Welcome to Making Data Matter. We have conversations about data, leadership at mission-driven organizations, practical insights into nonprofit mission, strategy data, and anything else we find interesting. I'm your host, Sawyer Nyquist. I'm your co-host, Troy Dueck. Today, I'm excited to welcome to the show Matt Benford. Matt, welcome to the show. Welcome. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
For folks just meeting you, Matt, give us a little background about who you are and what you do. Yeah. My name is Matt. I am the Chief Financial Officer of Sonoma Can or Sonoma Community Action Network. I spend a lot of time in that role of accounting and finance. Accounting, looking back and finance, looking forward, and how to make, I would say, data-informed decisions with how we repurpose and allocate dollars. So that's a lot of my world.
A lot of my time, the group that I work with is more community-centric and getting resources into the hands of people who need it, so we can provide some equitable transformation in the places that we serve. So that's a little bit about my world. Yeah. I love it. So let's start. I want to do a little bit more. Tell me about what the community action partnership is like, or more specifically about the type of work that you do in Sonoma County.
Yeah. So Sonoma County is a little bit, you're positioning it on a map. It's a little bit north of San Francisco, about an hour and a half north of San Francisco. And what the community action agencies are really designed to do is to rally around those who need support in these different clusters. And a lot of the time, it's based on county, but there are some private groups that support families with the resources that they need to move forward in life.
A lot of the groups that we work with have some kind of challenge or hurdle that they need a hand in helping to address. And so as a whole, the community action agencies, community action networks, partnerships were established back in the 50s throughout with the use of federal funds and continue to this day be funded by the government through community services block grants that you may have heard about. So anyways, for our group, we focus on the footprint of Sonoma County.
And our goal is to really help ensure that families are, like I said, moving along a path of equitable transformation. And what that simply means is we embrace a whole family approach, right? Not adjusting just one specific need, but having the ability or capacity to help with a variety of needs that are all interlinked in some way for families that are interlinked in a way so that families can move forward with the resources they need.
So for instance, early childhood education is a really big one for students and kids and our families that otherwise wouldn't have access to some of the more appropriate or supplemental educational resources. Or we also talk about in that model asset allocation. How do we provide housing or housing supports, financial stability to families that are struggling, moving place to place, or some even struggling with housing insecurity that way?
So asset building, ECE, or early childhood education, health and wellness has become a big one over the last few years, both behaviorally, mentally, and then physical health. So we provide those connections and supports for the families that need them. And then social capital, simply how we define being able to connect others to a network of resources.
So if you've experienced or have the benefit from what we've provided or what a community action has provided or any other network has provided, that we can connect you with continuing resources that would make sure that you are moving along the path of transformation. So that's kind of the programmatic side. That's how we support all of this. But as you would realize, doing all this, it costs money for everything to be put online.
And so that's my role in making sure that all those resources are allocated appropriately. We have a ton of federal funding that we make sure to monitor so that we don't misallocate and that we can continue to create those trajectories of financial resource to our families. So yeah, I know that's a mouthful. And there's a lot there, but that's kind of what we do.
Yeah. How do the needs or environmental or economic factors of Sonoma County differ from a city like San Francisco or other urban environments? What are some specific things around Sonoma County that are maybe unique challenges or unique opportunities that you guys have? Yeah, in my experience, Sawyer, before coming to be the CFO here, I was with the United Way, their Bay Area chapter in San Francisco. And really big push in SF and the surrounding areas, Oakland, was housing.
And so we spent a lot of funds, a lot of time focusing on housing initiatives. As I've arrived north of San Francisco to Sonoma County, the difference isn't as pronounced, which is to say housing is a huge piece of what we do in housing and addressing housing insecurity.
And while I would say there's more resources in San Francisco, just by nature of it being a major city, the felt need on the outskirts of major metropolitan areas is still pronounced and even to some extent more dire than in these major hubs. Because I think in the major hubs, you can deploy resources faster. There's more resources to deploy. And the data that governs how we approach that work is very consolidated to those hubs.
Whereas when you get into the outskirts, a lot of work has to be done to pull together resources and network and find funding opportunities so that we can still address the same type of needs. And I think what we found, too, is that as people exit those mass centers, LA, San Francisco, Oakland, and look for some kind of relief in the surrounding areas, the prices are still being driven higher. And the need is becoming much more pronounced.
And so I'd say in short, housing initiatives are really important for us. And because of that, we're not just, I mean, I think that's a symptom of a bigger issue where we're talking about financial stability and how do we create pathways for gainful employment?
How do we create pathways for families to thrive, not just in their housing situation, which feeds into a bunch of different challenges when you're experiencing insecurity that way, but how do we help to address the different problems that come along, including housing and housing insecurity? So yeah, I think I've seen that be really pronounced over the last, I'd say, five or seven years that I've been kind of monitoring that space, or been in that space, I should say.
This is awesome stuff to hear about the work that you can do right there in your community. And I'm thinking about how private nonprofit organizations are often using some kind of state or federal funding. And what often comes with that, some might call it shackles, but let's not suggest negative viewpoints here. But it does come with, as you are using those funds, you have to then report back how you're using those funds. And there's that compliance aspect of reporting.
And so I'm just curious and wanted to explore with you, how do you use data to make informed decisions and aren't just caught up in the, well, we need to report on this because it's part of our compliance requirements. Like, yes, I want to do that and be held accountable well for these funds, but I want to be able to take that reporting and mature on it so that I can actually make data-informed decisions for our organization. So explore that with me.
What's that look like for you and your role, and how have you been able to impact that to mature beyond simply checking the box of compliance? 100%. Great question, Troy. And I think what's important for me in that area is twofold. As a leader in the organization, obviously, the compliance piece, there's a ton of that. There's a ton of monitoring. There's a ton of auditing.
And so from a data perspective, making sure that we've set our systems up so that we can report out very quickly is important for me. The longer that we lag or our inability to produce reports for compliance purposes, the longer that takes, the more flags that start to exist with the state and with the federal government.
But outside of that, what I'm excited for with what we're doing is that we're not only taking that data and putting it into our single audit or some of the monitorings that we have, but we're actually making it actionable.
So for instance, last year, we started as a cohort of nonprofits in our county, where we realized that the services that are being provided by different kinds of nonprofits, whether they're community actions like ourselves or health-based, behavior health-based nonprofits or any other profit in between that's kind of focusing on this whole family approach, mental health wellness, child education, everything I was talking about earlier.
We realized that there were families that were having to get resources at different spots through different agencies and having to fill out the same kind of information each time. And for some, that's at best is kind of a pain in the neck to do each time. And for others, it surfaces trauma to really talk about how you're experiencing poverty or to be able to talk through these experiences that is part of the intake program. And it's a barrier to entry, right? And it's a barrier to entry.
Sometimes they aren't going to do it at multiple places. I've done it once, and that's all I can handle. And so they can't get the help that they need. Exactly. And so that's exactly it. And so what we ended up saying was, how can we take funds and apply for funding, grant funding, to create a resource connection network whereby we would create, you all probably heard this before, but UDIP, Universal Data Intake Programs.
How do we create that where, and essentially as we talk about it, there's no wrong door to approaching the services that you would need from a particular nonprofit.
And so how do we share that data and create that kind of system amongst our partners so that when a person, if Matt comes in and says, I need these kinds of services, that when I fill that form out, that's information that exists in a system that if I were to go somewhere else to get services, that that can be pulled down and applied. So we are in year two of the implementation of that with a small group of nonprofits, and I'm really excited for it.
A lot of what I've seen in the past is, like I said, disparate intake systems. Over here, over there, and it creates barriers, like you said. It exposes traumatic experiences. It's hard to navigate. And it's sometimes very confusing and very time consuming. So all those checkboxes are just the opposite of what we're trying to do to create efficiency. So we want to change that. And I think the transformation around building those systems has been great.
And having the ability to be supportive of not only our community members, but to work with other nonprofits to do that has been pretty awesome. One follow up question on that is, does your office, being the finance focused office, are you responsible for most of the data work directly? Or are you partnering with a data team within your organization to produce these kinds of reports and think through these kinds of application efficiencies?
I'm just trying to get a better lay of the land right in your organization. We're partnering for sure. There's enough every coming out of my office that we have to manage. But we have a compliance team that kind of has put that together and a data team that has worked on a lot of those items. But obviously, there's that connection that we need to have. And so that's kind of our setup now. I'm very, very tight knit with our COO and his crew that's running that entire thing.
You mentioned one thing in there when you talked about kind of the more government funds is you talked about having really efficient reporting or being able to do it fast, like quickly. What does that look like to what have you learned? Like, what is it like when it's slow? How have you made that effective and efficient reporting from that standpoint? Yeah, without getting into too much detail, one of the things that I realized over the course of my career is that finance fuels impact.
And so the best way for us to ensure that we're feeling that impact is to create the systems that facilitate it. So by and large for us, at least for my office, is our accounting systems. And because we share data and financial data, programmatic data across the agency, our finance system has to support a lot of that, both from a quantitative standpoint and even in some cases qualitative. And so for us, it was rebuilding the way that we code items into our financial system.
By and large, it was a, for me, Sawyer and Troy, I like to think about finance in a decentralized manner. Like, it's how do we make sure that while my office is the champion of the accounting and finance portions that we've democratized it in a way so that directors and senior managers and the rest can access and make those decisions for themselves. And so we've created a coding system that helps move that process faster. We deal with several hundred thousand transactions a month.
And there's no way that anyone in my office is going to be able to parse that out to figure out, Sawyer, your expense requests from three months ago just got approved and they got coded correctly. That's something that should be in the hands of your manager and the directors and budget leaders who are managing the grant. And so if we are able to support you in coding that, that makes it a lot faster than us trying to comb through data to make sure that we've gotten it all right.
And so finance has now taken this very centralized approach and has made it decentralized where now we are business partners with a lot of the programmatic areas around our agency. And that makes it a lot faster for us to report. Because we can say, hey, we're getting our audit, we're getting our desk monitoring is coming in, or whatever kind of review is happening. These are the transactions that are in question tell me about them.
And we can get those answers very quickly and I can speak with confidence to the auditors who come knocking on my door before it even gets to our programmatic folks, which allows them to be more efficient. So as long as we are able to be partners with them, we can answer these questions. And Sawyer, the other piece of the question was, what does it look like when it's slow? When it's slow, we're not pulling those reports down.
We're not being able to understand these transactions or miscoding or reclasses and things like that. But I'd say primarily with the coding structure that we have, it's produced more efficiencies and more insight than the agency has had in the prior time on how to make decisions for that specific program.
My team and the rest of the C-suite leaders look at it at a broad level, strategically to say how do we then move the agency forward towards whatever initiative that would be next on the horizon for us. Now, Matt, I bet that took trust to get to that point. I'm thinking most departments think of their data as they're the owners of their data.
And building that trust to let other people actually start seeing that data, make some level of decision on that data, can be a bit scary when you get more decentralized and democratizing the data around the organization. How did you get there? Or were you there when you came in and you got to build on something? Tell us that side of the story. By no means. Yeah, I think for us coming, for me, I've been there just a little over a year.
And so coming into the role, it's been a process to ensure trust, right, that what we're looking to do makes sense. And I say that the move from centralized to decentralized finance, the agency was firmly based in a centralized manner. Hey, finance will take care of you. And that put a lot of capacity in our teams. And it was a grind for us. And so when I came in and saw this with the partnership of our CEO, we made that. We're making that switch. And systematically, we've done it.
The mental piece is always like the behavioral piece, the practical piece, is something we're always driven home. No, no, no, no. You help me make these decisions. This is your budget. How can we support you in making those decisions around what you'll do next or what questions do you have on it? A lot of time, Troy, we have folks who are very experienced in budget management based on their experience and others that are new to role, new to management, new to this kind of world.
So a lot of time, we're partnering that way. And I think over the past year, it's created a lot of traction that we can look at finance and say, hey, what's Matt and the team up to? Where can I get a slot on Matt's calendar, which is very small? But where can I be available to just ask a question? We're lucky today. That's what I heard. We got an hour on Matt's time. I made time for this one. This is good. This is good. But being supportive has given a lot of confidence to those team members.
And then I think in turn, because we've seen how fast we can create reports or answer compliance questions and then make decisions, it does a little bit to move the trust needle to the next level. So yeah, I think it's always constant. It's a constant thing. I don't think we've ever arrived, but it's a movement for sure. And one side of the coin that we've been talking about is the efficiency and the trust bleeding that comes from that. But efficiency is about cost saving.
And it makes us using our dollars better. But then the other side of that was, I think you started talking about it. It's like, how do you make decisions within the strategic and the impact? You said finance drives impact. So that if we're doing efficient processes and saving money or be more effective, then what is the impact or the strategic and decision making part that comes out of that or out of data that you see? I think maybe I'll talk about it like this.
The stakes, if we get it wrong, is misallocation of resource. That we're not addressing a need that's felt or we're addressing the wrong problem. And I think if we approach it from a standpoint of mitigating risk by allocating resources appropriately, that kind of bubbles up to show us where we continue to need to focus on the allocation of resources. So for example, I was talking earlier about how housing is super important for us.
What that means is that we need more dollars to go towards that initiative. So that doesn't just mean like the dollars that we have to grant out or dollars that we have to conduct surveys or pass through funds from the federal or state governments. It also means the capacity at which our team needs to operate to support those kinds of efforts. And many times, if we don't understand the full costs, we end up revving past our capacity threshold.
We can't afford to do it because we have two little folks, smaller teams that can't afford to manage entire caseloads. That we're not thinking about our revenue models appropriately on how we will provide fee for service. And so I think when we're talking about how to allocate resources, we're considering what's the need, what have we seen the need be in the past? What's our vision for addressing this need in the community and where are we gonna find the funding? We can't say yes to everything.
And so we have to prioritize how we do it. And I think that's the strategic way that we think about moving the agency forward. We can't do everything at once. So what do we focus on? And I think as we look at our data and how, again, going back to those universal intake forms, where are we seeing the most need? Housing is popping up for us. Mental health and wellness is popping up for us as a big piece for how we are seeing the need.
And then we're asking, well, where can we find funding and how do we step through this to support those people that are showing that felt need? And a lot of the time, because we're a nonprofit, resources are scarce. That's kind of the risk that for at least for our agency, like we're largely government funded. And so that funding doesn't change year to year to year.
And so we have to figure out good ways to make sure that we're keeping that administrative costs lower or understanding the capacity for our administrative team and our infrastructure team really as a whole to deliver on some of those programs that would continue to benefit the community. So it's a delicate balance for sure. Is there a sort of cadence where you're evaluating strategic initiatives? And like, as you think about asset allocations is that quarterly, is that monthly, is that daily?
I don't know. Like, how do you think about like in terms of assessing and iterating over, are we putting dollars in the right places? Yeah, I think a lot of the time, we're in a really cool spot, I would say, because our executive team is newer to the organization. So that evaluation is happening more frequently than it happened in the past, I would say.
I don't know that there's any particular cadence that we would sit down and say, all right, let's look at all this data and say what's coming next. But there's definitely a pulse that we're catching. And I think that as we understand periods of performance for certain grants and renewals for how they come through, we're able to say, okay, what can we do more with this? Or as we talk with other community partners, we're even understanding from kind of anecdotally, hey, what's happening here?
Or, well, we're seeing this, we're seeing that. And now we're able to leverage that to apply for funding. Funders are just really, really focused on joint efforts for nonprofits to support initiatives in the community. So we're partnering with others on initiatives and grants and writing these things together for either pass through or joint funding that will help support the need. And so a lot of it is understanding, all right, what are we seeing? What are other organizations seeing?
What's the data saying to us, at least from what we have coming into our system? And again, we're still learning how to make sense of all of it, but all those things together kind of give us our move forward to say that, hey, maybe now is not the time to focus on, let me put it like this, our Community Action Partnership is kind of focused on that whole family approach.
There are other Community Action Partnerships that are mainly focused on maybe out east that are focused on weatherization and being able to clean energy and being able to fund those kinds of efforts for businesses and our communities that would need that kind of support whether they're in a disaster prone area, right? For us it's the fires, but for others it could be hurricane season or tornado season, that kind of thing. And so they have a different type of focus.
And so that says to us, hey, we're not gonna focus on that. We're gonna focus on what's pressing for our community at the time. And then following up on that, what does success look like? If you're gonna use data and measure success, I think we're kind of maybe talking about it, but I wanna really zoom in on this and focus on in your words, how would you define success for whatever that particular season is of the work that you're doing?
Yeah, I think there's a number of ways I think we define it. For instance, for us, it's more around families served and with what service, right? So if we're thinking through this kind of universally intake system, what was our goal for the families that we wanted to serve and how many did we serve? I think a particular note is when we start to talk about healthcare or I should say behavioral health and mental health services, there's a lot of money that comes to the state for that.
A lot of money that comes to federal funding for that. And so the barometer is kind of given to us. This is what you should be looking for, and this is what you need to kind of go by. And like we were talking about earlier, not just from a compliance, mainly from a compliance standpoint, but for us, we're using it to determine how we then approach escalating those kinds of services. So how many contacts are we making a month? How many calls are we making a month?
At what increment are we making those calls? For our case managers, what kind of resources are they being provided on a regular basis to support with the different cases that they have? We've recently started blood pressure screenings as part of the intake so that we can have that data available for our health and wellness teams. And so success is really ticking those boxes because what it means is that we're doing everything that we can to connect our families with resources, right?
If we're not ticking those boxes, that means we're missing a piece of information that could be beneficial for that person or that family to get resources that could be unlocked if we would have had it. So I think we're defining success by touch points. I think we're defining it by services provided. I think we're defining it by, in our early childhood education programs, kids served, number of kids served.
Even in that world, we're thinking about meals and how many meals are served on a daily basis. And that's all information that goes back to the government, obviously, but we're able to say, all right, if we're serving these amount of kids with these kinds of meals, how do we leverage that into more high quality meals or supplement that for more nutritious meals? The same thing for, I would say that's for our elementary and for our preschool.
And I'm really excited for that in the sense that we've pivoted that to take federal funding and show the need so that we can supplement state funding for that program. So that allows for our classrooms to be open longer so that we can support families that where parents aren't able to get off work or work in the different hours that their kids would have childcare in an educational context. And what does that mean?
That means that not only are we sick in this box, or early childhood education, we're ticking this other box on workforce pathways as far as our whole family approach is concerned, because now parents and guardians are able to spend more time making more money so that they can, again, deploy those resources for themselves towards equitable transformation in the community. So we're doing a lot that we, I'd say that address that issue.
And for us, it's different data points and different metrics that kind of exist across the different programs, specifically. But I think from my vantage point, we're looking at it on how does a family move through the model and what things need to be considered as they do that. And so family serve is always going to be something important to me as I'm looking at it.
But specifically, as you kind of drill in, you'll see that our health and wellness is focused on, case manager, or health and wellness case managers are focused on calls made, contact, touch points, that kind of thing. Our early childhood education folks are focused on meals served, kids served, that kind of thing. So it's very nuanced and very specific, but it all works together. That's awesome.
You just described a two-way street, because earlier in the conversation, you talked about decentralizing the finance data to get it into the hands of those that are managing their budgets and doing the operations and making some strategic calls around their expenses and things like that. But then you also just now talked about how you got to collect data from all those operational units on measuring, well, how many people got served?
How many people are in this education program or this health program or whatever it is? And that's not something you're directly interested in, but it is so indirectly related to where you allocate dollars, you need to know where that is. So how do you translate that? Okay, these KPIs of members served and education programs up and running and all those other KPIs that are very operational, how do you translate that into those dollars in your reporting? I'm curious what that looks like for you.
Yeah, so I think there's the external and the internal component of that. And I think before you get to any of it, again, that partnership where it's like, hey, how do we in finance, how do we kind of insert ourselves into these conversations? I think that that's the way that we're able to support.
But what I found is that as we're inserting ourselves into this conversation, not only are we giving information on like budget numbers and spend and that kind of thing, but we're also getting information, because we'll come back and have to sign off. And I'm sure you both have seen before, like we produce these reports that go up to the state or to the feds, they're looking both the fiscal side and the programmatic side on the same report.
So we're having to collaborate to put this information together. And I think that as we do that, we're able to see like, oh, okay, so there was X amount of kids served and that translates to this amount of spend in the quarter or the month of the period. So that would mean this, you know, so we're actually taking that to the next step, not just for, again, not just for the compliance purpose, but we're rolling that up.
So when I get the data, we're able to talk with our finance committee around what does this report tell us about what we're doing, right? Because we're trying to move our group out of, well, these are X dollars and we have this budget and we perform this way. And this is, you know, we're trying to move away from that to say, this is how we perform it. This is why it happened, you know, and this is what's being able, this is what we're excited about.
And if, you know, if there's a discrepancy between that data that we're producing in these reports, we're able to explain it for whatever reason, whether it's a new initiative coming online that we're running a little hot on, or, you know, overpaced on, that we can say, hey, this is startup or it's implementation for this and this is what we're projecting out.
So I think that's the financial piece of it that is firmly within my office, but also supported by the data that our, you know, our chief program officer is able to provide to us around housing, workforce pathways, early childhood education, health and wellness, you know, social capital, that kind of thing. So I would say, you know, how do we do that and what does that mean for our reporting internally and externally? It means that it's more comprehensive.
It's more, it's more integrated, it's thought out, it's produced in a manner that says, we are focused on our allocations of resources and here's how we did it, right? Instead of just kind of saying it and looking at numbers, you can't really parse out allocations that way.
You know, I could blow it out for you, I could show you each grant we have and you know, whatever, but you know, a lot of times we don't have time for that, you know, in these short meetings that we have with our boards and with our committees. So how do we make it simple? How do we make it digestible? How does it become actionable? How do you feel informed? How do you then, as a board member, talk about it in the communities that you have influence in?
So I think helping to roll all those items up has been a real big piece of the work that we do at the executive level and really just the nature of community action partnerships across the nation. It's just, it's really tied together, I'd say. Matt, you're just, you're articulating a, at least a vision or an ethos about like how data and how you think about strategy and action at your organization.
I'm just curious, like based on the different organizations you've worked at and all the different organizations you interact with, how have you noticed how different organizations approach data differently or maybe their appetite, their interest, their level of investment? Yeah, how they approach data differently from what you've seen. So I think you have a very clear vision of what this would look like and the cultures developed with you.
What does it look like at different organizations you've been at or you interact with? Yeah, it's way different. I think each one has a flavor, and I think for my time at different organizations, the focus on data governance or being able to create some infrastructure around how we handle data is varied. And I think that it's by and large due to funding in that area, being able to find skilled professionals that can build that type of infrastructure that helps us to support it.
And other times, we've had the resources and it's just been a pain to implement it correctly, or maybe not correctly, but in a way that provides the most relevant data. And out of all the agencies I've been a part of, the ones that have struggled with data and struggled with making data-informed decisions have been agencies that have siloed the work. Well, that's just the data thing, right? Just have our data folks put it all together.
And it's not just data, but it's siloed approach to programs, how to approach to finance and ops and data and everything else. And when you have those siloed approaches, no one's talking to each other about what needs to be produced. And all of a sudden, when it's time to, the auditors are knocking in annually or the reviews happen, hour scramble, trying to figure out how do we pull and where is this and what's that and so on and so on.
And I think that those have been challenging organizations to be a part of because not only does a siloed work happen functionally, but the vision for shared services, shared data, shared finance, shared infrastructure, is not articulated from leadership. And so for me, I'm very focused on breaking down those silos so that information is shared in a way.
Obviously within compliance and considering the privacy pieces, especially as we talk about mental health or health services even, but internally to say, we need to democratize this in a way that helps people in our organization move quicker through the work that they do, more efficient, and in a way that pulls it all together so that we can present a unified front to funders when we're seeking more resources to allocate to those that we're serving.
Yeah, like I just think about if I am somebody and I get included in those data and I have insights into what's going on and I can kind of see both from finance and other operational data points, like I get more bought in and I can make better decisions and I can collaborate better with my peers across different business units. And I guess that would probably spark a lot more efficiency and also strategic impact when you have organizations operating.
But I get scared, Sawyer, because now you're looking at my data, making decisions about my data when... Troy, we're on the same team, though. We're not. But that's a common reaction to democratized data is I don't want people looking at my data and thinking that they know how to interpret it properly. They're going to misinterpret it. They're going to mishandle it. And that's where that trust piece comes in. I don't know, Matt, if you want to speak to this. Well, I think...
But that is a visceral response that can come where some people are all ready to share and democratize the data and collaborate together. And other people are like, eh, you don't touch my stuff. Like, that's my stuff. You leave that alone. So how do you break those silos down? Yeah, I think you're 100% right. And I think that, you know, for me, what I've learned in my career is being curious, right? Like, it starts with a question, right?
You know, tell me about, you know, tell me about this piece of data or tell me about these families or this metric that you all use. What's that about? And that, to me, that disarms a lot of the, hey, this is mine, versus, okay, well, you know, this is a leader asking a question of me because, and I'll preface it by saying, I have no clue what this is, you know? So why don't you tell me about it? And I don't put on any airs of, you know, having to know everything about the organization.
I don't. And I think that's why, you know, in my role, I have to be very curious and be able to ask good questions to be able to support the agency. And so when I'm able to do that across each program, all of a sudden I've broken down some of those silos. And then I can say, you know, hey, that piece of data you just showed me about family served, that sounds similar to what our case managers are doing, you know, in health and wellness, you know?
Is there a way to connect these two dots so that the metric that you are trying to move forward is supported by data that they may have in their department? And it's not just me asking those questions, but our entire executive team, our entire director level asking those same questions. And what we're demonstrating, at least for me, is the ability to answer those questions and answer them very quickly from our subject matter expertise, right?
So if someone were to ask, you know, I don't understand this, you know, Matt, you use that word P and L a lot, what does that mean? You know, and so I'm able to explain it, or I'll talk about allocation, or I'll talk about an indirect cost rate or cost recovery rate, you know, that kind of thing. And people will stop and say, hey, I need to understand it.
And I will stop right there and answer that question as if this is what we're talking about now, you know, everything else can wait, let's talk about this. And that's provided, you know, information has provided a lot of opportunity for people to grow. And I think that when you're not told, I need this data, you're not doing it right, this doesn't seem to jive with what we need from a compliance standpoint.
That's obviously gonna put up barriers, but if you're asking questions, you're able to get to there together and you're able to share your insight, why you're asking that question, where you can connect the dots, things you may have missed, things that you can share. And I think that's important in breaking down those silos.
Yeah. Another way of disarming the negative reaction of that's my data is I've heard from someone else recently just say things like, you know, I could be totally off on this, but it seems to me. And that's a way of just letting them know, like you're trying to enter into that space with them. You said it earlier, it's partnerships, like it's partnering together with people. It's not that you're right, they're right, or heaven forbid anybody's wrong in the conversation.
It's more just about how can we work together? And I love these practical tips of how you can break down the walls and the barriers so that people can not be so concerned about misuse, mishandling of data. And it requires taking some risks to build that trust. You have to give trust just as much before you can even expect trust in return. So yeah, great comments. That's exactly it.
And I think just to add onto that too, I think one of the areas that makes it continue to move is the feedback that we get on it, right? So if we're just learning and saying, oh, that's great, thanks for sharing that. You know, and we're not implementing it or at least putting it into a manner where it can be looked at at a higher level or shared across, it just kind of goes nowhere. And I think that we want to, at least I want to make sure that I'm a conduit for information.
If I'm sitting in a meeting, I might have a vantage point that's not held by those folks that are in the meeting and same for them. And so we're all coming together to collaborate and that feedback piece is very important. So, you know, as I think about it, it's a lot less of me being a subject matter expert in the certain areas that I'm in finance and accounting.
Of course, I can answer these questions and we can get into the details, but a lot of time I have team members that are very, very, very knowledgeable on those things. My goal is to provide financial leadership to answer the questions around where were we, where are we going and what's gonna help us get there and to be able to articulate that in a way that makes sense for the person who's asking that kind of question.
And so that changes from when I may be talking to, you know, the mayor's office or the, you know, the federal government or funders to our team members that are, you know, new to the agency and just signing on as a program associate and they're really excited about what they're doing and they just need to understand some of the financial portions of it.
So that's what drives me in the work is being able to take what I've learned and apply it from a leadership perspective and really show a different side of finance. I think that has been changing the narrative around finance and accounting from kind of pushovers and, you know, using all the data and Excel sheets and more of a leadership piece and we're at the forefront of being able to help make decisions around where we move next.
Matt, one thing I was hearing is you guys went back and forth, there was like this thing that came to mind was like a culture of humble questions or humble curiosity of like leadership who's like executive leaders are coming and having these conversations and being willing to admit I don't understand or I'm curious to understand more and exploring with humble curiosity, humble questions and what that does to just like create buy-in and engagement from everybody.
Matt, personally, what landed you in the nonprofit world and why does this work matter to you? What about it landed your career and has kept it in this domain? Yeah, I think for me, there's a lot around, like I mentioned before, I feel like finance is a fuel to impact and I firmly believe that. And I think that as I have gone through my career, being able to help other people and where their needs are has been a focus of mine.
And so I've been in a variety of different nonprofit contexts that I've been able to do that and I think what drives me with it is seeing that, especially from the operational sense, is being able to see that the work that we would do that's sometimes behind the scenes, that's in the back office or primarily focused on reporting like you've been talking about, really does make a difference.
And so when I partner with our chief program officers or our CEO and they're telling me the stories of how people have been changed by the work that we're doing, I know that a lot of the, that I've had an input into that. And so, and the cool thing for me is being able to share that with my teams, right? There's still a very, with me being the most visible finance leader in our agency, we have accountants who are just like, I just focus on this day to day to day.
I'm in Excel day to day, you know? And so when we have those team meetings to say, all right, hey, let me tell you a story about how the Community Foundation of Sonoma County just awarded us half a mil to do this capacity building initiative. This is because you were able to do this on time and we were able to get this kind of report in and you helped with closing the books at this period that supported that information that went on that grant application.
I think that changes things rather than just saying, I'm just inputting these numbers, I know my debits and credits to, wow, like this is actually making a difference. And so for me, and I kind of digress, but for me learning how to sharpen that skill to be able to support from a very operational and infrastructural standpoint has been, it's been a joy for me to do that and to give back in that way. And as I started my career, I was very much people centered.
I was in ministry for six or seven years before I kind of entered into the nonprofit space in this kind of environment. And so I never really lost that wanting or that desire to serve people in a really, to serve people in a really felt way in the things that they deal with on a day-to-day basis. And so I think I do it from a different vantage point now, but making sense of it from an operational capacity is something I strive to do for myself and for the teams that I get to lead.
Yeah. So being a finance guy, I just have to ask you, why was the Baker so good with their finances? Geez, I don't know. Holy smokes, that's a stump question. It's because they had so much practice with the dough. Okay, yeah, all right, all right, perfect. Perfect. I'll lead off with that when I have my next team meeting. That would be great. That would be great. Thank you, Troy, for that. Good one. Anytime. Yeah, this has been a great, I've really enjoyed this conversation.
Matt, Troy, thank you, gentlemen. Matt, for anybody who wants to find out more about you, connect with you online, or find out about your organization, where should they go to find you guys? Yeah, so we're at sonomacan.org if you wanna learn more around what we do in Sonoma County. Obviously, I only touched on a few things today, but there's a lot of resources that we have.
If you're interested in connecting with me directly, you can buy me on LinkedIn, and would appreciate that if, again, any curiosity is my thing. So if there's something cool that you wanna share, that'd be awesome, and I'd love to connect that way. Excellent, excellent. Well, thanks so much, Matt. Always a pleasure, Troy. And for listeners out there, thanks for joining us on this episode of Making It a Matter. Have a great one, everybody.