Corentin Penloup, 2011
By Abby Stainer, Director of Continuous Improvement
As nonprofits or community advocates, we have all long faced tight budgets and heavy workloads, leading us to work beyond max capacity and sometimes to even push past our skill sets. This culture of urgency and make-do leaves no time to pause and reflect, leading to short-term solutions generally winning out over long-term improvements. But I’m here to argue that when we “build the bike while we ride it” we, like Leila Billing stated in her article “Time, toxic productivity and urgency cultures in non-profits,” undermine our own ability to carry out quality work.
“…the actual impact of this blink-and-you’ll miss-it pace is often undermining our ability to carry out quality work, rather than enabling it.“
– Leila Billing
At the beginning of the COVID pandemic the words of Aaron Mishler, a nurse, former Army Medic, and Ebola responder were reposted on social media as a stark warning against letting urgency overtake wisdom, and I’ve not stopped thinking about them since.
Aaron’s repeated warning was, “There is no emergency in a pandemic.” His argument was that regardless of the urgency or the need of their patients, if healthcare workers did not stop and put protective gear on before coming to their aid, they would only be able to help for a limited time, as they would quickly become a patient. Aaron acknowledges that this is a hard thing for people in caregiving industries. They want to help. They want to meet the need immediately. But their skill sets are valuable, and so preparation is a necessity for long-term impact.
By the nature of our nonprofit or community advocacy work, we are all in an emergency. People don’t have housing, food, healthcare, or childcare. There is injustice, exploitation, and suffering, but that is WHY we must prioritize our preparedness and not risk our health and wellbeing or our efficacy and impact. We want to meet needs immediately too, but we MUST pause and plan, so we can better, more sustainably, help others.
Up until the end of 2023, Hunger Free Oklahoma’s outreach teams were organized and managed according to geography, not focus or skill set, because that’s how we had always done it. The result was that everyone felt they needed to be and do everything. This, combined with the breakneck speed of all our work, didn’t leave a lot of time for reflection and planning was often rushed to get to the doing, which led to hit and miss quality or execution depending on who was doing what. Burnout and isolation were also big risks.
It became clear that if we wanted to keep growing and improving, something needed to change. Then, we had a sudden staffing vacancy and instead of just backfilling the role, we created an interim position with one very specific focus, and surprisingly, it was very effective.
“What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.”
– bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
This quote from bell hooks really captured what that moment felt like. It reminded us that if we want something different (and better), we have to first be able to imagine it. Program leadership took a full day offsite with no distractions to break away from “the way it’s always been,” and reimagine what could be possible. The final result was a new Continuous Improvement team.
The American Society for Quality defines Continuous Improvement as “the ongoing improvement of products, services or processes through incremental and breakthrough improvements.” At Hunger Free Oklahoma, it means a dedicated team that does the analysis, building, and refinement of our data, systems, and processes to optimize our program teams.
Our services:
- Data cleaning, analysis, layering, visualization, and reporting
- System & Process mapping, building, improvement, integration, and automation
- Training development, optimizing, digital formatting, documentation, and facilitation
- Other services like pain point identification, building surveys, and debriefing
One year in, we’ve started to see real, organization-wide shifts. Instead of scrambling to fix things on the fly, we build systems that work for us long term. Teams are more focused, connected, and willing to share and learn from one another. There is a noticeable shift in how we approach challenges. Instead of setbacks we see them as opportunities to improve.
And when you combine clearer systems, better collaboration, and space to test and refine, people feel more fulfilled in their roles, meaning less burnout. We’re not just doing better work, we’re feeling better while doing it.
Continuous Improvement in action:
SEBT
In 2024, Hunger Free Oklahoma began supporting Tribal Summer EBT programs. Like most new things, it came together quickly, leaned heavily on the executive team, and required a lot of behind-the-scenes work to keep up.
This year, the Continuous Improvement team came in to help create a more sustainable structure moving forward. We built a clear roadmap that outlined milestones and ownership, reducing surprises and last-minute work.
Behind the scenes, we improved data tracking in our relationship management system and created a Tribal Portal so partners could troubleshoot and move faster on their own. HFO’s work in Tribal Summer EBT is now clearer and easier to manage, track, and improve going forward.
Program Evaluation
The non-data side of the Continuous Improvement team spent some of the last year building out a more robust and consistent system for Hunger Free Oklahoma to document and understand the outcomes of its projects and programs. The project started with evaluating how Program Evaluation was working at HFO.
We identified the following concerns:
- Too many ways that staff were evaluating or reporting on their projects
- No standard format or cadence for reporting on projects
- Difficult to gauge our return on investment or translate what we learn from one project to another
After identifying the issues and needs, we built a standardized program evaluation template suite to report on projects from idea to outcome. This suite lives in a centralized library that every team can access to compare methods and outcomes, speed up onboarding for collaboration or support, and gather data for reporting to stakeholders.
These examples of positive results from Continuous Improvement don’t mean we haven’t had some growing pains, though. Initially, staff was unclear as to what we could do and thought we were too busy to “bother.” Folks were also used to taking a DIY approach to solving difficulties in their work. With these challenges in mind, we built some Best Practices for engaging with the CI team.
Always make the ask!
- Don’t guess or assume our capacity
- Book a meeting even if you’re not sure what your ask is – we can help with that too
We are magical but not magic
- Improvement takes time and planning
- Ask as far in advance as possible
Talk problems first
- Identifying pain points first allows for better problem solving
- Specifics help us meet your needs
- Consider re-training or improving processes vs. more data or systems changes
Let us look at the big picture
- Our goal is to find solutions designed for the whole organization’s greatest good
- We avoid duplication wherever possible
- We work towards collaboration and synergy always
Is Continuous Improvement right for you?
If your organization or community efforts have lots of ideas floating around but no person or time to test or implement them, if you are in constant catchup mode, or if the tools you have don’t match how you actually work, then I invite you to consider Continuous Improvement.
But before you start to think about how to implementation in your organization or community, be sure you have buy-in on three key ideas:
- Clarifying roles and responsibilities strengthens teamwork by letting people focus on what they do best.
- Continuous Improvement work always finds demand—start with small, consistent refinements if you can’t staff a full team.
- Investing time in planning and improvement saves resources long-term and increases mission impact.
You can also partner with Hunger Free Oklahoma, and we can be your Continuous Improvement team! As a capacity-building, backbone support resource for our food security partners, HFO can fill the gaps so your team can continuously improve.
In the current context, it can be enticing to solve the problems as they come, for whoever to do whatever to meet each immediate need. But remember, there is no such thing as an emergency in an emergency. If we don’t pause and plan, circle back and improve, we run the risk of inefficiency and burn out. And if we are the last line of defense, what happens when we are no longer able to do the work? Continuous Improvement is how we can best protect ourselves, serve our clients, and care for our communities.