Empowering Communities: Matthew Ratz’s Mission to Bridge Opportunity Gaps

Tasha: Matthew, can you please introduce yourself and a bit about your nonprofit history?

Matthew: Sure. So my name is Matthew Ratz. I am currently the executive director of Passion for Learning Incorporated, which is an organization that seeks to close opportunity gaps for students in low income communities.

Matthew: And we do that specifically through after school enrichment in STEM, college readiness, filmmaking, financial literacy, and, uh, we do college tours as well. And our goal is to find a way to Open students eyes to things they may not otherwise get access to. But I’ve been in the nonprofit space for about 12, maybe 13 years.

Matthew: I started my career as a classroom teacher and realized that you can’t actually slay a dragon when you’re inside its belly. It’s you can’t do that. So Had to get out of the classroom. I, uh, became a vocational training coordinator for adults with autism and designed, um, hands on tasks for them so that they wouldn’t be sitting all day in a day program and be bored and, you know, Self injuring, et cetera.

Matthew: And then I moved through that field, uh, did a couple more, uh, day programs supports for adults with disabilities. And in fact, recently, uh, piloted a curriculum in human sexuality for adults with autism that got published on Amazon, that’s

Tasha: amazing.

Matthew: Yeah, thank you. And that was just, you know, through a partnership that I had with someone who I worked with a decade ago.

Matthew: And then in addition, I, uh, worked in mental health advocacy for a while. I ran a peer recovery center. Uh, right up until the COVID pandemic shut everything down and then worked for some nonprofits in the mental health space and learned that, uh, you can work for a nonprofit in the mental health space, or you can be a person managing your mental health.

Matthew: You can’t do both.

Tasha: Mutually exclusive.

Matthew: Mutually exclusive. So I’m really grateful now to be in this position where I get to do really important work, right? I’m, I’m opening students eyes and experience while also I’m able to manage my mental health. I’m able to set boundaries. I’m able to be involved in projects that are very exciting, like this financial literacy curriculum that I’m writing.

Matthew: That’s all about mindset versus budgeting, right. And helping students shift from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset while they’re still in middle school. Right. And someone keeps asking me like, well, can you teach financial literacy to people who don’t have finances? And I’m like, you have to, you have to teach financial

Matthew: literacy to people before they get finances.

Matthew: Otherwise, You’re playing catch up the whole time.

Tasha: I have been that person. So I agree. I agree.

Matthew: That’s my nonprofit history. In a nutshell.

Tasha: I love it. I love it. And so in these years of nonprofit work in how many different organizations, what has been your favorite part of working at nonprofit?

Matthew: That’s a really good question. My favorite part, meeting the people, regardless of mission, Regardless of organization size, the people who work in the nonprofit space when they get there are tenacious for change and advocacy right before they get spoiled by the organizational culture. Or the money, right.

Matthew: As you rise through the ranks, the people are just authentically eager to see a better world. And that’s probably the best part of being in the nonprofit space. Overall.

Tasha: It was interesting. I was having a conversation the other day with, uh, with someone who was talking about not feeling like their work had impact they’re in for profit and just feeling kind of aimless.

Tasha: And that, you know, like, how do you meet these people who changed the world? Like, that’s what they’re missing. Like, how do you do this? And I realized. I feel so blessed because I meet those people

Matthew: all the time. You just got to get out of the for profit space. And, and honestly, like the for profit space, all that it’s providing is a fancier version of indentured servitude, right?

Matthew: Like you get a fancy desk, you get a fancy car, but you’re wearing golden handcuffs, right? Cause your lifestyle has crept up to the point where now you need that cushy salary just to maintain your lifestyle. You can’t ever leave the lifestyle. And what do they say? People who retire and stop working live like 10 years shorter than people who continue volunteering in their retirement because that sense of purpose was all they had in their job.

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: That’s terrifying to me. I, I act as if I’m retired now. That’s awesome.

Tasha: I love that.

Matthew: I’m not, I’m, I’m 40 years old. Like we don’t get retirement here in America. It’s not a thing. So I need to vacation when I have the energy, I need to take my kids places that they’re not going to see otherwise. Right. I need to have my instruments around me so that I can see

Tasha: your guitars in the background.

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: Like during the day, take little breaks, you know, in my office, I have a hammock. I have an Intendo Wii, like I’m able to do my work and I’m able to nurture my inner child and I’m able to use my time effectively because no one’s micromanaging me.

Tasha: Yeah,

Matthew: I’ve got a really supportive and energizing board who want to see results, and it doesn’t matter how much time it takes, right?

Matthew: It’s the results that matter. And I’ve switched my mindset now to I’m not compensated for my time.

Tasha: Yeah,

Matthew: for the results that I’m bringing, right? How many students are we reaching? How many programs are we launching? How many high school students are we able to shuffle around to college tours that they otherwise wouldn’t get to visit?

Matthew: Like what’s the impact we’re having, not just what the dollars that I’m raising.

Tasha: I love the conversation moving to impact like that. Just like where it’s not about dollars. Obviously it can’t not have a component of being about dollars. Like there is that’s somewhat unavoidable, but that just shift over impact over the dollars is just, I think it’s, it, it can be world changing.

Tasha: I think also for the people in nonprofit to go, Oh my goodness, I made like twice the impact we did last year. And yeah, we didn’t make any more money or something like, but like, I just, I feel like it gives you a different feeling as the people.

Matthew: It’s also really interesting to be on LinkedIn and see all these people like posting sardonically, right.

Matthew: The pizza parties that they got for, for surpassing 6 million in sales or the peppermint that they got from, or the water bottle that they got.

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: Right. And it’s like, I got to see three students tour Loyola university of Maryland. And see what a private Jesuit college looks like in the middle of Baltimore.

Tasha: Yeah, that’s

Matthew: right. And hear their questions and, and, and see their excitement about the Gothic architect. Like that’s so much better than a pizza party. Come on.

Tasha: That’s pretty amazing. We’re sure. And I know we started to already talk about this, so I feel like you’ll have good ones for this. Um, what do you feel like are the biggest challenges of working in nonprofits?

Matthew: So as I mentioned, the best book I’ve read on nonprofits is The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. And I think it’s really important for nonprofit folks, especially leaders, to think about the fact that nonprofits exist at all is an indication that our society has failed. The fact that we need specific organizations to feed people, clothe people, house people, because society won’t, not that they can’t, but they won’t.

Matthew: Is an indication of a failure of society. And it’s my opinion that every nonprofit leader should have as their goal, putting their nonprofit out of business because the advocacy and services won’t be necessary.

Tasha: Of course,

Matthew: that’s not the goal of nonprofits. The goal of nonprofits is to perpetuate their own existence by and large and always find a reason to be raising more money.

Matthew: And yeah, I think that we lose the thread. So the revolution will not be funded really gets me thinking about what am I doing to maintain the status quo and what can I do to challenge it. And I recognize that a lot of people like the status quo, right? Marx talks about the petite bourgeoisie and I understand that.

Matthew: It’s nice and comfy. It’s really comfy. Yeah. To live in a big house and drive a fancy car and have a private chef. Like, that’s, that’s nice, right, but isn’t it nicer to know that everyone’s getting what they need in an equitable society? And like, your comfort is not through exploitation of people who never get to live comfortably?

Matthew: People who are bathing in a polluted river? Right. People who are reading at the fourth grade level, like your comfort demands the exploitation of those people. So,

Tasha: well, I think that’s why some people choose to work in nonprofits when others would never consider it. Right. Because they see those inequities and they’re like, well, this can’t exist.

Tasha: The hard part is, is that they then sometimes are also. The inequities are forced upon them as well, right? You like you’re you’re joining the you’re joining it in like in your in your servitude and there’s a sense of martyrdom and but martyrdom cannot be sustained, right? But

Matthew: what’s interesting is that the largest group in America of people on Government services are employees of Walmart, which is the largest corporation in the United States.

Matthew: Right. And Walmart receives substantial tax breaks.

Tasha: Yeah. Yet

Matthew: the largest percentage of working people who are on food stamps are Walmart employees. So the idea is that, you know, yeah, you could be a nonprofits and scraping by, you could be in for profits and scraping by.

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: The idea is that, yes, we all need to be paid fairly.

Matthew: Um, and fair pay requires CEOs to not be earning 400 times their frontline workers and the other thing, when we talk about impact, the further you get away from the work, the harder it is to see the impact. And I think too many people want to be far away from the front lines of nonprofit work.

Tasha: It’s, it’s hard to witness sometimes, right?

Tasha: It’s sometimes hard to be a part of because. There is suffering and sometimes we’re serving people who are suffering and that can be really hard to sit, to sit in it and maybe not have really the means to fix it right at this time. And it doesn’t mean that you may like, hopefully the goal is to be able to one day change it, but I don’t think as a society we’re really prepared.

Tasha: to sit in suffering. Like, like, you know, I don’t think it’s a human condition.

Matthew: Interesting, right? Because there’s a phrase in career development that says, if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. Right. And I think that extends. So like the reason we take Kids on college tours. The reason we give them STEM enrichment and let them do filmmaking in middle school and financial literacy is like, we need to expose them to these things.

Matthew: Cause if they can see it, they can be it. But similarly, empathy comes from experience. And so if you’re afraid of, you know, serving soup at a soup kitchen, if you’re afraid of volunteering at a, you know, um, a homeless shelter, if you’re afraid of donating clothes you’re not even wearing so that people don’t have to freeze in the winter, right?

Matthew: Like,

Tasha: yeah,

Matthew: that, that limits your ability to develop empathy. And understand that nobody deserves this, right? Like we have this language in America, right? That the homeless or the poor, right? It’s their own actions, their own choices. I’m like, no, there are systemic inequities that are designed the homeless, the people who live without homes are a fundamental feature of capitalism and need to be people living without homes so that the rest of us are forced into working coerced, if it were into working so that we don’t end up without a home.

Tasha: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a lot of food for thought right there. Uh, no, it’s good.

Matthew: That’s the reality, right? Is that people need to be on food stamps in order to remind others that, hey, if you stop working and in America, our health insurance is tied to our employment as well.

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: So if you don’t, if you don’t keep working, You’re going to lose your health insurance.

Matthew: You’re going to lose your groceries. You’re going to lose your house, your car, your family. It’s all essential for the exploitation to continue.

Tasha: Oh man, I could do like an entire, I may have to have a good

Matthew: future. No, my students, my students tell me that I should do a podcast and I’m like about what? And they’re like, everything.

Tasha: You know what people can do, Matthew, is they can throw ideas into the hat. We’ll pull them out at random and it’ll be like a surprise podcast and we’ll go.

Matthew: Whose line is it anyway, but just for me.

Tasha: Very, very neat podcast. I love it. I love it. Um, okay. So the next question I have is, um, how does, uh, peer support, peer engagement help you in your nonprofit work?

Matthew: So it’s interesting because I’m also a certified peer. Which is a mental health term. And so peer support is fundamental to everything that I do.

Matthew: Um, in so far as you need people to know, to stand side by side with you, right. And know where you’re going and know where you’ve been and understand your story. They don’t have to understand the whole thing, right. But just the fact that on the hive. Right. We’re all in nonprofits, nonprofits. Like there are some really big, there are some multimillion dollar, hundreds of millions of dollar nonprofits.

Matthew: And then there are some nonprofits that have 25, 000 in the bank. Absolutely. And so the compensation level varies significantly if you’re talking to a CFO of a hundred million dollar nonprofit versus the, you know, solo practitioner of a tiny nonprofit that just opened. I had a, I was talking to someone who’s starting his own nonprofit here in the state in DC, and I said, you missed the fundamental lesson of starting a nonprofit is that you start the nonprofit after you become independently wealthy.

Matthew: Yeah,

Tasha: it makes it a lot easier,

Matthew: right? There’s no reason to start a nonprofit if you don’t already have a family foundation. It just, it’s yeah. The money, the money makes the wheels turn, unfortunately. And there’s a French saying, I think is money makes dogs dance.

Tasha: Monies make dogs. That’s a great, that’s a great quote.

Matthew: Right?

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: Um, yeah, it just, it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating because as you said, Right. We come into this work and we want to make an impact. And as a result, we’re forced to light ourselves on fire to keep other people warm.

Tasha: And

Matthew: I learned that my time at running a peer support center, that you can’t light yourself on fire to keep other people warm.

Matthew: Cause it’ll never be hot enough for everyone. And here you are self immolating and they’re like, it’s still a little cold back here. Put a blanket on, right? Like, come on. But in terms of peer support, it’s, it really is. It’s people who are not in it. Can’t understand it.

Tasha: Yeah,

Matthew: right. People, people who have business consultants whose job it is to produce really exciting PowerPoint slides are not going to be able to empathize with someone who yeah, also may have to write PowerPoint slides to convince someone to fund a program that’s going to change a person’s life.

Tasha: Very different pieces. of work. And, you know, we’ve had a couple, uh, people write Hive related articles, but one of, uh, my favorites so far has really been about non profit entanglement, right? And the idea that people who join non profits, not only are they a certain type of people usually, but they’re also probably more prone To because they are passionate, they’re also more prone to compassion fatigue when it happens, because they have so much, they don’t, they don’t have a stop measure to do it.

Tasha: They haven’t been taught it. And that’s partly why they ended up in nonprofit essentially in the first place is because they see the need, they want to help. And so it’s, it’s like, almost like there’s a symptom happening as well. And I know we’ve, Had two people join the hive and I’ve connected both of them personally who they are focusing in on non profit consulting and but like burnout for non profits like that is now a niche which is a sign to me like usually that used to be hospital workers that used to be social workers that was talked all about during the pandemic so for there to be a recognition that this is the state of non profit work that burnout and compassion fatigue is so high that It affords itself a consulting group.

Tasha: Like that means that is a pretty huge, like flying of the red. It’s not even just like a, Oh, maybe there’s something going on. This is like full up, right?

Matthew: And the reality is work as it’s designed in the 21st century demands. The pushing of our personal boundaries. There’s no such thing as work life balance.

Matthew: You have work life integration. You need to integrate your life into your work, because if you don’t, your work will integrate itself into every component of your life.

Tasha: And

Matthew: so here we are being told work life balance, right? Like, you know, Self care weekends. And what is self care? Self care in this country is about spending money on yourself money that you don’t have because you work in nonprofit, right?

Matthew: So the whole paradigm needs to shift. It’s Yeah, we’re burning out. We’re not made to spend 40 hours indoors staring at a screen when the sun is shining.

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: Right. In the same way that like I tell my I teach college students and I have them in the in the winter semester and I When I open my class, I say, listen, we’re mammals, we’re warm blooded mammals.

Matthew: We want to be in our beds, inside caves, not worrying about anything until the sun comes out. And the fact that you’re not, the fact that you’re here at 9. 30 in the morning to learn English composition is an indication that you care about something. But understand that your body wants something different.

Tasha: Evolutionarily,

Matthew: we want something different. And I was even giving today, today’s April 1st. And I asked my students if they knew the history of April 1st and they didn’t and I said, well, the Julian and Augustine calendar had the new year in April, which makes sense because we have the spring equinox, we have Easter, we have Passover, we have Nowruz, which is the Persian New Year, we have the Lunar New Year all around the spring.

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: April 1st makes sense. January 1st doesn’t make sense. Why would you start the new year in the darkest part of the winter? You start the new year when the sun comes out and the trees start sprouting. But when they introduced the Gregorian calendar, the Roman Empire was so insistent that January 1st be the new year that anyone who still celebrated April 1st as New Year’s Day must be a fool.

Tasha: Yeah, that’s hilarious. That’s a great, I don’t think I had ever heard the history of it before. So that’s, that’s great. That’s pretty cool. I mean, sad. Sad. It’s sad,

Matthew: but it, it’s, it’s just, it’s understanding that like we are, we are not above nature as humans. We are part of nature. Yeah. And we do ourselves tremendous damage when we think that we’re above it because we are natural, right?

Matthew: It’s our beginnings are dust and our ends are dust. Like all other things that come from the ground. Right? Like,

Tasha: yeah,

Matthew: my kid was watching Naruto any, uh, the other day. He loves anime and it was something about how, you know, we don’t all have the same path, but we all have the same destiny. And I said, yeah, it’s death.

Matthew: And a second later, the character goes, Death.

Matthew: All of us are going to die. That’s the only thing we have in common with each other is that ultimately we’re all gonna die. And there’s a guy I follow on LinkedIn. He starts every meeting with the comment. He says, listen, someday we’ll all be dead. None of this will have mattered. So let’s keep that in mind as we progress through the agenda.

Tasha: Yeah. Well, and I, I mean that even whole cultural thing, absolutely. I have many people in my life. Had some weird, crazy health stuff over the past, how many years? And I’m very comfortable with talking about dying. Cause it’s been a real possibility many times and people are so uncomfortable. They just want you to say you’re fine.

Tasha: They just want you to say you’re fine. Like, do you know what I mean? Like no one wants to talk about it. People like my kids have been to. I don’t know, probably 15, 20 funerals. I come from a big family, so it’s my partner, and they have friends who have never ever, like their parents wouldn’t even consider being at a funeral, right?

Tasha: And it’s not like, it’s okay. Everybody has different ways of doing it, but I do think there’s like a deep seated fear about talking about it. And we’re doing ourselves a disservice because like you said, I don’t know what the other alternative is exactly, but we shouldn’t be planning that there’s a different alternative and we should be planning for what is going to happen.

Tasha: Right? Right.

Matthew: And the reality is, is that it’s a great humbler and nobody on his deathbed wishes he spent more time at the office.

Tasha: Yeah, absolutely. You take the vacation, you play the guitar, you enjoy the Wii.

Matthew: You, you spend time with your kids, right? And like, I love that my work allows me, I volunteer every month and I go into my kids classroom and I teach art enrichment to his classmates for an hour, once a month.

Matthew: That’s pretty cool. Right. And the fact that I’m able to do that and that I’m able, I have a memory of my father coming to school one single day when I was in kindergarten. And I only have that memory because he actually did it for my baby brother. And so I was old enough to remember him doing it and going, he’s a chiropractor.

Matthew: So talking about the spine and the body.

Tasha: Yeah,

Matthew: single day. I’m in my kid’s classroom once a month from kindergarten through fifth grade.

Tasha: That’s amazing.

Matthew: Right? And when I’m gone, he’ll remember my Abba came to my classroom and taught my classmates about the Mona Lisa and about, you know, Vincent Van Gogh and about Matisse and about Picasso.

Matthew: And I’m not an art student. Right? Yeah, that stuff. And I like to talk about I showed I showed his fifth grade class Guernica this year and like contextualized Guernica in the context of the two wars that the U. S. Is currently engaged in, right? And like, look at look at who the victims of the war are perpetually.

Tasha: Yeah,

Matthew: right. Well, these are big

Tasha: conversations and we need to be having them right. And, uh,

Matthew: appropriate age. I think I think as a parent, yeah. I spend a lot of time explaining things to my kids as if they’re adults, they’re 11 and 13, but I’ve always been like, I’m going to talk to you as if you have the comprehension to understand what I’m saying, because I don’t, you know, belittle you or assume your naivety.

Matthew: You’re my child. Therefore, I’m assuming you have comprehension, right? Which might be dangerous. It might be dangerous. I said to my kids class because they were reading a book about a body image and about fat shaming. And I said, the best way to come back to someone who calls you fat is you can say, I can always lose weight, but you’ll always be, uh,

Tasha: I love that. And enough of the

Matthew: kids understood what I was suggesting, that I didn’t have to finish the sentence.

Tasha: I was going to say, it feels like a very, very flashback to my, uh, late eighties, early nineties childhood. So I was like, that, I love that. That’s great. Come back. Definitely more appropriate than some of the things nowadays that may or may not be said.

Tasha: And, and yeah, like, I think there’s a, there’s so much to speak up. I love all of, yeah, I love all of that. Um, final question, um, that I had was. What have you enjoyed or gotten the most out of being a member of the non profit hive?

Matthew: It’s another good question, Tasha. I think I’ve had seven hive chats.

Tasha: Oh, I probably can find it out.

Tasha: But

Matthew: six or seven.

Tasha: Yeah, it’s quite a few

Matthew: and none of them have been about work,

Tasha: really. That’s super interesting,

Matthew: right? Like we spend a tiny little bit of time talking about what we do.

Tasha: Yeah. And then we

Matthew: just spend the rest of the time learning about each other. Right? Like I met this guy, Nagi.

Tasha: Yes.

Matthew: Right. And like, yeah, Nagi works as a nonprofit programs guy.

Matthew: I’m not quite sure what program he’s running, but I do know that he’s in mental health. On the side, right? And like, I’m in mental health on the side and like, he’s a man of South Southwest Asian origin. I’m an Ashkenazi Jew, right? So like, we don’t have a lot in common except that we’re both men talking openly about our mental health situation, right?

Matthew: And how would we have met other than through the hive, right? And then I met a woman the other day who actually went to summer camp with my sister.

Tasha: No way. That’s crazy.

Matthew: Right. It’s a small world. It’s a small world.

Tasha: It is. It’s smaller than we think it is. Right. Like, because we

Matthew: think it is. And interestingly, I know you’re in Canada, so I do work with a Canadian company called pay what you can peer support.

Matthew: I’ve been working with them for a while. They’re based out of Toronto.

Tasha: Okay. And

Matthew: it’s this international model of just, here are the different support groups we have for different diagnoses. Isn’t like Just pay what you can. Right. Show up.

Tasha: I love that.

Matthew: And we need that. We need that as our third spaces are turning into retail hubs, right?

Matthew: Like Starbucks is the third space. Like that’s not a, that’s not a feasible way to meet people. Yeah, right. You’re not meeting people at the shopping mall. You’re not meeting people at the grocery store as adults. We’re not sitting in classrooms anymore. Like there are limited opportunities for networking.

Matthew: In the world.

Tasha: In the world. Uh, yeah.

Matthew: And, and I, I tell people all the time, like, your co workers are not your friends, your co workers are not your family. Like, even if you have a romantic relationship in your workplace, it’s a relationship of convenience. It’s like surviving an airplane crash. Like, you just happen to be in the same place at the same time.

Tasha: Yeah,

Matthew: right. And maybe you’re

Tasha: trauma bonding at the same time, right? It’s quite

Matthew: possible. Like I found that when I was a teacher, I formed really strong relationships with fellow teachers in my school building.

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: And as soon as I was no longer a teacher, I had nothing to talk with them.

Tasha: Yeah. Yeah.

Tasha: Because you have that moment. Right. And, and I think that was partly what I’d hoped for with the nonprofit hive is I was having so many conversations. You know, change makers who really, truly felt like so alone, they felt there was no psychological safety to talk about all of this at work. So when they ended up on the phone with me, who was working as a consultant at different points and for different, many different kinds of nonprofit organizations, it would be 20 minutes of talk therapy about marketing or fundraising or Salesforce.

Tasha: At one point I was working with a Salesforce partner for nonprofit and We had to have that conversation first. They needed that conversation. They needed to talk about that with somebody. And then we’d have like 10 minutes where we’d actually go, Oh, wait, okay. Like reel it back. What were we talking about again?

Tasha: Because a lot of the time, half the challenges were within their own teams. They didn’t think that it was necessarily unsolvable, like unsolvable, but they needed almost a consultant to come in to third party the situation so they could move forward. And, you know, I think that really just speaks to the state of a lot of nonprofits that.

Tasha: That is an easier solution.

Matthew: And interestingly, I am totally against return to work forcibly. Like nobody, nobody who’s been successful in remote work needs to return to the office, except that the office does provide space for that.

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: Right. That’s the only possible silver lining I can envision is that you’ll cross each other in the hallway and be able to unload for five minutes.

Matthew: With someone who gets it, right? Nowadays, our only communication are meetings, and the meetings have agendas, and we don’t have time to check in with each other. Um, but I don’t Really,

Tasha: terse Slack messages,

Matthew: right? Right, but I don’t and, and also the surveillance, right? Like, how much can you really get into when everything’s documented, when everything’s recorded?

Tasha: Yeah. Oh, for sure.

Matthew: And, um, but I don’t support return to work. I think return to work is just because landlords are getting greedy.

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: However, yeah, we don’t have spaces to have these kinds of informal conversations anymore. And the hive really meets a need there in so far as, yeah, it’s people who otherwise wouldn’t have met each other, but are coming, becoming simpatico in some way.

Matthew: Yeah. It leads to some meaningful exchanges. I mean, honestly, I was texting with Nagi when I was back in Staten Island, visiting my parents, we didn’t get to see each other. It was Ramadan anyway,

Tasha: but yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, that’s wonderful. And you know, for me, like I looked at, you know, I know Nagi actually joined.

Tasha: He was one of our wait list people originally, which is crazy now. And before he’d even started pure minds and moved into his start of his own thing. Um, he was amazing in that, like. You know, it’s nice to be able to go, Oh, here’s this person, Nagi, who I know, who’s been, you know, first of all, doing like more international aid work.

Tasha: And now it’s moving into this specific subject. When you joined, you know, I’m taking partly a tagging system to go, here’s what Matthew’s doing now, which is more education focused, but here’s his past, which included mental health. So when you guys ended up at the same time, I’m like, this seems like it’s a little fortuitous.

Tasha: Let’s put these two people together. And. You know, it’s not always a slam dunk. I don’t do perfect every time, but I do think You know, having this core base that is nonprofit work and you have someone who gets what you do to some degree right off the bat, just allows the conversation to advance on different levels quicker because you had that to start.

Tasha: And like you said, sometimes you don’t talk about your work at all and they jump into something else entirely. Um, but I, I’m, I’m really glad, uh, I’m glad you’ve joined it. I love that story that you two are staying connected. That’s great.

Matthew: Yeah. Listen, I’m still in touch with Katie, Catherine too, who was at the meeting I had.

Tasha: Yeah, she does, uh,

Matthew: she works for, um, support a classroom, something about adopting classroom, I think,

Tasha: or something like that, right? Yeah, no, she’s fantastic too. So

Matthew: she asked me, she was like, well, you know, what, uh, do you think, what do you think about, um, I don’t remember, project, whatever the other one is, I can’t remember this teacher funding thing.

Matthew: And I said, here’s the thing is that the teachers are the ones who know what they need.

Tasha: Yeah,

Matthew: right. And teachers need the same way that nonprofits need unrestricted funding. Teachers need unrestricted funding.

Tasha: Like

Matthew: teachers, teachers know what they need. And like, if they have this idea for a project and it goes up on GoFundMe or whatever it is, right.

Matthew: And they don’t get it, the project doesn’t materialize.

Tasha: Yeah,

Matthew: right. But a teacher is flexible enough to understand. Okay, I still want to do something like this. So how can I scale it back?

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: And giving them unrestricted funding allows them to meet the needs of their students in creative ways. And sometimes it’s just having snacks in the classroom, right?

Matthew: Because kids can’t learn when they’re hungry. But you can’t go on to go fund me and say, please fund my students snack.

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: And she’s like, that’s so funny. That’s exactly what we do. I’m like, okay.

Tasha: Which is so cool. Right. And like, this is the thing. There’s so many nonprofits out there doing such incredible work.

Tasha: Like every week I get blown away by some new person. I take a lot of the brand new people. And then now that someone like yourself has been doing it for a while, I’m like, okay, well, clearly Matthew’s crushing it. I can, you know, I kind of start my like more senior hivers you’ve taken. This is week nine, by the way.

Tasha: And, um, You know, I have these trusted people where I’m like, this is amazing. Like, you know, um, kind of have that point to like vet people over time because people give me reviews and feedback and then it ends up being this, you know, wonderful spot too, to like, hear the new stories, hear these new people, why they’re joining, what their background is.

Tasha: So like, I love sharing in. In what is out there and what resources exist because I can’t possibly learn it all like it just is never going to happen so, um, not searching for it is nice. There’s

Matthew: a really important quotation that I’ve kind of been striving towards where it says, if you’re the smartest person in the room, find a new room.

Tasha: I love that.

Matthew: And I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been in that position now for a while, especially working, you know, in mental health, in autism services and developmental disabilities like I have, I, I, I knew a lot.

Tasha: Yeah. And I

Matthew: was working with people who didn’t know quite as much.

Tasha: Yeah.

Matthew: And you know, the, the space of education, people think they’ve seen everything.

Matthew: You’ve never seen everything.

Tasha: Yeah. No. Can’t possibly. Right. You’ve never

Matthew: seen everything. And students will always surprise you.

Tasha: Yeah. They’ll always

Matthew: surprise you.

Tasha: Those next generation kids coming in, I tell you there’s a, there’s especially like my 8-year-old. I started school during the pandemic and in Canada, we were out 26 weeks, I think, or it was quite a long, long time, felt like a long time.

Tasha: So I, uh, you know, just interested to see and, uh, where it heads next. And, um, this has been amazing, by the way. I, my biggest problem is going to be going backwards and trying to figure out how the heck I take like a couple minute clip out of this.

Matthew: Well, listen, we dwell in abundance. So this is awesome.

Tasha: Thank you so much, Matthew. I really, really appreciate you doing this because, and obviously I get a chance to like talk with you more, which I wouldn’t have gotten this chance otherwise. So this is amazing. Thank you.

Matthew: Yeah, no, I appreciate the opportunity and I’m ready for round two.