started in college having an interest in marketing specifically for nonprofits and kind of went down the marketing half without the nonprofit peace for a while, as I kind of started my career, went into retail and learned kind of the basics of marketing and communications and business in general, with the future goal of bringing those same skill sets to a nonprofit. Once I was really kind of honed in on those skills and thought I could make a difference with, and While in retail. I was working on the wreath, the community nonprofit partnerships, and the program and the customer interaction with those pieces so kind of really getting my feet wet in that area. And those programs grew up figure than the retail partnership in became its own foundation that I took over and left the retail space for about five years ago. So really, what inspired me to work on this nonprofit idea is that there are four hundred twenty thousand foster kids in the United States, and there wasn't many retail partners or corporations that were bringing awareness to their need or really getting involved with it like they are around cancers or childhood diseases and things like that. So what the problem was is that it was really fragmented that it was hard to help foster kids across the country because it was a regionalized problem. So kids needed and it was done. City wise county wise all over, but no big overarching reach. So we thought we needed to make it easier for corporations to help these kids. And you knew how to do that? coming from the retail side. So we put our brainpower to work to create a nationwide network and just make it easy for large scale donations and large scale efforts to help foster kids across the country.

well, When we first started working on this project on the retail side, before it was a nonprofit, it was figuring how What is the need? What are the biggest needs? How what one of those needs can we fill realistically, efficiently, and get across the country? Cause it's not always about filling every need, but instead what kind of message? What can you communicate? What can you physically bring in bull with? How much, manpower you have also have much arm muscles you have what you can actually handle in order to get out? So we kind of talks to nonprofit partners all over the place. Small ones, large ones, ones we've been working with deep with years, and what we haven't worked with yet to figure out where are the gaps because we didn't want to reinvent the wheel. We wanted to fill the gaps so that we could improve care. So it really started with listening, learning, researching, and then from there, taking those business skills to be like what can people understand, what can the average person help with, and then how can we do that across the country? It started with the central items of like school supplies and shoes and backpacks and gifts, around the holidays and then has grown as we grew those programs and had more bandwidth and also learned how to help Foster Kids.

So when we actually became our own foundation and then step outside of the retail, the retail space to run independently, it was really kind of building the team from scratch on eight years in, because before we were utilizing the team of the retail partner who helped create it, and we were using their entire I. T. deferment and their entire Daniel sweet, everyone is playing a role. But when we needed to step aside, It was time to grow independently. We needed to feel really critical roles as that we went. We actually went and looked for people that we had specifically worked with before in those skill sets or when looked for different experiences so that we each had a different niche. Like I had the marketing experience down. So we have that piece in the executive director role. But we also needed strategic planning, and we needed someone who had worked with lots of charity partners before, so they had a kind of a lot like herding cats in a lot of ways of working with 200 partners. So how to communicate email and kind of strategically will be really organized and then have the right. Everybody has to be pretty I.T. proficient when you're computer at risk You might have to google it. The I.T. team has to step in and when you know we need to find technology to make it work for us and how can we do mass communications that automatically filled with the information we need. So really going out of our way of everyone needed to be able to fill a niche. But everybody also needs to be able to be a big team player and be able to jump from program to program and skills got to still set and active learners because we're constantly having to figure out new ways to do things specifically with COVID right now. We had to completely revamp how we work, how we go to work, how we reach kids, how he distributes tens of thousands of donations without physically touching them, or physically providing them to someone. And so one of the biggest characteristics we have to look for is someone that's not going to be stuff Looking at these are my job responsibilities and instead looks that let's get it done and what can I learn to do this piece or how do I figure that out? So someone that can go and learn and matter how old you are or how long you've been out of school is a very, very critical skill that I would say. Any nonprofit, I don't know, single nonprofit employees that have one lane and stick to it. You almost always have to go. You're something out.