What It Means to Finance with Courage

Often one of the greatest prevailing challenges many nonprofit organizations face pertains to money, or rather not having enough. Finances, while maybe not the most exciting topic to most people, is critical to the overall success and sustainability of all types of organizations, especially nonprofits that depend on the generosity of donors and funders to be able to continue their vital work.

As part of the Young Center’s Finance Team, we witness and engage in the conversations that are not always pleasant to have, including conversations about budget cuts that need to be made, suggestions for how to allocate funding during the fiscal year, and so forth. From the outside looking in, it may seem like traditional Finance Teams are the rationalists of organizations; the ones splashing icy water on the visionaries, bringing them down from their big dreams and creative ideas, dampening down the fun when it is time to get real about the numbers.

At the Young Center, I like to believe our Finance Team is made of dreamers too. We lead with courage in our financial work by finding the financial opportunities to fund our organization’s dreams into reality.

Financing with courage is all about letting strategy, dreams, and trust in our teams guide our financial decision-making process, not the other way around. When financial decisions govern what an organization like the Young Center can or cannot do, and we put an arbitrary cap on how much money can go towards a specific initiative or goal without listening to and responding to the organization’s needs, that is when the impact we can make on the lives of immigrant children can be severely restricted.

Recently, the Young Center engaged in a multi-month process of solidifying our Fiscal Year 2024 budget. We met with each team across the organization, encouraging individual teams to put together their proposed budget for their department and asking them to outline their priorities, their needs, their goals and the money required to fund them. This staff-led process allows us as a Finance Team to listen first and fund second.

We trust that no one knows our work better than our team members on the ground who are doing it every day. They are experts in what they do, and they have inside knowledge about what they need to feel supported, to deepen our impact, and to advance our Young Center mission. As a Finance Team, it is our job to listen, to trust our teams, and to respond to what they are telling us they need to be successful. Then, we work our magic to ensure an organizational-wide budget can adequately address each team’s expressed needs with proper financial support in a way that does not jeopardize the Young Center’s sustainability.

Over this past year, the Young Center has experienced tremendous growth in our staff, including on our Communications Team. Never before did we have a designated team of communications and media experts, but it was investment in our organization’s mission that our leadership identified as a core need and one we invested in financially. With the growth of our communications team, we have had to respond to the expressed needs of our communications staff and trust that they know best about the tools and resources they need budgeted to be able to do their job successfully.

At the heart of our team’s magic to build a functional budget for the Young Center is our integrity. We remain honest with ourselves, each other, and the wider organization about the challenges we may be facing, the unforeseen circumstances that may be making budgeting difficult for any given year, as well as the windows of opportunities to invest in a longer-term vision that is essential to our organization’s ability to support impacted immigrant children.

By Izadora Rabelo and Paulette Jones, Young Center’s Finance Team