We were lucky to catch up with Jackie Hunter recently and have shared our conversation below.
Jackie, so great to have you with us and we want to jump right into a really important question. In recent years, it’s become so clear that we’re living through a time where so many folks are lacking self-confidence and self-esteem. So, we’d love to hear about your journey and how you developed your self-confidence and self-esteem.
I’ve developed confidence throughout my career by forcing myself to take on tasks I wasn’t sure I could do, and volunteering for responsibilities I wasn’t totally comfortable doing. My very first job was teaching English in France, and before I took on that role I had only left the country once before. I was completely on my own, navigating a culture I wasn’t familiar with and a language I did not speak as well as I thought I did. After my first day, I sat at a bus stop and cried! Then I got over it and kept showing up for work, and eventually I knew my way around, improved my French, and developed a love of travel I still have to this day. When I returned, I found work in the male-dominated field of major league baseball, and I definitely found myself laying low and staying quiet in the early years. At some point I realized I wasn’t going to get ahead by staying in the background and so I made it a habit to speak up in meetings, share my ideas, and question the status quo. Before I knew it, I had built connections and fostered respect with my colleagues, and I was actually able to have a voice and make an impact with my contributions and ideas. I built my career there over almost ten years, and the confidence that I built has helped me since moving on from that position. I’m still not totally comfortable speaking in front of people, and unfortunately the only way to get over this is to just do it, so I try to volunteer for presentations and speaking opportunities even though sometimes I really don’t want to. When the opportunity came along to be the Grants Director for Impact100 Cleveland, I questioned myself again – am I really the most qualified person for this position? Surely there is someone with more experience who would do a better job! But once again I decided to do something I wasn’t quite sure I was ready for. Getting involved with Impact100 Cleveland has helped me to continue to build those skills while getting the opportunity to give back to the community in a meaningful way.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I have been in the development field for nearly 15 years, with positions in multiple different areas of fundraising and grantmaking for nonprofit organizations. I have always sought out professional and volunteer work that allows me to give back, whether that means volunteering for a food drive, helping build youth baseball fields in the community, tutoring local youth, or fundraising for cancer research by participating in a biking event. My current work is in foundation relations, working to secure grants from various types of national foundations. In my spare time, I volunteer as a mentor with College Now Greater Cleveland, and this year I joined the founding board of Impact100 Cleveland, a women’s giving circle that works to make a difference in Greater Cleveland by awarding transformational grants to nonprofit organizations in our region. As grants director, I have had the opportunity to help develop our grantmaking process as well as network with some of the many amazing nonprofit organizations in my community.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I think the most important quality in my journey has been flexibility! I have wanted to be many different things “when I grow up” throughout my life, including a writer, a librarian, a journalist, and an actress. If I had been too set on one thing, my journey would not have taken me to France to become an English language instructor for a year, to work for the philanthropic arm of a Major League Baseball team, or to a totally new position in healthcare fundraising. In terms of success in my work, good writing and communication skills have been instrumental in helping me stand out in interviews and in my day to day job responsibilities. Being able to communicate clearly is important whether or not your job involves writing on a daily basis, and in our virtual world it’s even more important when messaging with colleagues and customers. The last thing I would say is collaboration. Most people don’t live and work in a vacuum, and being able to collaborate successfully with many different personality types and folks from all walks of life is essential to success.
Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
This is such a hard question because I am a total bookworm and it’s almost impossible to pick one! That being said, I’m going to go with The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. I read this in college for the first time and it absolutely blew my mind. Of course, by the time I read it, feminism had come a long way and much had been debated and improved upon since it was first published, but it was my first introduction into feminism as an academic concept and I think it retrained my brain to understand social expectations of women and the way that we just accept certain gender roles and inequalities because it’s all we’ve ever known. For me, understanding the concept that children are raised to believe they should act a certain way and become a certain thing because of their gender allowed me to identify the ways I was performing gender roles in my own life and if/how it was holding me back. That allowed me to speak up for myself, especially in work situations, when I felt someone was speaking over me or dismissing my ideas.
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