Her Story
About Darlene
Darlene Burke serves as founder and executive director of Ten Toes In, a nonprofit she established 11 years ago to aid formerly incarcerated men and their partners with reentry into society. The organization delivers a six-month intimate relationships curriculum inside prisons, followed by weekly case management, monthly support groups, and resources for housing, employment, legal matters, education, and family reunification. Burke maintains two offices, one in Los Angeles and one in Compton, California, which opened on the organization's 11th anniversary, while also reaching participants globally through virtual meetings. In addition to her nonprofit leadership, she has worked as a real estate agent with Century 21 for 23 years and participates in PPW, Transformative Programming Works, an umbrella group for prison programming organizations. She attributes her accomplishments to the independence and fearlessness her mother modeled as a single parent and stresses the importance of work-life balance to avoid burnout while leading with integrity and treating clients and staff as family.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Darlene
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to the values that my mother instilled in me as a single parent. My mother was always my biggest cheerleader. She always said that whatever I put my mind to, I do it. She taught me that there were no limitations, that the sky was the limit. And she raised me to be an independent thinker, and not to have fear.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice that I've ever received is truly to find the balance between work and personal life. As an Executive Director, it is very, very difficult to have that balance, because you want to give the people that you serve your energy, your time, your attention. But then you burn out because you don't give yourself the personal attention that you need to refuel yourself. So as a leader in whatever area that you're in, you really have to find that balance between the two.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would tell them to always remember their why. Why are you doing what you are doing? Because there are so many distractions in the world that can take you off of your path. It's wonderful to be motivated. But it's more wonderful to be disciplined and have systems that's gonna keep you on track to achieving your goals and making your dreams a reality.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Challenges is funding, trying to obtain enough money to pay my team members, to keep the doors open, to keep the lights on, that's always a challenge with nonprofit organizations. Opportunities is that God put me in this position and he says, Darlene, you're the only person that can do this. So I'm giving you this task, and I do my very best every single day to be the best version of myself as the executive director of Ten Toes In.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Integrity. Treating everyone that I embrace as family. Valuing how I hear people, how I see people, how I support people. I want to make sure that everybody feels love as a part of our 10 Toes In family, and as well as my personal family. And I want to make sure that we're all on the same page, that we're there to really, really support each other in time of need.
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