Environment Education Victoria
President & Board Member · 2019–2022
Took the presidency of a cash-strapped environmental education NFP and turned it around. Turns out running a non-profit is not that different from running a business.
What I Learned
- A negative earnings position with less than a year of cash runway focuses the mind quickly. The governance problems are usually secondary to the financial ones.
- Volunteer organisations run on social capital. You burn through it fast if you treat it like a command structure.
- The mission clarity at a well-run NFP is often better than at a well-funded corporate. Constraint forces honesty.
I joined the EEV board because I thought it would be a good way to contribute to environmental education in Victoria, and because someone I respected asked. I became President about six months in, when it became clear the organisation had a more urgent problem than programming -- it was running out of money.
The financial position when I stepped up wasn't subtle. Negative earnings, less than 12 months of runway, a model that had drifted from the revenue sources that originally supported it. The first year was almost entirely about stabilisation: understanding where money actually came from, cutting what wasn't working, rebuilding relationships with the government and foundation funding partners who had become less engaged.
The harder part was that none of this is paid work. You're asking volunteers -- often passionate educators who got involved because they care about the environment, not because they enjoy reading cashflow statements -- to sit through budget conversations and make hard calls. Getting that room to move requires a different kind of persuasion than corporate strategy work. You can't lean on authority. You have to earn consensus.
By the time I stepped off the board at the end of 2022, EEV was in a genuinely different position -- profitable, with a sustainable funding mix and a clearer sense of what the organisation was actually for. I'm proud of that. I'm also honest that the work wasn't glamorous. A lot of it was emails, grant applications, and careful conversations with people who didn't always agree with the direction.
The thing I took from it that I keep applying elsewhere: clarity about the financial model isn't just a CFO concern. It's a leadership concern. You can't protect a mission you can't afford to operate.