In this episode of Build Momentum, Sarah and Katie are joined by Lina Eroh, Communications Director for the Overdeck Family Foundation. Lina leads both internal and external communications efforts, working closely with grantees and the Foundation team. She has also provided her specialties in corporate communication for iconic consumer brands such as eBay. She is the President of the Rye Free Reading Room Auxiliary Board and spends her weekends with her three daughters, husband, and giant schnauzer.
Some Questions We Ask:
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
Quotes:
“Overdeck Family Foundation's philosophy is to fund what we know the government struggles to fund or is not as interested in funding. So we know that the Department of Education spends less than one tenth of 1% of its budget on R&D. So that is a big reason why we designed our funding in these three pillars: evidence building, innovation, and growth.”
“You don't [want to] have an intervention in 2023 relying on evidence from like 2013, when nobody had Chromebooks. You really [want to] have timely evidence that a nonprofit can take to a district and say, ‘This works in this context, and this context is very similar to your context. Therefore, there's a real reason for you to try this product to meet the challenges that your system has.’”
“Kids should love learning. It's one of the amazing opportunities of being a human—and one of the real privileges we have of living in a country with a public education system. I'm really hopeful that coming out of the pandemic, some of this innovation that philanthropy has funded really does start to move the needle for kids, both in immediate outcomes and long-term results.”
“There's so much funding out there right now that is looking to be put to work for great things that really move the needle for kids.”
Connect with Lina:
Overdeck website
Lina Eroh’s LinkedIn
Email: lina@overdeck.org
Stay in touch with Sarah Williamson:
Free Case Study Guide
SWPR GROUP Website
LinkedIn
Stay in touch with Chad Bolser:
LinkedIn
About "The Secret to Transformational Leadership," which Sarah co-authored with Dr. Quintin Shepherd:
Transformational Leadership Secret website
Purchase the print or ebook
In this episode of Build Momentum, Sarah and Katie are joined by Lina Eroh, Communications Director for the Overdeck Family Foundation. Lina leads both internal and external communications efforts, working closely with grantees and the Foundation team. She has also provided her specialties in corporate communication for iconic consumer brands such as eBay. She is the President of the Rye Free Reading Room Auxiliary Board and spends her weekends with her three daughters, husband, and giant schnauzer.
Some Questions We Ask:
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
Quotes:
“Overdeck Family Foundation's philosophy is to fund what we know the government struggles to fund or is not as interested in funding. So we know that the Department of Education spends less than one tenth of 1% of its budget on R&D. So that is a big reason why we designed our funding in these three pillars: evidence building, innovation, and growth.”
“You don't [want to] have an intervention in 2023 relying on evidence from like 2013, when nobody had Chromebooks. You really [want to] have timely evidence that a nonprofit can take to a district and say, ‘This works in this context, and this context is very similar to your context. Therefore, there's a real reason for you to try this product to meet the challenges that your system has.’”
“Kids should love learning. It's one of the amazing opportunities of being a human—and one of the real privileges we have of living in a country with a public education system. I'm really hopeful that coming out of the pandemic, some of this innovation that philanthropy has funded really does start to move the needle for kids, both in immediate outcomes and long-term results.”
“There's so much funding out there right now that is looking to be put to work for great things that really move the needle for kids.”
Connect with Lina:
Overdeck website
Lina Eroh’s LinkedIn
Email: lina@overdeck.org
Stay in touch with Sarah Williamson:
Free Case Study Guide
SWPR GROUP Website
LinkedIn
Stay in touch with Chad Bolser:
LinkedIn
About "The Secret to Transformational Leadership," which Sarah co-authored with Dr. Quintin Shepherd:
Transformational Leadership Secret website
Purchase the print or ebook
Hello and welcome to Build Momentum, a show where we explore thought leadership and education. I'm Sarah Williamson, the founder of SWPR Group.
Katie Lash:And I'm Katie Lash, the director of the East Central Educational Service Center.
Sarah Williamson:Together we explore how to leverage key partners, your constituencies, and immediate to authentically impact your organizations and the leaders who champion them. We can't wait to get started. So let's dive into today's show. On today's episode, we have Lina Eroh, the communications Director for the Overdeck Family Foundation. Lina, welcome. So glad to have you with us today,
Lina Eroh:Sarah and Katie, I'm so excited to be here. What a pleasure to chat with both of you.
Sarah Williamson:Yes, Lina, I would love to learn a little bit more about your background and how you ended up in philanthropy. Will you tell us about that?
Lina Eroh:I will. Absolutely. So I joined Overdeck Family Foundation almost five years ago now. But this is my first job in philanthropy and in education. So my background is pretty varied. I knew coming out of school that I wanted to work in communications. And I think like many people, I started out at traditional agencies. And eventually, through a lot of sort of luck and randomness. I ended up in Silicon Valley, and was part of a very small startup, doing a lot of their branding and communications and marketing work. And we ended up being acquired by eBay. So I worked in tech at eBay for a while before my husband and I actually left to do some traveling. And during that time, I did a lot of writing and travel blogging. This was I guess, in 2011. And when we came back to San Francisco, I joined a venture builder. So it was a company that pretty much built startups and supported them through innovation and fundraising. I did that for a while working with a bunch of different startups consulting with startups, helping them figure out their go to market strategy, their communications, messaging and marketing campaigns and things like that. And when we moved back to the New York area, which is where I was from overnight, Family Foundation reached out to me, and I was honestly very surprised by the reach out because I hadn't really done this type of work before. But after talking to the team, I began to understand that so much of the work that I had done on the for profit side and on the tech sector side, would translate really, really well to the nonprofit side, because a lot of the work that I was doing was really supporting nascent company supporting companies who are starting to think about growing and expanding to different customers. And so my skill set supporting those startups translated really well to my support of the grantees that we have at overdyed Family Foundation. And honestly, it's just been an absolute joy and pleasure to do this work to help really build the foundation's national profile and our communication strategy and to support the very many diverse grantees that we have. It's been really fun, really awesome. Almost five years.
Sarah Williamson:Amazing. Congrats.
Lina Eroh:Thank you.
Katie Lash:Yes, Lina, and I can't thank you enough. Because the first time that we met, it was truly in a space of like, Hey, Sarah, do you know somebody who could just be willing to have a conversation with us, because I don't even know where to start. And so it was very nice that you gave us your time. And then honestly, it's kind of what led to this podcast is like other people probably have the same questions out there. Like they just don't even know who to get the conversation started with. But through that and getting to know you, we saw your impact report about priorities. So can you share about how the organization prioritizes recipients? How do you decide whether you're going to take on a project?
Lina Eroh:Yeah, Katie, Great question. So and I also loved our first conversation, it was so lovely to chat with you guys more informally. So I guess I'll start with just maybe talking about what the foundation does over duck family foundations, a fairly young Foundation, and it is a family run foundation. The vision really is to open doors for every child in the US by measurably enhancing education both inside and outside the classroom. And our goal is to provide all children an opportunity to unlock their potential. And we do that through both grant making and strategic support that unlocks three things for our grantees, innovation, evidence, and growth opportunities. And right now, the foundation focuses exclusively on the sector of education funding efforts, both inside and outside of school in early childhood and formal stem and what we call K through nine programs that include supporting educators and students centered learning environments. The impact report was really designed around these three pillars of unlocking innovation, evidence building and growth. And so when we make funding decisions, we really We look for organizations that meet, I would say, like three big pillars, and that then we can think about putting into one of these goal oriented frameworks. So the first is just does the organization or the nonprofits support the foundation's mission by measurably enhancing education inside and outside the classroom? The second is does it align to our portfolio or one of our portfolios, and it strategies, so on our website, which is overdeck.org, or you can learn more about the different portfolios and the strategies that we have, but like I mentioned, we typically fund in the areas of early childhood, informal stem and K-9 programs that are either focus on educators or students centered learning environments. And the third bucket is really the funding model aspect of our work. So in order to apply for funding or to get funding from Overdeck Family Foundation, you either have to be a direct impact organization looking to innovate or grow, or sort of an ecosystem investment that can clear the path for scale to our grantees and the work they do. And that includes your research field building, that type of stuff. Does that answer your question? Or is there anything else I can provide?
Katie Lash:No, I think that that's fantastic. Thanks for that.
Sarah Williamson:Yeah, that's super helpful. I want to kind of leave photographs that Lina. Yeah. What if a district or an organization is interested in pursuing funding? I know you touched on that, but is there an appropriate way to reach out?
Lina Eroh:Yeah, so we do not accept unsolicited grant proposals. And we don't explicitly fund districts. So we typically, you know, we fund a lot of organizations that work with districts, but we don't usually provide funding to districts directly. I think the best way to, I can just speak for us, but also just generally, my peers and philanthropy. The best way to think about connecting with philanthropic organizations, I would say is browsing their website, figuring out what they're funding and whether what you are doing aligns, subscribing to their newsletter, we're oftentimes people share RFPs. And they also share funding opportunities, both from themselves and others in the sector. And then going to their events. You know, right now, obviously, there's a lot of still webinars happening. So it's a lot easier for I would say, people to join events, and to participate in things across the country versus previously where you'd have to fly for each one. And so doing those types of things, I think, is a really powerful way to figure out what each Foundation is doing what each foundation is interested in funding, and how to connect with them. You know, I do think some foundations are working with districts more directly than we are, when we are supporting districts, it is usually through the support of a nonprofit organization that we work with. But I will say like, everyone is looking for great things to fund. I think sometimes people think of foundations as these like scary places to approach. And you know, we do most of us do have on the website, this idea of we don't take unsolicited grant proposals, because honestly, it would just be overwhelming to do so. But that said, I think all of our grantmakers are constantly on the road and scoping the internet to find great things to fund. And so there is this, like, we want to fund great work. And there's great work happening and making the connection between the two is, I would say advantageous to both parties. And so you know, when you are at an event, and there's a funder there, or if you happen to read something that a funder wrote that aligns, like, I think people should try to reach out like most of these foundations do have contact information on their website. So even though we clearly say that we don't accept grant proposals, that doesn't mean we don't welcome conversations, or information sharing. And you know, one of the things that I really love about my job now, and I say this to my team here all time is like, this is one of the only fields where you can really just get paid for constantly learning. Like we're constantly learning new things. We're constantly reading new research, funding reports, reading those reports. And so no one here sort of has a belief that they're holding for an extended period of time, that won't change with new information. And I think that's a real amazing asset to both the work that we get to do, but also just to organizations out there to know that we are always evolving, and many foundations evolve their strategies annually. You can find our strategy on our website for this current year. And I welcome you if you have something you're working on something that aligns to reach out to one of our grant makers.
Sarah Williamson:Yeah, that's so helpful. And I think it's, it's good for people to hear that just reaching out and sharing and collaborating. It doesn't have to be an ask, it's, Hey, this is what we're doing. What are you interested in learning about and just collaboration and attending webinars, engaging learning? I think that's so important for people to hear that it doesn't have to be this. It's for the ask. It's really for building the relationship, and that's really what this is all about.
Katie Lash:Well, and Sarah, did I hear you saying that that's some of its thought leadership, but I'm just plugging you're like, yes.
Sarah Williamson:And we're gonna talk about that. I think you're gonna talk about that.
Katie Lash:Yeah, I just it really is sometimes it's not like looking for the outcome of that conversation. It's Hey, who do you know that know someone that knows someone else? Right. Like, I think that's a huge piece that philanthropy can play. Yeah. So as the communications leader for your organization, Lina, how do you work with other organizations to tell people about your message? And how do you help folks tell their stories, the projects you're doing? Tell us more?
Lina Eroh:Yeah. Thanks, Katie, for that question. So we take what I think about as a grantee centric approach to our communications. So all of our different communication channels and communication vehicles are basically designed to help the grantees that we fund and the strategies that we believe in. So we don't really talk about ourselves much on any of our channels, including our own channels, we really think about it as a way of providing our grantees a platform in both reach and quality that they may not otherwise have access to. And I think the feedback we've heard from grantees is that that's really powerful like we can when we put together a webinar, we can invite a bunch of other funders and they will come and the webinar can be about say tutoring, we're doing a webinar later today about tutoring, we have access to invite lists and things like that our grantees individually might not. And so that convening aspect of philanthropy, I think can be really, really helpful to grantees and other foundations that take that approach to the work of basically saying, I am here to to help the grantees instead of talking about myself, I think really provide a huge value to the sector as a whole. You know, we typically like our grantmakers, and our communications team, and everyone at our foundation, like speak to other foundations and education, thought leaders as part of our job. And so using our platforms as a way to highlight organizations doing impactful work and trying to translate that work in a way that resonates with a specific audience, I think is one of the most powerful things we can do from the place where we sit in this whole ecosystem.
Katie Lash:Yes, thank you for that. Lena, if you answered a piece of this, but if you have other thoughts to this, you definitely want that with your last answer. But what role do you think this philanthropy play in supporting nonprofits and in addition to raising their voice, I think there'll be many of them that really count on you just to survive in so many ways, right? Like that totally exists to work alongside you.
Lina Eroh:100%. So I mean, ultimately, I would say over deck family Foundation's philosophy is to fund what we know the government struggles to fund or is not as interested in funding. So we know that the Department of Education spends less than 1/10 of 1% of its budget on r&d. And at the same time, we know that what's currently out there is not working for the majority of students. I don't think anyone at this point would disagree with that. And so that is honestly a big reason why we designed our funding in these three pillars of evidence building innovation and growth, those three areas are really, really important. So innovation, like this is where philanthropy was designed to shine, right? Like philanthropy can take more risks than the government like we can try to fund things that might not work. And no one is really going to like blame us necessarily. I mean, some funders, I think, would disagree, if things don't work out, but like we should take risks, not risks that potentially harm student outcomes, but certainly careful risks that can really accelerate student outcomes, really early stage organizations that, you know, are nowhere ready for government funding, evidence. Like, again, there are grant programs like ies and NSF that offer funding for evidence building, but those programs are often sort of burdensome to apply for, and you need a certain level of evidence to apply for them. So where we think philanthropy can really support and where our funding can really support is providing that evidence building funding that's timely and meets grantees where they are. So we think about this as both proving and improving program effectiveness, but like funding validations that help an organization move up in essence here so that they can then apply for government funding is a big part of what they do, of what we do funding just general like knowledge resources about a certain area that we are seeing grow like tutoring or personalized learning, or differentiated staffing like funding reports that really synthesize all of this research going on into one readable resource for either, you know, funders to use for organizations to use for policymakers to reference is a big thing, I think, and a big aspect of what philanthropy can release Pour it in. And the last is growth. So, you know, at the end of the day philanthropy is a drop in the bucket compared to federal, state and district funding for education. We all know that. But to get to that growth, nonprofits need a lot of help. So in addition to providing what we think of as growth capital to really take an organization from early stage to this, like growth momentum, where they're now sort of larger and capturing government funding, we also think about advising organizations in key capacities that are required for sustainable and impactful scale. So everything from leadership to revenue model to like we already talked about to, you know, the evidence that they have or don't have for their intervention. So I think those three areas are really, really important too, for philanthropy to really do well. And if we can do that, well, then the entire ecosystem of education really improves, right than what's out there actually works for kids. It answers and the challenges and problems that kids are currently facing, and it's backed by timely evidence, so you don't have an intervention and 2023. Relying on evidence from like 2013, when nobody had Chromebooks, you really have timely evidence that a nonprofit can take to a district and say, this works in this context. And this context is very similar to your context. Therefore, there's a real reason for you to try this product to meet the challenges that your system has.
Sarah Williamson:Are you looking to build brand awareness and expand your impact as an organization, but maybe you're struggling to find the ROI with your general marketing and PR efforts, it could be time to try something a little different. At SWPR group, we approach every organization through the lens of how we can help them add the most value to the conversations that are happening in education today. For one of our clients, the Institute for education, innovation, this led to the launch of Supe's, choice, an award that we co created to build incredible brand awareness and his firmly established organization as an industry leader driving impact, growth and awareness on every level. What will your success story be? Let me know when you're ready to get started. Reach out at Sarah with an H. sarah@swpr-group.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
Katie Lash:LIna, I love so much what you just said about that role of philanthropy and like allowing risks, right, because we've talked about this a lot with the few grant projects that we have going like they were COVID Relief dollars, right. But like the whole reason that these grant projects existed, right was somebody's got to figure out a solution that doesn't exist today. Like the whole reason that the grants out there is helping people solve an unmet need. Well, what was interesting, you know, sometimes my team things didn't go exactly how we thought that they were going to go mid COVID, right. Like when we were writing those grants, like what we thought was true. But what we saw happen was different. But what I'm always saying to my team is like, if we zoom out, can we really think about how beautiful it is that things went so differently than we thought but it's still like was such a success, right? Like, obviously, some pieces of it aren't going to stick. But some of the pieces we never saw coming, we saw things stick that as part of that project that we just like could not have even expected. And I think it's so important that running projects like this, that we appreciate that right innovation is if it was easy, somebody was already going to be doing it anyway.
Lina Eroh:Exactly. And it should be messy, right. And I think like that we've wrote a few blog posts about this. Like, I think things that happened during COVID, obviously, like a lot of things did not work. And like tech enabled learning for little kids does not work. I'm a mom of three little girls, Zoom preschool was not happening in my household. So we just opted out. We did a lot of sensory buttons. But there's a lot of experiential learning. But you know, like, there were things where COVID really turbocharged adding technology into for instance, like professional development for educators, having them be able to access it on their own timeline, really thinking about it in a way that was more like educator centric. So the educator really owned their professional development journey versus a school saying, okay, march 24 is PD day and therefore you do like some completely unrelated PD to what you were doing March 23. And therefore, now you have the training. And so you know, like we saw a lot of our grantees who started experimenting by necessity for instance with adding like virtual PD for they're not necessarily just for educators but also just for the facilitators of their project for the trainers that are project they're still doing it because actually people are like this works way better on my timeline than it did when I had to travel 45 minutes one way to like go to this class and I had to like find childcare and had to travel 45 minutes back and it was a pain in We saw the same thing with some of like we fund in our early impact portfolio, which is our early education or early childhood work, I should say, We fund a lot of things that our healthcare system adjacent because like the health care system is one of the only systems for early child care in our country right now. And so a lot of them added in telehealth in a way that, you know, wasn't being covered by Medicare, Medicaid before it started being covered. And all of these like prenatal and postnatal sort of like well visits, that before you would require the nurse to travel to each individual person to talk to the mom to see how she was doing. We're now happening via cell phone, which honestly is like a lot more convenient for a lot of people. And it allowed the nurses to meet with a lot more people every day because they weren't traveling in some of these very rural areas, very long distances between appointments. So we saw the addition of technology really beneficial in that space. Another area where we sigh and this is like very relevant with what's going on now. But where we saw technology really move the needle is high impact tutoring, which as we know, is like one of the top priorities down from the DOE to a lot of states and districts to help accelerate learning. And so we for a long time have funded an organization who sort of was one of the early leaders in this saga education. And even before the pandemic, one of the things that we really struggled with was how expensive tutoring is like it is expensive. And when you think about one on one tutoring, which was shown to be effective, like there was just no way for districts to pay for that at scale. So one of the first things that we thought about with this organization was like, Okay, well, how about like small group versus one on one. So they started doing small group tutoring three, four kids and a group. And we measured the impact. And the impact really didn't go down from one on one to small group. And then even before COVID, one of the others, this was still pretty expensive. One of the other things we thought about with them, okay, like, What about like, can you add technology into part of this, like not for the actual tutoring, but like for the practice of what the tutor and the child work on together? Can you add, like a, you know, verse basically a personalized learning software that like if a child is struggling with adding fractions after they have 20 minutes with the tutor, then the next 20 minutes they actually spend on a software like figuring out, can they add the fractions, and then the tutor gets the report back being like, the kids got this or they don't have this. And so, you know, they started doing something like that before COVID. And the results came back basically saying again, like, the impact did not go down. So now they offer both traditional and tech enabled tutoring models. And the impact is pretty similar between the both models with students experiencing something like two and a half growth in math skills during one school year, which is pretty incredible when you think about, you know, what the recent nape scores show for math learning across our country. So I do think that in many ways, COVID turbocharged, like a lot of innovation that otherwise wouldn't have happened or would have just been in these, like tiny sort of pockets of innovation and our country would have been bright spots that nobody really looked at. And I think the question is now like, what last, like what happens now that we're basically we're out of the pandemic, obviously, COVID is still a virus that is circulating, but the pandemic has pretty much ended. And so how do we use some of this innovation from the last three years to not just improve learning for all kids, but to really help them catch up because we know a lot of kids fell behind in a way that's really problematic for their long term success as students and like productive members of society?
Sarah Williamson:Well, you said it. Wow. Mic drop. Nice, Lina. Okay, so I think you covered I was going to ask you for some case studies, but you pretty much just summed it all up. Can
Lina Eroh:you tell you another case study that was? Yes. So I think like one, I have been spending a lot of time on this lately. This is like my project at work right now. But it's our family engagement work. And I think family engagement is a really interesting term, that the education sector has bounced around for a while where people aren't family engagement is important. But it's sort of nice to have, you don't like need to have it like it's nice. But you know, it's also expensive. These families are all over the place, like some of them don't want to come to the parent teacher conference. And that is what it is. And so, I do think that during the last few years, we saw how incredibly critical family engagement is and also what happens when family engagement does not exist in a district in a scalable and effective way. So we fund a nonprofit called Learning heroes, which I'm sure you're familiar with. They do a lot of research on parents perceptions of how their kids are doing and the parent child school relationships are the trifecta, thinking about all of that. And so it's pretty crazy because 94 percent of parents nationwide still think their kids are on grade level in math and reading. And we know that that number could not be further from accurate, right? Like the recent nape numbers are like fourth graders are somewhere in the 30%. For math and reading, that's already a sharp decline from pre pandemic pretty, pretty terrible. And millions of dollars that we talked about are being spent on learning acceleration, but like, the numbers are not moving. And so we've really at the foundation started thinking about this sort of crisis of awareness of the problem as a key crisis to fix before we think about the crisis of achievement, which I think our country is also in. And so we have a hypothesis that really like ensuring that parents are aware and part of the solution is a critical component to getting these kids back on track, because teachers can't do it alone. schools can't do it alone, the vast majority of kids time is not spent in school, right, like the number surely something like 80% of time is spent outside of school. And so we have a few grantees that I'm pretty excited about in this space that really talk about like just how impactful family engagement can be. And also like how technology can make it more scalable. So one of them is talking points, which is basically like a two way communication channel like a family engagement platform. It uses text messages, but it auto translates these text messages into like, I think over 100 languages. So the teacher can text in English, but the parent receives it and whatever their native spoken languages, Vietnamese, Spanish, whatever it might be, that's what they're receiving it in. And they started before COVID. But they've scaled incredibly through COVID, because schools really started seeing the necessity for this improved communication. So we saw, for instance, like a recent evaluation found that schools that adopted talking points experienced a 15% reduction in absenteeism rates compared to schools that didn't. And as we all know, like right now, not only do we have I think that achievement crisis, but we have an attendance crisis in this country as well, where kids are just not going to school, I think something like 30% of kids are like chronically absent. And so we're really excited about opportunities to use technology to make family engagement, more like both effective and scalable and cheap for districts. I can't remember the exact cost of talking points. But I think it's something like, don't get me wrong, but it's like a few dollars a student like it is very inexpensive. And so obviously, something like this, a text message is not going to solve a child like being unable to read or not being able to do
Katie Lash:Lina, I've never heard of talking points, but I arithmetic, but it might solve a parent not knowing that their child is not doing this well and needs extra support. And I think the beauty of this moment is like there's a lot of extra support and extra programs out there right now and districts, I think Sarah was you mentioned or maybe Katie, like the ESSER dollars are out there and they need to be spent, and they need to be put to work. And so like these programs are funded, they're out there for districts and for parents to access. And so we really just need to make sure that they are as subscribed as possible. Like anytime there's an MTC, in any of these programs, we're losing a huge opportunity to help a kid catch up, and fall back in love with learning in a way that I think like all kids really should do, like kids should love learning. It's one of the real amazing opportunities of being a human. And one of the real privileges I think we have living in a country with a public education system. And so I'm really hopeful that, you know, coming out of the pandemic, some of this innovation that we've seen, and some of the innovation that philanthropy has funded, really does start to move the needle for kids, both immediate outcomes and long term results. just searched it while we're talking. And I definitely am going to be sharing that out with a few people that I know that have that need for sure. So that's amazing. I'm glad you brought that up. So glad to hear it.
Lina Eroh:They're a wonderful team led by a great female leader who I think whose parents were immigrants and who would have really benefited from the service. Not that text messages existed back then.
Katie Lash:Yeah, no, I love it. I love it. Well, so Lina. Thanks again for giving us your time. I think that people that listen to this episode are going to find it so helpful of just like, again, knowing where to start or it just it is something you're right that you said earlier, it's like seems scary philanthropy seems like these great big power player organizations that which they are so important to the ecosystem, but you just don't know how to approach the conversation or where to start. So thank you for like being willing, willing to talk to us today. If people are listening and they want to talk to you. Not that they're going to ask for unsolicited proposals. But if they just want to meet you, how should they do that?
Lina Eroh:Yeah, absolutely. So people can reach me at Lina@ovedeck.org, that's Li Na at overdeck.org. Or you can follow me and I do a lot of writing on our news and Resources page on our blog, you can follow us on LinkedIn, sign up for our newsletter, and you'll hear from us shortly if you do any of those things. But really, Katie, I think you said it best, like there is an inherent power sort of dynamic between philanthropy and grantees. But I think what everyone needs to be really clear on is like, one cannot exist without the other, you know, and so I do hope that organizations doing great work are able to find funding for that work from the type of either foundation or public funding stream that makes sense for them. I think there's so much funding out there right now that is looking to be put to work for great things that really moved the needle for kids. And that's really why we're here.
Sarah Williamson:Thank you, Lena.
Lina Eroh:Thank you. Thanks for having me today, Sarah, and Katie.
Sarah Williamson:If you're looking for more of this thought, leadership goodness for your organization, you're in the right place. Visit us at SWPR-group.com To learn more about how we work with education organizations and their leaders, superintendents and influencers to increase your impact. Again, that's SWPR-group.com. Thanks for tuning in today and we will see you next time on Build Momentum.