Nonprofit Management- Depaul USA- Reflection Paper #4

This week you will meet Mr. Charles (Chuck) Levesque, President and Executive Director of Depaul USA (visit his website).

Link to the website to view the interview is: https://app.vidgrid.com/view/NjttzVwiq1MF.

Please view Chuck’s interview, and then write a reflection paper (300–500 words) describing what you learned from his interview. You may want to talk about his organization and its mission. Or you may what to describe the challenges he faces in his work. Since this is your observations of the interview, you may focus on any topic that Chuck addressed in the interview.

ANSWER

Non-Profit Management

DEPAUL USA is a national homeless non-profit organization. It is an affiliate of the DEPAUL International Group. Chuck Lévesque is the president and the executive director of the organization.  The mission of the organization is to provide services and programs for homeless individuals. The vision is to ensure that every person has a place to call home. According to chuck, the main challenge facing the organization is funding. He says that it is important to understand that there is no mission without money. Being a national group, 55% of their funding originates from government contracts. The other remaining amount they have to raise through individual giving and foundations. Raising money from individuals and foundations is challenging for them because they find that some people are only willing to donate to local non-profit organizations. The main challenging part in this is that they have to balance their yearly budgets.

The organization has good retention of their permanent employees as they offer good benefits. They, however, do not have good retention of their temporary staff. There is a lot of turnover in that sector. They spend a lot of time hiring and training their temporary staff, and this is a result of them having multiple jobs; hence they cannot keep up, and some choose places where they get better bonuses. They hire people with the technical knowledge of what is required and those who share the same values. The organization looks for motivated people to serve and have the emotional intelligence to work in such an organization. They also have to be open about their policy. They also hire people with criminal records because they believe in giving people second chances. According to chuck, one cannot run an organization on volunteers. One can use volunteers, but an organization cannot be run using volunteers. They, however, use volunteers where it is possible, but they have hired professional staff to ensure a smooth flow of the organization.

References

Levesque, C. (2021). Interview with Chuck Levesque. https://app.vidgrid.com/view/JLyMesjqr69M