I will never forget the sunny day I graduated from Delaware Tech eight months pregnant with my youngest child as our family sat nearby, along with all the nursing graduates and the closest bathrooms I had previously identified in case anything went wrong. I had a determination to succeed for my family – little did I know just how much we, and our now new nonprofit, would rely on that success in the future.
I took my first journalism-related role straight out of high school designing newspapers and my first editor role shortly after college graduation, running my hometown newspaper. I also spent a few amazing years at the Delaware Farm Bureau working in public relations and all the while, I was the photographer, interviewer, writer, investigator, page designer, operations manager, community relations professional, and more, often finding myself wearing an unimaginable number of professional hats every day.
But none of those moments can compare to where I am now as the associate editor with the Delaware Business Times, working with an amazing and knowledgeable team, while simultaneously managing a volunteer-run, statewide nonprofit organization of my own as a now single, widowed mother to three beautiful children who once celebrated my college graduation with me before my career took off.
DJ’s Alliance officially began in January 2024, now serving suicide loss survivors through community outreach and postvention efforts, or the support offered to someone after such a death – people like my children and I. We lost my husband, their father, to suicide on Sept. 1, 2021 – the first day of National Suicide Prevention Month.
What we found in the midst of our grief was that there was little to no suicide-loss-specific support available for us at the state-level and, even worse, our story wasn’t unique. In fact, there were 137 suicides in 2021 in Delaware, including my husband, leaving up to 4,110 people severely affected by those deaths and 18,495 exposed to them with seemingly little support afterwards.
It often leaves me emotional knowing the impact we get to make now and I’m sure other nonprofit leaders feel the same passion. I find myself wishing my grandfather, Norman Joe Lear, Sr., could be here to offer advice after starting his own nonprofit, the Milford Community Band, which still operates more than three decades later, drawing in musicians and visitors from sometimes states away.
He might tell me that starting with the idea was the easy part; you have to start somewhere. But navigating everything else is where it gets hard from the community engagement and money management to donor relations, fundraising and board development. All of those behind-the-scenes concepts, and sometimes barriers, are crucial to making a splash in Delaware, a state where corporations thrive and nonprofits, well, sometimes simply exist.
According to the IRS, Delaware can lay claim to 9,870 active tax-exempt organizations, 8,467 of which have 501(c)(3) status like DJ’s Alliance, and all are fighting for a piece of the pie so we can continue operating or expanding programming. Some of these nonprofits include Delaware’s health care systems like ChristianaCare, Beebe, Bayhealth and TidalHealth, or educational institutions like Wilmington University and Delaware State University.
But those nonprofits are certainly not in the same category as what one might usually think of in terms of a nonprofit like Delaware’s larger 501(c)3 organizations such as the YMCA or Goodwill. Even then, the larger the nonprofit, the more likely they are to have staff that can handle the daily tasks and programming my volunteers and I have spent more than a whopping 700 unpaid hours facilitating this year outside of our personal employment responsibilities. We also had an amazing intern who offered 150 hours of expertise, all with a minimal, hard-earned budget of close to $0 and no office space.
For smaller organizations, it’s an uphill and exhausting battle riddled with barriers, like securing funding from the state. The Delaware Alliance for Nonprofit Advancement (DANA) recently announced that many other organizations are struggling to receive that funding and launched the Delaware Nonprofit Action Network (DNAN) as a formal advocacy arm to provide a stronger voice among a sea of corporate lobbyists at Legislative Hall in hopes of emphasizing the economic value nonprofits offer.
While I continue to trudge forward and learn the inner workings of being an executive director while working full-time with kids at home as a single mom, I do so with a smile because I know the work I do and the work of all of our nonprofits across the state is needed and wanted. Managing a nonprofit and continuing to wear a dozen hats at a time has been an interesting challenge and I’m so grateful for our incredible team, my work family, knowledgeable groups like DANA and my own children, friends, family and new connections that make our dreams a reality every day.
Keep your eyes open and celebrate the kindness that happens every day in our local, community-driven nonprofits. We’re out there, working as hard as we can to, as we like to say at DJ’s Alliance, create a safer and healthier Delaware – one nonprofit at a time.
