Micaela Connery, Co-founder of The Kelsey talks about how they use financing and grants to 10x investment in affordably disability housing in San Francisco and San Jose. She also gives her reaction to the $60k per tent that San Francisco paid during the Pandemic.
About Micaela
Micaela co-founded The Kelsey with her cousin Kelsey, who continues to inspire and inform the mission and work today. Micaela has been working on inclusion in communities her entire life. She has seen firsthand the housing crisis facing adults with disabilities and their families. As a research fellow at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, she spent a year studying the issue in detail. The Kelsey exists to turn the challenge of disability housing into the opportunity of inclusive community.
Micaela completed her MPP at Harvard Kennedy School focusing on housing, disability inclusion, and community development. She was a Cheng Fellow at the Harvard Social Innovation and Change Initiative where she worked on designing The Kelsey. In 2017, she received her MBA as a Mitchell Scholar in the Smurfit School at University College Dublin. She’s a proud University of Virginia Wahoo. Prior to The Kelsey, Micaela was the founder and CEO of Unified Theater.
More about The Kelsey
Podcast Transcript
George:
This week on the podcast, I have an old friend, Micaela Connery joining us to talk a little bit about her work at The Kelsey. Welcome to the using the Whole Whale podcast where we learn from leaders about new ideas and digital strategies making a difference in the social impact world. This podcast is a proud production of Whole Whale, a B Corp digital agency. Thank you for joining us. Now, let’s go learn something.
George:
Micaela, I have known of your work for a very long time, when you founded your first nonprofit now on to your second, it’s incredible. But you are the co-founder and CEO of The Kelsey, an amazing group building inclusive housing at scale in some of the toughest [inaudible 00:00:52] San Francisco and down in San Jose I believe, housing for I think it’s hundreds of people right now. Is that correct?
Micaela Connery:
That is correct.
George:
And amazing [crosstalk 00:01:00]. Can you tell us a bit about your work?
Micaela Connery:
Yeah, so good to be on, George and great to share The Kelsey’s mission and what we’re working on. So our mission is to pioneer disability forward housing solutions with the belief that doing so opens doors to homes and opportunities for everyone. So what began with a really personal and issue specific passion around housing for people with disabilities, both started with our co-founder and my cousin Kelsey, and her own personal challenges finding housing in the community, as well as the issues that the millions of Americans with disabilities face and communities all over the country in finding housing that’s affordable, accessible and inclusive. So we started with that need and recognize that building integrated community-based housing for people with disabilities and meeting those needs just creates a better housing product for all people and all communities.
Micaela Connery:
And to your point around doing so with a very, you know there are 61 million Americans with disabilities. So thinking about this issue at scale, and thinking about how we influence change, not just for the 240 plus homes in our pipeline, but thinking about how that can expand out to serve millions of people nationally and even more millions globally, is a joint impact and systems change strategy where we both build communities to meet immediate housing needs and demonstrate what’s works. And then use that to inform systems level policy, advocacy, community organizing and field building so that we can create the market conditions and remove the barriers in markets, so that inclusive housing for people with and without disabilities becomes the norm. And so we’re on our way to doing that as a still relatively young but high impact to date organization.
George:
I feel like I probably understood a good half of that. And this is why I reached out to you. I reached out to you also initially because of an article that came out and I just needed help understanding it. The article coming out in the San Francisco Chronicle talking about the $16 million that was spent on tents, the top line is like $61,000 per tent per year. And I’m like, that’s not housing, how’s the city spending this much on a tent that doesn’t have running water, that doesn’t have four strong walls? And here, you’re over there building hundreds of units and I don’t know, what was your reaction to that? How do you make sense of this for someone like me?
Micaela Connery:
Yeah. So I think my reaction to that is that, as the public and our media is very quick to sort of first of all, the solution was meant in defense of sort of the cost there, this was not meant to be a permanent or perfect solution. This was an emergency solution during a time of COVID, where people were trying to figure out how to keep the unhoused community in San Francisco safe and healthy in the best way possible. But I don’t think I doubt anybody would come out and say that this is the long-term solution. But I think sort of the public outcry around that cost, we have to hold public accountability to if you’re complaining about the millions of dollars put into that tent community, and you’re not also advocating for permanent funding sources and taxpayer subsidized funding sources for affordable permanent housing, ground up development communities.
Micaela Connery:
And or you’re not advocating for the development and increased density or increased housing units down the block from where you live or in the neighborhood that you think is so cute, where you’d like to walk in and spend time in. You can’t have both parts of that. So it’s great to sort of say that these emergency solutions are not cost effective or even not sort of long-term dignified and humane for the people who live there. And in the same vein, then you need to say and what I think should be that solution is publicly financed, ground up development increased density in the city in the neighborhood, where I live and where I work and where I pay taxes. So we’re always willing to spend money in sort of a reactive way often, and then easy to critique that spending. And what we need to be looking at is sort of proactive long-term solutions and solutions that leverage.
Micaela Connery:
I think one of the interesting pieces about that article is it brought up that that solution was not eligible for sort of federal partnership and federal reimbursement. So thinking about solutions that how money is spent, but how a piece of money spent on a local level or at a foundation level also was used to unlock other dollars, I think also was a sub note of that conversation but something that is important and equally relevant as we think about affordable housing, in the Bay Area.
George:
In my brain, I try to categorize things. I put this in the firm category of ounce of prevention versus pound of cure. Ounce of prevention, and you could be doing here really is tiny, but ultimately, you find yourself in times of crisis of stress, like a pandemic, but that was building for a long time, but the article needed to get headlines. And it did, because it’s an alarming to look at how much a pound of cure costs, how much that actually is. And to the larger point of like, what people are actually paying for, like the other comparable program they were looking at was even more expensive, which is the hotel program, the city spends 300 million thereabouts per year on the on house community in and similar services and it costs them 270, for instance. About 270 per night to put someone who’s experiencing homelessness in a hotel.
George:
By the way, that’s 100 grand. That’s 100 grand a year and guess what happens next year, no new house was built, nothing in the realm of affordability. So I think it’s maybe frustrating, because you get to look at how the community reacts. And like all that’s like anger and rage and like, “George reached out to me at this moment, because he’s like, all fired up and confused.” As opposed to like, what about when that prop, whatever was going around? Because in California, those of you who don’t live here, we can vote on just about anything including not limited to the flavor of our vape pens that we want to allow. And then you end up seeing a lot of these maybe lost and forgotten bond measures or pieces in municipal or city or state levels that we can vote on, that would lead toward that ounce of prevention. Can you talk a little bit about that? Things that you see right now or things that, like why did we not do this or that with regard to props?
Micaela Connery:
Yeah, so props and measures, depending on whether we’re talking sort of at the city or county or state level, that support and I think going back to your hotel are a huge part of supporting solutions here. And I think going back to your hotel example, and sort of getting paying sort of the per night cost to have somebody have a big house and have a roof over their head, I think is looking at sort of one piece of the housing puzzle. So we need to look at sites and land and how and where housing gets built. We need to look at dollars and cents and who pays for and what the cost of that housing is and who’s paying for that cost. And then we also do need when we look at the cost of homelessness in a city like San Francisco and anywhere, we’re also often talking about supportive services and therapeutic services and medical services and all types of other programming that has nothing to do with sort of the physical space where a person lives.
Micaela Connery:
So it’s important to and so it’s really easy for people to just talk about the cost to develop housing or the cost per night of a hotel room. But we really need to think holistically about those three pieces of the puzzle, sort of the where the dollars and the and the services. And so when you look at, if you’re thinking about the issue of homelessness in the Bay Area, you should be thinking about how you’re saying yes to different measures and props that are providing funding for affordable housing, where you live. But it’s really easy to have sticker shock and quick responses to a one piece of that puzzle, but it’s going to take us thinking across the whole supply chain of affordable and market rate housing. Those two pieces come together toO.
George:
Yeah. There’s a lot of sticker shock.
Micaela Connery:
Yeah.
George:
A lot of shocking information. It’s like it’s shocking at a big number and at a little number because it’s frustrating also to watch how small the I guess in this case, the cost per house so that denominator is right, that the single human guy got tent versus like something that maybe could have been planned to three years prior, something that was a bit more permanent. But then in this article, they also quote, which is just shocking, housing costs of $700,000 a unit. I got like, I watched like, flip this house and shit, like you can go and buy. You can buy a house for half of that somewhere else, like what is going on? In my mind, I’m like, “Gosh, move to Nevada or something,” like why can’t we get the cost down or what goes into this number?”
Micaela Connery:
Yeah, so I think first let’s talk about the move to Nevada question, which is I do think I want to be careful around that piece, which is that people talk about, and it’s been an ongoing discussion, the disability community of like, it just costs too much to live or too much to build in the Bay Area. And the solution is, people need to look elsewhere. I think that’s one not the solution. We as bay area we want to an income diverse community. But I also think, we’ve seen, it’s interesting, the one of our service partners, the Golden Gate Regional Center, which is the agency who provides support for people with developmental disabilities in San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo counties. And their executive director often talks about that people have been priced out of their kind of catchment area, because they can no longer afford to live there.
Micaela Connery:
And when they are priced out, guess what? Sure, they can find somewhere cheaper to live in the Central Valley, although now they’re increasing, they’re having their own affordable housing crisis and it’s sort of bleeding out. But also when we require people to live elsewhere, because they can afford it, we’re also requiring them to leave their natural and community support systems, whether that be the person who supports them in their home, or their friends, or their church or their family. So that can’t be our solution. And I think the cost of housing, there’s a lot of factors. We are underwriting two projects right now, one that will start construction at the end of this year in San Jose, and one about a year behind in San Francisco. And it’s just expensive to develop housing [crosstalk 00:12:05].
George:
What are the numbers on those? Can you just tease us with… what can you share?
Micaela Connery:
Yeah, I mean, we’re going to come in and about what is average for the region, which is somewhere between 600 and $700,000 a door. And that is the reality of developing in the Bay Area, and particularly developing as we try to engineer costs. You can do things like, take out amenity spaces, or take out accessibility features or value engineering certain sustainable materials and that’s [crosstalk 00:12:35].
George:
You’re doing 240 units, you said?
Micaela Connery:
Yes.
George:
So you’re wielding upwards [inaudible 00:12:42] $160 million right now.
Micaela Connery:
Well, I’m not wielding it personally but yes, we are. We will unlock that. And I think that’s also another important piece here is what we wield is the philanthropic dollars, that is sort of the first money in. So in both of our projects that are right around 65 to $75 million development projects, like I said, both around 101, 115, one 112 homes in San Jose in San Francisco, and they’re going to be upwards of 70, right around 70, $75 million projects in total. And we will be open sourcing our financials once those numbers are totally, once our financing closes, because that’s part of our mission is to be really transparent about how these projects get built and funded. So once the numbers are final and firm, we’ll be sharing those with anybody who’s interested in seeing them and to what we wield.
Micaela Connery:
I think that’s also a really important part of this discussion is how we use philanthropic and private dollars to make these kinds of multi-million dollar several 100 home communities possible, is that we use Philanthropy in the early phase to de risk and acquire sites that are value add development opportunities. Then we bring in the public subsidy in the city partnership to take a huge chunk of the capital with public investment, then we’ve got sort of the key pieces and go forward and unlock other state federal and philanthropic dollars to round out the capital stack. And so what we wield is yes, we have over 150 million in a housing development portfolio underway right now, and ultimately what our projects will cost, and that’s made possible by about $15 million in philanthropy.
Micaela Connery:
So that’s really where the Kelsey is singularly focused right now is how do we raise philanthropic dollars so that an individual donor can put in a million dollars into a project to support affordable, inclusive housing. But there are a million dollars isn’t just worth a million, it’s actually worth 10 million, because we’re taking that million and we’re lining it up with public subsidy and a permanent mortgage and tax credits and federal dollars to be able to make these communities feasible overall. I think that’s when we talked about cost per unit but we should also be talking about value per dollar. Which is like you put in your money, leverage matters a lot, and you put in your philanthropic dollars. Or a city puts in their public subsidy, and how is that being used alongside other capital to create more value and ultimately house more people and a better product?
George:
I think I love hearing you talking about the financial stack and making it open source. And I want to get back to that in a second but I have to take my hat off, and salute full on love. Anytime someone like yourself applies an abundance mindset versus gets trapped in a scarcity mindset, someone who says, oh my gosh, we have like $15 million in our backyard. Like you could have just as easily put up the blinders and been like, all right, let’s protect this and let’s build 10 units over here on the side, because we can control it. And it would be way too risky to then try to parlay that and take that kind of risk and take that kind of gamble for good, if we’re being honest. Like you had to hold your breath and convince a lot of people that, “No, no, we’re going somewhere good.”
George:
I nod and I see this also in the health sector at times, I have to point to groups like the Michael J. Fox Foundation that do a similar bit of work where they de-risk, this is an important word, especially when talking to the financial folks. De-risk for pharma to work on pharmaceutical research that helps advance Parkinson’s and research around Parkinson’s disease and finding a cure there. And the same way that you were doing that here, you could have gone there again, and been like, “We’re going to take it, we’re going to build one unit.” But no, you’re like, here’s an intractable problem you dropped, it was like 60 million folks in our country, fall into the category of disabilities and how you solve that is not 10 units at a time, let’s be honest.
George:
You have a big freaking role. And yeah, open sourcing a model like this makes a lot of sense, but I think what I also love is that the advantage, it’s like, the strategic advantage is actually in the inclusivity itself, because you open up the door to these other subsidies, you can play it in. I mean, it’s kind of incredible. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about designing that at a tangible level and making the case to like, all right, you got the foundation on board, like how do you get the next Domino to fall?
Micaela Connery:
Yeah, well, I think to pick up on the abundance mindset versus a scarcity mindset. If you go on our website, that’s actually one of our principles of advocacy and organizing too because for two reasons. One is that when I first started research on this, so when I, like I mentioned in a personal family connection, but I started this from kind of an academic, like what’s the problem? And it was looking at where the existing projects were often disability only. And they were often sort of philanthropicly or independently financed by a group of families or one foundation where they were building sort of six units or even 25 units at a time, but they weren’t being done alongside public subsidy or the other, even privately financed sort of affordable and market rate housing infrastructure. So it was really important for me when I started this work of one, we don’t want to segregate people with disabilities.
Micaela Connery:
And every focus group we did with people with disabilities, they said they didn’t want to be segregated. So the sort of inclusive model was both what was kind of qualitatively right. But it was also to your point quantitatively what made sense, because by integrating housing for people with disabilities alongside whether that be other affordable homes or other middle income or other market rate homes. It then opens these projects up to unlocking the public subsidy that is tied to those other housing unit types, and making sure that disability funding doesn’t sort of get hold away over there, but it’s used to kind of unlock and bring forward and if you do the calculations, sort of on a per unit what needs to be fundraised basis, you’re getting a better bang for your buck in the philanthropic raise that we have. In our San Jose project, we have 29 homes.
Micaela Connery:
If we just went and built those 29 homes of the 115 for people with disabilities who use supportive services, we could have to your point exactly gone and just build those 29 homes with private financing, but it would have segregated and it also would have actually on what we had to raise, then equal if not more than what we’re having to raise for doing it in this integrated sort of public private partnership model. So that was really key and I’d also say we think a lot about intersectionality and the scarcity mindset that I do fear that if we don’t sort of think of the deepest affordability which frankly public sector partnership is required to go into the SSI Reliant lowest income people with disabilities. Which is disproportionately black and brown people with disabilities, we have to look at an abundance mindset and have to recognize the diversity of disability needs and the role that the public and philanthropic sector plays to solve that. And that sort of create these very white and very affluent segregated models that is just not kind of meeting the broadest definition of disability inclusivity.
George:
Yeah. Narrative thread too in here is the service efficiency and community. And definitely back to my obviously like poor thought but I’ve heard it mentioned before, of like, hey, there’s tons of room in Las Vegas, right? I should just build a giant tower out there on the desert. And like, there you go, your cost per units 30k, and you’re set, put everybody on an island. And there’s so many reasons not to do that. But also like, let’s just bring it back to economic arguments, because you’ve had to make the economic argument. As soon as you walk out of the philanthropic rooms, I know because I know you in your conversations, you’re like, “No, no, this makes financial sense.” It’s going to cost you so much more to bring in the community necessary to serve this population, that’s going to put a huge price on this and not to be like that kind of ruthless and pragmatic.
George:
But I feel like you’ve had to look at the freaking numbers involved and be like, “Look, it’s just better anyway you slice it, when you look at the whole person, the whole situation and the ounce of prevention, and how you [inaudible 00:21:36] in community. I think it makes a stronger community in general. And just I don’t know if there’s any other piece. I want to also touch on the fact that you name yourself as a co-founder, and I also happen to know that you consider Kelsey the other co-founder. I wonder how it’s been championing a cause for which you personally, frankly, are not a constituent of, though you have obviously a close relationship. How do you navigate that when you’re in the rooms that you’re in?
Micaela Connery:
Yeah. So I think of like I mentioned that Kelsey, my cousin had multiple significant disabilities, she actually passed away right around the time that we got our first funding for The Kelsey. So what started off as an organization that was really shaped by her has also become a legacy organization and that’s something I take really seriously and I’m really proud of. But I think a lot about what it means to be a leader and allyship of saying that I consider myself an ally of the community of people with disabilities and of disability rights issues, and recognize that I myself have not lived with a disability. Likely as many of us will, I could live with a disability at another point later in my life, but right now I have not had the experience of living with a disability or being a part of the disability community.
Micaela Connery:
And I take that really seriously and what that means to be a leader and how I don’t think it should be a requirement that no non-disabled individuals can lead disability rights focused organizations, or disability service efforts or inclusive housing development, as is the case in what I’m doing. I think it would be negative if no people without disabilities thought they could lead or be a part of solutions for people with and without disabilities. But I think it really requires intentionality, and being co-led by people with and without disabilities. So that has come through in my work in big and small ways that the first thing I did when I started thinking about what it would look like to build new solutions and housing for people with disabilities was go talk to people with disabilities, and learn from the leaders of disability rights and service and advocacy organizations across the country.
Micaela Connery:
And also be really willing, which I think leadership as an ally requires even more than any other leadership of being really open to criticism and challenging feedback. So when I first started this organization, I had disability rights advocates, who changed my view on how I approached this from the very start and sort of made me rethink about services and housing models and how that would be delivered. That directly shaped how The Kelsey has looked at our inclusion concierge and our on-site services model and think really intentionally from the feedback of disabled leaders. We did focus groups where we centered people with disabilities and all different types of disabilities and their family members and other community members, so that people with disabilities insights and feedback was embedded in our model from the start. And then we thought about our organization leadership and how we are co-led again, on our board and on our staff to ensure that we have people with disabilities represented and particularly increasing to think about also people of color with disabilities, which is exceptionally important and something that we’ve also centered on.
Micaela Connery:
So taking that seriously and not being afraid also to name that, I don’t have a disability, and there’s a power dynamic and a privilege that comes with that, and that I need to be conscious of and recognize every single day in this work. And that doesn’t mean my leadership is less valuable or less credible. It just requires the attention to that and not pretending that that’s not something that creates the dynamic that needs to be constantly addressed and questioned and pushed forward. So I take that job and that responsibility and what I would say the privilege really seriously.
George:
What do you think The Kelsey is in 10 years?
Micaela Connery:
I think that there is a Kelsey community in every major market in the country, but that there are also Kelsey enabled models of housing that are not called the Kelsey and that aren’t run by or supported by the Kelsey directly. But that our advocacy on a systems level or our influence on sort of a field building level has created a whole ecosystem of disability forward including housing options, which I hope and believe that the Kelsey will be the best in class but will be the best in class of a very diverse market of disability inclusive housing. And that’s sort of our dream, that we’re still operating communities everywhere for anybody who wants to live in them, but that there are other people operating communities that have a lot of similar characteristics. And we’re really proud of that, of sort of the groundswell of disability forward housing solutions that are our model and our advocacy in our field building has made possible.
George:
This is just to come back to how unselfishly you care about what you’re trying to achieve, to open source your secret sauce of like, this is how you combine these financial models, these subsidies, these city and municipal actors. Like you’re giving away the blueprint to coalesce competitors, in many of the same ways that you watch like Elon Musk sort of like not really give a shit when he’s like open sourcing a lot of like, lithium ion, drive train designs for the Tesla. He’s like, “Shit, we need electric cars. This is just where we need to be. I don’t give a shit if I am the one who wins but I know that I need to make a very viable stand to wake up.”
George:
And we saw announcements this year, many car companies being like by 20 some odd, it should have been 10 years ago, we’re going to get to… Like each one had to capitulate. So I think it is beautiful that you want a field of competitors in 10 years rather than like winner take all.
Micaela Connery:
Yeah, no.
George:
I knew there was a reason I had you on this podcast. How much money would that take? How much money would it take just to get you where you need to in 10 years? Like someone just write a check.
Micaela Connery:
Yeah, I think that if I think about this question a lot that if we essentially, if we wanted to have think about a Kelsey in every state across the country, and we wanted to have a seed like sort of [inaudible 00:28:17]. What if we could do like a search fund for inclusive disability forward housing models? We could kind of do what we did in the Bay Area, that together we can do more community organizing and sort of open source groundswell kind of process and then pick a couple of sites to develop. And we wanted like $10 million to see that in every single state. I think we could make a dent and move this issue permanently forward. So yeah, if somebody would like to write us our $500 million check, I’d be very into us taking this nationwide within 10 years [crosstalk 00:28:49].
George:
You can do 500 all at once, you can do 10 per state as a roll out.
Micaela Connery:
Yeah.
George:
There’s your number. 10 will get you 100.
Micaela Connery:
Yeah.
George:
10 will get you 100, come to the table. I love it. All right. I can talk to you forever, about a number of topics, but I’m excited to move in to a rapid fire. All right, you’ve got 30 seconds ish, to respond to the following. So I’m sure there’s questions ahead of time. Hopefully, you are ready, what is one tech tool or website that you or your organization has started using in the last year?
Micaela Connery:
Black, and we love it.
George:
Boy, what tech issues are you currently battling with?
Micaela Connery:
Well, we are definitely continuing to look at website and Zoom and other online Google Docs, Google Sheets, accessibility. So we obviously center on having disabled people with diverse access needs both sensory and cognitive, and people who are blind and people who are deaf. So how to make all especially in this virtual world be fully accessible, whether that be our website, or a Zoom meeting, or our design standards work that we’re doing with 600 design elements in Excel spreadsheet of how to make those accessible to a diverse group of people with disabilities. We have a long way to go, I think in making our digital world fully accessible.
George:
What is coming in the next year that has you the most excited?
Micaela Connery:
Groundbreaking on our first project, which feels like a long time coming, but actually is in relative terms been very quick. But we have our first project in San Jose, where we’ll put shovels in the ground by the end of 2021 tax credit pending, so I’m really excited to [crosstalk 00:30:34].
George:
I’m getting an invite to that.
Micaela Connery:
You will. For sure.
George:
I’m getting an invite to that?
Micaela Connery:
For sure.
George:
Can you talk about a mistake that you made earlier in your career that shapes the way you do things now?
Micaela Connery:
So I think to your point around open sourcing of thinking that competition, and you had to sort of hold your secret sauce, and that you had to sort of two things, you had to sort of keep things internal until you really knew exactly how to do it. And you weren’t sort of iterative and transparent and recognizing that being iterative and transparent early on allows one your organization to really figure out what your value add in a broader system is and to a rising tide lifts all boats and to bring the whole sector forward. I think in the social impact social entrepreneurship space, especially through kind of the area that you and I met George were like, the first question is always like, what makes you unique? And like why are you like the best and only of what you do?
Micaela Connery:
So I really internalize that as a young social entrepreneur early on thinking that I had to be sort of the only and had to be different which meant that I had to sort of protect ideas and not let them out. And I have really rejected that in phase two of just saying, actually if we are looking for impact at scale transparency and collaboration and open sourcing is going to be required. And if you’re really good at what you do, you can open source out the wazoo and you’re still going to be the best at what you do. There’s just going to be a lot of other really good people doing that as well and that should be the goal.
George:
Do you believe that nonprofits can successfully go out of business?
Micaela Connery:
Yes.
George:
[inaudible 00:32:25] three in a Hot Tub Time Machine back to the start of your work at The Kelsey, what advice would you give yourself?
Micaela Connery:
I would define roles because we work in collaboration a lot, I would be more intentional about upfront defining sort of roles and responsibilities and then being open that those might change over time. But I think we sort of built the plane as we flew, which is required for a startup. And so there definitely were some growing pains as it resulted in that both on our internal team and also how we work with partners that we still are working through. And I think if I had, that would require me to have a time machine too, because I know where we’d be now. And I think we were still trying to figure out where we were going to be in the year. And so we couldn’t define those roles and responsibilities right off the bat. But having clarity of sort of what your core competencies are both at an individual staff level and an organizational level, helps you drive impact and work better in partnership, especially as an organization that’s so focused on development and operations partnerships.
George:
What is something that you think you or your organization should stop doing?
Micaela Connery:
Well, sort of I stopped doing it but letting emails sort of run your schedule and your priorities and run your life. And so that’s a constant work in progress, but not letting email be the dictator of attention and priorities.
George:
If you had a magical wand to wave across your industry, what would it do?
Micaela Connery:
It would make it rain, [inaudible 00:34:02]. The key was the gold makes the rules and we’d have a lot of gold and then we’d be able to make a lot of rules around advancing disability inclusive housing. So we’d have cash.
George:
How did you get started in the social impact sector?
Micaela Connery:
I got started as a 15-year-old, I started a club at my high school around inclusive performing arts called Unified Theater that was a student run arts program for students [inaudible 00:34:34] without disabilities. And that’s I did not know I was starting social impact organization, I thought I was just starting a theater club and everything grew from there. I think that has been the singular orientation of my social entrepreneurship journey as I make air quotes because I still sometimes struggle to call myself a social entrepreneur. I would call myself much more of kind of a social problems noticer, where I really want to solve problems. And I’m less interested around how being the founder of an organization or starting something, I’m really I see a problem and this seems like a solvable problem, so let’s just do something about it. And that was the case when I was 15 and probably will be the case for the rest of my life.
George:
What advice would you give college grads looking to enter the social impact sector?
Micaela Connery:
I would recognize that it is a career and an industry but it is not. And that there is vocation, and a vocation is a vocation and whether that’s because you’re passionate about nursing or education or disability rights or military service or technology. I think it’s really important that we not pretend that working in the social sector is it’s like an altruistic, kind of like do good or feel but that it’s what is your vocation? What is the issue that you care deeply about? And then where can you have the most impact on? And if that’s the social sector, and the nonprofit sector great, but that also might be going and working for Wells Fargo and making sure that their affordable housing lending is of inclusive projects or of affordable projects. So I think it’s really important to understand what is the issue area that you care about? And then what is the lever that you are uniquely called to push around that issue, and not being so tied to what sector that’s going to be, but being really tied to where you can then have the most impact of where those two things combined.
George:
What advice did your parents give you that you either followed or did not?
Micaela Connery:
So this is funny because I’ve also said around what my magic wand would be of gold and money. But I will say that my parents always said that if the only item on the pros column was money, then it was a bad pro column. So I think that as I make both personal and professional decisions of obviously my work is we spent a lot of time talking about financial engineering, but that on a more personal level, that you have to be financially sound. But there needs to always be more than just about money. And both my parents made mid career transitions. My dad went from being in hotel management to managing property and assets for the Catholic Church. And my mom went from being a mechanical engineer to a high school physics teacher. So watching them make those transitions where they were still able to provide for their family, but they ultimately thought about what sort of drove them to make the world a better place and supported a thriving life that they wanted to live. That example, I think, has continued to resonate in my own life.
George:
All right, final hardball. How do people find you? How do people help you?
Micaela Connery:
So you can find us online at the kelsey.org. And there’s a couple different ways people can help us. One is that if you live in the Bay Area, and you’re interested in actually getting involved in our projects, on a community advisory group, or on a capital campaign committee, or helping do inclusion hours, or a sweat equity, there’s a lot of different ways that you can get engaged and contribute. So you can find out how to contact us on our website. We are always looking for financial supporters. And whether that is our community that we call it, the community of monthly givers who are people who give 30 bucks a month to support our mission that supports our ongoing operations or our developer and builder community where people who are giving 25,000 to million dollars, multi-million dollar, multi-year pledges. Financial support is the secret sauce that allows us to get these projects done and there’s information about that on our website.
Micaela Connery:
Then I think the last piece that people can do to support us is to just be advocates for inclusion in the different spaces where you live and operate. So whether that is saying yes to an affordable housing project down the street from where you live, or making sure that when your company or your brand or your foundation has a diversity strategy that has no mention of disability, which is remarkable to me, how often I get sent applications for things where it talks about centering on the most marginalized or including a lens of inclusion, but not mentioning disability. You can change that on a level where you live work and play of making sure that when we’re talking about inclusion, and when we’re talking about policies that support the multiple [inaudible 00:39:55] and most marginalized in our communities, that disability is one of the abundance. Not scarcity, not one only but one of many priorities that we’re thinking about to create truly welcoming and thriving places for all people. That disability is mentioned and thought about and intentionally included.
George:
Thank you for your time. Thank you for your work. And I feel like I’m in the room with greatness. And I can’t wait to revisit this in 10 years and be like, “Well, she did it.” Thank you.
Micaela Connery:
Yeah, let’s have a follow-up when that happens. So thanks for having us.
George:
This has been using the Whole Whale Podcast. If you want to keep learning more about these topics and others, head on over to Wholewhale.com/university to keep learning with us. Thanks as always to Gregthomasmusic.org for his tunes that underwrite our tracks. They’re fantastic. Hope you’re doing well Greg. And just a reminder subscribes really help us on any platform that you listen to us on, please give a thought to clicking subscribe and maybe even a comment because we like hearing from you.
