Challenging the Way We’ve Always Led: Bri Gerzevske on Rethinking Nonprofit Leadership
Key Takeaways
- Many nonprofit challenges are systemic, not personal. The frustrations leaders experience often aren’t unique to one organization. Recognizing that can be the first step toward meaningful change.
- Leadership deserves its own skill set. Being an exceptional fundraiser doesn’t automatically prepare someone to lead and develop a team.
- Middle managers need more support. They’re often expected to balance competing priorities without the training or community to help them succeed.
- Feeling seen matters. Honest conversations with peers remind nonprofit professionals they’re not navigating these challenges alone.
After nearly 15 years in fundraising, Bri Gerzevske has come to a realization that many nonprofit professionals eventually reach: the hardest parts of the work often aren’t unique to one organization. They’re shared across the sector.
That realization has shaped the next chapter of her career. Rather than focusing solely on fundraising, Bri is asking bigger questions about nonprofit leadership, workplace culture, and what it would look like to better support the people doing the work. Through her initiative, Oddball Leadership, she’s creating space for nonprofit professionals to question long-standing assumptions, connect with peers, and imagine healthier ways of leading.
For anyone who has ever wondered whether they’re the only one struggling with impossible expectations, Bri offers both validation and hope.
When the Problem Isn’t Personal, It’s Systemic
Bri’s career has spanned nearly 15 years in faith-based and social service fundraising. Along the way, she’s built relationships across the sector, completed graduate studies in nonprofit management, and listened carefully to the experiences of nonprofit professionals working in organizations of every size and mission.
What continues to stand out isn’t how different those experiences are. It’s how remarkably similar they can be.
Time and again, she has watched people realize that the challenges keeping them awake at night aren’t failures unique to their organization. Someone working in a completely different cause area, serving a different community, and reporting to a different leadership team is often wrestling with the exact same issues.
That realization became the catalyst for Oddball Leadership.
“One of the things that still shocks me to this day is when people finally look outside of their own experience and realize that the challenges and the issues they’re facing… are also being faced by someone else in a completely different organization with a completely different cause. It’s not a personal thing, it’s like a systems thing.”
Rather than accepting that “this is just how nonprofits work,” Bri wants leaders to ask better questions. Why do these patterns keep repeating? Why do so many nonprofit professionals feel isolated in experiences that are actually widely shared? And how can organizations better prepare and support the people stepping into leadership?
For Bri, changing nonprofit leadership begins by recognizing that many of these challenges aren’t individual failures. They’re symptoms of systems that have remained largely unquestioned for years.
Are We Asking Leaders to Do the Impossible?
One question has been occupying much of Bri’s thinking lately, and it emerged from her own experience leading a fundraising department of more than ten people.
Like many fundraising leaders, she cared deeply about coaching, mentoring, and helping her team grow. At the same time, the expectations placed on her by senior leadership were heavily focused on frontline fundraising: donor meetings, major gift solicitations, proposal writing, and revenue goals.
The tension was impossible to ignore.
Can someone truly excel at developing people while also carrying the workload of a frontline fundraiser?
Rather than offering a simple answer, Bri is inviting the sector into the conversation.
“I’m sort of working on this thesis right now… is it really possible to be an effective manager, an effective leader, and an effective practitioner? You can’t divide your attention evenly between staff reporting to you and donors.”
It’s a question that extends well beyond fundraising. Across the nonprofit sector, talented practitioners are regularly promoted because they’re excellent at their jobs, only to discover that leading people requires an entirely different set of skills.
Building Leaders, Not Just Fundraisers
One observation in particular has stayed with Bri as she’s reflected on her own leadership journey.
“Just because you can secure a seven-figure endowment doesn’t mean you’re a good boss.”
It’s a simple statement, but it challenges one of the sector’s most common assumptions.
Too often, nonprofit professionals are promoted because they’re exceptional fundraisers, program leaders, marketers, or grant writers. Leadership becomes the next logical step, even though very few organizations provide meaningful training in coaching, conflict resolution, team development, or people management.
As Bri points out, this isn’t a problem unique to fundraising or even to nonprofits. Many industries assume that technical expertise naturally translates into leadership ability.
In reality, they’re different skill sets.
Through Oddball Leadership, Bri hopes to create spaces where nonprofit professionals, particularly middle managers, can build those leadership muscles before burnout becomes inevitable. Instead of pretending leaders should already know how to navigate every challenge, she wants to normalize asking questions, learning from peers, and developing practical solutions together.
Why Feeling Seen Matters
Even while wrestling with difficult questions, Bri remains deeply hopeful about the future of the nonprofit sector.
That hope comes from something surprisingly simple: being surrounded by people who understand.
As she shares her ideas and explores what Oddball Leadership could become, she continues to meet nonprofit professionals who recognize themselves in her experiences. They tell her they’re asking the same questions. They’re facing the same tensions. They’re trying to build healthier organizations while working within systems that don’t always make that easy.
Those conversations have become one of the greatest sources of encouragement in her work.
“When I’m around people who are affirming what I’m feeling… and I can tell somebody else, ‘I see you. I know where you’re coming from,’ it’s a constant sense of encouragement… I think that feeling seen and feeling valued and having a sense of belonging in community… I don’t think even the most introverted of us can live without that.”
For Bri, community isn’t simply about networking. It’s about recognition. It’s the relief that comes from realizing someone else understands exactly what you’re experiencing without needing a lengthy explanation.
Whether those conversations happen across a coffee shop table or through a virtual community, they remind nonprofit professionals that they aren’t carrying these challenges alone.
Creating Space for Better Leadership
Nonprofit work has never lacked passionate people. What it often lacks is enough room to question the systems that shape the work itself.
Bri Gerzevske is helping create that room.
By encouraging honest conversations about leadership, management, and the realities nonprofit professionals face every day, she’s inviting the sector to move beyond simply accepting “the way things have always been.”
For The Nonprofit Hive community, her perspective is a timely reminder that meaningful change often begins with naming what’s true. When nonprofit professionals recognize that their struggles are shared, they’re able to stop carrying them in isolation and start building better solutions together. Sometimes the most powerful leadership doesn’t begin with having all the answers. It begins with creating the space to ask better questions.