Megan Ihnen

One of my most important mentors was a professor at Peabody who I've stayed in touch with over the years. They were so helpful when I was a wide-eyed grad student wanting to do all the things. They helped me understand what is achievable on your own and what's achievable when you team up with people - that feeling that you don't always have to be the only one, you don't have to do everything all by yourself. Sometimes it's really valuable to work in a team or work inside something, get everything you can learn out of that situation, and then break out on your own. That's part of entrepreneurial spirit - recognizing when you're being called to be a leader and do all the parts yourself or strike out on your own, and when it makes more sense to be on a team, even if it's not the team you put together. They would always say 'Megan, have you thought about...' and my ears would just perk up every single time because it was always this great idea that would probably change my life. That person who just lovingly lays out some steps on your own plan for you - I'm so grateful to them for that. They taught me to realize it doesn't always have to be that all-or-nothing kind of thing. There's value in being the point person and there's value in being in a collective. And when someone ahead of you in their career says 'have you ever thought about,' you listen to that, take it in.

Curiosity is a superpower - I say that all the time and I feel that deep to my core. Just put yourself out there and try things. Get curious about what does it look like from this perspective, what does it look like from a different vantage point, what does your field look like from every single seat in the house. It really makes you indispensable to your company, your organization, your field, or just to the work that you're doing, whatever your big goals are, because you took the time to look at it from all these different perspectives, and that is so incredibly valuable. I say this to my students all the time - I want them to just try things, to put themselves out there, to take an internship, to do a job for a little while, to look at it from a different perspective, and not feel like everything needs to be overly curated immediately. Self-explore.

I see a lot of challenges with our current funding landscape at the federal level and the uncertainty that's happening there. We're seeing challenges that aren't going to have quick fixes. When you look at a grant that's $20,000 less than it was in the past, that's somebody's entire job that's getting cut, and that has so many knock-on effects in our communities. We're always going to want more resources to do the work we do in nonprofits, but we're in a situation right now that is even more challenging in some ways than the pandemic was, because the pandemic was going to end at a certain point. These funding challenges will not change substantially in quite a long time and they're going to have a long tail. After what we all persevered and pushed through to get through the pandemic, to then have this same type of uncertainty and feeling like the rug is being pulled out once again - I look at every day and go, okay, how do we manage this, how do we continue to persevere when this could all just get pulled. Because of that uncertainty, we also experience it on the philanthropy side where donors themselves aren't feeling like they have the ability to step up and support. They're feeling even more closed right now, saying I'm not sure if this is the right time for me to be supporting or contributing in a larger way. You end up seeing that ripple effect happen where the signal of shrinking funding on one side communicates to donors that they should also tighten up their pocketbook strings. They're not thinking we need to show up and help weather this storm, they're thinking maybe we should back off too.