Webinar: Doing the Work - Fiscal Responsibility and Staffing Sustainability

Will Paese, Executive Director of Re-Member (serving the Oglala Lakota community on Pine Ridge Reservation), leads a thoughtful webinar for the Anabaptist Community Development Network on “Doing the Work: Fiscal Responsibility & Staffing Sustainability.” 

He offered a compelling look at what sustainable, community-centered nonprofit leadership requires in practice, sharing insights from Re-Member’s work alongside the Oglala Lakota community on Pine Ridge Reservation.

As the organization has grown to a $1.7M annual budget and a 15-person team – over half of whom are enrolled tribal members – Re-Member has remained committed to being “big enough to have impact, small enough to have a soul.”

Key themes from the presentation included:

• The importance of investing in people through living wages and local employment.
• A candid discussion of leadership evolution, staff housing challenges, and the role of external partnerships in resource-constrained environments –while maintaining a posture of advocacy with the community rather than speaking for it.
• Navigating staffing challenges in contexts with high unemployment and limited infrastructure.
• Balancing immediate community needs with long-term systemic change.
• Lessons from sustaining operations through COVID disruptions, refining donor communication, and building trust through long-term relationships rather than transactional service models.