Breaking Free from the Scarcity Mindset: Insights from Hailey Hechtman
In today's nonprofit landscape, staff often operate with the mindset of needing to be scrappy and constantly tightening their budgets. While fiscal responsibility is crucial, a risk-averse, budget-obsessed mindset can prevent nonprofits from realizing their full growth potential. This "scarcity mindset" stifles innovation and limits the impact that organizations can make.
To understand how to overcome these constraints, we sat down with Hailey Hechtman, who has been in the nonprofit sector for over a decade and currently serves as the Executive Director of Unsinkable, a leader in mental health storytelling. Unsinkable helps people bridge the gap between struggling with their mental health and taking steps towards mental well-being.
In her role, Hailey collaborates with the Unsinkable Board of Directors and team to set strategic direction, enhance organizational reach, capture impact, develop partnerships, and foster community conversations aimed at decreasing stigma and creating spaces for meaningful dialogue around mental health. Recently named to The Peak’s Emerging Leaders 2024 List, Hailey shared insights into how she's been able to grow and scale her organizations by shifting the typical nonprofit mindset towards one that embraces calculated risks and prioritizes sustainable growth.
Join us as we delve into Hailey’s strategies for overcoming the "scarcity mindset", her approach to fostering innovation, and the importance of mindset work in the nonprofit sector.
“Can you share a bit about your background and how you got involved in the nonprofit sector?”
I have been working in the nonprofit sector for my entire career, starting back in university. When I was in my second year at Queen’s University taking my degree in psychology, I found it odd to be focusing on a subject related to connecting with people, and yet not being required to get hands-on experience.
As a result, I applied to become a volunteer with a local distress line in order to get a better idea of what it is like to work front-line in mental health, an area that I have always been incredibly passionate about. Given the size of the organization, and its completely volunteer-run structure, I ended up taking on a variety of different roles: from volunteer coordinator, to trainer to interviewer and eventually took on the role of executive director.
This sparked something in me.
A desire to empower teams, design programming and think strategically about the impact that we could have in our community.
From then on I knew I wanted to spend my career in nonprofit leadership.
Throughout the past decade plus, I have had the opportunity to be involved with a number of different incredible causes- from founding and launching the Yukon Distress & Support line in Whitehorse in 2014, to starting the Yukon Inter-Agency Network on Disability in my role as the Executive Director at Teegatha’Oh Zheh, to moving back to Ottawa and leading efforts in accessible, inclusive hiring at Causeway Work Centre, to now running Unsinkable, a national charity harnessing the power of storytelling to bridge the gap between those struggling with their mental health and steps towards mental wellbeing.
Along the way, I have also worked to support other initiatives through consulting from strategic plan development, to creating standardized narrative reporting for the Yukon Government to curriculum development for the Northern Institute of Social Justice. I even brought to life a community of practice in Ottawa gathering leaders in the social impact space together monthly to spend time together, sharing lessons learned and ultimately reducing the loneliness that can exist when you are in a position sandwiched between a team and a board.
I love this sector and feel immense gratitude that it has allowed me to contribute in so many ways to issues that I deeply care about.
“How do you define the "scarcity mindset" within the context of nonprofit organizations?”
To me, scarcity mindset in this sector means a difficulty seeing the possibilities and can lead organizations who have a strong mission and vision to pull themselves in a number of contradictory directions for fear that funding will not be in place to support the world that they are intending to do for and with their communities.
It means seeing others working in the space with a lens of competition and suspicion, expressing anxiety about working together to avoid assumptions of overlap or duplication.
To me, thinking scarcely in the social impact space means always focusing on what you don’t have rather than being creative, open and innovative about what you can do with your current resources and collaborative around what you can build if you start to take an ecosystem approach.
It means staying small not necessarily in size but in impact, relegating your efforts to what feels achievable and fits within the confines of a grant versus reimagining systems. It means not investing in teams and infrastructure, and being risk averse to trying new approaches or establishing new streams of focus.
It means being trapped in what you have known versus freed by what you are learning.
“How do you balance the need for fiscal responsibility with the desire to take risks and innovate?”
This is a great question and one that I feel is incredibly misunderstood in the sector.
The concept of fiscal responsibility in nonprofits is one that has been inaccurately assigned to spending the least amount possible and avoiding overhead in order to reduce critique for how an organization operates with public funds.
To me, fiscal responsibility is understanding what you want to achieve and investing accordingly. It is about having a clear plan and impact goals that you are aligning your activities to in order to create the greatest benefit for the community you serve.
This includes investing in building a strong team, having in place systems that allow you to run efficiently, growing people’s capacity through training and professional development so that the work continues to become that much more effective. I see fiscal responsibility including taking risks and innovating.
If you stay stuck, with broken processes, or are under-staffed or do not have people who can act upon your mission, there is a significant risk there. If your community changes and their needs change with them, there is a risk to maintaining the status-quo as what you offer may no longer be what will support and empower your stakeholders.
If we shift our thinking and recognize that it is not about finding balance between these two but instead about integrating them, we can go so much further.
“What challenges have you faced in your efforts to scale Unsinkable, and how have you addressed them?”
As a young organization in the social impact sector, we continue to focus on refining our mission and our strategic direction. This means constantly asking questions about our impact, our program design and looking for ways to build that are sustainable while honouring the ever-evolving nature of the work that we do.
When it comes to scaling, for us it has been about acknowledging our current capacity while visioning forward where we want to go.
That can at times be challenging to communicate with funders as they tend to prioritize organizations that have an established program stream and a long history of delivery.
That said, our approach to the question of “how do we know?” is always being answered through a variety of impact measures from pre and post surveys of our programs, online analytics and testimonials, we are able to showcase why our core focus on storytelling is a powerful way of encouraging people to access mental health supports, cultivate community and foster a perception shift that reduces community and self stigma.
Another key way that we are growing as an organization is through partnership development. As a national organization, we feel we have a responsibility to amplify local initiatives across the country, especially those who are taking a community-centered approach to mental health.
By aligning ourselves with others across the ecosystem, we are not only able to add capacity, we are also able to introduce and pilot new programming that combines the resources, expertise and ideas of multiple agencies in order to scale in a systems way.
“What leadership qualities do you believe are essential for driving growth in the nonprofit sector?”
From my perspective there are three key leadership qualities that you need to drive growth in the nonprofit space.
The first is curiosity. You need to be someone that is able to see possibilities, ask big and small questions, be open to exploring avenues that do not feel obvious, and be ready to dive head first into trial and error in order to find what will have the greatest impact on your community. By being open and always learning you will be able to find supports, lessons learned and knowledge that can make a huge difference for your organization’s structure and direction.
The second is collaboration. Being someone who sees others as an essential element of their journey, bringing in their feedback and perspectives to build something better. Without collaboration, you are only able to access as much creativity as you individually possess. By working with others, whether within your organization by empowering team members to take on new projects or set their own objectives or including other nonprofits in the design of your deliverables, you can begin to iterate so much more meaningfully. Diversity is key to growth.
Lastly, I believe that as a leader you need to be a model. A model for how to show up, for how to communicate and for the mission that you are leading. This means admitting to your mistakes, acknowledging when you don't know, being honest about your limitations and demonstrating what it means to be there for others.
These three qualities are ones that I am by no means perfect at but that I try to work towards every day.
“How important is mindset work for leaders in the nonprofit sector, and how can they cultivate a growth-oriented mindset?”
Mindset is truly everything, especially in a sector that can feel slow to shift and where you do not always see the immediate results of your effort. When we are working on big, complex challenges from mental health to housing affordability to food security and everything in between, it can feel discouraging that we cannot make the momentum that we all so desperately desire. These are all systemic issues that are intersected with policy, capitalism, bias and extend passed our sector into every other aspect of community across the country.
Many leaders feel weighed down by the reality that they cannot generate change the way that their community is asking for and certainly not at the expediency that they know would make the greatest difference.
This means that it is that much more critical that we shift our mindset to one that is driven by what we can influence, where we can collectively advocate and ultimately where we can set new systems in place. That takes imagination, ingenuity and above all else hope.
Remind yourself if you are working in the nonprofit sector that you get to do this work, you get to be an influencer, you get to voice the need for something better and you get to reach out to many different branches of our society and invite them to make change with and alongside you.
I have always liked the quote “we overestimate how much we can do in a year and underestimate how much we can accomplish in five”, and feel that this should be further emphasized every day to keep us recognizing the compounding effect of our efforts and what they ultimately lead to down the road.
Connect with Hailey on LinkedIn here.
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