Leader to Leader: Nora McCarthy

Starting a new nonprofit is typically a grueling experience.  It takes a special kind of person to sign up for the long days, meager rewards, and uncertain future that almost invariably come along with the early days of a nonprofit.  

Nora McCarthy has done it twice.  

In 2005, she launched Rise, a magazine that offers parents who are involved in the child welfare system an opportunity to tell their stories and advocate for themselves. Over the years, McCarthy helped build Rise into a stable organization that has successfully worked with hundreds of parents to document the child welfare experience. 

After stepping down from Rise last year, McCarthy has now launched a new enterprise: the NYC Family Policy Project.  Through research and policy analysis, the Family Policy Project will make the case that New York City has historically “over invested in child protective services and under invested in community institutions and networks that help families thrive.”

Trained as a journalist, McCarthy had to learn nonprofit leadership on the fly.  In this interview with New York Nonprofit Media’s Greg Berman, she talks about how she navigated her departure from Rise, starting over again with the Family Policy Project, and how her approach to management has evolved over the years.  

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Berman
Tell me about the moment when you decided that you were going to leave the more-or-less comfortable perch that you had established at Rise. 

McCarthy
A few years ago, we had started a strategic planning process, where we were looking at what we wanted to focus on for the next three years. The organization had been gradually moving away from media advocacy and towards organizing. We were asking questions like, "How are we going to do this and what does it look like?" rather than, "Should we do this?" I talked with a coach a few times throughout that process. With her help, I decided to lay back and really let the staff and the organization go where it was going to go. We had consultants, meetings with the board and a three-day retreat. At the end of it all, I felt very clear that the organization was making an exciting and much-needed shift. I felt like the process showed that the organization was really functioning well, that we had a plan, and that the team could do it. And I also felt like I was not a natural fit with that work. The alignment between my particular skills and the goals of the organization was less clear. It was a good opportunity for others to take over. I remember thinking, "Okay, we're good. I'm going to go do something else and Rise knows what it is and where it's going."

All that took place two years before I actually left (in June 2021). Then we did the time-consuming work with the two folks who did take over – Jeanette (Vega) and Bianca (Shaw) – to make sure that they deeply understood our budgeting, and our contracting, and our relationships with funders. They were basically running everything without me by the time that I left. 

Berman
Do you have an ongoing relationship with Rise?

McCarthy
They asked me to be available for one day a week for a year, mostly just to support the fundraising and proposal writing. That ended in June. 

Berman
So your contractual relationship is over, but how does your emotional relationship with Rise feel these days?

McCarthy
They're doing them. I'm happy to talk with them, but it's really under their leadership now. We successfully transitioned a long time ago away from me holding any kind of mental ownership. I've really enjoyed seeing the evolution of their work from a distance. I think it's changed from when I was there, but I like where they're going and I'm excited to see what happens.

Berman
That all sounds incredibly healthy. I think a lot of executive directors have a hard time letting go. What’s the secret? Why do you think you and Rise have both been able to move on?

McCarthy
I think it was always in everybody's mind at Rise that I was in some ways a temporary leader. It's an organization that should be, and now is, run by parents impacted by the system.

Berman
You say that you were a temporary leader but you were there for something like 15 years…

McCarthy
For the first eight years, it was just a magazine and it ran on a budget of less than $100,000. We worked in a closet. That, to me, was all really comfortable. I really conceptualized myself as a person with journalism skills and writing skills. Management was always a funky fit for me. But then, in 2013, we shifted to being an advocacy organization and developed more meaningful methods for parents to hold real power. Throughout that whole time, I was asking myself, "Why me?” I'm not a natural fit with any of that kind stuff. I don't think it's easy to develop an organization, even a small organization like Rise with a budget of $1.2 million. I don't know anything about budgeting or management. The organization had to invest in me to learn that stuff. I was always conscious that that investment could be made in other people. 

Berman
So you leave Rise and almost immediately turn around to start a new thing. How has the Family Policy Project benefitted from your experience with Rise? Or, to put it another way, how are you approaching this new project differently than you did with the creation of Rise?

McCarthy
Well, all of those things I said I'm not good at, I did get somewhat better at, so I feel more equipped to develop an organization. I didn’t even remotely know what that meant when we were starting Rise. Rise started as a project of Youth Communication, which is a larger youth development organization that publishes newspapers and magazines written by teenagers, including teenagers in foster care. And so it really never felt like, "Oh, I'm starting an organization." It was a project. And it lived for a couple of years inside of Youth Communication. There was just no intentionality around it, really.

When I was telling people that I was leaving Rise, people were asking, "What are you going to do?" I always gave the same answer: "I would really like to work at a progressive think tank focused on child welfare issues." In New York, we have so many of those that are focused on criminal justice, but we really don’t have one that focuses on child welfare as a justice issue. So, I wrote a paper that attempted to articulate what I think about child welfare in New York City. And I shared it with a bunch of people. One of those people was April Glad at the Pinkerton Foundation. Pinkerton ended up giving me a grant to see what I could do around operationalizing the paper. That was just manna from heaven.

The seed funding to get started was obviously a key moment. Another key moment happened when I started talking to people about it and Tricia Stephens, who's a professor at Hunter College, said, "We could do this together." It has been great to have a partner from the start.

Berman
Am I remembering correctly that the Family Policy Project is part of the Fund for the City of New York?

McCarthy
That’s right. We’re part of the Fund, which was also the fiscal agent for Rise. We’re also part of the Urban Justice Center's Social Justice Accelerator Program.

Berman
Why did you decide to use a fiscal sponsor rather than incorporating as a standalone 501(c)(3) and going the independent route?

McCarthy
Well, from my experience with Rise, it just works really well. The Fund does a lot of the difficult things so you don’t have to. For example, whenever there are HR issues, they have staff for that kind of thing. I don't know how we would have dealt with those things at Rise. And so, when I was starting this new project, I asked them if they would support that, and they did. So to me, as a new organization, it really makes sense because you don't have the money to hire multiple staff to help with administration issues. 

The Accelerator Project at Urban Justice is a different setup. There, it's more about giving you exposure, helping you think through what you're doing, making connections, and having a peer group that is also building an organization so you don’t feel so alone.

Berman
In my experience, there's real excitement that comes with a startup. But there’s a lot of drudgery as well. How does it feel to be going back to square one and having to do all the non-glamorous work that always goes along with starting something new?

McCarthy
I don’t think I ever benefited from the glamour. We never really got to a point at Rise where I wasn't personally doing the budget or sending out an email, or something like that. So, in some ways, it hasn’t really been a transition for me. I think the biggest change has been the lack of an everyday sense of community. There's nobody to turn to on a daily basis. At Rise, we all sat in one room together. The absence of a collective spirit has been unpleasant, I would say. 

Berman
You mentioned the role that Youth Communication played in helping to give birth to Rise. Keith Hefner, the founder of Youth Communication who retired a few years ago, was pretty well known in New York nonprofit circles. I'm curious what leadership lessons, if any, you took away from your time with Keith?

McCarthy
I still see Keith all the time. He was a mentor and a door opener for me. I started working at Youth Communication at age 22. Basically, I've always been working either for or with Keith. Keith's style of management, and I think he would cop to this, is no management. His philosophy is to hire people that he admires and let them do their thing. For people who are not into having a boss, it is fantastic. You had so much freedom, but you could always go and talk to Keith and get his mind on your work.

I personally loved and thrived in the independent spirit over there. So that was my operating mentality. But Rise had to actually run very differently. Ultimately, Rise ran on a very intensive, supportive management style. We were constantly checking in and asking questions like, "How is the organization supporting your growth? How's your supervisor?" It was a very intentional, and intensively team-driven, way of working. 

Berman
The Keith Hefner style that you described is very similar to the management style that I experienced when I first started working for John Feinblatt at the Midtown Community Court. I also really thrived in that environment. But I wonder if that management style is even possible any more, given the way the workplace has changed?

McCarthy
Funding, I think, has changed a lot of things. There are a lot of detailed outcomes that an organization has to deliver. You make promises to funders and then you have to run things tightly to achieve them. 

I guess the other thing I would say is that, while personally I am much better at working in an environment where you have a lot of latitude, there's a lot of people, perhaps even most people, who don't necessarily work that well with wide latitude. It can cause trouble if you're not really being intentional about how people work and grow. Some people are naturally confident and very good self-advocates. Other people, not so much. They have fantastic abilities and ideas, but they're not going to jump in the ring and just start going. So you have to develop more equitable ways of ensuring that, no matter what the personality, people are able to leverage opportunities at your organization.

Berman
I hear you. And I certainly experienced that in my old job at the Center for Court Innovation. But I guess I would argue that when organizations become much more intentional in the ways that you just described, something is gained, but something is lost too.

McCarthy
I agree. I just had such a surprising day yesterday where I met someone for coffee. I had never met her before and we ended up having coffee for three hours. That’s exciting. Suddenly, you're in a very creative space, and you're having an honest conversation. There's a lot that can't happen when everything is rigid. I think that the most important place for there to be that open space is really in the frontline work. Something that is terrible about the child welfare system is that the work at the front end is so codified. There's so many boxes. There's so many specific meetings. But there's very little time just to sit with a person to really find out, “Who are you?" I think relationships are really key to anybody's progress in life. And so, that clamped-down feeling that many workplaces have, actually makes the work impossible, particularly when the work rests on deep trust.