Effective Community-Building Strategies with Doug Ulman

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Doug, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

It's my pleasure, my friend. So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Sure. So I have the honor and pleasure of serving as the CEO of Pelotonia, which is a 14 year old nonprofit organization that raises money for cancer research at the James Cancer Hospital and Ohio State University Cancer Center. I'm a cancer survivor myself and so I get to do what I love every day, which is helping other people find ways to give back and make a difference in this mission of ours. So it's humbling and it's truly an honor to work in this field and work with amazing colleagues and partners and friends.

Yeah, the work that you all do is impressive and the timing is perfect. Kai was just sitting on my lap. We were talking about how at the Indiana game, Doug and his team and his son were out on the field celebrating. Can you tell the listeners about how things went this year?

Yeah, absolutely. So this community, this Pelotonia movement, is just so generous, so engaged and so excited about what we're accomplishing. And this year at the game against Indiana, we were able to present a big cardboard check to the Leadership of the university for $22 million, which is remarkable given that we're still sort of coming out of COVID and it was quite a bounce back year for us. And so we're on that growth trajectory again. And you know, It's. It's literally 130,000 donations made up that nearly $22 million. And so if you think about that, it is very grassroots. It is people all across the country and around the world who care about this cause in and who give their, their time, their talent and their treasure. And it culminated with a big event last week and then being on the field celebrating with some of our riders and partners, which was phenomenal.

That's so cool. That is impressive. Very good work. Appreciate the work that you do. And I am, I'm so excited that you were able to take some time with us today. There's so many things we can talk about and listeners before every conversation. What I tell people is I want to talk about the things that excite them. Like, like what's really moving you? And when I asked Doug this question, he talked about community. And in every conversation we've had, Doug, like, that is. That seems to be the through line with everything that you do. So tell us more about what community means, like how you define it and then we'll. We'll flow from there.

Yeah. No, I think community drives everything. I think when we assess our own lives and we think about the times when we were at our best, it's when we are in community. It could be a sports community, it could be an educational community, it could be a religious community, it could be a community service or nonprofit community. But when we are doing things with other people and striving to achieve something that none of us can do on our own, I feel like that's when we all are sort of at our best. And that started for me at a really young age because my parents raised my brother and I in the first planned city in the United States of America. A place that was built on this notion of diversity and inclusion and acceptance and service. And so that's just what we knew as kids. And at the time, we were oblivious to what it meant. But it wasn't until later in life that I realized not everybody had that opportunity. Not everybody was united in that. And it's really driven my career ever since I was. Was diagnosed. Because what I couldn't find when I was diagnosed with cancer was a community of other young adults who'd been down this path. I had everything else. I had great family and Friends and teammates and insurance and education. But I couldn't find other people my age to share their journey, share their experience, and sort of connect with. And I think that's one of the reasons I learned at an early age the value of community, the value of doing things together. And I think right now, more than ever, as an isolated or increasingly isolated society, we've got to find ways to come together. We've got to find ways to bring people together, either organically or intentionally, to live in community.

You're so right. And when you think about it, it's a really great point. I never thought about it. Our best times are with other people. We are. We're social animals. Right? That's what we need. And now I want to go a bit deeper into your story, because there'. There's an interesting element, because right now what you've done is you've been able to create an incredible community with what you're doing with Pelotonia. And you've been doing that in different ways throughout your career as well. And now we understand, like, a bit of that origin story. But I want to go a bit deeper. When you, at a young age, had cancer, you said it was an isolating type of experience. You were alone. Can you tell us a little bit more about that feeling of being surrounded by people but still feeling alone?

Yeah, I mean, it. Look, I always say being a young adult is hard as is, and then when you layer in cancer or a health challenge or any type of obstacle, it makes it that much harder. And again, I had everything I thought I needed. I had highly educated parents. I had insurance. I had teammates, classmates, professors. I mean, I was 19 years old. I thought I was invincible, right? I was. I had the whole world in front of me, and yet there was something missing. And I. It took me a little bit to figure it out. But what was missing was that community. Somebody who I could just look to, and we could easily bond without even saying anything. Somebody who would share their experience. And I would get chills because I would say, gosh, that sounds so familiar. Somebody who could say, this is what you can expect a year from now or six months from now, or sort of how this. This journey and process is going to go. And that's what I couldn't find. And I was sitting in my dorm room one day in Providence, Rhode island, and I called my parents and I said, we got to do something. And they said, what do you mean? I said, we got to start something to bring people together, because I know they're out There, I know they exist. And if I'm having this feeling, there's got to be others. And as soon as we did that, we were so naive, didn't know what we were doing. But as soon as we started an organization, people started calling, saying, oh, you know, my sister had cancer when she was in high school. My cousin, my mom, my. You know, and it just showed that there just needed to be a platform, just a convening, a place for people to feel empowered to share their story and connect with others. And, you know, time and time again, and at least in my life, I just continue to see the value in people having these shared experiences and being able to live and be in community. And that's why I try to have that be the thread of everything I'm involved with.

It makes so much sense. And it makes all the difference, too. I mean, especially when you think about it from, like, a health perspective, physical and emotional and mental health. Community helps you be well in all of those arenas of life. And it's so funny. I think a lot of times when you think about our, like, our Western mindset, we often fail to appreciate just how powerful community is because we can be so individualistic. Totally.

Well, and I think that's a big part of, obviously, your expertise and your focus. This idea of shared sacrifice, like, you can sacrifice a little bit to gain a lot. And I think that's often lost on people. And I remember when I was a kid and I've said this often, but my parents taught my brother and I the difference between a community and a crowd. And what they told us was, in a crowd, people push and shove an elbow and try to get ahead of the person next to them. And in a community, people look around and they embrace and they smile. They might hug or handshake or fist bump these days, and they know that no one actually gets to move forward unless we all move forward. And it's just like a nuance of, I'm not trying to fight with the person next to me to get ahead of them. I actually believe that there's enough abundance of resources that everybody can have a high quality of life. Everybody can have a community, everybody can have education, everybody can have access if we all just commit to that vision. This idea of a little bit of shared sacrifice, I think, goes a long way to impacting communities and the world.

It makes a lot of sense. And now when we think about how to do this, because everybody might be listening and saying, you know what? This Doug guy, I think he knows what he's talking about here, I'm down with community. Let me go ahead and try to start one. And now we run into difficulties. Now it's hard. What is it that makes building community so hard?

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Look, I think communities are diverse and they can be all shapes and sizes, right? You can have a small. I'll use an example. You can have a book club in your neighborhood, right? It might be eight people, 10 people. That's a community, right? You could have a school that's a thousand people. That's a community. You can have a city or a community that's 10,000 or 100,000 people. So they come in all shapes and sizes and there's no parameter other than, in my mind, some shared values. So whatever community you're a part of, if you think about those communities that you may be involved with, there's some shared alignment, there's some value, there's some aspirational goal with pelotonia, it's to eradicate cancer, right? So we have a large community because so Many people have been touched by the disease and. And are fed up with it and want to do something to make an impact. So that's our unifying, sort of one goal. But other communities have other sort of shared values or shared characteristics or shared aspiration. And I think that's what unifies people. Even if the rest of their lives might be seemingly polar opposites, they can come together around that book club. They can come together for that religious experience, they can come together for that sporting experience. I mean, I think back to sporting events, and we've all been to sporting events, where people. You look around the stadium and you realize the diversity in that stadium is so great, and yet everyone is embracing, everyone's hugging, everyone's got tears coming down when their team wins. Like, people are rallying around something that brings joy and community. And, you know, again, sports, in my mind, is one of the great examples of how people come together from seemingly totally diverse backgrounds.

Absolutely. And there's so much research on that as well. The shared goal. Right. But also not just having the shared goal, but actively working together toward that goal. There was this really cool study, one of my favorite studies, where they had, I think it was kids at camp. And so they start. They created a rivalry. They wanted to see if they could create a rivalry like kids across the different buildings. It's like, yeah, we don't like each other, blah, blah, blah. And so they would compete with each other, and they would haze each other, those type of things. But then what. It was brilliant. What they did was they had, like. They made it seem like somebody else came in, like another set of campers or something that came in and, like, messed up both of their things. And so they said, you know what? We need to get those other campers. Right. And so now they have a shared goal, a common goal. And they were able to create that rivalry and create that animosity and then break down that rivalry and animosity. Animosity by creating that shared goal, moving in unison toward one direction.

Totally. Totally. And I mean, that's beautiful. And it's true, like, over and over again in history. That's what happens. You find the commonality and you realize that bonding together, we're stronger than ever. Right. And so we can go further. Right. The word peloton is the group of cyclists that ride more efficiently together. A peloton is the group because we can go faster. I can draft off of you. I can. I can save my energy, and we go faster as a group. So the whole ideation of pelotonia comes from the word Peloton, because the more people we add to the community, the faster and further we go. And I just think that's such a great metaphor for any sort of community building activity. And I'm actually, I'm reminded. Just this short story, but I'm reminded. So my wife grew up in New Orleans and we had the chance to go to the first NFL game, the first Saints game in the Superdome after Katrina. And if you remember, Katrina had. After Katrina, there were thousands, tens of thousands of people living in the Superdome. The roof was leaking, people were passing away. It was sort of this unbelievable city within this building for people just to survive. And so when they opened the dome for this game, it was the Saints versus the Falcons. And I just remember being in that stadium and looking around and thinking, the people in this stadium have just been through hell. They've lost their homes, they've lost their family members, they've lost almost everything. And yet for that three or four hours, there were tears of joy. People were hugging each other, strangers hugging each other, high fiving each other. And if you can get that level of joy to a people, a group of people that have just been through the unthinkable, imagine what we can do when we bring people together in ordinary or more normal circumstances. And so I think we just have such an opportunity to continue to provide places for people to come together, because great things will happen.

Absolutely. It makes so much sense. It makes so much sense. And when we. When you think about your experience building these communities, what would you say are the top things that get in the way of effectively building this community?

I think sometimes one of the things that is hard in community building is having it be top down. So it's got to be grassroots. So I'll use, you know, Pelotonia as the example. But Pelotonia is just a platform. It's a platform for people to share their story, to share why they care about this mission and this cause, and to do something about it. Pelotonia has to be about the participant. It has to be about the movement member, the person who's joining the community. It isn't about the organization, and it isn't about us professing our objectives to the community. It's about them having an opportunity to speak what they care about and have that be embraced by others around them. And that's a nuance, but it forces you to give up a little control. You have to give up a little bit of control of the brand and of the movement, and you hand it over to others, and they are the stewards of it. I mean, our mission is only as powerful as the stewards, the participants, the volunteers, the donors. That's who powers this. Our goal is simply to provide a platform for people to do something special together.

Okay, now, leaders are listening to you, Doug, and they just had chills. Not the good kind. They're scared. They are terrified. They said, let go of control. How am I supposed to do that? That's terrifying. So for those scared leaders out there who are afraid to let go, how did you get to that point where you felt comfortable doing that?

Well, I mean, look, giving up control of anything is not natural for most people, right? We all have, like, fears and phobias. And look, I like to be in control just as much as anybody else, but I think there's a level of trust. And I would give my colleagues at Pelotonia all the credit in the world because they see the inspiration from the community. Like, we go to work every day because we hear the stories of why people are participating, and that's what inspires us. And we're driven to just provide more opportunities for more people to be involved. And so we can provide guardrails, we can provide sort of some guidance. But the real reason it works is because we have a very clear and transparent vision and sort of aspiration. So nobody questions the. What Pelotonia is about. We're about cancer research. 100% of every dollar going to innovative, groundbreaking ideas that could have a transformational impact on the lives of people diagnosed. So that's it. Everything we do, we can trust the community because they have the same goal. Everybody knows what we're trying to achieve. And that is the. What I would call the unfair advantage. Not every company has that. Not every organization has that, has that. And so I fully realize how lucky we are to have a specific goal that everyone is aligned around and that. That provides tremendous value and makes it a lot less complicated.

That makes a lot of sense because, again, it's. It's so interesting because when you think about it, everybody's moving in unison toward a specific direction. They're able to do that because we have a clear goal that is clearly articulated and easy to understand. And I love quoting da Vinci where he says, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. And when you think about his work, it was very nuanced, very deep, and it took a lot of work to get to that point. But to be able to create something simple, that is a level of mastery that takes a lot of. Right. So from the outside looking in, we say, wow, shared goal. I get it. It's so clear with peloton. But the pathway to get to that shared goal probably wasn't as easy because you have to have everybody like in the leadership aligned with that. So what was the process to get to that point?

Yeah, it's a good, it's a good point. So I would say first, let me give credit to some of my predecessors who really developed this notion. One goal, end cancer. Right? So simple, so simple and yet so hard. Right, so, so the mechanisms by which we do that are very challenging. The aspiration is clear, the mission is clear. But yeah, the, the strategies to actually make progress towards that are not so simple. And that is probably the biggest obstacle we have every day. It's not that we aren't aligned, we are. It's how do we get there faster because we're super impatient. And how do we tackle something this big and celebrate progress knowing that we aren't going to solve it tomorrow or next week or next month? And that's one of the biggest challenges, because movements and community building organizations can burn out, right? You've got this aspiration and you're now 14 years in and you've raised $250 million. And, and where are we? Where's the finish line? Where's the end zone? Where's the, you know, like, when are we going to stand up and say we did it? And this is a long journey. And if you think about social movements, they are long journeys, right? I mean, the, the, the social entrepreneurs and innovators of the last hundred years, they didn't do this in a month or two months or a year. They did it for their life. And this is something we as a community are committed to. And it isn't going to be tomorrow or next week or next month. We're going to make progress. We're going to save lives while we make progress. But this is a lifelong commitment of the community.

Yes. And that brings up one of the toughest things, right? Because like you said, these types of movements, they take time. And we're moving really, really aggressively to a goal where we're not sure when we will get there. And that's tough. And there's some people, and I think this term is used, this phrase is used as an insult, but it's just a fact. Some people are built differently. So for instance, there might be a volunteer who says, I will work really, really hard for seven days to end cancer. And then they're done. And then there are other People who could do it for an entire lifetime, and they're so passionate about it that it doesn't stop. And so when you're talking about the ability to celebrate small wins, that's something that doesn't happen by accident either. Because again, when you have such a big and ambitious goal, there might be people who just compare their success to that goal. Well, we haven't ended cancer yet, so I guess we're not successful. So how is it that you continue to motivate the volunteers, the people on the staff, even though we're moving to such an ambitious goal?

Yeah, no, you're exactly right. It is an ongoing process. So we have to celebrate and we have to share transparently. So over the years, I'll give you some examples. But over the years, we've had researchers who we've funded develop new therapies for certain types of cancer that get approved by the FDA and are now used to treat people all over the world. Not just people in central Ohio or Ohio or the US but all over the world. And we have to share those stories. One of the stories that we've shared over time is a story where we gave a $200,000 grant to a researcher who had a very audacious, bold idea that $200,000 launched a clinical trial that ended up developing this drug, which is now used again all over the world. Those things are happening, I don't want to say every week or every month, but they're happening on a regular cadence. And the community loves hearing those stories. In fact, every survey, every engagement we do, focus group wise with our community, that's what they want more of. Give me more of that sort of inspiration to keep going. Because that's what they share with their donors, that's what they share with their friends and family. And they say, this is why I arrive, this is why I volunteer, this is why I contribute. We've had in the last two years since we launched something called the Pelotonia Institute for Immuno oncology. They've launched 30 new clinical trials. Not only are they looking at new therapies, but people are being treated on those trials now. So people's lives are being changed as we speak. And it is a long process, but the building blocks are there. And there's enough examples to point to, to say it's working and we got to keep going, because otherwise, if we couldn't have those proof points to say it's working. If we didn't get to meet firsthand the researchers at OSU and hear their story and hear their passion, it would be hard to sustain. But the movement has to be driven over time by those wins, those victories that lead ultimately to that one goal.

It's so interesting hearing you say this, Doug, because I think a lot of leaders might be afraid of setting big, ambitious goals because they say, I might not meet these goals or I might not ever meet them, or something like that. But what you're showing is that you can have it both ways. You can still have wins and celebrate wins, even though you have a massive goal. I think that's, that's a major takeaway here.

Well, I, I. So I try to live by this notion that you should be both naive and audacious because. And we used to talk about this when I was working at the Livestrong Foundation. We used to talk about this all the time, this idea that you can be sort of naive enough to set this massive goal and audacious enough to try. And if you fail. So I'll use pelotoni as an example. If we fail, okay. Quote fail, we will only have saved thousands of lives. Okay. Is that failure? I don't think so. So why not strive for that aspiration? And yeah, if you come up short, you might only save 100,000 lives or a million lives or, you know, some great accomplishment. And yeah, I mean, we, we have a, we have a board member who has been involved in pelotoni for a long time, and he's a CEO of a large public company. And he is phenomenal. And he always pushes us to set goals that, you know, seem unachievable. And I'll never forget one year he gave the example. He said, doug, if you. I'll just use round numbers. But he said, if you set a goal of raising 20 million and you raise 21, you're going to be really happy. He said, but if you set a goal of raising 25 and you raise 23, you're going to think you failed, but you'll have raised 2 million more than if you set the goal lower. And it's so true, like, we're so driven to achieve these goals that sometimes we lose sight of the fact that if we just push ourselves a little bit harder, a little bit further, we will go to places that maybe we didn't think were possible, and we won't have failed. We'll actually have achieved more. And so I always think of that example when we're setting our yearly sort of goals and our budgets and sort of say, like, maybe we could set this a little bit higher and have an aspirational goal that might be. Might be unachievable. Maybe it's not. Maybe we can get there.

This is so good. For the sake of time, I have to wrap here, but, you know, I could just chat with you for ever about this. But before you go, let's get an opportunity not only to let folks know about how they can get involved with Pelotonia, but also the really cool things you're doing with pickleball.

Well, first of all, first of all, thanks for having me. And second, you know, we welcome anybody to Pelotonia, so you can go to pelotonia.org and find ways to get involved or contact me directly. But anybody who wants to eradicate this disease is welcome. And we would love to collaborate in any number of ways. And yeah, you and I have talked. Pickleball, it's the fastest growing sport. I know you're a recovering tennis player, so I won't go too deep on this, but it is the fastest growing sport. And you know, we started playing it as a family during the pandemic because there were few things to do. And what I realized so quickly is it is an unbelievable opportunity to build community. It is a totally democratized activity. A 10 year old can play with an 80 year old and anywhere in between. And I think, you know, Robert Putnam wrote a book years ago called Bowling Alone. And it was this notion that people used to bowl in leagues and that used to be a social construct in communities that people would go bowling together. And over time, people started bowling alone. And when I thought and heard about pickleball, I thought pickleball could be that pickleball could bring communities together. Leagues, clinics, rural, urban, doesn't matter. And so that's my idealistic view and I think it's happening. People are adopting this sport in droves. And anything that can bring people together is good for the world, in my opinion.

I love it. Doug, thank you so much for taking the time with us. Really appreciate it. And thanks for all the great work you do.

Thanks for having me.

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