The Accidental Nonprofiteer
When I first started working in the nonprofit world, I had no roadmap. No training. No master plan. Honestly, I didn’t even intend to end up here. But like a lot of people, I stumbled into it because I cared deeply about an issue and wanted to make a difference. Before I knew it, I was running an organization and learning the hard way what it really takes to build something sustainable.
That’s the story behind my book, The Accidental Nonprofiteer: Building Systems That Serve Your Mission (Not the Other Way Around). I wrote it for all the reluctant visionaries out there—the people who never set out to be “nonprofit leaders” but suddenly find themselves steering the ship.
What’s inside the book
The book isn’t theory. It’s a collection of lessons I learned in the trenches, from running on $2 margins selling CafePress merch, to finding a $25 membership model that actually worked, to figuring out how to keep volunteers rowing in the same direction when everyone had their own idea of what success looked like.
Some of my favorite takeaways include:
The Pharmacy Principle: how a teenage job counting pills taught me more about responsibility and service than any management textbook ever could.
The Inbox Awakening: that time I got banned from Constant Contact in two hours flat—and what it taught me about trust, communication, and community.
Automation Without Alienation: using tools and systems to scale without losing the human touch.
Revenue Without Selling Your Soul: finding models that fit your mission (and don’t drain your team in the process).
Every chapter is rooted in real mistakes, experiments, and pivots I made along the way.
Why it took me eight years to finish
I’ll be honest—it took me nearly a decade to turn these stories into a book. I had half-written blog posts, scattered notes, and lots of unfinished drafts sitting around. It wasn’t until I started using AI—not to write the book for me, but to help with structure, flow, and editing—that it finally came together.
That process actually echoed one of the main themes of the book: systems should support the mission, not the other way around. AI wasn’t the author—it was a system I used to bring clarity to something I’d been wrestling with for years.
Why I wrote it
I know what it feels like to be thrown into leadership without preparation. To juggle a mission you care about with the daily grind of operations you never signed up for. I wanted to put this book out into the world so that others wouldn’t feel as lost as I did starting out.
If you’re leading a nonprofit, starting one, or even just volunteering and wondering how things could run more smoothly, I think you’ll find pieces of yourself in these stories.
Closing thought
So here’s my question for you: what systems in your organization are working against your mission—and how might you flip them to actually support it?
If that resonates, you can grab the book on Kindle.