, they are— I'm gonna just make a guess here because this is what I see with my lawyer colleagues that I've seen over the years who are still practicing a lot, they're about burned-out husks, and many of them have died. And I look at myself and I, and I say, I am, I am enormously blessed to have— be strong and healthy and serve others.

Yeah, similar, similar. I look back in, in my old corporate finance colleagues and I see them still in the same similar situations and challenges that they're still dealing with. But you know what's interesting, they follow the work that I do here in a mission-driven environment too. So I see— and there's been a lot of work and advancement around leadership and being authentic and being vulnerable as leaders and being servant leaders. Critical. So I do see that they see it, and— but I think I see also that kind of longingness to want to be more plugged into a cultural work environment like that.

Oh no, I teach, I teach leaders deep listening skills, and, uh, it's— some of them find it very difficult to be able to listen to emotions. I teach people how to listen to emotions rather than the words. And but when they get it, it's life-transforming and really powerful. We're talking about that. What in your organization and your life, tell me about the value of listening as a, as a, as a basic value, leadership value? How important is that to you?

Well, it's one of my, probably my single most powerful trait. And I, you know, like I said a little while ago, I wasn't born on third base. I was maybe in the dugout.

Okay.

Um, hadn't, hadn't, you know, lasted to hit. I had some work to make up. And so I was an introverted, insecure individual, and what I used to overcome that was listening and observing and watching others intensely, very observantly. And then as I grew into an adult and into my professional career, that skill set is ingrained in me, and it has served me very well in understanding where someone's coming from. And it isn't just what's coming out their mouth. In, in fact, it usually isn't what's coming out of their mouth. It's how they say it. It's the tone, it's the look, it's the situation. And because, well, I am an introvert, very strong introvert, I am good at hearing and watching and seeing things that a lot of us miss otherwise.

You, you were talking earlier about how you're grooming people in, in your team to be able to step up in succession planning. How much, how much is talking about listening and the importance of listening coming up when you have these talks, developmental talks with your people?

It's very important and it comes up in different ways. You know, we all have different skill sets and personality traits that, you know, put us in one place around the listening scale than another. And I pull my team together on a regular basis and we talk. And if somebody has a challenge or an obstacle or something they're, they're really struggling with to overcome, we work collectively as a team to help troubleshoot those kinds of issues. And teaching listening is a big part of that. In it, one of the, the biggest areas where you can teach it is when there is conflict and challenge. So, um, when you can take that time out and, you know, I'm a mother, I've raised 3 kids too, so if I have to put— I, I'm— I don't parent my, my team here, but those skills are transferable, right?

Exactly.

And we talk about breaking down obstacles, barriers, and in different levels, and really teaching one another and giving each other the patience and the trust to, to listen and to express ourselves.

Yeah, there's a whole, um, concept that's, that's being researched now around psychological safety on teams. And there was a Google study that came out a couple of years ago where Google was really curious. Why do we have 1/10 of 1% of our teams are absolutely exceptional and everybody else are kind of okay? And, and what the researchers found was that when there is psychological and emotional safety on the team, that's the driver of performance. And the key to psychological and emotional safety is having people know how to listen to each other. And I thought that was— of course, Google didn't implement any of that, but, but the findings, the findings are remarkable. And it's kind of what you're talking about, that for me, in leadership today, one, being authentic, vulnerable, knowing how to listen creates like psychological safety. Those are foundational. Then on top of that, you can layer in knowledge, experience, you know, subject matter expertise, that sort of thing. But if you don't have those basic skills, to begin with, um, creating a, a really outstanding dynamic team is going to be very difficult. That's my experience anyways.

I agree. And that, and it's easier said than done because we're all human and we all erupt and we all have emotions and, and, you know, there are, there are triggers that happen and we have to learn how to recognize them and deal with them, take, take a break from it because, you know, we're not perfect. We're all human.

It turns out there are some skill sets that most— that I teach, that I think I'm the only one that in the world is teaching this. There are skill sets based on some neuroscientific brain scanning studies that show that when you, when you listen to emotions in a particular way, you literally de-escalate a human brain, and you can do it in 90 seconds or less. This is why we've had so much success in the prisons, because we teach our incarcerated students the skill, and they can immediately go out and stop fights and arguments and gang riots. And violence simply by how they listen to and reflect the emotions of upset people. And what's really neat is it's a transferable skill, it's duplicable, replicable, and it only takes about 6 to 8 weeks to master.

Yeah, well, no doubt you've read the book Crucial Conversations, right?

And, and Difficult, uh, Difficult Conversations. I know those guys. And Voss's book, Never Split the Difference, he teaches sort of the same concept, but I started working in this area about 10 years before he did. So we're all kind of converging onto this idea to focus. It's not the words that we speak, as you mentioned before, that's not what's important. What's important is the emotional experience that we're having in the moment, and that's what we need to be paying attention to.

Agreed.

Really interesting. One more question, I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself, Dawn, that we wouldn't know about unless You revealed it to us.

One thing about myself you wouldn't know— well, as much as I put my kids first in my, in my whole, uh, upbringing, I really— and I, I take such pride in them, and they are the greatest gifts of my life, but I love it that they're all grown and they're fairly independent. And I just am— I, I love just this time in my life where I get to reflect back on, on my life and where I've been and where I'm going. And I just have a real desire to hope that somebody can benefit from my road and my experience and my growth and my stories. Um, and I, I think overall, because I'm, I'm most of the time perceived as very business-minded and professional, that I think people forget that I too have a story and, and growth and, and want to— I have that desire to give back and, um, and help others. I don't, you know, I, I want to say I want to help people so they don't struggle as much as I had to. But really, the struggle is in the growth. You can't grow without it. So I don't know if that answers your question, but—

well, we'll come to that. We're actually going over quite a bit, over half an hour. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to speak with us. I really enjoyed this conversation, Dawn.

Oh, well, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it, and the time flew by. I can't believe our time is up already.

It always does.

Yeah.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media. Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.