Building Capacity — October 2026 - Good Works Results LLC

Leadership insights and community resources for those building capacity in themselves and others. From Daniel Riemenschneider, executive coach and strategic advisor serving leaders across Northeastern Illinois.

What do you already have that could open a door for someone else? This issue looks at what leaders are up against, the practical work community-based agencies are doing about it, and how much more comes within reach when we work on it together.

What Keeps Them Up at Night

I was invited to facilitate a convening of the Human Services Coordinating Council of Hanover Township, with nonprofit leaders, township staff, and mental health board members. My leading question: what is the challenge you came into this work to help solve that still feels out of reach?

Funding that is tight, short-term and inflexible, forcing leaders to weigh mission against keeping the doors open. One response named the bind exactly: "how to focus on mission while still being financially viable". Too little affordable housing and too few shelters. Eligibility rules that screen out the very people a program was built for. Families squeezed by tighter budgets, reduced state assistance and fear around immigration. Insurers shaping decisions about care, and government changes that land hardest on clients.

My follow-up: what would most help? The top answer, even ahead of money, was each other.

What would most help their organizations

Then they got to work, right there in the room. Asked what they already had that could open a door for someone else, agencies offered access to crisis funds, free legal clinics, and university connections for interns. One agency that had climbed out of the negative offered to walk others through the reserve policies behind its turnaround. Another left having met an intern candidate. The most-repeated ask was a directory of who does what, so no one solves these alone.

All of that started with two questions. A powerful question gets people sharing what is really going on, and these two work well beyond human services. Try them with your team, your board or your network:

What challenge did we come here to help solve that still feels out of reach?

What do we already have that could open a door for someone else?

Good questions open doors. Here is what it looks like when agencies walk through them together.

What Movement Looks Like

I designed and facilitate the Agency Capacity Builder for the Milton Township Community Mental Health Board. It began with roundtables and discovery conversations asking funded agencies what they needed to build their capacity. Their answers kept circling back to two things.

Finding and keeping good people. When a trusted caseworker or counselor leaves, the families they served feel it, and so does the community. This cohort works on how agencies hire, onboard and hold on to good staff. Asked what kept an experienced staff member who had a better-paying offer elsewhere, these leaders named team connection, real recognition, a voice in shaping the culture, strong supervision, and the mission itself.

Measuring impact. Many agencies can tell you how many people they served. The harder question is what changed for those people. This cohort works on collecting the right data and sharing it, along with the stories behind it, in ways funders, boards and partners can trust.

Right now, executive and midlevel leaders from 18 agencies are meeting in six-month peer cohorts that include group sessions, visits to each other's agencies, and coaching. Each agency brings a real challenge, the group looks at it from different angles, and peers leave with new ideas to try that move it forward. It works because it is built on trust and a desire to do good work for our communities together.

Here are the shifts underway so far.

Shifts underway in Capacity Builder cohorts

This is the work that keeps good services in our communities, and it deserves the same support we give the programs themselves.

These leaders asked themselves two questions worth borrowing. Take them to your own team, organization or network:

Why do our best people stay?

How do we know our work is making a difference?

See the Peer Forums →

Asking good questions also means acting on what you hear.

Listening Forward

When a client works through a challenge and comes to a new insight, we talk about what they want to try next. I ask the same of my own practice.

What I'm hearing Midlevel leaders who came up through direct service are still working out what kind of leader they are, and how to speak up with confidence. What I'm trying next → The next Nonprofit Leaders Forum cohort I'm assembling adds a leadership identity component, so each leader can explore who they are as a leader in the role they hold now.

What I'm hearing Supervisors want help with the hard conversations they have with the people they lead, most often when there is conflict. What I'm trying next → Building conflict skills into the Forum curriculum on purpose, and taking my own coaching to the next level in an advanced class this fall.

What I'm hearing Over a year together, Forum participants build real trust. When it ends, they want to stay in touch and meet others doing good work nearby. What I'm trying next → An invitational gathering for 60+ Forum alumni across three townships, to reconnect and build new connections.

Ways I can help

Executive Coach
Helping leaders find their voice as they step into bigger roles.

Strategic Advisor
Guiding agencies as they strengthen hiring, retention and impact measurement.

Cross-Sector Convener
Bringing leaders together to solve what no one can solve alone.

Could you use this kind of support? A 30-minute conversation is a simple place to start.

Let's connect →

Thank you for the good work you are doing.

Daniel Riemenschneider

SUPPORTING LEADERS. STRENGTHENING COMMUNITIES.

Leadership insights and community resources for those building strong, connected communities. Published by Daniel Riemenschneider.

Three conversations keep coming up lately, and none of them are easy. This issue sits with all three, alongside a reminder of how much good already exists in our community, and an invitation to partnership.

Conflict, Compensation, Community

These are three words I've been hearing lately when I sit with nonprofit leaders, not as separate topics but as three threads of the same conversation: conflict, compensation, community. None of them are new, but the frequency has picked up.

Conflict shows up first inside the team, most often in the relationship between staff and their own manager or organizational leadership. In one recent stretch of coaching calls, five out of six sessions centered on some version of the same tension: how to navigate conflict with a boss, and whether it was worth staying. The work of supporting clients is heavy, and the people doing it are already carrying a lot of emotion into every day. Being heard and supported by leadership is not a nice-to-have; it is what makes it possible to go back out and do the work well.

Compensation is another hard conversation that keeps coming up. Cost of living keeps climbing faster than most organizations' budgets can move, and executive leaders want to pay their people more but are boxed in by funding cuts, limited insurance billing, and market rates they cannot match. The honest version many midlevel leaders are living: I want to stay in this work, but I am taking on a second job to do it. Salary is not the whole story, but it has to be enough of one.

Community is what holds the other two up. Leaders need trusted teammates. They need people outside their own organization who understand the weight of the role and can speak into it. Across the peer cohorts I facilitate, that outside perspective is often what turns isolated uncertainty into confirmed direction, leaders realizing they are not the only ones navigating something hard. And they need real connection to the community they serve, because we were created to be connected to each other.

None of these three challenges gets solved by ignoring the other two. Leaders who are heard, paid fairly, and connected to people who understand the weight of it can keep doing this work well. That is what conversations with our behavioral health workforce keep confirming.

Sometimes the connection we need is already close by...

Not Alone in Not Knowing

A few weeks ago, I sat down with a middle school principal to learn about the needs he was seeing in his community. I was happy to share some of the resources I have come across along the way. His response: "I had no idea this existed in our community."

I hear a version of that response often. There are more resources in our community than any one person could track alone; that is the challenge and the opportunity together. I know the feeling firsthand. I spent years inside a nonprofit and did not know much of what existed either.

That is a gap I am trying to close. I am learning alongside the leaders, owners, and neighbors I meet, one conversation at a time, then connect what I find to whoever needs it next.

The Community Resource Guide is one way that happens. The Community Leaders Series is another, a space built so people from schools, nonprofits, government, law enforcement, and business can meet the people doing work adjacent to theirs.

If you have ever looked around your own community, seen a need, and wondered where to even start, look for the people already willing to share what they know. There are more of them than you think.

The next Community Leaders Series gathering is built around exactly that: partnership.

Inclusion as Partnership

Date: September 15, 2026
Time: 4:00 PM to 5:15 PM
Location: 1770 W Centennial Pl, Addison

Inclusion isn't something any one organization does alone. It happens in the partnerships between the people, organizations, and businesses that share a community: a business partnering with the community that supports who it hires and serves, a school partnering with families and the programs students are part of outside the building, local government partnering with the organizations making sure every resident has a place in community life.

At the next event in the Community Leaders Series, you'll hear from Rob Bond and Mike Contreras of Addison Park District on the partnership with Northeast DuPage Special Recreation Association (NEDSRA) and what makes it work. It's a partnership rooted in a shared belief that everyone in the community has value and belongs. You'll also meet people whose work touches yours in ways you might not have realized, and start conversations about what could be built together.

Whatever you are carrying, in your organization or your field, you are not the only one. Building community happens when people like you show up in the same room and help each other carry it.

Thank you for the good work you are doing.
Daniel Riemenschneider

SUPPORTING LEADERS. STRENGTHENING COMMUNITIES.