Ingram's December 2022

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4 1. Bill Maloney said his organization has found that people are hungry to lend their service to non-profits. | 2. All organizations, for-profit or non-profit, must rethink working conditions to retain top talent, said Andr é Davis . | 3. Michael Weaver pointed out that scholarships may cover tuition for college students, but many are still challenged to cover basic costs of living, including food.

of The Farmer’s House pointed first to the Paycheck Protection Program of 2020, which “helped retain the quality staff we needed, so when everybody came back, we were intact.” Terry Dunn, reflecting on the Great Recession of 15 years ago, asked about how the current economic challenge, particularly with inflation, was impacting operations. Amy Allison said her operation had been compelled to raise its pay scale floor from $12 an hour starting out to $17. “It’s a huge differential,” she said, “and some of our staff who had been with us for years were resentful, because now people are coming in at the same rate is it took them four or five years” to attain. A direct support professional, she said, now runs $20 an hour, a little more than some can make at McDonald’s. “We have to stay on par to get people to come and work in this profession.” Without that, she can’t staff operations, and care requirements don’t allow for cutbacks in staffing. Chris Rosson said “you see the effects on employers with inflation, but in the general population in unexpected ways. We get a hundred calls a day right now from families that are facing eviction, and a lot of it tied to very basic changes in their cost profile. They have to feed the family tonight vs. paying the rent on Friday, and they are choosing to feed the family. Those are very real choices that thousands and thousands of families in the community are making every day.”

From the education perspective, said Debby Ballard, that’s exactly what students are experiencing: making the choice on whether to eat or pay for other basic needs. “The food pantry at UMKC has grown, and the need has grown even more where students literally don’t have enough food to eat,” she said. “When you think about how funding is different, I do think that corpo rations and individuals are changing their funding strategies to be more intentional than in the past, where they would support a sponsorship or luncheon or something. A lot want to see funds to support the pantry or students who don’t have gas to get to class.” Scholarships help keep the students from making the choice to drop out, but they still have costs for rent, books and other expenses. Michael Weaver, whose Mission Vision Project helps steer under represented groups into health-care education and careers, said that “when you look at scholarships, there are a lot of things they don’t cover, like board prep, and we have kids that have to make a decision between taking extra courses to pass their exams vs., believe it or not, food insecu rity. And some of them are working at the same time.” André Davis, who serves on multiple boards mainly focused on children, said the pathway to greater engagement is understanding what employees want. “It requires leadership to be adaptive, to be agile, and you have to ask your staff,

even your funders, ‘How are you doing? What are you willing to support? If I had an additional need, could you get behind that?’ Sometimes we run toward a funder, because we just want the money.” The Talent Quest Terry Dunn, noting that tens of thou sands of jobs are going unfilled in this region alone, asked what various organiza tions are doing to secure talent while they compete with a private sector starved for qualified workers in its own right. Kathryn Mahoney of Wayside Waifs said the animal-welfare organization had struggled to keep veterinarians on staff and was having additional challenges with adoptions being down and operating costs up. One strategy, she said, is to get into schools and spread the message about career potential, she said, “because they don’t necessarily know that shelters are an option for them.” Kim Gronninger, with Topeka-based financial-services giant Security Benefit, said that “one thing we discovered during the pandemic is that a lot of younger workers especially really enjoyed working remotely, and they left for full-time remote positions.” A hybrid work schedule has helped mitigate that, she says, as have new initiatives to encourage volunteering and add to the company culture. Gloria Jackson-Leathers noted that many employees simply have to work at home; it’s not a choice, because they can’t

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