Episode 88: Jennifer Gabriel

Join Lori and her guest, Jennifer Gabriel, as they talk about celebrating women's achievements. Jennifer Gabriel is the CEO of the National Women's Hall of Fame, a nonprofit committed to amplifying women's voices and supporting those who drive positive change. Jennifer emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the contributions of every woman, reinforcing the idea that each deserves a moment of celebration!

Here are the things to expect in this episode:

• What sparked Jennifer's interest in advocating for women's rights?

• Who is funding the National Women's Hall of Fame?

• Jennifer advises newcomers to philanthropy to align their career choices with their passions and values.

• The developments or goals that people expect within the organization this year.

• And much more!

National Women’s Hall of Fame Website: https://www.womenofthehall.org/

National Women’s Hall of Fame Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/womenofthehall/

National Women’s Hall of Fame Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/womenofthehall/

National Women's Hall of Fame LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/national-women-s-hall-of-fame/

Jennifer Gabriel’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifergabriel/

Connect with Lori Kranczer!

Website: https://www.linkphilanthropic.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorikranczer/

Episode Transcript

00:11

You're listening to the positive impact philanthropy podcast where we share the journeys of everyday philanthropists as they incorporate philanthropy into their lives. Philanthropy is a personal journey, and through the stories we will share here, we hope that it sparks something in you and how you can make your own philanthropic impact in the world. I'm your host Lori Kranczer, attorney, philanthropic advisor and legacy event strategist. Together, we're going to explore what it looks like to be an everyday philanthropist and make a positive impact in the world. Before we get started, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss a new episode posted on Wednesdays. So I'm really excited to have our guest today. It's a bit of back and forth trying to get this scheduled, and I'm so excited that it worked out perfect timing. So I have with us today, Jennifer Gabriel. She is the CEO of the National Women's Hall of Fame. Welcome Jennifer.

01:02

Thank you. Lori, it's such a pleasure to be here.

01:05

I am so excited for this interview. So Jennifer, start us off, tell us more about you.

01:10

So, as you mentioned, I'm the current CEO of the National Women's Hall of Fame. I have been in this position for almost three years, and my journey to actually take this position was a very interesting one. We can talk certainly about my past and sort of, you know, I have the very typical, very typical journey of somebody who didn't intend to get into philanthropy and fundraising, kind of fell into it, and then found out that I really enjoyed and loved huge pieces of it, and so that's what my career has been dedicated to. So I've got over 25 years of fundraising experience across a wide variety of various tracks. So Annual Fund, membership, leadership, gifts. I was planned giving director for a while at an institution of higher education. And back in 2021, I saw the this position posted that the National Hall of Fame was looking for a new leader to really take the organization from what has been a very, very volunteer driven, volunteer led organization with a really wonderful regional reputation and footprint and and really bring that mission national. So I actually am from the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. Originally, I traveled to Seneca Falls New York, which of course, is where the National Women's Hall of Fame is located, but also is the place where the first women's rights convention in America happened. And I remember learning about Seneca Falls when I was in eighth grade from my teacher, Mr Bazzoni, and there was only one sentence in our history textbook about the women's rights movement. And even at however old you are, when you're when you're in eighth grade, 12, maybe 13, I knew that that was problematic, and that it was something that it just was appalling to me, even as a young child. And so I talked to my teacher after class, and he said, you know, right up the lake, about 30 miles away, is this great town called Seneca Falls. I would urge you to go visit it. I think you'd really enjoy it. And so within a couple of weeks or months later, my parents and I traveled up to the area, and it was the first time I really felt like I'm part of I can be part of something bigger than myself, and history happened here in my backyard, and it's history that I'm super proud of. And so that kind of launched me into a whole I wouldn't even say it hasn't been my career, necessarily, but just an interest in the women's rights movement and being a part of national conversations about women and equity and equality. So when this job was posted in 2021 I was like, wow, that I cannot think of a more perfect, full circle experience for me to now steward the mission of an organization that embedded in an area that had such a profound impact on me as a child, and so that, you know, it was a six month search, and at the end, I was really grateful to receive the offer and to accept it, and it's been a wild, amazing ride ever since.

04:40

That's amazing. So I want to go into that. But I also, what's amazing is that when people come on to the podcast, I always ask you what first inspired them, or how they got that inspiration to do something more and here's yours, right? So, but I bet there is something before that, because what inspired you or what prompted you to say something to your teacher? What was it, even beforehand, that you understood the importance of women's rights?

05:10

It's a great question. So I, I come from a very large extended family, and most of my cousins are, were little boys, and I was the oldest of all of the cousins. And I can remember when I was really little, like six, five or six years old, like one of my most you know, one of my original memories is that my younger cousin, who was a boy, could run faster than I could, and he, he, he's probably four. I was maybe six. He was four, and I remember him taunting me and saying, you run like a girl. And it was like, I remember that so vividly, like it was when you were playing tag, like I could remember where I was in the yard, like all of those kinds of things. And later that year, so I would have, I would have been in first or second grade, my teacher assigned us a, we were learning to write essays, you know, three or four sentences kind of thing. And we had to write an essay that was to the prompt of, if you were president of the United States, what would you do? And I wrote that, if I was president of the United States, my platform was that the school day would only be from 10 to 10:30 in the morning, and that I would give every, I would give everyone in the world a piece of my mind that girls can do anything boys can do. So there was obviously something in my formative years, my very early formative years, that that told me that I was different than my boy cousins and then boys, and that somehow being a girl was a problem and was something that I would constantly be having to prove myself, you know, just even understanding that, I think, is amazing at six or seven years old, and certainly it was the foundation for for what I'm doing now, and for you know all of my activism and advocacy around women's rights and equity

6:55

Absolutely and even, and understand having self awareness to understand also what led you to do the work you're doing now. So that's great. All right, so let's get into the work that you're doing now. So tell us what you're doing at the organization.

07:18

So it's been a fascinating, as I said, kind of amazing, wild ride. So when I started at the organization at that time, it was 53 years old, so we're now 55 years old. And they had done 29 induction ceremonies over the years and inducted almost 300 women into the hall. But for the most part, the organization was run by the board and by a group of very dedicated volunteers in the Seneca Falls area. And you know that extended from all the operations work that needed to be done to even opening up our museum and staffing the desk every day. It's really remarkable when you think about a group of volunteers coming together and creating this, this entire mission and this organization, and then being willing to have the, you know, willing to have the energy to see it through and to actually be there on a day to day basis. So in 2020, the board. So this is, you know, during the pandemic, the National Hall of Fame moved from a small storefront gallery in downtown Seneca Falls to this gorgeous limestone building on the Erie Canal system in downtown Seneca Falls right across from the Wesleyan chapel. It's this great opportunity. It is this great opportunity for us to build a permanent home for women's stories in this iconic building. And the board got together and wanted to figure out how to leverage that opportunity as a way to bring national attention to the organization so much like the Baseball Hall of Fame is a pilgrimage destination and serves the Cooperstown area. That is the goal of the National Women's Hall of Fame is to have that same recognition and people to come across, come travel, to visit us whenever they feel, want to be inspired. In 2020 the board hired a fundraising firm to do a feasibility study to really determine what it would take for the hall to become a national organization, and whether or not we have the supporter base to make it happen. And that feasibility study came back with the number one recommendation of yes, this is possible. This is absolutely achievable. You have the base to do it. You've got to hire professional staff to bring this forward, and in hiring that professional staff, prioritizing fundraising and philanthropy, needs to be at the top of the list, because that's where the organization is at right now.

09:59

So ask you a quick question, I'm curious. Who's funding? Are they women or men? What's the makeup of your constituents or donor base?

10:09

Yeah, donor base, great question. So it is, I love this question, actually, because it is average people like you and me. It is people who are our average donor is making gifts of $150, $500, $1,000 we of course, have a major gifts program. We have a Planned Giving Program, but it's really the annual fund and leadership giving where we've seen the biggest increase in our support over time, and I think about that and how powerful that is, that we are supporting a mission based on what the public wants. And the public is supporting that. And it's not one or two, you know, rich people that are making this work. It really is a collective.

10:58

And gender wise I'm curious, because women tend to give more to women and girls groups. I'm wondering if you're seeing the same thing.

11:06

Absolutely and we definitely, also see the impact of giving circles. Women's giving circles in particular, there are a lot that are involved with us, and it's one of the things that I think, in terms of this position, for me, I have learned so much about the power of these women's giving circles. And you know the collective impact that women can make when they come together and say, we want our philanthropy to be pooled and to do something really significant.

11:35

Oh, I love it. Okay, so tell us more about the work that you're doing. And also, I know that you have something coming up, depending when our listeners are listening to this episode, they've already passed but why don't you share what you're working on?

11:48

The selection process for the National Hall of Fame is an independent one, so staff and the board have no say over who is eventually inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. It's an independent national panel of judges that accepts the nominations that come in to us throughout the year. And that body of experts is about 100-120 strong, and these are women and men who are experts in their fields across the wide array of disciplines that we acknowledge so we have inductees who have been in the arts, athletics, philanthropy, certainly public service, business, STEM. There's really no category of achievement that we are not recognizing. And in many cases, our inductees have created their own categories, because that's you know what their accomplishment has been and so that process happens, and it takes about a year for the national panel of judges to make their final recommendations to the board. And then we begin reaching out to the women and letting them know that they've been selected and that we would love to honor them as part of the induction ceremony. It's pretty exciting. 

13:02

It was really exciting. Okay, so let's go back again to your journey to where we are now, because this is just an amazing point in time right now, where you are. But I know that you have experience working in philanthropy, different types of fundraising positions. What got you initially into that area? Because a lot of people don't think about going into fundraising. So what happened with you?

13:26

So what happened to me was I needed a job, and so I was a journalism major in college and became a political speechwriter right after college, and worked in the city of Boston for several years, and loved that position and loved speech writing. But then my personal life called, and I really wanted to make a move further west and move to Colorado. And political speech writing is, of course, something that happens, you know, in DC and in other major metropolitan areas, but not necessarily something that is needed in a smaller town in the middle of the country. So I knew I needed to reinvent myself and figure out what my next step of my career was, and grant writing was something that I could very easily tailor my resume to show that I had the skills and experience to be able to manage a grant process. So I got my first job as a grant writer for a nonprofit organization in Colorado, and quickly discovered that grant writing was not something that I found particularly enjoyable. It's a lot of churn and burn and just, you know, it's very detail oriented, while also being mindless at times, because of all the, you know, just the attachments that you have to put into these grants and things like that. And I, what I was missing was that ability to to build a relationship with somebody and really feel like that philanthropic. I didn't have these words at the time, of course, but being able to, like, really feel like I was raising money alongside people, not just kind of in a bubble in a cubicle writing grants. So, you know, bless the grant writers out there, that is a really difficult position, but I am such a relationship driven person that I quickly realized that I was much more comfortable in the major gifts and leadership giving arena and having face to face conversations and thinking about strategies of how to bring people into the fold. And so it was through that experience that I landed in philanthropy, and that was over 25 years ago, and I've never wanted to get out. It's just, it's a perfect fit for me.

15:38

I know, isn't it great when I left law, also, I would never go back 23 years ago so on, I hear and I hear you on the grants, if I never have to write another grant again. Very happy for that. So what type of advice or resources would you suggest for people that are just starting out and considering a career in something within philanthropy.

16:08

It’s really interesting the landscape just in the time that it sounds like you and I are kind of like the same age and sort of pathways the amount of change that's happened within the philanthropy and fundraising world is pretty astonishing. You just think about the number of resources that are out there now that were not around 25 years ago, and organizations that support fundraisers and organizations like the Lilly School of Philanthropy at Indiana University that is studying philanthropy and really pushing out some really incredible research. I, if I were starting my career right now, I would be reading that. I mean, I'm reading it anyway, but reading it with an eye towards how do I create change in this environment? There's a lot of things about the philanthropic landscape that work very, very well, and there's a lot of things that are broken and don't work very well at all. And so I think it would be fascinating to not just think about what my day to day life might be like as a fundraiser, but also, how can I create systemic change within the philanthropic landscape, whatever that might mean. And that, to me, is a very powerful philosophical, maybe, discussion that folks should have with themselves about how they can be a part of something bigger than themselves.

17:31

True. I think there's so many more options now, certainly you know since I started out over 22 years ago. But speaking of philosophical and we're sort of at that time that, why don't we talk about your values and what you consider your legacy to be?

17:52

Yeah, I think, I think I've really leaned in, especially in the last two or three years, in being a part of this job, in particular to the word authenticity, and it's always been a foundation. And benchmark of my relationship building with donors is that you have to have trust. In order to have trust, you really need to have authenticity. There needs to be that back and forth and not hiding. I think early in my career, I would hide pieces of myself in donor conversations, because I felt like you needed to be a chameleon and you're just there to facilitate an eventual gift. And what I've learned is that my most meaningful donor relationships have been ones where I've showed up in in whole and and have built, you know, a friendship with these donors that lasts, you know, in many cases, beyond us even working together in that capacity. So to me, when I think about my legacy and and what I want to do with the rest of my career, it's reinforcing that there is a different way to to fundraise, and reinforcing that the new way to fundraise where we all show up and we're ourselves and we're authentic, actually is really beneficial for both the personal needs that we have as individuals and fundraisers, but also can be really beneficial for the relationship with the donor and between the donor and the organization, because it just continues that trust circle just continues to keep growing and building when you do that.

19:31

Absolutely. And don't, you know, I once so Naomi Levine, who used to run funded raising at NYU years ago, over 20 years ago, I heard her speak several times, and she and one of the things that she spoke about is that, as fundraisers, number one, we're probably the most important people in an organization, because you bring in the resources, but and they should be the most highly paid. However, one of the things really struck me is that she told her when you need to have hobbies and read books and read the paper and do all these because you are an individual. You're not just the conduit to getting funds for your organization. You're actually in a relationship with donors. And it was stuck with me, and it's true. I mean, it's also working in plan giving, Legacy giving, we have these very deep relationships with our donors, but it's always stuck with me that it should be a relationship that is not just one sided and just getting that, you know, that transactional type of relationship and getting that gift, and it's also better for the donor. I mean, you mentioned having these relationships outside of the work that you're doing. I see that all the time with the people that are doing it the right way and developing relationships with donors. I'm all for asking the questions and having those deep relationships with donors, and it sounds like you're doing that with your work. And so think it's wonderful what you're doing. I'm so excited to see this event and tell us what is in store for, you know, moving forward, like what's next on the horizon?

21:05

Yeah well, I think, you know, this has been a very big, exciting step forward for the National Women's Hall of Fame to get our induction ceremony broadcast. But I don't think about that broadcast date itself. I think about the day after that broadcast, and that's what I am focused on right now, is what are we doing with what will be an increase in understanding and appreciation of this very important mission, so adding a programming position to the staff? Moving forward, we, of course, will continue and hopefully, whether it's virtual or in your community, to be able to feel the inspiration from the women that we have honored, because in so many cases, they are not household names, and they deserve to be. So I think about that a lot, that we are redefining what it means to be a celebrity within the women's rights movement, and that's what I hope people will stick with us and join us for this ride as we do that together, because I think we all benefit when that's the reality, right?

22:06

So why you share where people can find out more information about what's going on now and in the future?

22:12

Our website is womenofthehall.org there's a blog there that I maintain to kind of give some behind the scenes insights. And then, of course, you know, we've got an email newsletter. Our social media handles are all women of the hall and lots of ways to stay connected. And of course, we would love anyone who's in the upstate New York area to drop by the museum and say hello and just kind of see our work in action.

22:40

Great, well thank you so much. Thanks, Jennifer, and thanks for everyone. That is, has joined us and is listening. We hope you provided some insightsand inspiration that you could use for your own philanthropic journey. Tune in on every Wednesday for new episodes, and we'll see you soon.