Keeping Community at the Heart of Doing Good | Vicki Pozzebon

Vicki Pozzebon explores how listening, living your values, and caring for the people doing the work can help nonprofits stay true to their purpose.

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In Vicki Pozzebon’s childhood home, generosity was a practice. Her Italian immigrant parents welcomed people with food, while her father taught newcomers skills in his well-drilling business. That spirit of sharing knowledge and making room for others still shapes her work.

On this episode of Doing Good, Pozzebon explores how nonprofits can keep that human purpose alive amid fundraising pressures, board dynamics, and the demands of running an organization.

Her approach to strategic planning starts with the community. Rather than leaving decisions to staff and board members, she brings in the people an organization serves, its partners, and others who can help identify what is needed. Listening requires a willingness to hear uncomfortable answers. If an organization’s services are no longer needed, she argues, its existence deserves to be questioned.

She also urges founders to investigate whether another nonprofit already does the work they envision. Good intentions become more useful when they respond to a need and build on existing efforts.

Values, meanwhile, must show up in decisions. She describes a housing initiative in Silver City connecting affordable, healthy homes with construction training and sustainable materials. Its challenge is making those commitments work together in practice.

That same scrutiny belongs inside nonprofits. Pozzebon calls for better pay, benefits, and

working conditions, challenging expectations that people doing meaningful work should accept exhaustion or financial insecurity. She wants funders to take chances on emerging organizations and support the infrastructure they need to succeed.

Her approach is grounded in a framework linking the individual, the group, and the work itself. Transformation can begin with asking for support, caring for oneself, or relating differently to colleagues.

For Pozzebon, goodness grows through people who pay attention to one another and act with care. Sustaining it means building organizations whose daily choices reflect the communities they exist to serve.

Visit Propera Partners https://prosperapartners.org