We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Patrice Shumate a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Patrice, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.
To find my purpose, I kept looking. I am still looking. Feeling like you are living your purpose is an evolution in understanding yourself and your place in the world. You change. The world changes. It is hard to feel confident in it all.
I have always felt like I had some kind of purpose, I just couldn’t put my finger on what. In college, I truly had no idea what profession I wanted to declare (or if I wanted to be in college). In the second semester of my freshman year, I had my dorm roommate pick my class schedule. It was a very interesting semester – nutrition science, speech pathology, meteorology, self-defense, and social work. I learned so many things I never would have been exposed to had I tried to follow one path, but it was social work that felt like it was connecting the dots. Becoming a social worker felt like the means to living my purpose.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I started my adult life eager to change the world and I thought being a social worker would help get me there. I had no idea what the universe had in store for me. Over 15 years, I lived in two countries, three states, got married, had a couple of kids, worked in over 15 different jobs, and started my own business.
The most surprising thing in it all was starting my own business! It was 2:30 in the morning, I was up nursing an infant (that spent the first year of his life refusing to sleep), and I was thinking about the proposal I was drafting to take on another grant writing client. I had been doing freelance grant work as a sole proprietor for a few years but had started getting more referrals and was worried about my capacity to take on another organization. I had specifically focused on small organizations that tend not to have the funds to hire other grant writers because I know how hard it is to grow small nonprofit organizations, having worked in many throughout my social work career. I also knew how hard it was to get entry-level grant writing work because the limited number of salaried positions out there require years of experience, and there aren’t many places to practice under the direction of an experienced grant writer.
So, in the middle of one sleep-deprived night, I decided to create a place these two groups could meet and grow – A Village for Good. People often ask me why I didn’t start my own nonprofit and the answer is, we don’t need more nonprofits. We need more connections and partnerships. We need more for-profit companies building purpose and collaboration into their culture. We all need a deeper understanding of how philanthropy works and avenues to challenge practices that just aren’t making a positive impact. We provide grant readiness and writing services while advocating for real discussion and solutions combating inequities built into the fabric of our philanthropic system. When we have the power and space to invest in ourselves AND our communities, everyone wins!
A Village for Good is working to solve disconnection in the nonprofit sector. We have the world at our literal fingertips, but our connections are limited by character counts. Our networks are guided by algorithms that bring us more of what we already have – and the nonprofit sector is no different. I set out to build a consulting business and found a saturated landscape of nonprofit consulting options offering quick tips and tricks to help nonprofits. A Village for Good is working to create a community of practice that digs deeply into purpose, relationships, and collective impact.
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?
Listening – In my undergraduate program, I had a course where we spent the entire semester practicing listening. Seriously. Listening is a skill – a skill that not everyone has. It needs to be learned and practiced like any other skill. It is amazing what we can understand when we have fully heard another person.
Empathy – In my case, I think empathy is a family trait. I come from a long line of decent humans who care about other people. I use empathy as a lens with which to view the world and interactions I have. It helps in all scenarios big and small, and is useful in every sector.
Introspection – We do not come into this world as a clean slate and the world we come into certainly isn’t neutral. We are formed through so many influences (some of those influences happen in utero!). When we lean into the curiosity of who we are and what influences we have on the world around us, we find opportunities to grow.
Before we go, any advice you can share with people who are feeling overwhelmed?
Overwhelm happens a lot in helping professions and can be called a lot of different things (stress, tension, burnout, etc.). There is really interesting research out there about compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma – the helper taking on the stress or trauma they are helping other people with. A good portion of my work is researching what is wrong with the world and working with people who are most affected by those problems. It gets heavy. Then, throw in normal life stressors on top of it and it can be hard to see the sunshine through the rain clouds.
Over the last few years, I have started exploring the benefits of somatic practices that help the body release stress and trauma. It is amazing the physical impact stress has. Stress, fear, and anxiety can accumulate in our bodies and manifest in pretty nasty ways if left unchecked. BUT! We have tools to bring calm and balance to our minds and bodies! Our own bodies are the tools! It is amazing! We can utilize these tools whenever we want, as many times as we want, and certainly in our workspaces.
Sometimes, our bodies communicate our emotional and physical state before our brains do, but we don’t really live in a society that encourages a stronger mind-body connection, and we don’t usually develop these self-awareness skills as we grow into adulthood. Take breathing, for example. We master breathing right at birth because we can not survive without each inhale and exhale. Because it is instinctual and ingrained in our survival, we rarely consider ways to maximize its benefits in our daily lives. Practicing intentional breathing can prep your brain and body for stress that is to come while helping release the stress that we are holding.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.avillageforgood.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/avillageforgood
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrice-shumate/
Image Credits
Image of calendar quote – calendar created by Oh Happy Dani
