When Kevin Dean graduated from the University of Memphis 19 years ago, he started working at the nonprofit Volunteer Memphis. He would later serve as director of development at Hope House and then was executive director of Literacy Mid-South, both nonprofits.
And then he decided he wanted to work for all the nonprofit organizations. He took a job as interim head of the Alliance for Nonprofit Excellence, an organization that was a resource to the region’s nonprofits.
“The plan was that I would create a strategic plan in a partnership with the board and go back to my consulting practice,” he says. “I came in and saw so much potential that I decided to stay.”
And with a willing board, he shook things up. The organization changed its name to Momentum Nonprofit Partners, moved its offices, increased the number of its employees, and doubled its annual budget.
It took some persuasion on Dean’s part, but he is nothing if not persistent.
“It’s a structure problem for nonprofit associations all over the country,” he says. “Traditionally they had rested on this consultancy model that wasn’t really sustainable and also wasn’t necessarily what nonprofits needed.”
He was determined that Momentum be the nonprofit resource center that would give nonprofits what they needed to thrive, and the effort needed to be funded by the foundations, which, he says, were not as active in funding as they should have been.
“My argument to the foundations was that we’d make their investment better,” Dean says. “We’d make funding stronger, and we could do it for a fraction of the cost than some national consultant. We would bring everyone together and create a stronger nonprofit sector, which would only benefit everybody involved.”
The pitch worked. “We’re now able to be responsive and pivot very quickly to the needs of the nonprofit instead of building out programs that we can then charge for to keep ourselves open,” he says. “I’m much more interested in helping nonprofits succeed than I am creating new streams of revenue based on things that aren’t being asked for. We have the benefit in Memphis of having funders that understand how important this organization is, and we have this great opportunity to serve as the model.”
“When the pandemic happened, everyone started looking to us just by default for information about what to do.” – Kevin Dean
Dean wanted to make it easier for nonprofits — which are often tight on funds — to join Momentum. So, he made membership free. “We also do a free capacity assessment — a list of recommendations to make the nonprofits stronger. Whether that’s better board governance or better legal compliance or better fundraising, it’ll tell them exactly what they need. Then we can build a plan around that, whether through us or somebody else.”
In a larger sense, Dean is striving to make nonprofits more meaningful as organizations and as members of the community. “We’re trying to get them involved, help them professionally develop their staff, develop themselves, build up the plans that they need, but also convening people and giving the nonprofit sector a voice and a place at the table,” he says.
The test came two years ago when Covid-19 showed up. “When the pandemic happened, everyone started looking to us just by default for information about what to do,” he says. “I was literally fielding about a hundred emails an hour.”
Dean says Momentum didn’t have the answers but knew how to find and share them. It started a virtual Covid-19 information session to provide data and discuss what others were doing around the country. It did a needs assessment that was sent to the funders and brought them together around collaborative funding.
What emerged was the Mid-South Covid-19 Regional Response Fund, with grants administered by the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis in partnership with the City of Memphis, Shelby County Government, United Way of the Mid-South, and Momentum Nonprofit Partners/Mid-South Philanthropy Network.
The needs were many. Nonprofits often do in-person services, so distributing masks and other PPE gear became important. Small nonprofits were having trouble getting PPP loans, so Dean wanted to make things happen. “I don’t have a finance background,” he says, “but I knew I could send this information on. I was connecting them to banks that I knew would respond.”
Much of the effort was making sure the smaller nonprofits didn’t get lost in the flurry of activities and efforts. And Dean feels it’s been a success. “It’s been a horrible two years,” he says, “but this is when we as an organization really figured ourselves out and who we absolutely needed to be.”
And as if dealing with pandemic chaos wasn’t enough, Dean decided he also wanted to get a doctorate. So, he did. He earned it in Organizational Leadership and Learning from Vanderbilt University in 2021. “I love learning about things. I love studying leadership,” he says. He admits the timing was a little bad, but he made the most of it. “It served me really well during the pandemic when I was learning. A lot of the research I was able to do for a lot of this work was around nonprofits. I got to do deeper dives into stuff that I thought I already knew, but I got to really look at a lot of research.”
