Leading With Values When Everything Is on the Line

By Paula Fynboh, CEO

One of the first responsibilities I was charged with when becoming Aspire’s CEO was ensuring the organization operationalized our values. In other words, how would we, from the Board of Directors to front-line staff, put our values into action in a way that is tangible, transparent, and measurable?  

To deliver against this charge, I developed Aspire’s ‘Values in Decision Making Scorecard’. The process and rubric I created was just published by Georgetown University’s Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership to help other mission-driven organizations build transformative structures that establish trust, cultivate a culture of integrity, and drive impactful work. 

I hoped the scorecard would become an institutional tool at Aspire to ensure leadership alignment, transparency, and trust-building. Ultimately, my goal was that everything we did moving forward would center those closest to our work, namely our students, families, and community. Over the last four years, our Values Scorecard has guided everything from curriculum and program development to HR policies and practices, as well as our fundraising efforts and the development and implementation of our organizational budget and strategic plan. 

This past spring, our ‘Values in Decision Making Scorecard’ was put to the test when federal funding cuts suddenly and immediately eliminated 30% of our budget and the 17 dedicated Aspire AmeriCorps members who taught lessons, mentored students, and supported Aspire families every day.

We knew we had tough choices to make. We could make decisions from a place of fear, scarcity, and competition; or we could make decisions with a spirit of hope and moral courage, and that centered our students and their community and aligned with our values. 

We chose to lead with our values. Our ‘Values in Decision Making Scorecard’ became a compass in guiding our decisions and actions and making sure they aligned with Aspire’s five organizational values: Growth, Connection, Equity & Access, Excellence, and Fun & Caring.

Growth

Before the federal funding cuts, we had doubled the number of students we serve, grown our fundraising by 97%, and only had three employees leave our organization in four years. This unprecedented growth and results are evidence that putting values into action works, and we knew that honoring our commitment to our students’ growth with our actions was the only real option on the table, even if it would be hard. 

Immediately after learning about our federal funding cuts, we began to hear concerns of scarcity. Very well-meaning people, themselves discouraged by the headlines and fears of additional cuts to education and safety net programs like ours, told us it would be a hard time for nonprofits. But we didn’t give in. Within 36 hours of losing our federal funding, we launched our ‘Rising Together’ fundraising campaign. With the trust we had built through living our values, our community rallied around us. We raised enough money to hire back 15 of our AmeriCorps members as contract employees. This allowed us to continue our school year programming and serve a record number of students through our 2024-25 school year and summer program. 

Initially, we estimated that over a third of our students could lose access to our critical programming. Our data proves that students who return to Aspire year after year experience the most growth and the highest gains in reading and math, sometimes improving up to three grade levels within one year. Over 30% of students losing access to our programming would have a detrimental impact on our students’ futures, and we were not going to give up on their potential. Our ‘Rising Together’ campaign attracted national attention and helped us close this gap in programming. We still started the year with one empty classroom – which represents about 15% fewer students than last year. However, with creative thinking, innovative partnerships, and sheer determination, we will reopen this classroom in January and serve the same number of students as before the federal funding cuts. 

Connection

Because of our values-centered culture and our strong connections with our students and families, every one of our AmeriCorps members volunteered to show up for work the next two days after the announcement of the cuts while we figured out our next steps, even with their contracts and funding eliminated. 

We also heard from our students and parents how important Aspire is to them. 99% percent of the families we serve are experiencing poverty. Despite their economic realities, our families responded with open hearts. Over 50 parents wrote letters of support for Aspire, and 18 community organizations, despite their own fears of losing funding, signed onto a letter of support for Aspire. One of our students offered us $50 of his hard-earned savings, and one of our students’ moms began donating $5 a month because she didn’t want her son and his friends to lose access to Aspire, a place they call their second home. Other nonprofits in the area also helped raise funds, expanded awareness, and offered programmatic partnership support. 

These acts of generosity and courage didn’t happen by accident or because the word ‘Connection’ is listed as a value on our website. They happened because we hold ourselves accountable to putting our value of connection into action and ensuring our community feels connected to Aspire and each other. And when we needed it the most, our community showed up for us. 

Equity & Access

Our mission is to serve students most impacted by the educational opportunity gap and to treat every family with dignity and respect. Cutting students from our programming would deepen inequities. Within three days of losing our federal funding, we had a plan that would allow us to keep all our classrooms open until the end of the school year and make sure each student registered for our full-day summer school program would have a seat, marking our largest summer cohort in Aspire’s history. Through a mix of creativity, fundraising, and reworking our budget based on end-of-year surplus and contingency funding estimates, we not only honored our commitment to every single Aspire student and family, but we kept our programming at no cost to them. 

We prioritize taking care of our team and honoring our pay equity commitments, even and especially in turbulent times and when resources feel limited. Too often, fear and scarcity influence organizations to pull back on their equity commitments and investments in staff, resulting in well-meaning organizations replicating some of the same systems of harm we are working to change. We know that “hurt people, hurt people,” and “healed people, heal people”.  

When we faced the decision of whether to join a federal lawsuit challenging the federal funding cuts, we returned to this same value. When we had to choose between doing what was right and what was easy, we chose our value of equity and access. We knew our responsibility lay in not just restoring our funding and programming for our students, but for the 1,000 nonprofits across the county also losing their funding and the many thousands of historically marginalized students they serve. 

Excellence

One of the systems that contributes to the educational opportunity gap is that schools and society as a whole have lower expectations for low-income Black and Latinx students. Aspire is committed to sustaining high-quality programming, and we have high expectations for our students. Despite a climate of uncertainty, we just launched our next five-year strategic roadmap. Priority one is pursuing programmatic excellence that responds to the new realities facing our students’ educational and social-emotional needs. 

Our dedicated team is moving forward in developing a new STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) curriculum to expose our students to new topics and open doors to emerging STEM careers that are often disproportionately closed to low-income Black and Latinx students. We are launching a new social-emotional curriculum to support our students in feeling connected, valued, and encouraged in a climate where it is easy for them to lose hope. We are expanding our parent programming to further meet the holistic needs of our families in the wake of deeper cuts to safety net programs. Finally, we keep refining our evidence-based literacy curriculum to support further student growth and foster a love of learning. We are committed to excellence, even in crisis.

Fun & Caring

Last, but certainly not least, at Aspire, joy is not optional.  As we pilot a new staffing model in the wake of our federal funding cuts, almost all of our newly created staff positions are filled with past AmeriCorps members who not only bring institutional knowledge and existing relationships with our students, but also their whole selves to Aspire. Our team continues to meet fear with compassion, creating a space where our students and families feel safe, supported, and celebrated. Our classrooms, hallways, and offices continue to ring with laughter, playfulness, and warmth.

Why Values Matter to Me, as a Leader and as a Human Being

When values are not operationalized, they are not felt. And when values are not felt, they are not believed; and when values are not believed, organizations fall apart in times of crisis. 

Earlier in my career, I passed up two promotions because I didn’t want to become the type of leader that was often modeled to me, leaders whose title and ego was more important than listening and lifting the lived expertise of community and staff closest to the work and leaders who were more influenced by the bottom line and scarcity over possibilities, imagination, and abundance. When I accepted the role of CEO at Aspire, I knew I would make a million mistakes, but I also hoped I’d have the courage to lead differently and in alignment with my values.

I chose to submit my ‘Values in Decision Making’ process for publication at Georgetown University’s Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership because when values are put into practice, when they guide decision making at every level of an organization, and when they shape strategy, budgets, programs, and culture, as they do at Aspire, organizations and the people connected to them thrive, even in turbulent times. 

Several organizations have already shared that they used Aspire’s response to these funding cuts as an example to their own leadership teams and communities about what was possible. It is my hope that this work can continue to  help to shift our current culture on organizational values and what leadership can look like. 

This is not always easy work, but it is the right work, and it is the work that this time calls for. Leading with values isn’t just possible. It’s powerful.