Gratitude

The focus of this week is gratitude. The definition of gratitude is: “the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.”

I am truly thankful and appreciative of every single Idahoan who helped the Idaho Nonprofit Center raise over $3.9 million for 634 nonprofits through Idaho Gives. I can never underscore the significance of your overwhelmingly wonderful support for our participating organizations. Your kindness and generosity allows our nonprofits to pay it forward by continuing to fulfill their missions in your communities. You made an incredible difference, thank you.

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Teamwork

I feel a tremendous amount of gratitude for my role in leading a team of six other dedicated and passionate professionals, not just through Idaho Gives, but in all the work we do to fulfill our mission for you, our nonprofit friends. 

• We have increased the number of training and capacity building opportunities available to our nonprofits and made them all free.  
• We’ve ramped up our advocacy efforts in support of Idaho’s nonprofits.

But I am especially grateful to see the benefits of our hard work pay off through Idaho Gives. In addition to the months of planning the campaign, this year my team and I worked behind the scenes for Idaho Gives almost around the clock for 14 days straight. That is true passion and dedication to our mission of supporting nonprofits. 

We were up late at night watching the ticker climb, looking to see who would win those milestone prizes, pushing Idaho Gives on social media, answering donor calls (yes, my team took calls in addition to our volunteers) until 11:00 pm every weeknight. I’ll never be able to thank them enough.  

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Partnerships

I certainly can’t express enough gratitude to our media partners across the state: 

• KTVB and Impact Radio Group in the Treasure Valley and south central Idaho
• KPVI and Riverbend communications in eastern Idaho
• KREM and IdaVend in north and north central Idaho
  
  

There’s not enough thank you’s for our award pool sponsors and our underwriters: Idaho Central Credit Union, Idaho’s National Laboratory and Regence. But I really do enjoy feeling thankful, there’s been a lot of that lately.

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Pay it Forward

The best and finest example of the manifestation of true gratitude was in the past two weeks. Last week we were surprised by the Idaho Community Foundation, honoring us not only for all our COVID-related capacity building and advocacy work but for the nearly $4 million we helped raise for Idaho nonprofits.  
As part of the CEO Pay it Forward Challenge, Karen Bilowith, CEO of the Idaho Community Foundation honored us after having been recognized by someone else the previous week. That’s the circle of gratitude: being thankful and wanting to return the kindness.
When it was our turn to consider both recognizing and challenging someone else immediately the Micron Foundation team came to mind. Just yesterday we were thrilled to take the time to pay kindness forward to their staff and to honor their leadership in supporting nonprofits, not just locally but in communities across the globe.

Locally, Boise team members have raised nearly $900,000 since January. Then supported by a two-for-one match by Micron, that number grew to over $1.6 million. The Micron Foundation also generously gave to numerous organizations throughout Idaho (including the Idaho Gives award pool fund) and donated a significant portion of funds to the COVID-19 relief fund held at the Idaho Community Foundation.  
The most wonderful part of saying thank you to people like the Micron Foundation team is that they don’t do what they do for recognition, their humbless in accepting our challenge and gratitude was incredibly present. I enjoy saying thank you the most to people who don’t seek it out.

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Community

Aside from all of our work and feeling grateful for our team, our supporters and our community, I’m also grateful for the incredible work the nonprofits put in every single day to make Idaho the most wonderful place to live, work and play. 

The past few months have taught us many things, all of which I am also grateful for:

We are resilient.

We are creative.

We are exceptional problem solvers.

We are smart.

We are adaptable.

We are nimble.

We are pretty damn amazing.

Each and every one of us that works in the nonprofit sector now has a list of skills we never knew we had, but through it all we’ve always remained one thing that I’m mostly grateful for: 

We are kind.