Fast Break: Breaking Barriers, Building Futures

Becky Menefee

Welcome to Fast Break. My name is Becky Menefee, and I have the great honor of representing M3 alongside your faithful host and my esteemed colleague, Matt Cranney. 

Today, in honor of Women’s HERstory Month, we are looking right in our own backyard at women who are actively writing history in our communities every single day. I am absolutely thrilled to welcome three powerhouse executives in the local nonprofit space to the table.

Today we have Brenda Campbell, President and CEO at Secure Futures in Milwaukee, Tara Penasovich, CEO of Boys and Girls Club of Kenosha, and Jane Graham Jennings, Executive Director of the Women’s Community in Wausau. Great to have you all here. Thank you for your time.

00:46 Becky Menefee Brenda Campbell Tara Panasewicz Jane Graham Jennings

Thank you.

00:46 Becky Menefee

So today we’re celebrating these three dynamic women who are shaping the nonprofit sector, a sector where women make up nearly 70% of the workforce yet still face barriers to leadership and equitable pay. And yet, despite those challenges, women are leading the way.

Nearly 57% of nonprofit CEOs are women, far outpacing corporate America, where only 11% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. So today, we’re diving into the stories, the barriers, the breakthroughs, and the bold paths forward carved by women who are transforming communities every day.

Brenda, let’s start with you. Financial freedom is such a cornerstone of women’s history. When you’re teaching financial capability to teens today, how do you see this specifically changing the trajectory for young women in your programs?

01:36 Brenda Campbell

Oh, Becky, that’s such a great question, and it just really resonates with me personally. I grew up in a large family where resources were tight. My parents were frugal. I don’t remember ever wasting anything, but we really weren’t taught about investing or building wealth. We didn’t have conversations about planning for the future.

When I’m teaching financial capability to teens today, especially young women, I’m thinking about what I wish someone had taught me earlier. I know what it feels like to work hard and still not fully understand how money can work for you. And I know how powerful it is once you do.

When young women in our program start to understand things like credit, saving, planning for the future, you really can see that shift. They begin to see themselves differently. Someone who can build wealth and negotiate their worth and make independent choices. For many of them, there isn’t generational wealth or a financial playbook at home.

When they gain these skills, they’re not just learning about money, they’re interrupting a cycle. That to me is what changes the trajectory. It’s, you know, financial capability really gives young women options, and they don’t have to stay stuck. Whether that’s in a job, in a relationship, in a circumstance, and really that’s why this work matters to me. I would say it’s not abstract, it’s personal.

03:02 Becky Menefee

Yeah, it’s so good. And when you think too, and just the history of women and being able to get credit on their own and open their own accounts. And that really wasn’t that long ago when those things became a reality.

So when you think about it, our parents, my parents didn’t teach me that stuff either. So this is really important work to really be delivering in the communities, thank you. That’s awesome.

Tara, shifting over to you. Mentorship is vital for young women trying to figure out what they’re capable of. As a female leader advocating for youth, how does the Boys and Girls Club actively encourage the next generation of girls to take up space and see themselves as future leaders?

03:45 Tara Panasewicz

So the Boys and Girls Club believes that greatness exists in every child. And the way to develop that is through positive mentorship. So we have two programs that I’d like to highlight:

One of them is our signature program called Youth of the Year. It’s our signature program that recognizes leadership and a strong commitment to a youth’s future, character, and leadership. Locally, every year, the club will select their own Youth of the Year.

And I’ve been at the club for about five years, and I’ve had the absolute pleasure of seeing three female Youth of the Years, one of them being, her name was Nakaya. She was a Youth of the Year just prior to me arriving, but this strong female future leader is now at the University of Wisconsin Parkside studying to be a doctor and came back to the club so that she could stretch this opportunity and advocate for more youth in our community to be a part of the club.

So these women and future leaders are being empowered every day through that mentorship and just bringing out what’s so special in them. That’s really what we do at the Boys and Girls Club to develop these future leaders. It’s through mentorship, the power of positive mentorship.

05:14 Becky Menefee

I love that, the power of positive mentorship. I love that. And lining each other up to see, to show each other that it can be done as well, right? That’s just such great work.

Jane, the history of the women’s movement is deeply tied to the right to safety. How does the broader history of the trailblazers who fought for domestic violence awareness inform the way your team operates today? And how do you define strength when helping a woman rebuild her life?

05:43 Jane Graham Jennings

Thank you so much for the question. And I like that I got to hear Brenda and Tara because the things that they talk about are core to stuff that we do as well.

The women who started the anti-violence work, part of that came from understanding that when women were trapped in relationships, they had no options. You know, in the ’70s, women could not leave a relationship and get a car loan, get a bank loan. They couldn’t open a bank account.

Part of that history has been lost. Young women today, many don’t know that just short years ago, women had no access to resources.

So the program that Brenda provides in generational wealth, which women didn’t have, when you don’t have that, when you don’t have a safety net, when you don’t understand your own finances, you don’t have the possibility of leaving a relationship that is very harmful.

For young women to learn and understand their value and worth, and then also for Boys and Girls Club, we also need to teach young men how to be respectful and how to operate in a world where you need to do other things besides be angry.

So, in our history in this work, the trailblazers and the women who started this work, whose shoulders I still stand on, recognize that part of being trapped in a relationship was because financial stability didn’t exist.

So now women are mostly in the workforce. It’s fairly common for women to work outside the home. The sad thing is that the safety for women hasn’t necessarily improved. We still have a tremendous amount of abuse that occurs within homes. We still have the cliff that when women are able to finally leave a relationship, if they in fact are able to, oftentimes they are still find themselves impoverished.

So they’re often faced with a choice of, do I find myself homeless for me and my kids, or do I stay in this relationship and maneuver as safely as I can so that my children and I don’t have to be homeless?

And thinking about your point of, well, how do we just find strength? Strength is survival. Too many people think that women who are trapped in relationships where they are in love with someone who is intent on destroying them, that they’re weak. And actually the strength that it takes to maintain that, the strength that it takes to try to keep your children safe when you are afraid of a person that you love, that strength is immense.

The strength really comes from the people we’re serving. They are the ones who have the strength and we just help them find it.

08:24 Becky Menefee

Wow. Strength is survival. That one gave me goosebumps. I don’t know what it’s like to be in a situation like that, I don’t want to pretend to know what it’s like to be in a situation like that and what it feels like to be helpless and have to make an impossible decision like that.

It’s got to be hard work for you and your teams on a day-to-day basis. So thank you for that. We need advocates like you to show us that the strength that we do carry is in survival. So thank you.

All right, I want to open up this next question to all three of you. In my own day-to-day leading a sales team here at M3, I know the immense energy it takes to keep people motivated and driving towards a goal year after year.

But doing that in the nonprofit space while carrying the heavy emotional weight of your missions is a whole different level. How do you protect your internal cultural, internal culture, excuse me, keep yourselves from burning out and actively mentor the women in your staff to step into leadership roles? Brenda, let’s start with you.

09:25 Brenda Campbell

Oh, Becky, I love that you named the energy piece because it’s just so real. In nonprofit leadership, and we heard this from Tara and Jane too, like the mission is so personal. We care so much, and that can blur the boundaries if you’re not careful. I know I’ve learned that the hard way.

And I think when you believe in the mission, it’s so easy to overextend. I wouldn’t say this is something that I’ve mastered, it’s something that I actively work on all the time.

In thinking about the part you asked about protecting culture, I think that really starts with modeling that growth. I can’t tell my team to take care of themselves if I’m sending them emails at midnight and never unplugging. So I have been really trying to be transparent about my own boundaries when I’m stepping away, when I need a reset. I’m vocal about that and really try to keep talking about capacity.

At Secure Futures, we also normalize honest conversations about workload and emotional weight. The work that we do, especially the work that’s focused on students who are under-resourced, you know, it’s so important, but it’s also so heavy, and we try to create space to process that.

As I think about, mentoring women into leadership, that was another part. I try to be really intentional about giving them visibility and real authority, not just like tasks. I want them to have ownership. I want them making real decisions.

You know, as I think about leadership, it’s not really something that you wait to be handed, it’s something that you practice. Part of mentoring women specifically is also talking about confidence, boundaries, not tying your worth to constant productivity.

And, you know, to be honest, that’s something that I think I’m still working on myself.

11:26 Becky Menefee

Oh, I love all that. I have a lot of things to say to those. You’re singing for my hymnal. I love it. But let’s go to you, Tara. How about you?

11:33 Tara Panasewicz

Absolutely, Brenda, 100%. I encourage everyone who hasn’t done so yet, if you have the opportunity to do so, getting a coach, just being able to talk to someone who gets it is such a wonderful experience and I’ve been able to, I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do that a couple of times in my career and it was an amazing experience. So everyone out there, if you have the ability to do that, please do it because it’s wonderful.

And burnout is real. I completely am experiencing that myself and I need to do better at that. Just like Brenda said, how can I do that when I’m constantly not unplugging? So that’s something I’m going to actively work on myself.

But I’ll focus on the internal culture piece because we’ve actually been in a culture shift since I started about five years ago. Some great coaching advice that I received years ago was when you’re put into a leadership position, it’s not your responsibility to go in and start changing things right away. You should be an active listener. You should ask questions. You should observe. And then after that, start to make changes.

And when I first got there, we were really, we were rewarding. I noticed we were rewarding individuals for leaving. It wasn’t, like to get a promotion within the company, but if they left, we would be like, rewarding and parties and things like that. And I kind of questioned that.

So what I really started focusing on was creating shared experiences, and safe places where we put the employees in our youth first. And the first thing that we started with was focusing on recognizing employee milestone anniversaries. That’s an amazing thing to celebrate. So I’m super proud of that.

But as far as mentoring women within the industry too, we have one-to-ones with my staff where I just learn about what motivates them and we set goals so that when an opportunity is presented to me, that I’m able to share it with them so that they can achieve their goals and what they’re passionate about.

13:36 Becky Menefee

Awesome. What about you, Jane?

13:38 Jane Graham Jennings

Honest conversations. Oddly enough, when we’re doing interviews for potential employees, I just say to them, you’ll be traumatized working here, because that is what will happen every, by choosing this profession of advocacy, you sign up to be surrounded by trauma daily.

So honest conversation about that. And then of course, humor. We have to bring humor into it because these are really, really heavy things that we deal with. We have to find a way to work through that and to have honest conversations.

So one of the really fortunate things in our industry is that it’s pretty much all women in the industry. So I have been, in my 30-year tenure, I have been surrounded by incredible mentors and people doing this work. For folks internally on my team, I really try to embody the mentorship that I got. Because everything we do is really hard, it’s not feasible for people to only do the direct client service.

We need to involve other things so they can be in community meetings, in community task force, so that they get a little break time, that they can still be providing advocacy and support and just only sitting and hearing the stories and carrying that pain.

Tara mentioned that. What are you interested in? What are some things that you can do that’s going to make you feel well-rounded in this work, that you’re making a difference, not only in holding the pain of survivors, but in addressing and trying to change the systems that the survivors need change?

15:10 Becky Menefee

So I’m hearing some really great themes around, modeling, being a good model in your work-life balance, if you will, work-life integration, finding a coach, a mentor, but also having really transparent conversations.

I love the idea of normalizing workload. And because this is what we all deal with, everyone is dealing with it. And so I feel like for so many years, for so long, I know in my own career, it was very much, you were asked to do it, you do it. And so boundaries weren’t really a thing ever.

And so it’s taken a long time to assert yourself and find the boundaries and what’s okay, not okay. And in this world, I think, we get so caught up in our work. And with the heavy work that you all do, I have to imagine that’s got to be a delicate needle to thread. So thank you for your perspective on that.

All three of you are doing heavy lifting to improve each of your communities across the state. If you could wave a magic wand and briefly describe one systematic issue in your region that you could change tomorrow, what would it be? Brenda.

16:15 Brenda Campbell

If I could wave a magic wand, I would make financial education and access to resources accessible to every young person. And something that we’ve really learned over the last 20 years doing this work is how much financial education is a racial justice issue. When you look at access to financial education, there’s been a lot of movement now across the nation in getting a personal finance course requirement.

Before that, you could see that just across the nation, about one in every 10 students had access to financial education, but it dropped to one in 25 for students of color. Today, it’s better that it’s still uneven.

Too many teens are making life-altering decisions about college, career, credit, without the guidance that they need. And that gap doesn’t just affect finances, it shapes their entire trajectory.

17:22 Becky Menefee

So good. Tara?

17:24 Tara Panasewicz

I would use it for everyone and all the youth in our community. But what I would like to focus on is third grade reading proficiency. Third grade reading proficiency is a future indicator of high school graduation and incarceration rates.

So it’s imperative that as a community, we come together and try to impact change in this area. The club, what we’re doing at our facility is about five years ago, we brought in Sylvan Tutoring to do a assessment of our youth and tween setter members.

And we see about 250 kids a day, not one at that time of our kids read at grade level. So what Sylvan ended up doing was we had a partnership with them and wrote some grants to be able to do some individualized tutoring. The reading scores have been amazing. There were kids that didn’t even recognize or know how to write their name. It’s life-changing.

18:19 Becky Menefee

How about you, Jane?

18:20 Jane Graham Jennings

I would shake around more than just our region, but it would be across the nation and the world. And it would be a wand that would stop our acceptance of abuse and assault. People say that they are opposed to it until the person doing the harm is someone they know, and then it changes.

So when we’re doing education in schools and with young people and even with elementary students, we tell them that if someone is touching them and is making them uncomfortable, to keep telling an adult until someone listens.

Because the first response from most adults is, I don’t believe it, and that’s because of the people doing the harm that are people in our lives. And so it’s really hard for people to comprehend that someone they know and trust would do that.

Everyone hates a sex offender until it’s someone that they know. And then there’s all kinds of excuses for why this didn’t happen or why it wasn’t that big a deal.

And within domestic abuse, to change our acceptance of that abuse. We have laws that say this isn’t appropriate, but we see so many victims in a system in which the offenders are not held accountable in any way.

And we know the data explains when children grow up in homes, when there’s violence, they are more likely to repeat that abuse. So if we’re ever going to stop the cycle, we need to stop accepting abuse and stop making excuses for people who cause harm.

19:48 Becky Menefee

Oh, wow. That’s a good one, Jane. Thank you.

All right, before we wrap up, we’re going to do a fast, lightning round. Two questions. Two questions and one sentence to answer. We’re going to go reverse order. So Jane, then Tara, then Brenda.

What’s the most impactful coaching advice you’ve ever received, Jane?

20:03 Jane Graham Jennings

Well, this was actually in college. I had a really terrible, sexist, misogynist professor, and I just really struggled with the way he treated females in the class. And I went to my advisor, who was a female professor in the same department, and I just was complaining about it. And I remember one day I was walking out of that classroom just so frustrated with this professor. He was tenured, so, you know, there was really no recourse of anything. And she just looked at me and she said, Jane, persevere. Just that one word that always comes to me every time I’m feeling overly frustrated.

20:41 Becky Menefee

Love it. Tara.

20:43 Tara Panasewicz

From a celebrity, I will say, and I’m a huge Chicago sports fan, so Michael Jordan from the Chicago Bulls. This is probably a very popular one, but I have the poster on my wall in my office.

And he talked about how he’s missed 9,000 shots in his career, lost 300 games, been trusted to take winning shots, and he’s failed. He’s failed over and over, but that’s why he succeeds.

21:06 Becky Menefee

So good. Brenda.

21:09 Brenda Campbell

Yes, I had so much to choose from, so much great advice. But the one that came to my mind first when you asked this, Be as kind and nurturing to yourself as you are to your colleagues.

21:22 Becky Menefee

I love that one. That’s beautiful.

All right, and the last one we’ll do is describe the future of women in leadership in your community using just one word. Jane.

21:35 Jane Graham Jennings

Tenacity.

21:36 Becky Menefee

Tenacity. Tara.

21:38 Tara Panasewicz

Collaborative.

21:39 Becky Menefee

Collaborative. Brenda.

21:40 Brenda Campbell

Unstoppable.

21:42 Becky Menefee

I love it. That’s good. I like that.

All right, Brenda, Tara, Jane, thank you again for your time, your vulnerability, and your ongoing dedication to your communities.

For our listeners who may want to get involved, where can they find you? Brenda.

21:57 Brenda Campbell

SecureFutures.org. Come check us out. You can volunteer, support us, SecureFutures.org.

22:04 Becky Menefee

Tara?

22:06 Tara Panasewicz

Oh my goodness, you would think I would remember that name of that website, BGCKenosha.org.

22:11 Becky Menefee

How about you, Jane?

22:12 Jane Graham Jennings

WomensCommunity.org, all one word, no apostrophe.

22:16 Becky Menefee

Perfect. Brenda, Tara, Jane, thank you again for lending us your voices, your insight, and your leadership. Today’s conversation showed what happens when women take the mic, not just to share stories, but to shape futures.

You’ve shown us what courage in motion looks like and what it means to lead with purpose and how nonprofits continue to be the place where women redefine what’s possible. I’m struck by how powerfully your stories echo the women who came before us, the advocates, the organizers, the visionaries. And I’m equally inspired by how boldly you’re shaping what comes next.

We’re reminded that progress isn’t measured only in data points, but in the everyday decisions, the boundary pushing, and the constant recommitment to equity and impact.

To everyone listening, may this conversation push you to keep showing up for your communities, for one another, and for the future of women in leadership. Because what we heard today makes one thing clear. Women aren’t just part of the story.

We’re leading it.

This has been Fast Break brought to you by M3 Elevate. I’m Matt Cranney, thank you for joining me. Do you want more tips to grow protect your business? Subscribe now and catch all of our episodes and we’ll see you next time.