Running a nonprofit that serves 1.5 million people across 1,400 sites is hard enough in a stable environment. Doing it while federal program funding is under threat, the economy is unpredictable, and your brand is under-recognized outside the disability community is a different challenge entirely.
Kendra Davenport has been Easterseals’ President and CEO since 2022. In that time she led a financial turnaround at the national office: no line of credit, no debt, departments that consistently come in under budget, and a long-term orientation most nonprofit leaders talk about but few execute on.
In this episode of the Charity Charge Show, Stephen Garten sits down with Kendra to get into the specifics: how she thinks about financial discipline, vendor audits, reserves strategy, board engagement, and building an organization designed to outlast any single leader.
Quick Summary
- Easterseals serves 1.5 million people annually across 70 affiliates and 1,400 centers nationwide.
- Kendra led a full financial turnaround at the national office without taking on debt or a line of credit.
- She reviews the budget weekly and recommends auditing vendors annually — cutting 50% or more is realistic.
- Windfalls should be split three ways: long-term reserves, short-term accessible savings, and strategic reinvestment.
- Operating like a business, not a family organization, is the single biggest differentiator for nonprofit resilience.
Guest: Kendra Davenport, President & CEO, Easterseals (in role since 2022). Nearly 40 years of nonprofit experience in fundraising, marketing, communications, and organizational leadership. Participant in the University of Chicago Booth School’s Global CEO Leadership Program.
Q: For anyone new to Easterseals, what’s the mission, and how big is the organization today?
Easterseals has been around for more than a century. We exist to support people with disabilities of all ages — helping them live life to the fullest, participate fully in society, whether that means going to work, getting an education, or simply living in their community.
We have 70 affiliates across the country operating out of 1,400 centers, and we support about 1.5 million people every year.
One thing I always say internally: if you’ve met one affiliate, you’ve met one affiliate. They’re all very different. Some focus on early childhood intervention. Others serve adults with intellectual and physical disabilities, veterans, or people re-entering the workforce. The through-line is the same — we meet people where they are and help them access every aspect of society.
Q: What drew you to Easterseals? You came from fundraising and marketing, not program operations.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d even be competitive for the role. I told the person who suggested I apply, “I have no disability program experience.” And they said, “That’s exactly why you should apply.”
The more I learned about what they needed — someone to make Easterseals more sustainable long-term, refresh the brand, expand public awareness — the more it clicked. Our biggest challenge is that unless you’re part of the disability community, you probably don’t know what Easterseals does or how vast we are. That’s our Achilles heel.
All of my experience in fundraising, marketing, and nonprofit management had been pointing toward this. I feel genuinely fulfilled here, especially at a moment when so many nonprofits are struggling. We’re growing, innovating, and constantly trying to be more current.
Q: What separates the nonprofits that thrive from the ones that stagnate?
The organizations that survive challenging times are the ones that operate like a business, not like a family organization. That means making hard decisions when they need to be made — including letting people go if it’s what’s financially necessary, even when the mission is to help people.
Nonprofits tend to struggle with gray areas. Businesses don’t. Businesses make difficult decisions and move forward. Nonprofits will keep saying yes, yes, yes until the team is stretched impossibly thin.
Too many organizations get caught in feast-or-famine cycles because they keep doing the same things and expecting different outcomes. You have to stop, matrix it out — what’s working, what isn’t — and make changes. It sounds simple, but most organizations don’t actually do it with clear eyes.
Q: How do you approach budget management at Easterseals? Weekly reviews sound intense.
I know that sounds extreme. A lot of people would say look at it quarterly or monthly. But reviewing more frequently keeps departments aligned and, more importantly, it keeps people collaborating.
Here’s an example. If you get to the end of a quarter and one department has $50,000 in permanent savings but another is $30,000 short, you want those two managers talking. One covers the other, and if they need it back in Q3, they work it out. When your managers operate like that, you’re doing something right.
I’m proud that our departments at the national office are almost never over budget. The key is transparency and a willingness to make adjustments. The budget shouldn’t be hard and fast. If you’re seeing a downturn in individual donations by Q2, you need to change course — not keep spending to what you originally projected.
Q: What did you actually find when you went through a vendor audit?
Every leader should do this when they step into a new role — and then annually after that. At one organization I won’t name, I asked for a full vendor list in the first week. We brought the team in, went through every vendor and what they actually did for us, and ended up cutting the list by more than 50%.
Some contracts we let run out and didn’t renew. Some we severed immediately. Others we renegotiated: “this made sense three years ago, it doesn’t now.” Most vendors are far more willing to renegotiate on scope and payment terms than people expect. The relationship doesn’t have to end. It just has to reflect reality.
The tricky part is that vendor relationships become almost like friendships over time. There’s a reluctance to say “we don’t need this anymore” to someone who’s been good to you. But the savings are real and they compound year over year.
Q: How should nonprofit leaders think about short-term investments and reserves?
When a windfall comes in — a major gift, an unexpected grant, a strong fundraising quarter — the instinct is almost always to spend it immediately on something visible: advertising, a new campaign, digital. Sometimes that’s right. But often it’s a short-term reflex, not a strategic decision.
I think every windfall should be split three ways:
- A portion into long-term permanent savings you can’t easily touch.
- A portion into short-term accessible reserves for when you need to hit a goal.
- A smaller portion into something genuinely strategic, like a new fundraising initiative.
The longer I’ve been in this work, the more I think about what I want to leave behind. When I eventually move on from Easterseals, I want whoever comes next to have reserves, not be in crisis mode. That requires thinking 5 to 10 years out, not just this fiscal year.
Q: You chose not to take a line of credit during the turnaround. Why not?
As a fundraiser for most of my career, all I think about when I hear “line of credit” is pressure. You take it, the first few months feel easier, and then you lose sleep because now you owe more than you borrowed — and you weren’t raising enough to begin with. You’ve just delayed the problem and made it more expensive.
We toughed it out. We diversified revenue, tightened spending, and audited everything. Today we have no line of credit and no debt. That puts us in a fundamentally different position to weather federal funding cuts and agency closures than organizations that were already leveraged going in.
Sustainable nonprofits are the ones that don’t borrow their way through hard years.
Q: What books or resources have had the most impact on how you lead?
If my team were listening, they’d all say the title in unison: Atomic Habits by James Clear. In the nonprofit sector, if something isn’t an immediate visible success, we call it a flop and move on. That book reframes it. Small, consistent improvements compound into large ones. The same logic applies to building a stronger team or a healthier organization.
The other one is My Life in Full by Indra Nooyi, the first female CEO of PepsiCo. I’d recommend listening to it because she narrates it herself. Her story of navigating a heavily male-dominated industry, being consistently underestimated, and what she looked for in leaders is one of the best leadership books I’ve ever read.
Beyond books: I write a daily message to my team every morning. Sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a 10-minute read. I link articles from The Economist, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review. I’ve done it for over a decade. It clarifies my thinking for the day and gives the team a consistent signal about what I value.
Q: Where do you see AI fitting into the nonprofit world?
AI is already in our world and some of it is genuinely valuable. Summarizing a two-hour meeting, synthesizing a stack of pre-reading for a board session, accelerating ad development — those are real time savings.
That said, I don’t think AI will eliminate a large share of nonprofit jobs, especially in direct service. Easterseals runs hands-on programs. AI isn’t replacing a job coach or a disability services coordinator. My husband is a researcher who helps companies model what AI will do for them, and his point is consistent: AI can speed up your research, but only a human can parse out what actually matters for your specific situation.
The CRM comparison is a useful one. Twenty years ago, most nonprofits were using their database as basically an address book with giving history. Now even small nonprofits have sophisticated CRMs that model planned giving and personalize outreach at a level that used to require a team of 20. AI will follow a similar arc. The organizations paying attention now and figuring out where it fits their mission will be ahead when it matters.
How to Support Easterseals
Easterseals supports anyone with any disability, across all ages — including acquired disabilities, rare diseases, autism, and physical limitations. Roughly 70 million Americans, about one in four, live with a disability.
To find your nearest affiliate, make a donation, or learn about services in your community, visit Easterseals.com and enter your zip code.
