#46 Making Sure We Can All Rise Together

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Allison Moore, the CEO of Comic Relief US. Allison spent many years as an executive in global media companies before coming to work in the nonprofit sector, and so she brings that unique perspective to her work in leveraging the power of entertainment to create a just world for So welcome to the show, Alison.

Hi, Erika. Thank you for having me. I'm really glad to be here.

Yes, me too. You— I can— you know, I asked you to join us because I know that many of our listeners are concerned about the effects of the current situation on vulnerable populations especially. And I thought your perspective about what's happening in your sector and how we can help would be tremendously useful. So, Ready to dig in?

Yeah, yeah, let's go.

Okay, so many at-risk people are more vulnerable now than ever before. So how have the pandemic and the ensuing economic downturn affected the populations that you serve?

I, you know, no one could have presupposed what was going to happen with, A, that COVID happened, but also the just tentacles of impact that this virus has, has had. And I think it's extraordinarily far-reaching. Some of the people who were most affected, deeply affected, are the same people who are the most vulnerable. When I think about people of color in those populations and the number of people, people of color, particularly in poverty, who are way over-indexed, and you think about the sort of vulnerability that that population has from the virus for a lot of systemic reasons. You know, this is just— it's been a domino effect. And so we've seen myriad ways that this has affected folks. And when we say this, you know, because we focus primarily through Red Nose Day on children, it's never just children in isolation. It's children and their kind of concentric families around them. So, you know, this has affected hunger, food insecurity, the complete crumbling of the educational system, and some of these public schools that are not well suited to begin with and rely on the sort of infrastructure from nonprofits and others to to sort of fill in the gap. Health programs, of course, and health kind of scarcity for many people and people living in poverty. I think the entire issue of rents and rent destabilization and homelessness that will occur from that will just exacerbate those 2 conditions that I just mentioned.

Yeah.

I think it's worthwhile to say, while we had an economic and, of course, a health crisis, 2 of the first things that come to mind, The social justice and racial justice movement that happened with the killing of George Floyd unleashed what is a huge awareness of the impact of systemic racism as a driving factor in so many poverty factors.

Yeah.

And inextricably intertwined. And I think that has just been a trifecta of incredible impact for people who are suffering. I mean, 54 million people in the US, including 18 million children, are going to experience food insecurity. I mean, that's staggering when you go to your own store, and I go to my store down the street, and look at the amount of food and food waste that happens in this country. And when you just— you almost can't fathom about that, you know, children in the US being hungry, but it is a massive, massive issue. And, you know, I'm speaking in the US. On the global scale, it's off the charts.

Yeah. I mean, that statistic is staggering that 1 in 6 people in the US, the richest country in the world, don't have enough food. Food. That's crazy.

It's crazy. I interviewed a woman last night on a panel. She runs an organization called Copia. And people should check it out. It is around food waste elimination. And she's taken what is sort of technology and hacking and sort of startup hacking to figure out how to get food from A to B. And I think— and we'll probably talk about this a little bit, but in the— with the sort of just complete bomb of the pandemic that has hit, all of the nonprofits that usually did A, B, or C have now had to expand it from A to Z of services and try to, you know, stick their fingers in the holes of the dam, frankly, to kind of ensure that people can get taken care of in the way that— to just even reach the bottom line bar. And on the food waste side, It's a great example of the domino effect of restaurants being closed, food coming out of— not coming out of restaurants so much. And there was a huge pipeline for her in terms of taking that food and then distributing it and finding out the logistics and distribution means, an innovative one, to get to people and to get to shelters. I mean, it just— everywhere we turn, this pandemic has uprooted what were already fragile systems. To give back and to help support people.

That's a great example and kind of leads into my next question, which is, how are the current circumstances making it harder for your organization, for Comic Relief and other social change organizations, to accomplish their goals? What are the barriers that this is putting up?

So from a Comic Relief standpoint, and, you know, our largest sort of campaign that we have in the US here is Red Nose Day, and that Red Nose Day is funded through public fundraising. So unlike most— a lot of nonprofits who do galas and do all, you know, this kind of thing and have like maybe huge mail campaigns, the lion's share of our raise comes from— I always call it like fishing in consumer land to convert consumers to donors, right? So my audience is Walgreens' audience, is NBC's audience, is the people that buy M&Ms from Mars. And because of that, when COVID hit and it hit every sector in the commercial marketplace across the board, you know, we had, just by way of a specific example, you know, we were planning on launching, it's April and May is our timeframe. We sat with our partners at Walgreens and figured out very quickly we couldn't actually sell noses in store. No one was supposed to put a synthetic nose on your face.

Right.

And, you know, and then what was the retail traffic going to look like? So, you know, this is in some ways very analogous to how I would say commercial partners had to pivot. We had to pivot to a digital nose. To be able to kind of create one that was on social platforms and create an entire sort of like unlocking chain when people would buy something, you know, donate online and unlock a nose. It just had to throw it on its ear and had to do that pretty quickly. I think that again mirrors what a lot of commercial organizations did. But on the flip side, so we raise these dollars and then we distribute those dollars out to very specific programs that keep our mission in line, which is keeping children safe, healthy, and educated. Yeah.

In the—

and we are tightly wound with our grantee partners. And so our grantee partners are people like Boys and Girls Club of America, Save the Children, Covenant House, the IRC. It's across the US and globally. As we sat with them and sort of huddled with them, like, what are you seeing? What do you need? What can we do to support you? I think the just recognition of the spiraling impact that was happening So not only did their funding infrastructure go away, the galas, the events, the drives, the public fundraising drives, which were more like you and I riding a bike together and raising money, that kind of thing.

Right.

Which is not the way we do it, but the way these folks do it, all crumbled within a couple of weeks. So that pipeline of dollars coming in that was a natural flow, really decimated. And then the actual operational taxation for these organizations of what they had to support, You know, tripled. So Covenant House, which is one of our grantee partners, and they're an amazing, amazing organization that sort of— they support homeless and trafficked and runaway youth across the country and have an incredible program. But, you know, in many ways, this is not fully describing it. It's sort of a shelter framework, right? There's a place to stay, there's a place for health, and, you know, this kind of compendium of services. for these youth. When this happened, you know, Kevin Ryan, who's the CEO, said, I had to start PPE and get rooms that were kind of sheltered for the kids who actually had COVID.

Mm-hmm.

And we had more food that we needed to supply, but the foods we got from restaurants weren't coming in. I mean, the funds that were coming in had dried up tremendously. And then the operational taxation of actually running the nonprofit and all the services increased beyond expectation. And so, you know, what used to be a very kind of known cash burn every month of what the kind of services— and never enough money to fund it, but certainly an understood kind of rhythm of what that operational spend looked like— went out the door. And so—

So fees went up and income went down.

Easily.

So then I always promise my listeners some practical next steps, which I think is particularly important in the conversation we're having. So what can each of us do to support and enable the kinds of organizations like yours that are trying to bring social change and support the most vulnerable people during these crazy times?

Yeah, I'm going to hit it on the first level of if you are in a position to give, give what you can, you know, in time and money, small and large ways. I think there's an enormous amount of need and people feel like that my one thing is not going to do anything. Untrue. It's kind of like the idea you should have when you vote.

Yeah.

Act, act, and act now.

Yeah.

Stay informed. I think the idea, you know, we're all in our little bubble, we all sit in our social media feeds, and, you know, get outside your immediate sphere. Just the data I gave you on the sort of children in the US who are, you know, will be sitting in hunger and/or severe sort of food deserts, that's staggering. So, you know, listening enough to understand, A, how perhaps luckily we are insulated from this, perhaps on your day-to-day. I hope that's the case with all of your listeners, but understanding, you know, what is happening more broadly and where it is you can help and how you can do that. And then finally, now's the time. I mean, if you're a leader or at a company and you have the ability to understand what purpose-led activity and actions do, not only for your employees, but how it makes you show up to consumers, how it makes you show up to your partners.

Yeah.

It is no longer the time where you can kind of turn your head away and that doesn't affect me. it actually will be starting to more affect your bottom line because that's the kind of decision-making that consumers are going to be making now. Like, what have you done in the midst of all of this stuff? Have you just kind of protected your bottom line, or have you actually kind of protected your bottom line but then also looked to give back in a material way that made a difference? And I think that's what anyone probably sitting in a decision-making capacity should be running through their head now.

That's great. And I think that's really true. I mean, a lot of data shows that consumers, especially younger consumers, that companies want are much more purpose-driven and really do look to see how the companies they buy from or support are behaving on a social level.

It's a decision-making tool. It is not just a whimsical thing. It actually is part of their sort of process of vetting A or B. And I think the smarter C-level executives understand that. And I think, you know, I mean, that's been a huge, huge piece of our Walgreens relationship is just that defining commitment to community and health and health helping children has been a commitment from Walgreens from the top and NBC's from the top. And I think that that matters. It matters to the end user.

That's great. So thank you so much. This is such an important topic. And I love your passion, which is very inspiring, and your clarity and practicality. I know we could talk about this for another couple of hours. But I always promise our listeners that it'll be short and sweet. So listeners, if you're interested in finding out more about Comic Relief US, just go to comicrelief.org. where you can get more information or make a donation. And to discover how to be a more courageous and generous leader during difficult times, you can just go to ProteusLeader.com, click on Topics, and choose Accepted Leader. So thank you so much, Allison.

Thank you for having me. It was great to talk to you about this.

Yeah, it was wonderful. Thank you for listening, everyone. Until next time, here's to creating the life You truly want.

We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. For more insights and tools for leadership and management, join us at theprudentialeader.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.