Meet Your Host
Abbey Harlow
For more than 20 years, I've worked alongside nonprofit leaders as a staff member, then consultant. Much of that work has been with small, rural organizations, where the executive director is also the grant writer, the IT department, and the person who unlocks the building. Through Harlow Nonprofit Consulting, I help leaders fund their work, build real connections, and lead sustainably. And through the Rural Roots Roundtable, my membership for rural nonprofit leaders, I make sure they never have to figure it out alone.
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Christal M. Cherry
Christal M. Cherry is the Beyoncé of board leadership.
Founder of The Board Pro, Christal is a nationally recognized nonprofit consultant, speaker, and coach who brings courage, curiosity, and care to every boardroom. With over two decades of experience in fundraising, board governance, leadership development, and DEI strategy, she helps nonprofit leaders and boards move from stuck to soaring. Known for her humor, wisdom, and truth-telling, Christal turns board retreats into transformational experiences and trains CEOs to lead with intention and inclusion.
She’s also a published author, adoptive mom, and breakfast lover who never shies away from the tough conversations—or the opportunity to make your board braver, bolder, and more effective.
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Josh Feldman
Josh walks daily. He watercolors on Zoom calls, and on good days you can find him hiking in the mountains of western MA. Josh is a master facilitator, coach and public speaker with 20 years of experience building cohort communities, experience design and community building with other do-gooders. He is a creativity evangelist, dirt-digging aspiring gardener, and lifelong student to his three kids.
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Vivian Gietz
Vivian Gietz is a Fractional COO for nonprofits and founder of Melondrop Nonprofit Ops. For almost a decade, she's worked in nonprofits, as an operations director, executive assistant, and marketing coordinator, watching the same pattern play out again and again: a smart, driven Executive Director becomes the sole decision-maker for everything, and the organization stalls waiting on her.
Vivian closes that gap. She holds both the operations side, where the structural gaps live, and the marketing and communications side, where those gaps show up as lost funding. This dual perspective is her edge. Using her Seed to Harvest framework, she works with EDs over a focused 90 days to rebuild the systems and decision-making structure their org actually needs, freeing EDs up for the work they got into this for: donor relationships, strategic planning, sustainable funding.
Vivian lives in Vancouver, BC with her dog, Sedona, and cats, Teddi and Baby.
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Madeline McGill
Hailing from Colorado, Madeline McGill began her career working on economic justice campaigns with non-profits and labor unions across New England. In 2018, she moved back to the Southwest to help found the Rural Utah Project, bringing their fundraising and communications programs online. After building a storytelling program with the advertising equivalency of $11.1M in the Four Corners, she’s remained rooted in rural narrative work ever since. In 2021, she founded Western Desk, a rural-based consultancy, to develop storytelling and narrative capacity within small organizations — creating programs that center the contributions of working people. Today she leads storytelling at Resource Rural, where she designed and built the program from the ground up. She has since grown it fivefold, from a pilot into a national program working alongside rural and Tribal organizations in every region of the country.
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Kelly McLaughlin
Kelly McLaughlin is the founder of From Scratch Fundraising, helping nonprofits with complex and messy missions build individual giving programs from the ground up. She began her career raising over $1 million a year for niche foreign policy advocacy, then built giving programs for missions spanning immigration, climate, and historic preservation.
Kelly holds a B.A. in Political Communications and wrote her Master's thesis on translating complex political ideas into language everyone understands — an extension of her years as a community organizer building relationships around exactly this kind of complexity.
Handed the standard fundraising playbook early on, Kelly found it extractive and ineffective for missions too complex for tidy metrics or elevator pitches. So she built her own approach instead: relationships over dollar signs, rooted in mission and community rather than templates. She now helps organizations develop messaging and systems for real relationship-based fundraising.
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Rachel Muir
Meet Rachel Muir, whose passion for fundraising is so intense she’s been certified as an alternative energy source. Rachel launched Girlstart, a non-profit empowering girls in STEM in her apartment with $500 and a credit card at age 26. Several years later she had raised over 10 million and was featured on Oprah, CNN, and the Today show. Rachel holds a Certificate in Philanthropic Psychology with distinction from the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy. When she isn’t wishing all dresses came with pockets, she’s doing a webinar transforming people into confident, successful fundraisers in her League of Extraordinary Fundraisers membership program.
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Aparna Rae
Aparna Rae is an author, speaker and dot-connector who writes about the nonprofit and philanthropic world from inside it - the burnout, the funding gaps, and what sustainable leadership actually requires. As founder of the firm Moving Beyond, she partnered with more than 60 organizations, including major private foundations, to shift over $300 million in grantmaking toward BIPOC-led and Global South organizations. She also co-founded Future for Us, which grew into a movement of 20,000 women of color and translated into millions of dollars in raises and promotions for its members. Her trauma-informed leadership work with frontline managers at one of the Pacific Northwest's largest employers put real money back into the pockets of the workers who needed it most. Aparna has lived and worked in six countries, and she builds from one conviction: the people closest to the problem are usually closest to the solution — funding included.
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Loretta Turner
Loretta is an exceptional social entrepreneur, executive coach, and advocate for an equitable nonprofit workforce. As the Founder and Organizational Wellbeing Strategist at Do Good Leadership Collective, Loretta’s work focuses on caring for the social impact sector through organizational resilience and people + culture strategies. She believes in putting people first, and that prioritizing the wellbeing of those who work tirelessly behind the scenes of social impact is key to building and sustainable organizations. Loretta brings over 15 years of experience to her work as an executive leader, strategist, wellness practitioner, facilitator, and coach.