Every Child Needs Someone - Kathryn Fernandez

0:00The CMO Whisperer:Hey, welcome to The CMO Whisperer Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest today is Catherine Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer of Big Brothers Big Sisters Independence. Catherine has spent her career helping people reach their full potential. First as a teacher, then as a Peace Corps Youth Development Volunteer, and later through leadership roles across Philadelphia's nonprofit community.

0:44The CMO Whisperer:Today, she leads one of the region's most impactful organizations, working every day to create life-changing mentoring relationships for young people across the Philadelphia region and southern New Jersey. Before joining Big Brothers Big Sisters Independence, Catherine served as Chief Development Officer at Habitat for Humanity Philadelphia, where she helped lead a period of significant growth, strength and fundraising efforts and spearheaded the organization's first multi -year campaign, raising a whopping$5.75 million to expand its impact. And throughout her career, Catherine has built a reputation for combining strategic leadership with authentic relationship building and a deep belief that every young person deserves someone in their corner.

1:27The CMO Whisperer:Her work has earned her recognition as a Philadelphia Business Journal 40 Under 40 Titan and a Titan 100 Hall of Fame leader. Catherine Fernandez, welcome to the show. Hi, Steve. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. You are very welcome. And it is my pleasure. And it is a cause that I am very interested in as well, which we'll touch on later. Okay, I got I want to start your journey first, if that's okay. Great. So I'm curious, and I'm sure everybody is, is what originally pulled you toward like this mission driven work? And when did you realize this was going to be your career?

1:58Yeah, so I've always been called to do something that makes me feel like I have a purpose in life. And, you know, if I'm going to spend eight, 10 hours every day of my time on something, I wanted to feel really personally meaningful. And I wanted to feel like something that is contributing. So I don't know when that started. I think it's just kind of always been a little bit of a part of my DNA. but it originally kind of evolved out of I my very first career was at the teacher and I'm a musician so I was a high school music teacher and I mean I originally had wanted to be a Broadway star but turns out that's a little competitive so I went in the direction of teaching instead and it was a really great experience I taught down in North Carolina for two and a half years and as we all have heard being a teacher is incredibly difficult and I didn't make it to that three-year mark where they say, if you make it, you stick around.

2:48The bureaucracy of teaching, the lack of resources, it was really a challenge. The thing I loved, though, is working with the students. I still follow some of them on social. I still have relationships and conversations with them. And it's been a very long time now. And so that evolved. And I was like, what am I going to do next? And I joined the Peace Corps. And I was able to serve in the Peace Corps as a youth development volunteer in Belize, in Central America. And that was an incredible experience. It gave me a chance to deepen my understanding of the different perspectives and experiences of youth because I was in a whole new place and do direct service in the youth sector in all kinds of different ways.

3:24You know, I started a literacy program at a library and I worked with young girls that were in the foster system on a women's empowerment program. And I started a Cub Scouts troop and really got to test all kinds of different programs with youth. And I loved that work. So I was like, I'm going to come back to the States and I love being a volunteer, but I need to make money. How can I be a volunteer for the rest of my life, but also make money? And I was like, nonprofits, that's about as close as I can get. So I wanted to pursue that path. And I needed to, I had been working for a long time at that point.

3:58And I didn't really want to start completely over in my career. So I was like, how can I get a degree and really like catapult into this space? And that's what brought me to Philly. I went to grad school at Penn. I got my master's in nonprofit leadership and kind of started my journey here in Philadelphia and started my journey in working in the nonprofit sector. And it's been quite an amazing ride. I've worked with a variety of nonprofits and a variety of sectors throughout the city. But I was 10 years, almost 10 years at Habitat for Humanity Philadelphia, an incredible organization and really a beautiful time in the evolution of my career and in my life and accomplished wonderful things there and really built my leadership to where I am now.

4:40And as I was starting to explore maybe some next steps, a few really interesting things kind of kept popping up for me. I was mentoring young women at Penn from the program that I had graduated from. And I loved that experience. I really felt this incredible connection to helping young women consider their next professional steps, pursue their careers. and most of the time the conversations were all about how to build confidence in the professional space and in their personal life. And so I had started talking with some colleagues about starting mentorship programs around the city, and this was years ago.

5:15So there was these little nuggets that kept popping up where I wanted to reconnect to mentorship or I wanted to get deeper into mentorship, but I also wanted to reconnect to the youth development space. And then Big Brothers Big Sisters Independence had an opening and it popped up and I couldn't help but pursue what may be next. And the more I learned about the position, the more I learned about what the organization needed next, I realized this is where I want to be next. And I think this is where I can have the greatest impact with my background and my skillset and what they need. And then, you know, I'm two months in and every day is just further reinforced what, why I'm here and why I'm really happy to be here.

5:57And this is the right place for me. It's an incredible team. It's an undeniable mission. It's a century of impact and data to support that. So that's what brought me here.

6:07The CMO Whisperer:So Big Brothers, Big Sisters, look, it's one of the most recognizable, I think, nonprofit brands in the entire country, right? And correct me if I'm wrong, I believe it started in Philadelphia, correct? Absolutely. And that's one of the things a lot of people don't know. You know, it's over a century old, but it did. There was a judge that kept seeing boys coming through kind of the juvenile detention system or through the courts. And so and going to reformatory school. And this judge was like, I need I want an intervention. We need a better process for what we do with that. And so they started evolving what eventually turned into big brothers, big sisters here over one hundred and ten years ago.

6:45And then Philly has evolved into the oldest and one of the biggest affiliates in the network. And Independence, where we are right now, is serving children in Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, Philadelphia counties, as well as in Jersey, in Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester counties. So it's really expanded. It's expanded beyond working just with boys, but to work with all youth and the vision being to just help all youth across the city achieve their full potential.

7:10The CMO Whisperer:So it's definitely a challenge, as I know you know, that you have to, you have that incredible history and a legacy, right? But by the same token, you have to keep evolving for the next generations, right? So talk a little bit about that kind of fine line, if you will. Yeah. So I think one of the beautiful things is we have this foundation of this legacy brand. And with that foundation, we have, you know, a tremendous amount of data. We have a tremendous, we're one of the most, we're rated as one of the highest trusted nonprofit brands in the country. We have demonstrated stories of impact. We're really well respected.

7:46So those things all work in our favor. One of the challenges, though, is being a part of a federated model. A lot of people don't understand our local brand and a lot of people don't understand our distinction from national. And so as a nonprofit, that's challenging because we're responsible for our own budget. We're responsible for our own programs and we have our own governing board. We adapt to our specific environment. So we're competing for dollars. We're not funded by the national headquarters. There's resource shares, but we're ultimately responsible for our own budget. And just because we have this tremendous brand to rely on and it helps, we're still impacted by a changing political environment, changing economic landscape, competition for dollars and contractions and corporate giving and individual giving and things like that.

8:34So there's, you know, finding this balance between standing out locally and being a part of this national brand can be a real challenge, even if there are opportunities in there. And then with our programs, you know, we have to keep evolving because kids evolve. So we know that our traditional one-to-one mentorship model is a proven model that is kind of the key. But kids need different things these days. So how do we evolve to meet what kids need in the spaces that they're in? So we're getting new programs where, you know, we're embedded in schools now. We're embedded in three schools in Philadelphia, knowing that kids need professional mentors all the time in their life.

9:14and they'd like to get that resource even in the schools. And we have one with career exploration. Well, come to your workplace, your workforce, you can bring volunteers and kids get to do career exploration. Sometimes their first time in a, you know, a several story building. It's sometimes their first time hearing about an industry they've never heard of. So helping kids get exposure to things they wouldn't have had exposure to. So we're kind of consistently looking at what kids need in this environment and evolving that.

9:44The CMO Whisperer:Yeah, in so many ways, it's, and this may be obvious, but the brand, which I'll put it in this context, is no different than any other not for not or regular non-nonprofit brand, say with me, that there's only so much of the economic pie to go around, right? And you're competing for that share of wallet, just like a CPG brand, for example. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's extremely difficult in the current landscape. We're all competing for those dollars. And, you know, I would argue, I've always been a huge proponent that nonprofits should operate a lot more like for profits. There are critical distinctions, but we're still a business and we still need to run a business that has the resources that a for profit needs, too.

10:25And like we need to retain staff. We need to make sure that we're promoting our profile and growing our engagement. We need to make sure that we're, most importantly, growing our finances and our revenue and so that we can keep sustaining for years to come. So it really doesn't need to be completely understood as a different beast as kind of the for-profit sector.

10:47The CMO Whisperer:Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for saying that because I think some nonprofit look at it as, well, we're in a separate, and you are in a lot of ways. But at the end of the day, there's so much similarity. You're a brand. Exactly. Right? And if you look at it that way, then you also want to have a company, like you mentioned, retention and employee culture and all those things that a for-profit company does. Right. Exactly. And how do we stand out locally? We're competing against hundreds of other nonprofits, even just here in Philadelphia. And we want to stand out. And we want to be unique. And we want people to uniquely want to engage with us.

11:27And how do we? It's not even just about the resources. It's about getting people involved, too. And so we have to be really smart about that. We have to be really creative all the time. We have to be up to speed on all the trends. And so that's very similar. And I think one of the things we do really well as a very well-established nonprofit, and I can speak to, you know, my experience with Habitat as well, we're really good at marketing around this people-centered way of looking at things. I think we really use the opportunity to communicate our mission around this asset framed where it's a positive.

12:05There's a huge opportunity to engage with us and we're really sensitive to the populations we serve. And I think we do that really well in our marketing and in our branding, but we're doing it also with really limited resources. And, you know, I was listening to your interview with Stacey Houston and with the Kevin Bacon organization, 60 Degrees. And one of her comments, I was in the car and I was like raising my hands. I'm like, yes, yes. She was talking about how we do all this, but people have the expectation we're not actually putting any money into doing that because we're nonprofits. And so there's this reticence for nonprofits to spend any dollars not on programs.

12:39And she, you know, articulated that beautifully. And I'm like, yes, why is this still something that's misunderstood? Because we have to invest in that even as a nonprofit that's really challenging to make sure you got to spend money to make money. You got to grow profile. You got to invest in the same types of things that for-profits do. And that seems to still be something that is difficult for supporters and partners to understand sometimes.

13:04The CMO Whisperer:I want to get into brand partnerships because the bulk of my audience is at a for-profit company, of course, just by the law of averages. In your experience, what makes for a good brand partner, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I love that question. I think the main thing is if we're going to engage, if you're going to engage with a nonprofit partner, you really want your team to be engaged. It can't be just leadership. It can't be just for the purpose of some kind of win related to exposure. It really needs to be about the company having a team that's engaged behind the mission. So when you're thinking through who you want to connect with, starting with what are your core values and what are your goals around the partnership and how can you align those up?

13:47So sometimes it will be because the company brand or product is really similar to the nonprofits. Great. That's kind of a natural way to start. But I was talking with a colleague once and he runs a for profit that sells pharmaceuticals. pharmaceuticals i care pharmaceuticals and they also have a secondary arm that sells nutraceuticals for animals for for pets and he is flabbergasted because the primary base of his team are like dog people and these dog people want their whole like all the benefits of work to revolve around the fact that they're dog people so like they need flexibility so they can get home on time to walk their dogs and they need they want like all the things they want in their workplace setting is really about their values as an individual.

14:37And so he had to start to frame up his benefits and his work around this. And so they do all their impact giving and their marketing and stuff around supporting the SPCA or supporting causes related to what their team cares about. And there's so much more buy-in when you kind of link those two things together. So I think that's like the primary thing. And then the secondary is there's kind of three legs of the stool. You want there to be engagement. You want there to be a resource share. And then you want there to be a mutually beneficial opportunity to kind of grow profile for both of you. And usually that was a really important part of that.

15:16Right. So you like I said, focus on what the team is going to be behind. Don't forget that what nonprofits need first and foremost is capital. They need dollars to support the mission. And so don't leave that part out of the conversation. And the other is, you know, we all want to grow profiles. So for this, especially that is the thing, but let's make sure it is alignment. Like make sure you're getting feedback from the nonprofit as opposed to just creating your own ideas. Make it collaborative.

15:45The CMO Whisperer:So that's the great advice for, for big brands, CMOs listening, flip the script now to your lens. What do you look for in a brand partnership? What makes for a good, from your perspective? Sure, sure. I think one of the main things is for it to be aligned with things that we're already doing, as opposed to partners coming to us that want to create something that's ultimately going to drive a idea that they have. Right. So the best miners are the ones that come and say, like, what do you need? That's the best first question to ask. And we can say, here are the ways that this could be really supportive.

16:22And I do think folks at nonprofits are really creative. We have to be really creative about our resources and things like that. So we can come up with a really strong list of ways to be creative in the partnership, but let us guide into it as opposed to, you know, coming to us and saying like two months from now, we'd like a hundred person volunteer event. And we want it to be and here are all the marketing things we want to do with that. That's really difficult to manage, but it's it happens often. So really focusing on that. And then the other is for it to be holistic. We not just like a transactional relationship.

16:56We want it to be a relationship. So as opposed to kind of a one-off opportunity, what are ways that we can continue to be in relationship? What are ways we can get your team involved? And we want the partners to fall in love with our mission and to really care about the mission. And I think those make the best relationships.

17:12The CMO Whisperer:Yeah, totally. Okay, before we do the fun part, the random five where my audience gets to know you, I want to give you the opportunity. How can people get involved? Volunteering, partnering, donating, or even joining the team. But before you answer, I want to say I am honored, along with one of my business partners, Daylu Jackson, to be on the organizing committee for the next, I believe it's the 26th annual. That's right. I got it right. Look at that. Big Brothers, Big Sisters Independence Golf Classic. It's Monday, September 14th at the Philadelphia Country Club. Information, you can just Google.

17:47The CMO Whisperer:I think Big Brothers, Big Sisters Golf, I think should come up. Let me know. And I will shamelessly plug. We are looking for sponsors. We're looking for foursomes. Any way you can help, I will say that for you. And I am so honored to have a really small part in that very worthy cause. But if you want to talk more about that, that's great. Or talk about other ways people can get involved from any number of lenses, including, I know, you're going to need some marketing help soon. Yeah, absolutely. Well, first, thank you so much for your involvement and your plug, because that is the next and soonest opportunity to kind of get engaged with us is on September 14th.

18:24And it's going to be a great event. And 26 years, the team knows how to do this really well. So this is my first time seeing it here, but I think it is going to be a lot of fun. So really grateful for you and really grateful for our mutual friend, Daylu Jackson, for chairing that committee and driving that. So really excited. And if people aren't golfers, because there are some of us out there, you know, there's a reception at the event. And some of the folks on this podcast right now may even be chatting at that reception. So if anybody's interested in even coming out and supporting that way, reach out.

18:55We'll make that happen. We'd love to have folks get engaged. We have another event coming up in the fall in November. It's called our Big Futures Breakfast. It's November 4th, 8 a.m. at the Crystal Tea Room. Yes, that's very early, but it will make sure people get off to on for their days on time. And that's really going to be a beautiful event because it's a mission focused event that's going to have a program that's all about our bigs, our littles, our mission. You get to get a really big snapshot of who we are and it's going to be a lovely breakfast. So we'd love people to save the date. No ticket price to attend.

19:27So all you need to do is sign up under a table captain and get to know big brothers, big sisters through that event. And then what you were alluding to is, yes, this is the place that I wanted to share. Please keep an eye on our job postings. We need some new talent. It's not up yet. It will be in the future, but we're looking for some new support in our marketing and communications team. So keep an eye out because we need a lot of talent for our next chapter. We have a great team and we're going to keep building on that talent. So that'll be coming soon. And then the last couple of ways I want to plug ways to be involved.

20:03we're looking for more bigs. We need mentors. We have 500 kids on our wait list, which is amazing because there are 500 kids and their guardians that have identified how great it would be if they had access to one-to-one mentorship. How cool is it that people are out there that see the need for that? But we need a lot of bigs. So if you're interested in getting involved, the team makes it as easy as possible. And we say a lot, it takes little to be big. It also takes a little amount of time to have an impact. So I know it can be daunting to try to build that into your schedule. It is very possible and we know how to make it easy.

20:43So consider being a bank. Consider making a gift. Shameless plug. If you don't have the time because time is precious and what you can do is support by donating. That's another incredible way to support our work, obviously. and all of the things we just talked about can be found with more information on independencebigs.org. Golf event, all of those things, independencebigs.org is your resource for that.

21:10The CMO Whisperer:I will make sure that link is very prominent in the pod and the newsletter, and I'll post it everywhere. Or you can just come to me directly, and I'll connect you right with Catherine. Perfect. Thank you. Okay. You already have some fun here? Not that the rest wasn't fun, but you know. yeah okay let's do it it's just a random five here we go what's one accomplishment you're proud of that never appears on your bio i am my youngest son's little league coach elaborate so i played softball growing up i love ball we play all kinds of sports in our family but they were looking for volunteers so i've been both as head and assistant coach for years now he's nine and he's already starting to outgrow my coaching.

21:54So it may not last much longer, but my dad was my softball coach growing up. And so to be able to do this with my kid is really like one of the coolest things.

22:04The CMO Whisperer:I love that. That is fantastic. Okay. What's the best piece of advice you ever received? And do you still think about it today? Oh, that's a good one. I think the best advice is that everything is temporary, the good and the bad. And I do very much rely on that because when the good is happening, it keeps me humble to realize, to remember that it's short-term and it keeps me present. And when something difficult is happening, I just keep reminding myself that it will pass. It will, we will move on and there will, is light at the end of the tunnel. And I actually really rely on that in my day-to-day on both ends of that spectrum.

22:40The CMO Whisperer:Yeah. I bet this too shall pass, right? Right. Right. Okay. If you weren't leading Big Brothers, Big Sisters, Independence, what do you think you'd be doing or what would you want to do what's your dream well yeah yeah broadway's off the table probably at this point so i'm giving you the magic wand so you can i two very different ends of the spectrum i would love to perform on broadway that would be a dream or the other end would be like hiking across some country or hike through hiking the appalachian trailer just totally getting lost in nature and zooming entirely out of the real world into kind of the quiet of it all.