Her Story
About Heidi
My current role really combines communication, education, and outdoor learning, and I have a pretty extensive background in all three things. I was a teacher for 13 years at the middle school, high school, and community college level. I did a lot of outdoor programming with the Student Conservation Association and other environmental education groups. I've worked in nonprofits and in nonprofit communication off and on for decades, but I also am a writer. I published a book about the history of women's soccer, and I was the editor-in-chief of a quarterly international magazine for about 4 years. I had my own writing business for about 13 years. I just spent 9 years working on this History of Women's soccer book, so I've got a pyramid of knowledge in that. My main area of expertise today is communications and development. I'm always looking for grants, writing grants, communicating with sponsors or other funders, and communicating with our team at Pacific Education Institute to learn what kind of stories we should be highlighting on social media, in our newsletter, and in external media. I work in systems, updating and maintaining our systems in Salesforce. It might look like going out and having face-to-face meetings with funders or people who I could feature in a story, writing an article, writing a grant, or writing a grant report.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Heidi
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think just flexibility to some extent, and just hanging on. If I think about the book, holding on to what really mattered about it, even though it was a tough process. It took about 9 years, as I shared, and I think just remembering why, why I'm doing what I'm doing, whether that's in my job or with a project like a book where nobody's really looking over your shoulder, it's completely on you, just remembering the why.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
It's not exactly advice, but just the idea that with nonprofits, early on it was really like, well, you have to have the passion for the cause. But it was sort of like that was all there was, and what I've learned along the way is that it's not enough just to have a passion for the cause, you need to have a vision that's really clear. And you need to have a business plan. So if you have all 3 of those things, great, but just having one or sometimes even 2 isn't really enough to make it sustainable, so it's important to just be clear about all three.
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