Digging Deeper on DEI with Art Taylor
About This Episode
So much of the success of any of our DEI work is rooted in our ability to communicate vision through metaphor. It is, after all, a metaphor that connects to emotion, to our human ability to find empathy and build affinity between us. Vision, often, starts with a metaphor built with the heart in mind.
On this season of the show, we are talking about the role of storytelling in social change. And today’s guest has a natural gift for uplifting powerful and personal stories of impact from some of the nation’s most effective charities to build a more trusted charitable sector.
Art Taylor is president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance. As head of the Alliance, he oversees the organization’s work, which includes setting standards, evaluating charities in relation to those standards, publishing the Wise Giving Guide, and promoting charity accountability, plus a whole lot more. Art led the Wise Giving Alliance to introduce the accredited charity seal, a symbol of trustworthiness used by national and local charities that adhere to the Better Business Bureau standards for charity accountability, and it’s estimated that more than a billion impressions of that charity seal exist in the public domain. This is the bellwether that indicates to donors whether an organization is trustworthy.
At the foundation of all this success, however, is Art’s vision of success. This is the story — the metaphor — that touches us, too. “America is a very competitive place. And there are always ten chairs and 15 people. But I believe that we can take those ten chairs, and if 15 people get together, we can rework those chairs and make a bench, a place for us all to be able to sit down. And that’s how we have to view the world. We keep viewing the world as a zero-sum game. It’s not. There’s always more that we can produce if we work together.”
This is a conversation not about building bridges between communities but building a bench and offering those with opposing views the opportunity to sit together on it in the greater spirit of charity, impact, and trust. We thank Art Taylor for joining us on this show this week.
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Art Taylor:
The goal is to create more than we would've had or greater success than we would've had if we have left people out. And if we create more, then there's greater opportunity for people of all backgrounds. We don't have to be fearful of success. And I know that there are people out there that say, well, you must be from another planet. America's a very competitive place and there's always 10 chairs and 15 people. But I believe that we can take those 10 chairs and if 15 people got together, we can rework those chairs, right and make a bench a place for us all to be able to sit down. And that's how we have to view the world. We keep viewing the world as a zero-sum game, it's not, there's always more that we can produce if we work together.
Carrie Fox:
Hi there and welcome to the Mission Forward Podcast, where each week we bring you a thought-provoking and perspective shifting conversation on the power of communication. I'm Carrie Fox, your host and CEO of Mission Partners, a social impact communications firm, certified B corporation and Real Leaders Impact Award winner. On this season of the show, we are talking about the role of storytelling in social change, and today's guest has a natural gift for uplifting, powerful and personal stories of impact from some of the nation's most effective charities to build a more trusted charitable sector overall, charity, impact, trust. These are three important words we're going to be talking about today and that all describe the focus of today's guest well. Art Taylor is president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance, which you can find over at give.org. As head of the Alliance, he oversees the organization's work, which includes setting standards, evaluating charities, and relation to those standards.
Publishing the Wise Giving Guide and promoting charity accountability plus a whole lot more. Among his many achievements, Art led The Wise Giving Alliance to introduce the accredited charity seal, a symbol of trustworthiness used by national and local charities that adhere to the Better Business Bureau standards for charity accountability. It is estimated that more than one billion impressions of that charity seal exist in the public domain, which gives donors a clear, concise and accessible means of knowing whether an organization is trustworthy or not. And I'll tell you, in a time when Miss and Disinformation runs rampant, the work that Art and his team spearhead is essential. He is influencing and improving the nonprofit sector year after year and honestly day after day. And I deeply admire his commitment to elevating the sector. It is a great honor to have him here with us today, so let's get right into this conversation. All right, Taylor, welcome to the Mission Forward podcast.
Art Taylor:
Carrie, thank you so much for having me and I'm really looking forward to our discussion.
Carrie Fox:
So am I. For our listeners, I will say we may only hit one or two topics today because there are some things that are top of mind that we want to dig into. Before we get there though, Art, tell me a little bit about how you got to this important work.
Art Taylor:
Well, it's really interesting. I'll start by saying that I grew up in a relatively low income area and was raised by a single parent who had a eighth grade education, moved from Virginia, rural Virginia to Philadelphia when she was very young and started a career working in a department store and ultimately worked 37 years in the kitchen of a department store and raised two boys to be lawyers and we're doing, I think reasonably well given our situation. But mom had help from a lot of outside agencies. Our church, we were singing professionally in our church at a very young age, and it helped shape us. We were athletes and so we spent lots of time at our local YMCA, the Historic Christian Street YMCA. We went to camps, we went to local, we were musicians in other ways.
And so there were these other formative organizations that helped us grow and become men. And I think that we don't think about these organizations enough and how they really help young people thrive, but they were all nonprofits in some way. And so you grow up seeing this and maybe at some point in your life it affects you, you don't think about it as a child. But later on it did affect me and I got to understand just what it meant to have other people providing services and support so that you could have a decent life. The second thing I'll say is my real connection to the work of non-profits came after I graduated college and I went to a really good school that had a great accounting program at the time, Franklin and Marshall College, and was recruited to work for one of the largest public accounting firms in the world in their audit department.
And way these things work is you come in and you come in with a whole class of people. There were about 24 people in my class, and as it turned out, I was the only African American in my class. But more importantly, I was the only African American in the Philadelphia office of this firm, which had about 190 professionals. And at the time I was just feeling really glad that I could get the job and it was a great opportunity to work and learn about the public accounting world. But looking back at it, some things went on that helped me back, but also positioned me to work in a non-profit space. One of which was you come in and you get an orientation and after a period of orientation they send you out on jobs to do audits of companies.
And all of my classmates were put on jobs and I was not. And it took weeks before I was actually put on jobs, I was essentially relegated to the office and wasn't actually assigned to work on any clients. And I look back and I say, well, they couldn't have thought I was a bad accountant because they wouldn't give me a job to work on. But ultimately when I did get put on a job, it was a non-profit and the firm that I was working on was a group called Opportunities Industrialization Centers of America, which was in the job training space. And long story short, after I left public accounting, I was hired by this firm to be their chief financial officer and then later on I became the CEO of the organization. So at 30 years old or so, I was the president of a national job training program that was helping hundreds of thousands of people around the country.
And that gave me my footing in the non-profit world and I've never really looked back. But so you see how things that become obstacles sometimes direct you in a different way that maybe more fitting for who you are as a person. Although it would've been interesting to see what kind of accountant I would've been, although I don't think I would've enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed my career in nonprofits. So that gave me my grounding in the non-profit world. Nothing that I planned of course, but once you get into it, as I said before, you begin thinking back to those institutions that shaped you, and you say, now it's my turn really to make that possible for other people. And it's been great to have that opportunity both working on behalf of people and working on behalf of institutions as I now am as CEO of the BBB's Giving Alliance.
Carrie Fox:
All right. Thank you so much for grounding us with your mom first and your own experience and what's sticking with me about that incredible story and the journey that you just shared with us in just a couple of moments. I'm not quite sure how you condensed that so beautifully, but if I think about that, you were talking at the end there around institution change and a focus on institutions, but that what I see throughout your entire career, starting first with that experience that you shared with your mom and your sibling was people first. And how we make sure at every step of the way we are centering people and community and ensuring that is working equitably and well for everyone in a system. And if I understand right, that's part of what you're doing on these days. As you think about the role of institutions, the role of charities, the role of organizations, and also where we find ourselves as a country and a society, and how the work you are doing can continue to shape and inform that beloved community that you imagine and work towards. Is that right?
Art Taylor:
It does. And you talk about institutions, and I will say that there is an activist in me for sure, but I've always respected the role of institutions and I am very careful to tear down institutions. I believe that there are always opportunities to repair, renew, recast institutions. Yes, some of them need to go away because they're not serving a function anymore. But I think I am a institutional person because I think that's how we actually get things done. It's hard to get things done as an individual. I think movements are really important. They're organized to an extent and they bring attention to issues that need change. They bring attention to failings that are inside of institutions that need to be amended and adjusted.
And Lord knows we need people looking squarely in the eyes of these institutions and saying, no, this is wrong, this should change. But in the end, I think we need the institutions to stabilize and to operate with that change. And in fact, when institutions don't exist to create change, we need to create them. I mean, as an activist, you convince people that there's change that's necessary in society, then what do you do? What do we do after the protests, after the awareness is created, after the communications are clear? We now have to go about building something that will sustain the change and adapt our society long-term, and that's people organized through institutions.
Carrie Fox:
This is why I love your work and your point of view so much because it's a very, very important reminder that institutions allow positive change to happen at scale. However, the institutions don't change or create themselves, people change and create the institutions. And that's really the work that you get into is the people behind the institutions, are they doing that at the highest ethical level? Are they thinking about how they hold themselves accountable and how do their donors and communities hold them accountable? And that is essential work because again, as we mentioned at the top, there is a lot of mistrust and uncertainty and lack of awareness happening that your organization has helped to put a spotlight on to make the entire sector rise up to make those institutions work better. And yet there's still something that's been on your mind that you and your colleagues are working on, and how you continue the constant evolution of your work to further improve the institutions.
Art Taylor:
Well, there is a high degree of mistrust in institutions as you know, and institutions are certainly under scrutiny. We publish every year what we call a donor trust report, and these are pretty large surveys of the American population to try to get a sense of the extent to which they trust non-profit organizations. And we look at sometimes particular themes around trust. A year and a half ago we released the donor trust report, a special donor trust report on diversity, equity, and inclusion. And we wanted to try to understand how the public perceives organizations that are either doing work inside of their organization to become more diverse, equitable and inclusive, and to see how we might, whether the public would reward them or not for engaging in that kind of work. I will say that we had some really interesting findings as a result of that.
Interestingly, it was African Americans and people of color who said that they would be more likely to continue to support an organization that discriminated. And you look at that and you say, why would that be? Why would you support an organization that would discriminate against people like you? And what we could only conclude was that discrimination was so likely to happen in our society at some point, at some level, that people just assumed that it would be there and that you can't not support things simply because of that. And that's a sad statement, but also I think it might be that people maybe may have thought, well, who else are we going to support? There are really no other organizations, and that's not true either, but it just shows how important it is for these other organizations that are led by and serving people of color to actually get more exposure.
So I think that's one of the interesting findings and one of the more hopeful findings I think, was that while a majority of the people didn't say they wouldn't support an organization that was discriminating, many people who were white tended to say that we wouldn't support an organization that was discriminating against people. So we had some hope that some of the groups that we needed to have out there saying this is wrong, would actually step up to the plate and say that. So we do those kinds of surveys. Obviously our society is evolving, there are all sorts of disparities, economic, racial, health, you name it, we have lots of disparities in our society. Institutions I think ultimately will be charged with addressing those disparities. And as you said, the people in those institutions have to operate from a place of understanding and collaboration and willingness to communicate across difference so that we can get things done.
Carrie Fox:
You raised such an interesting point, and by the way, we will link that survey and report in the show notes so folks can access it easily, but around discrimination and what donors are willing to accept. And that if we even zoom out farther than that, how much in society and specifically in this work in the charitable sector, we have taken for granted about the way that non-profits operate, what we are willing to accept versus what we're willing to lovingly challenge and evolve and improve over the course of time as the world changes around us. And before we started, you mentioned that your standards revision process is coming up and that the last one you did I think was about 20 years ago. And so as you are coming into this time and being mindful about the world we live in today, what feels most pressing to you about what needs to be included or explored in this new standards' revision?
Art Taylor:
Well, there are a lot of things, and I don't know we'll have time to cover them all, I'll just mention a few and then maybe we can target some to talk about. One is this idea that if you calculate the amount of money an organization spends on overhead, let's say, meaning we calculate that as fundraising and administrative costs, that somehow you've done this wonderful work and you now know which organization that you should support if they have low overhead. And I just think that is an outdated approach to looking at organizations. And I can't tell you for sure where we'll end up with that, but we're certainly going to take a hard look at the role those ratios actually play in understanding the work of a non-profit. And so that's one area. A second area I think is cybersecurity and donor privacy, data privacy in general.
And I really feel for non-profit organizations that are strapped for resources, but we are equally at risk to these attacks and so forth from malicious actors without having the ability to protect ourselves yet. I think there's some things that we need to make sure we put in place so we're going to look at what organizations should be doing there, I think. And then I think there's a lot of work we have to do around this whole question of whether we can support and highlight organizations along their journey to create greater diversity, equity, and inclusion. And I don't know if we come away with a new standard for how organizations operate or best practices or more openness about what's going on, but I think there's some work to be done there too.
Carrie Fox:
Well, and that's the one, I think we're going to roll up our sleeves and try to dig into here. Again, acknowledging we cannot get to this conversation all at once, but that it feels really important to dig in a little bit further and understand. First you mentioned it that this is a journey that any organization at any moment in time is going to be at some step along that journey and that it's a lifelong process. I don't know that I can imagine any single organization saying we have become anti-racist because there's always going to be work to do. And yet then, what does that mean for measuring the effectiveness universally across the organizations that seek to have that accountability seal? And maybe it's just you don't need to have this fully determined, because I know the process is still coming up, but first draft thoughts as we like to say, where are you in your thinking on how do we measure effectiveness of what organizations are trying to achieve here?
Art Taylor:
Well, see, that's the thing. Organizations are very good at establishing goals and working to achieve them, but yet when you talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion and access and those kinds of ideas, you're not necessarily talking about a goal, you're more talking about a vision and you are on a journey. You're on a journey, you're not going to potentially ever hit a place that is a goal. You've not met a goal. Organizations don't do particularly well in my opinion with that. In fact, if we don't have goals and ways to measure our progress, then as some people would say, then we're not doing it. We only do things that when we measure them, right? So it's a challenge I think, in that regard. Secondly, I think that when we talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, it's hard to even establish goals. I go back many years ago when we used to have quotas for organizations and they did very well with that.
I mean, corporations, universities with college recruiting, they could just put out a number. We want the number to be X because that will be representative of the community that we're trying to bring in. And they would just make sure they filled the room up with X and then they could march on and feel that they had succeeded. But that's not the world we're talking about. We've long since decried quotas, although I could talk pretty positively about quotas if you gave me the time because back then they gave people opportunity where there would have been none. But I think today we're talking about something else, we're talking about how does an organization benefit from the diverse talents, abilities, and lived experiences of people in its workforce? And knowing that as our society continues to diversify, that customers, people we serve, people who we work want working in our institutions, the talent that we acquire are going to need to come from those diverse backgrounds in order for us to succeed as institutions.
And so there's a business reason, there's a business case for us to grow and to succeed, but it's not clear what success really is. And you go back to the individual personality challenge. So I am a person who may need certain things to be in place in order to feel comfortable working in a place where someone else might need something else to be comfortable working in a place. And as an institution, you're always trying to balance the needs of all sorts of people and also most importantly, hit your organizational objectives. We have an organization for a reason and we want to make sure we hit those objectives. So, when people, for instance, say to me, we want people to be able to show up as their authentic selves, I think we need clarity around that. We need clarity around that because taken to an extreme, we can't all show up any way we want to because the organization won't have what it needs to succeed.
By its very nature, we all have to sacrifice something for the good of the whole in order for the organization to succeed. And I think organizations have to learn how to balance what the sacrifices that people need to make against making sure people are treated fairly and given an opportunity to succeed at the highest level and to their highest ability. And at that I think is the sweet spot, and it's not easy to do with something that has to be worked on all the time. I think of how to go about this, and to me it starts with taking maybe an inventory of your systems and your processes and your cultural morays and your values and making sure after you take this inventory that you audit them to make sure that there aren't things that you're doing either intentionally or unintentionally to keep people back so that you're always looking for ways to make sure people can succeed and that your organization can get the most out of them and that they can be happy and productive.
I won't say happy, but they can be productive and valued participants in the organization. But I don't think there's this place where we can all expect to be in an institution where we're all doing whatever we want to do, it just doesn't work that way. So I think that's the challenge. Organizations have to look at what they're trying to achieve overall, then build in processes that assure that people are given the opportunity to succeed and that the pain and the opportunity is equally distributed throughout the organization for making sure that everyone has the opportunity to succeed. So one last thing, and for me, this is even harder when you think about what an organization has to do to get value out of its people who have diverse backgrounds. So if I come to an organization with a certain degree of privilege, which makes it more likely that I'm going to fulfill my abilities and produce at the highest level in an organization, what do we do to assure that other people have similar privileges or that the privilege that some people have doesn't inadvertently keep others from producing at the highest level?
And you have to look at this through every aspect of your organization, and that's really hard work, really hard work. But anyway, I think that's what really has to be done. And it can be a sliding scale. Some people may need additional support in some areas for them to succeed because they don't have the privilege that some other people have. And so you have to be willing to create systems that adjust for that, right? But then you also have to be willing to evaluate people to make sure that you're not adjusting for things that really don't matter.
Carrie Fox:
And that's a perfect segue to be thinking about then. So what role does communications play in all this? It's very easy for an organization to put out a report or put out a statement and say, these are the things we're doing and we celebrate our work in these ways, that doesn't mean that anything has changed inside the organization. And so as you set up the challenge, what I'm also thinking about is the other side of that, which is the beauty of this challenge is that there is no one right way. And I hear you, that is a challenge to say then what's the standard? But if there's not one standard and instead an opportunity to assess and analyze an organization against their stated values, if they have committed to a certain set of values, how are they year after year after year making progress towards those, right?
It's about momentum, it's about progress, and it's about change and it's not about overnight. We've changed this system to that system and now we're in good shape. There's so much space in terms of how it's translated in any given organization, and you're making me think about, I mentioned at the top, Mission Partners is a benefit corporation. Now the B-Corp model isn't perfect either. You can poke holes in that too. That said, what I have found so valuable about it is that we are held to a standard that we operate a business through a lens of people, planet, and profit. We're not driven by profit alone, and we are measured by a third party every single year on the impact we're having on society, on our organization, on our workforce. And so we have to think creatively of if we fully value our workforce and want to center their success and their ability to thrive, then we need to think about how we're supporting mental health in the workplace every single day.
Creating things like mental health sabbaticals or additional benefits that people can tap into. Or if we say we fully support and believe in pay equity and pay parity, then we are very public around saying, I will never make more than five times the lowest paid employee in my company. Which if you think about a corporation, that could be 300 times greater. So there are these levers that organizations can pull, but to your point, is the hope to get to a set of standards that every organization needs to abide by, or do you envision a space where there's a little bit of opportunity to opt-in to this lever or that lever all in a spirit of moving society forward?
Art Taylor:
I think we have to try to find ways to take what feels very subjective and make it objective. To me, the objective aspect of this is for an organization to really look hard at what it's doing and whether it is honestly giving every person the ability to succeed and to offer to the corporation what they bring to the table without sacrificing the overall mission success of the organization. To me, it's going to be different for every organization, but it's also something that I think is objective. Now you have something to shoot for. You can measure your performance, you can measure the extent to which people are being or perceived that they're being treated well, and whether they're being treated to the standard of how people should be treated in your organization. You can see how people are performing. We always measure performance, although there's some subjectivity around that, but we always measure performance.
And if you see that people in your organization aren't performing, and some of that has to do with how they're being treated, how they're being positioned, and if you've done the work to assess how your systems and processes and culture is working, then you're going to know if there are adjustments that you have to make to your organization's, processes, procedures and culture to make sure you're getting the most out of people so that you can ultimately achieve your organizational objectives. That to me is where we're headed, I hope, anyway, I hope. And then one last thing, Carrie, I think we leave this out sometimes, everybody's got to talk. Everybody has to feel comfortable expressing how they feel. And I'll say that this is especially true for people who don't necessarily understand what this DEIA is all about. I find that in conversations these days, they're less likely to speak up, but we have to know how they feel.
We have to know what's holding them back, because whether they speak up or not, if they're not on board, the pendulum will swing. And we're seeing some of that right now. We're seeing how in places like Florida, they don't even want to talk about history of people of color. They don't have it in their curriculum, and so it's not going to end there. There are people now who are going to use that to say, well, what's this stuff about DEIA? We don't even need this. The pendulum will swing if we don't hear from those people, and bring them in so that they understand that what they're afraid of, which is that they're going to somehow lose because we're going to give others opportunity. What we're actually doing, and I know you'll appreciate this, is by giving everyone a shot, we're going to create greater abundance.
We're going to create greater abundance, and that's really the goal. The goal is to create more than we would've had or greater success than we would've had if we have left people out, and if we create more, then there's greater opportunity for people of all backgrounds. We don't have to be fearful of success, that's what I think we have to hold up in front of people. We don't have to be fearful of success. And I know that there are people out there that say, well, you must be from another planet, America's a very competitive place, and there's always 10 chairs and 15 people. But I believe that we can take those 10 chairs, and if 15 people got together, we can rework those chairs and make a bench that is more comfortable, more eloquent, and a place for us all to be able to sit down. And that's how we have to view the world. We keep viewing the world as a zero-sum game, it's not, there's always more that we can produce if we work together.
Carrie Fox:
The future can be so much brighter if we're willing to see it and work towards, it won't happen on its own.
Art Taylor:
It won't happen on its own. That's right.
Carrie Fox:
You have given us so many things to think about, Art, of the opportunities, the possibilities that you're going to be taking on through this revisions process, and broadly as you think about your work. But Art, if I think about the seat you are in, you have a better line of sight into charities and non-profits than most in the world, certainly here in the country. I wonder if we can wrap up with a story, and you don't have to be specific about the organization, but what does it look like when an organization is centering diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging? How have you seen it operate and what does it look like to you?
Art Taylor:
Well, let me give you one great story, it's a story about really an organization's transformation. This is a group called, it used to be called Community Health Charities, and they were strictly into workplace giving. They were a campaign that they were going to corporations and people could support them. And through them they would support a lot of different organizations and community dealing with health. Well, they decided some time ago, about six years ago, that they needed to do more than simply be a conduit through which money flowed, and that there were people losing lives because they weren't getting treated fairly when it came to our health system. And when we say health systems, we mean that more broadly than just hospitals and doctors, we mean the social determinants of health, meaning that if I'm not eating well, I'm not going to be healthy. If I'm not getting good education, I'm not going to be healthy, because there's a whole host of not living in the right place, I'm going to be healthy.
So they realize that there's a role for them to play in helping our country and people in it to eliminate the disparities that we see in the health of our citizens. And so they transitioned away from being that organization to one that is now called Creating Healthier Communities. And in order to get there, they realized that they had to center their work on diversity, equity, and inclusion, they centered the work on that. And as a result, the organization has gone from raising, I want to say last year, about $250,000, maybe about four years ago they were raising about 250,000 to now they're going to be raising somewhere around 20 million dollars to do this work. And it's only growing because they're in an environment where we understand that if people are going to be able to contribute in the highest level at the highest levels, we have to create healthy communities. So that's one organization that I would love to hold up. There are many more, but that story is one that just really sticks with me.
Carrie Fox:
Well, I'm delighted. I did not know you were going to go there, but how happy I am that you did, because we were along that journey with Creating Healthier Communities and felt and saw it firsthand of how intentional that leadership team was in thinking about for us, we helped them with their rebrand and their new messaging to support the organizational vision. And we agree it's an incredible case study.
Art Taylor:
Yeah. And one last one I'd hold up, it's not so much the diversity issue, but it's the biggest issue, one of the biggest issues alongside of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is bridging. We have to be able to talk across difference and communicate across difference to solve problems. And as you know, we're perhaps more polarized today than we've ever been in the history of our country. And so there's an organization that is called Convergence Policy, that establishes dialogues for people to engage in who have very different points of view. And they come together over a long period of time just to get to know each other first, and then later on through these conversations, they start working on a problem. And the problem may have been something related to guns. So lots of people have guns and some other people don't want guns at all.
The people want them completely banned. But they brought people of different points of view about guns together. And what they discovered after a long period of conversation was that there was something that they could do together on eliminating gun suicide. So while there was no issue that we've completely resolved here, they did agree that no matter what your position is on guns, you might want to eliminate gun suicide. So here you have people of all positions thinking about this, working together and getting something done. We've got to do more of that. We've got to do more of that, that's the key. That's the key to diversity, equity, and inclusion too, because getting people across differences in race to talk and communicate and to understand and then work together to create a better society for all and a more just society for all is how we do it.
Carrie Fox:
Well, Art, we'll call this part one the vision, and then we'll come back and we'll do part two and maybe part three because I could just spend hours listening to you and I'm really looking forward to seeing how the standards process plays out. So thank you so much Art, for everything you do and for giving us some of your time today. Much appreciation.
Art Taylor:
Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. And congratulations, and thanks to you for all you're doing in our sector as well. You're a bright light, and that's what we need. We don't have enough bright lights and people who have great inspiration about them, your whole continent is positive and uplifting, and you're a person that's great to be around. So thank you. I look forward to all of the emails I get from you.
Carrie Fox:
Oh, you're so sweet. Thank you.
Art Taylor:
Will read them when I get them.
Carrie Fox:
It means a lot. Thank you. All right. And that brings us to the end of this Mission forward episode. Hope you've enjoyed this incredible conversation. We look forward to seeing you on the next one, and we'll see you again soon. And that brings us to the end of this episode of Mission Forward. Thanks for tuning in today. If you are stewing on what we discussed here today, or if you heard something that's going to stick with you, drop me a line at carrie@mission.partners and let me know what's got you thinking. And if you have thoughts for where we should go in future shows, I would love to hear that too. Mission Forward is produced with the support of Sadie Lockhart in association with the True Story Team. Engineering by Pete Wright. If your podcast app allows for ratings and reviews, I hope you'll consider doing just that for this show. But the best thing you can do to support Mission Forward is simply to share the show with a friend or colleague, thanks for your support, and we'll see you next time.
