photo by erick anderson
“I have always and only worked for nonprofits.” That’s the first thing Barbara “Babs” Feibelman tells me as our conversation begins. As she reviews the many roles she’s played in Memphis since the 1970s, it follows naturally that she’s now grown into a position of her own creation that is independent of, yet deeply involved in, the city’s thriving nonprofit community. Having stayed true to her calling, she’s made it her business to facilitate the sharing of hard-won wisdom.
She’s not alone in this mission, of course. Indeed, the collective nature of such a project is very much the point of her latest success story, Give Back Memphis. But to really understand that initiative, you have to see how it’s informed by the practical knowledge she’s been accumulating for more than 40 years. She spelled it out for me in a Zoom meeting that also included her partner at Give Back Memphis, Bill Craddock.
“When I first came to Memphis, I briefly worked at Rhodes College, doing some counseling,” Feibelman says. “And then I started working at Planned Parenthood, in their education department. It was an amazing time. We worked at churches and all kinds of schools. We were invited places then, in the 1970s and ’80s, that you couldn’t get invited to today. In fact, we had a very significant grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, to make what we called ‘trigger films,’ and develop a curriculum to go with those films.”
That project eventually led her to travel widely, distributing the films and training teachers. “We traveled all over the country and into Canada,” she says. The bit of perspective this afforded also led Babs to broaden her professional horizons. “I decided to go back to school after that. I had already gotten a master’s in counseling, while I was doing all that early work. And then I realized that I really liked business and marketing, so I went back to school and got an MBA and at that point started working at ArtsMemphis. To start an arts-in-the-schools program.”
The simplicity of the concept has been the key to Give Back Memphis’ success: connect good people with good organizations, pro bono. Since beginning with a single client in 2016, the organization has now assisted 39 different nonprofits in the city, with revenues ranging from $10,000 to $7 million.
Eventually, she would become the executive director of ArtsMemphis. Yet, as it turned out, her ten years there were but a prelude to the far-ranging experience Babs would garner when she stepped out as a private consultant.
“I did a lot of projects for foundations,” she explains, “reviewing applications and organizations that wanted funding, doing research. I also did strategic planning and mentoring for nonprofit organizations. I found that work very fulfilling, and I did it for more than 20 years, working for a number of organizations. Each time I had a project I had a little notebook, and I remember going through them, thinking, ‘This is crazy for me to keep things.’” Perhaps she intuited that one day there would be a way to put that prior experience to work.
In the meantime, she had been raising a family with Jef, her husband of 52 years and a longtime attorney with Burch, Porter & Johnson. Having known their son Adam since before he was a law professor at Tulane, not to mention their son Lewis, a Boston-based artist based, I can personally attest to Mr. and Mrs. Feibelman’s magnanimous tendencies, especially when it comes to providing snacks to their progeny’s motley crew of friends. Indeed, their Central Gardens home has become a de facto salon of sorts for local creatives of all ages.
photo by maysie craddock
Bill Craddock
Bill Craddock comes from the same Midtown milieu, and, as we speak, seems a little in awe of Babs’ track record. “I’ve learned a lot from her,” he says admiringly. “My background is business. I sold my company in 1991 and worked for the Episcopal Church for 25 years, then retired five years ago. And Babs, in her persistent, persuasive, and professional way, got me involved in this dream and scheme that she named Give Back Memphis.”
Ultimately, this dream came to life when Babs and Bill realized they weren’t the only people eager to share a lifetime of practical wisdom. As Bill explains, “There are a lot of people our age, and younger and older, who want to make a difference in this world. So we both felt we could develop an initiative that would identify and recruit professional experienced people from all walks of life to work directly with nonprofits on a pro bono basis.”
With more than 50 volunteers to draw from, Give Back Memphis can usually find a good match for the needs of any given nonprofit. The size of the consultancy pool they can draw from is a testament to the fact that Babs’ and Bill’s instincts were right: Individuals who have distinguished themselves over long careers want to do more than play golf.
The simplicity of the concept has been the key to Give Back Memphis’ success: connect good people with good organizations, pro bono. Since beginning with a single client in 2016, the organization has now assisted 39 different nonprofits in the city, with revenues ranging from $10,000 to $7 million. The average Give Back Memphis client generates approximately $800,000 in revenue and has a staff size of seven, and around 20 percent of their clients are repeat customers.
When I ask about their operating budget, Bill chuckles. Both Babs and Bill work on a pro bono basis with Give Back Memphis. “Well, when we have our consultant gatherings, Babs and I pay for the coffee.” And then he makes a more serious point: “We’re not in the commerce of fees, we’re in the commerce of ideas. So we trade ideas and we don’t send a bill at the end. As a matter of fact, we don’t have a bank account. We’re not a 501(c)3. We don’t have a financial budget. We have a strategy, we have a process, we have evaluations, we have a structure.”
Working as a lean operation outside of the conventional consultancy field is the great strength of Give Back Memphis, according to Babs. The advisors they recruit tend not to be from the nonprofit world. “Most of them have not been consultants, either in the nonprofit or for-profit world,” she points out. “Most of them have actually worked in the for-profit arena, and they have been remarkably successful. All of the people we’ve recruited as consultants have stellar backgrounds and experiences. And that’s what they bring. They’ve been engaged in strategic planning and have been able to use those experiences to help an organization. People who do human resources with us have worked in that field. That’s been their life’s work. Same with marketing. And quite a few, particularly the lawyers who are volunteers, tend to be generalists.”
With more than 50 volunteers to draw from, Give Back Memphis can usually find a good match for the needs of any given nonprofit. The size of the consultancy pool they can draw from is a testament to the fact that Babs’ and Bill’s instincts were right: Individuals who have distinguished themselves over long careers want to do more than play golf. A statement from Give Back Memphis notes some of their common characteristics: “Our consultants are experienced professionals such as lawyers, accountants, marketing professionals, former executive directors of organizations, business owners, and senior managers. Collectively in 2019, had they charged their usual rate, they donated over $375,000 in time/talent spent on pro bono consulting on behalf of Give Back Memphis. We have also relied on our consultants to help steer our program through our continuous improvement efforts.”
Our consultants are the backbone of Give Back Memphis,” adds Babs. And yet, though she and Bill tend to emphasize the importance of these volunteers above all other factors, the organization’s momentum and focus ultimately depend on the two founders’ insights. They are doing more than facilitating networks. In a sense, they are meta-consultants. From the very first meeting, the founders’ depth of experience helps define the tone and direction of their client engagement, as they identify exactly what kind of specialist(s) a nonprofit needs.
As Babs says, “We organize the first meeting between the consultants and the executive director and board chair. We introduce them. Each project has a work plan, and they work together on the work plan with us: the purpose of the engagement, the outcomes that they’re hoping for, the deliverables, the time frame. And very often the work plan is not what the organization started asking us for. But as we meet with them and get to know them better, even before we bring in the consultant, it’s a dialogue. Where they might say, ‘I want fundraising, I need somebody in fundraising,’ we start talking to them about their board, and it turns out they’ve got a dysfunctional board. People don’t show up, or there are no committees. So we’ll suggest that phase one should be board development, for example.”
However, after the initial meetings and work plan have been established, and specific consultants have been recruited for the engagement, Bill and Babs step back. “We say, you know how to find us,” says Babs. “And some of them will send us materials as they go along. A few of them will call us and say, what do you think about this? By and large, we contact them when a couple months have passed and make sure everything’s okay. But they take it from there.”
Beyond the numbers, who is benefiting from these good works? What impact is Give Back Memphis having on the ground? The spectrum of clients is as wide and diverse as Memphis itself. As some of their materials state, “Give Back Memphis clients work to address issues that include domestic violence, human trafficking, homelessness, civil rights, economic development, sports, education, and health, fostering creativity, and promoting the arts. Give Back Memphis clients also serve the breadth of our community, from children and youth, to women and girls, fathers and families, veterans, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community.”
One of their great success stories was Indie Memphis, right out of the starting gate. As detailed by editor Greg Akers in a Memphis Business Journal profile of the nonprofit last year, Give Back Memphis stepped in just as the local film organization was experiencing a major crisis. After starting with a bang in 2008, by 2015 the Indie Memphis organization and its namesake film festival were experiencing, as Akers writes, “a near-death experience” and “an existential crisis.” According to Akers, “the festival seemed to suffer from being understaffed and too ambitious.” As the article explains:
Indie Memphis needed help with governance, strategic planning, and growth — all areas in which Give Back Memphis could offer assistance. And so the festival was chosen through ArtsMemphis to be a pilot recipient of Give Back Memphis’ work.
“That was huge for us,” [Indie Memphis president Molly] Wexler said. “Give Back Memphis helped us with a strategic planning and fundraising, and gave us access to focus groups — all for free.”
Indie Memphis worked closely with consultant Barbara Prescott. She helped the festival fill out and stay on track with its strategic plan, Wexler said, including ensuring there was a development person on the staff — a first for Indie Memphis. “We hadn’t come up with a clearly thought-out development strategy before,” Wexler said. “The strategy was no longer ‘let’s just go make money.’”
“Give Back Memphis’ help was probably more valuable than any financial support,” [ArtsMemphis CEO Elizabeth] Rouse said.
From the outside, things may not have appeared to skip a beat. But, with a fresh board and leadership, and new insights and training, Indie Memphis had turned a calamity into an opportunity.
Give Back Memphis could also guide nonprofits on how to make their fundraising more social media-centric. All of this, Babs adds, makes Give Back Memphis all the more indispensable. “The need for pro bono work is greater now than it’s ever been,” she says.
Many others have benefited in similar ways. “There’s a little organization called PURE,” explains Bill. “It wanted to develop a program for youth development for young Black boys providing residential housing, home- schooling, and development of character, confidence, and trust in a safe community. Also, their focus is football with the goal of receiving college scholarships.”
Nonetheless, as with most of us, this was the idealized end of the story, before the days of covid-19. Now, it seems, PURE is stuck in a quarantine-era coda to that tale, an experience that’s been all too common among nonprofits everywhere. Says Bill, “Nonprofits, like everyone, are stymied by the virus. How could Give Back Memphis formally address this issue with our nonprofits? Over the past few months we’ve been networking with the Community Foundation, Kevin Dean of Momentum Nonprofit Partners, and with Elizabeth Rouse of ArtsMemphis. We sought their advice on ‘How fast can our pro bono consultant resource support nonprofits?’ We developed a covid-19 response program with resources to mentors to work with executive directors and also offer financial planning and projections.”
Give Back Memphis could also guide nonprofits on how to make their fundraising more social media-centric. All of this, Babs adds, makes Give Back Memphis all the more indispensable. “The need for pro bono work is greater now than it’s ever been,” she says. And with an eye to that, Bill and Babs are considering ways their brainchild can thrive and grow without them. “Scalability” is how Bill defines the issue, and it’s one that many of their own clients, like Indie Memphis, have faced: how to build on the success of a scrappy, independent volunteer organization and grow, without sacrificing the very flexibility that has helped them thrive thus far?
It may be that it’s a simple matter of character. All of Give Back Memphis builds on Babs’ original vision of pure altruism, which she in turn credits to her parents.
“It brings me back to my parents and the examples they set,” she muses. “I vividly remember how my mother became the president of the parent-teacher association for my school, P.S. 95 in New York. It was a highly charged political environment and the activist parents recruited her to serve. My father was the neighborhood Civil Defense representative — those were the days when we thought we were going to be attacked. When we moved south, my parents continued their professional careers and their civic engagement.”
And thus it rolls on, as her example inspires others to carry on in a like manner, fueled only by free coffee, bountiful snacks, and a burning desire to serve.
