Environment Education Victoria
President & Board Member · 2019–2022
Took the presidency of a cash-strapped environmental education NFP and learned that polished communication and genuine communication are not the same thing.
What I Learned
- Empathy is a functional skill, not a soft one. Authentic communication lands differently than polished communication -- people can feel the difference.
- Talent density matters enormously in small organisations. One or two genuinely excellent people changes the ceiling for what's possible.
- Corporate communication patterns are a liability in rooms built on trust, not authority. The sooner you notice you're performing, the sooner you can stop.
I stepped up to be President at EEV because I thought I could make the most difference from the chair. That turned out to be true and also harder than I expected.
The thing I didn't anticipate was how much I'd have to unlearn. Coming out of consulting, my communication style was calibrated for corporate rooms -- structured, clinical, built for people who read decks. EEV ran on teachers, environmental educators, community volunteers. Smart, passionate people with no patience for corporate presentation patterns, and rightly so. Learning to read that room, and adjust in real time, was one of the more uncomfortable growth experiences I've had.
The operational challenges were real. We were sitting on less than 12 months of cash runway when I took over -- not a theoretical problem, a live one. Financial stabilisation was the first priority. But the harder problem was people. The CEO at the time wasn't the right cultural fit for where the organisation needed to go, and I had to make that call carefully. Replacing a CEO in a volunteer-run NFP isn't like a corporate transition -- there's no HR department, no large budget to manage redundancy packages. For the incoming CEO I also rebuilt the incentive structure contractually, making sure their interests were genuinely aligned with the long-term mission rather than short-term metrics that could drift.
On the board side, I refreshed the roster significantly -- bringing in directors with stronger operational and commercial backgrounds. The original board was deeply representative of the communities EEV served -- that identity was worth protecting -- and the goal was to build on that foundation with added capability, not replace it.
What I took from it: empathy as a functional skill, not a soft one. Authentic communication lands differently than polished communication -- people can feel which one you're doing. And talent density matters enormously in small organisations. One or two people who are genuinely excellent changes the ceiling for what's possible.
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