His framework splits people into linear thinkers and cloud thinkers, and his claim is that conventional planning documents fail roughly half of them. If you have ever watched a strategic plan die in a drawer while the people it described kept working, that will land.

What he covers

• Linear thinkers versus cloud thinkers, and why one planning format cannot serve both
• The authority machine problem, building recognition is not the same as acquiring support
• Ride the dragon of passion, on why chasing recognition directly tends to starve it
• Working with neurodivergent clients rather than around them

Why we are running it here. Paul makes the point directly in the episode that this can be run as a nonprofit version or an outreach programme. For an organisation whose planning day has to hold staff, volunteers and a board in one room, a format that works for more than one kind of brain is worth a look.

Originally aired on Unscripted Small Business. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.

The part worth a nonprofit's attention is his point about defensibility. His example is a tattoo shop working with veterans' groups, where the partnership creates something a competitor cannot copy by spending more money. For a cause organisation, that is the case for corporate partnership stated in the partner's own language.

What he covers

• Findability over rankings, because only one of those places has a rank tracker pointed at it
• Turning Search Console into a gap list by comparing expected against actual click-through
• Internal linking, still one of the most reliable tactics and the least fashionable
• Digital PR and brand carrying the load as unbranded search erodes
• Your About page as the thing an AI model reads to decide whether to trust you

Why we are running it here. Nonprofits compete for attention against organisations with far bigger budgets. Findability and genuine community partnership are two of the few levers that are not purely a spending contest.

Originally aired on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.

He has also done the work in a nonprofit context that most agencies never touch: teaching questioning skills to border-crossing agents for an anti-trafficking charity in Africa. It is a short passage, and it is the clearest example in the episode of the method surviving outside a sales floor.

What he covers

• AI reliably earns a C plus, useful, and not the part anyone was paying you for
• Bad strategy plus AI is just faster failure; it amplifies in both directions
• Keeping your online reputation matched to your real work rather than inflated past it
• Degenerative engineering, using AI to distil what you already are instead of generating more of what you are not

Why we are running it here. Nonprofits are being sold AI harder than almost anyone right now, usually as a staff replacement. This is the counter-argument, from someone who sells AI services for a living.

Originally aired on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.

His own firm runs an NYPD toy drive, donates to Shriners, and organises Santa Monica beach cleanups. He is candid that this is both genuine and good for the business, which is the honest version of a conversation nonprofits rarely get from a corporate partner.

What he covers

• Empathy as a practical tool for finding what a customer, or a donor, actually cares about
• Holding authenticity while you scale, and where most organisations lose it
• Where AI helps marketing and where it flattens the voice you built
• Using community involvement to build visibility that advertising cannot buy

Why we are running it here. If you have ever built a corporate partnership and found the company wanted a logo placement and nothing else, this is a useful look from the other side of that table at what makes a partner stay.

Originally aired on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.

Her route in was personal. Her son has autism, and the advocacy she learned for him became the work she now does for organisations.

What she covers

• Why structured meetings are the cheapest accommodation most organisations never make
• Self-advocacy after a late diagnosis, and why so much of the workforce is arriving there now
• Framing accessibility in terms leadership already budgets for, productivity and retention
• Where AI genuinely helps, and where it is being oversold

Why we are running it here. Rebecca works with nonprofit CEOs, and she is speaking at Cause Camp on the accessibility gap in nonprofit organisations specifically. The episode is about workplaces generally, but the volunteer-heavy, under-resourced org is where these ideas bite hardest.

Originally aired on Unscripted Small Business, hosted by Zaneta Chuniq Inpower. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.

She goes into Charleston elementary schools and hands third through fifth grade girls a sport they have never tried. The program is called EmpowerPlay, and the clever part is who coaches it: the school's own teachers, hired and paid. The kids already know the hierarchy, so classroom management transfers for free, and the money lands in a teacher's pocket.

In South Carolina, twice as many boys play high school sports as girls. Melyssa's read is that this is a pipeline problem, not an interest problem. There is no youth program feeding the middle school feeding the high school, so the team never forms. The barrier for families is options and logistics, not desire.

She is also honest about the skill that did not transfer. Twenty years in sales, and asking a friend for money is still awkward: "We have a school on a wait list and we need $14,000 to pull that school off the wait list. Can you give me $100?" If you want to end that particular conversation, bring the program to a school or donate.

Diagnosed dyslexic and ADD in the 1980s, she makes a blunt argument about cutting PE: you cannot take kids with fast brains and expect them to sit still for eight hours. She has the before-and-after story of one disruptive student to back it up.

On AI, she is not generating graphics. She runs paid Claude and ChatGPT as collaborators for grant writing, pasted a thousand Instagram followers in to find collaboration targets, and has Claude clearing bounced email into HubSpot. Response time is a nonprofit's version of speed to lead, the thing Ignitvio measures in home services: she met a volunteer who waited nearly a year to hear back from a shelter. Her team answers in hours and staffed a volunteer manager to make sure of it. If you want to be one, they are taking volunteers and coaches.

Connect with Melyssa on LinkedIn. Leveling the Fields is @levelingthefields everywhere.

Read the full recap: https://unscriptednonprofit.com/melyssa-jaskiewicz-leveling-the-fields-girls-sports-pipeline/

More from the network: Unscripted Non-Profit and Unscripted Small Business. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

Key takeaways

• Three nuggets structure the episode: the matrix, generational trauma carried in DNA, and the fact that unconscious adults cannot teach consciousness.
• 27 years of classroom evidence. This is not a theory arrived at from outside the school system.
• 52 Insights for Gen Alpha turns the five SEL competencies into a personal journey, adapted by AI rather than delivered as a fixed curriculum.
• The free online pilot starts 8 September. Which is the practical reason to listen now rather than later.
• Guided meditation is the big gun. Her words for the intervention that does the most work.
• The screens never turn off, and that is a different environment from the one any previous generation regulated inside.

On this page

• Why Gen Alpha is dysregulated
• The three nuggets
• 52 Insights and the five SEL competencies
• The big gun
• Guinea-Bissau and the decade of return
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Why Gen Alpha is dysregulated

Queen D. Michele taught for 27 years, which means she watched the change happen in real time rather than reading about it afterwards. The environment a child regulates inside now includes a screen that never turns off and an attention economy engineered against calm.

Her framing is not that children are worse. It is that the tools were never handed over, and the adults holding them are struggling too.

The three nuggets

• The matrix. The systems and defaults a child inherits without ever agreeing to them.
• Generational trauma carried in our DNA. The idea that what was not processed gets passed down rather than resolved.
• Unconscious adults cannot teach consciousness. The one that does the most damage in practice, because it puts the work back on the grown-ups first.

That third one is the load-bearing claim of the whole conversation. Every regulation programme aimed only at children is building on a foundation nobody checked.

52 Insights and the five SEL competencies

Her programme, 52 Insights for Gen Alpha, takes the five core SEL competencies and turns them into a personal, AI-adaptive journey rather than a fixed syllabus.

The design choice worth noting is the adaptation. Social and emotional learning delivered as one curriculum to thirty different children assumes they all arrive at the same place. They do not, and that assumption is why so much of it fails to stick.

A free online pilot starts on 8 September.

The big gun

Guided meditation is what she calls the big gun. It is the intervention with the shortest distance between doing it and feeling the difference, which matters enormously when the audience is children who will abandon anything abstract.

Guinea-Bissau and the decade of return

The other thread running through the episode is her return to her ancestral village in Guinea-Bissau. It is where the generational-trauma argument stops being abstract.

The Fula History & Genealogy Society in America grew out of that work. Knowing where a line comes from turns out to be part of regulating the people currently on it.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• Why is Generation Alpha emotionally dysregulated?
• Can adults teach emotional regulation if they are dysregulated themselves?
• What are the five core SEL competencies?
• How can AI personalise social and emotional learning?
• Does guided meditation work with children?
• What is generational trauma and can it be interrupted?
• How do I join the 52 Insights for Gen Alpha pilot?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Megan Ihnen on the Live Music Project, another founder who ran the programme by hand before scaling it.
• Andy Choi on profit with purpose, on funding this kind of work sustainably.
• The rest of Unscripted Green & Non-Profits.

Find Queen D. Michele

She writes at her Substack. The Fula History & Genealogy Society in America, the 52 Insights pilot and her LinkedIn are all linked above.

Cite this episode

Queen D. Michele. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Giving Gen Alpha the Tools to Regulate a Dysregulated World.” Unscripted Green & Non-Profits, 2026. https://unscripted-green-non-profits.castos.com/episodes/giving-gen-alpha-the-tools-to-regulate-a-dysregulated-world

Key takeaways

• An image is invisible to search. Around thirty Seattle orchestras had put their whole season into a picture file, so as far as Google was concerned the concerts were not happening.
• Listener agency is the product. Filter by piece, composer, instrument, price, house concert against concert hall, or sensory-friendly format.
• Spontaneous Free Tickets turns donated seats into audience development, with post-concert surveys fed back to organisations that almost never hear from first-time attendees.
• The software is built in-house by volunteers. Corporate matching hours from Seattle tech employers plus bootcamp graduates who need public-facing portfolio work.
• They ran the programmes manually for years before automating them. Which is why the automation fits what actually happens.
• Geographic expansion before new art forms. A deliberate order, and the opposite of what most non-profits do.

On this page

• The concert season nobody could search
• Listener agency
• Spontaneous Free Tickets
• Shipping software on a volunteer dev team
• Sponsorship that does not extract from the arts
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

The concert season nobody could search

She sees that their concert season is a JPEG on their website and realizes like, Google can’t scan this. Google has no idea that this concert is happening, right?

— Megan Ihnen

This is the whole problem in one sentence, and it is not unique to classical music. Any small organisation that publishes its schedule as a designed image has removed itself from search. The information is on the site. It is just not readable.

For a community orchestra the cost is direct. Someone in the same city is actively looking for the thing you are performing, and there is no path from their search to your hall.

Listener agency

The Live Music Project calls itself a classical music advocacy and tech-for-good organisation. Its answer to the discovery problem is a calendar built around how people actually decide to go to a concert.

• By piece, so the Brahms Double Concerto search that started all this now returns something.
• By composer and by instrument.
• By price, which quietly removes the biggest barrier for new attendees.
• By format: house concert against concert hall, and sensory-friendly performances.

But we’re using technology to make that easy. Just make it easy to be curious.

— Megan Ihnen

Spontaneous Free Tickets

Organisations donate unsold seats. The project gets them to people who would not otherwise come. Then the part that makes it a programme rather than a giveaway: attendees answer a post-concert survey, and the responses go back to the organisation.

Small ensembles almost never hear from a first-time attendee. This closes that loop, which is why it works as audience development rather than charity.

This is a program in which their name can be on every single ticket, every single thank you and really reinforce that community level support.

— Megan Ihnen

Shipping software on a volunteer dev team

All the software is built in-house. The team is volunteers, drawn from two sources: Seattle tech employers with corporate matching hours, and coding bootcamp graduates who need real public-facing work in a portfolio.

The tradeoff is honest. The build pace is slower. What they get in exchange is a product nobody has to pay for and a pipeline of contributors with a reason to stay.

Manual first, automate later

They ran programmes by hand for years before writing code for them, and partnered with a university tech-for-good programme to build the first version. That order matters. Automating a process you have never run by hand means automating your assumptions.

Sponsorship that does not extract from the arts

Two deliberate choices close the episode. Expansion goes geographic before it goes into new art forms, so the model gets tested in another city before it gets stretched into another discipline.

And the corporate sponsorship model is designed not to pull money out of the arts community it serves. A sponsor funds free tickets and gets their name on every one of them, rather than competing with the ensembles for the same donor pool.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• Why can Google not read a concert season posted as an image?
• How do small arts organisations get found in search?
• What is listener agency and why does it matter for classical music?
• How do donated tickets become audience development?
• Can a non-profit build its own software with volunteers?
• Should a non-profit automate a programme before running it manually?
• How do you structure corporate sponsorship without competing with the arts groups you serve?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Andy Choi on profit with purpose, which argues the same point about non-profits needing a commercial mindset.
• Queen D. Michele on building a programme for Gen Alpha, another founder running a pilot before scaling it.

Find the Live Music Project

Everything is at livemusicproject.org: the concert calendar, Spontaneous Free Tickets, the weekend digest emails and the volunteer sign-ups.

Cite this episode

Ihnen, Megan. “When the Concert Season Is a JPEG Google Can’t Read.” Unscripted Green & Non-Profits, 2025. https://unscripted-green-non-profits.castos.com/episodes/megan-ihnen-when-the-concert-season-is-a-jpeg-google-cant-read

Fiesta Island Trash Cleanup by Rock N' Block

Kicking off our list is the Fiesta Island Trash Cleanup, organized by Rock N' Block San Diego. This event is scheduled for Saturday, March 29, 2025, at 10:00 AM. Volunteers will gather at 1519 Fiesta Island Road in San Diego to participate in this Adopt-a-Spot beach cleanup initiative. RSVP

Rock N' Block will provide necessary supplies, including gloves, bags, vests, and buckets. Participants are encouraged to wear comfortable attire, bring sun protection, and carry a water bottle. This family-friendly event welcomes friends, families, and even four-legged companions to help preserve the natural beauty of Fiesta Island.

To ensure adequate supplies, an RSVP is required. You can find more details and RSVP at their website.​

Litter Free La Mesa: Alvarado Avenue and Stormwater Channel Neighborhood Cleanup

Also on Saturday, March 29, from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM, I Love A Clean San Diego, in partnership with the City of La Mesa, is hosting a litter cleanup event. Volunteers will focus on diverting litter from local watersheds to prevent it from reaching the Pacific Ocean. Participants should wear comfortable clothes, closed-toed shoes, and bring sun protection. For more information and to register, visit I Love A Clean San Diego's events page.​

Compost Giveaway at Lake Murray Park

For those interested in sustainable gardening, there's a Compost Giveaway event on Saturday, March 29, from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM at Lake Murray Park, located at 6320 Murray Park Circle, San Diego. This event is exclusively for City of San Diego residents. It's a great opportunity to enrich your garden soil while supporting the city's waste reduction efforts. Details are available on I Love A Clean San Diego's website.​

Sunset Sweep: Manzanita Canyon

Looking ahead, on Thursday, April 10, from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM, there's the Sunset Sweep at Manzanita Canyon. Organized by I Love A Clean San Diego and the City of San Diego, this litter cleanup aims to protect our watersheds and prevent pollution from reaching the ocean. Volunteers should wear comfortable clothing, closed-toed shoes, and bring sun protection. More information can be found on I Love A Clean San Diego's events page.​

Please keep in mind that weather conditions can change, so it's advisable to check the latest forecast closer to the event dates.​

Participating in these community cleanups is a meaningful way to contribute to the health of our environment and foster a sense of community. Whether you're a seasoned volunteer or new to environmental activism, your efforts make a significant impact. For more information on these events and to register, please visit the respective organizers' websites.​

Thank you for tuning in to the Unscripted Non-Profit Green podcast. Until next time, let's keep our communities clean and green.

Key takeaways

• The Great Detachment is a marketing problem as much as an HR one. People want their work to mean something and most brands give them nothing to attach to.
• Every business can carry a social impact element. Andy’s claim is that there is no category where this is impossible, only categories where nobody has bothered.
• Brand equity is now tied to social responsibility. Not as a nice-to-have. As a valuation input.
• Non-profits need a profitable mindset. Not to make profit, but to stop treating sustainability as somebody else’s job.
• The narrative around non-profits has to change before the funding does.
• Action beats intention. The gap between what people say they care about and what they do is where the whole sector lives.

On this page

• The Great Detachment
• What profit with purpose actually means
• Why non-profits need a profitable mindset
• The for-profit partner nobody asks
• Pursue what breaks your heart
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

The Great Detachment

Andy starts from workforce dissatisfaction, and treats it as a signal rather than a complaint. People are not detached because the work is hard. They are detached because they cannot see what it is for.

That is a solvable problem and it is solvable commercially, which is the part that makes this episode more than a values conversation.

What profit with purpose actually means

Marketing can be a tool for social good, and Andy’s argument is that it is one of the few tools with enough reach to matter. A campaign that moves product and funds a cause is not a compromise between the two. It is the only version that is sustainable, because the moment the budget tightens a pure-cost programme is the first thing cut.

He is direct that every business can incorporate a social impact element. The barrier is imagination, not category.

Why non-profits need a profitable mindset

This is the uncomfortable half of the conversation. Non-profits, in Andy’s view, have been trained into a mindset that treats money as slightly shameful, which leaves them permanently dependent and permanently under-resourced.

Resources are what solve societal problems. An organisation that cannot fund itself is not more virtuous. It is just smaller.

The for-profit partner nobody asks

The practical opportunity: there are plenty of commercial companies that would happily extend their marketing reach through a genuine non-profit partnership. Save Fry Oil comes up in the episode as exactly that kind of business.

Brand equity is tied to social responsibility now. That means the partnership is worth something real to the company, which is what makes it durable rather than a favour.

Pursue what breaks your heart

The closing note is a call to action, and it is specific. Pick the thing that breaks your heart rather than the thing that scores well. Then do something, because intention without action is where most of this sector’s energy goes to die.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• What is the Great Detachment?
• What does profit with purpose actually mean in practice?
• Can any business add a social impact element?
• Why do non-profits need a more profitable mindset?
• How do non-profits find for-profit partners?
• Is brand equity really tied to social responsibility?
• How do I choose which cause to work on?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Megan Ihnen on running a non-profit that builds its own software, a working example of the resourceful mindset Andy is arguing for.
• Queen D. Michele on Gen Alpha and emotional regulation, from the education side of the same sector.

Find Andy Choi

Do Good Points is at dogoodpoints.com.

Cite this episode

Choi, Andy. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Profit with Purpose & Overcoming The Great Detachment.” Unscripted Green & Non-Profits, 2025. https://unscripted-green-non-profits.castos.com/episodes/andy-choi-of-do-good-points-profit-with-purpose-overcoming-the-great-detachment

Michael McDougald recently sponsored a beach based trash cleanup in Sarasota with Community Clean Links bringing 20 volunteers together on Siesta Beach to pick up debris from the recent hurricane.