We recently connected with Cristina Sanchez-Kerr and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Cristina, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I get my resilience from the same place a lot of people do, my family. One of my abuelas (grandmothers) was a single mother of four and the other had a challenging life in her own way. I think a lot about what they endured, how they persevered through life and lived into their 90’s and I find a way. I may be struggling but as long as I’m alive I know I have options and a way forward.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
What I do varies a bit, depending on the hat I’m wearing. My life is the nonprofit sector, I’ve worked in it since college and even as a consultant the past 8 years my focus has been on supporting nonprofit organizations. I have the opportunity to help the sector in multiple ways because I am an business owner and a student in the field. As a consultant and practitioner, I am able to advise nonprofit organizations but also build their capacity by doing work for them (that practitioner hat) in areas they do not yet have the staff or human resources to do themselves, such as program evaluation or grant writing. In my role as a student and researcher I also contribute to the field but in different ways. I’m excited to be in a doctoral program where I’m able to dive deep into the nonprofit sector, how it is operating, what it needs, and how to move it forward. Adding to the body of knowledge around the nonprofit sector is something I’m just beginning to do but am very excited about.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I consider myself an open and curious person and I think those qualities have served me well. My professional titles have been varied in the past 20 years but the connective thread has been a desire to give back and contribute to the greater good without getting hung up on one way to do that. My openness and desire to learn more about myself and others has given me the privilege of learning a lot about my strengths and challenges so I could be honest in discovering what the best use of my time and skills are. It has also helped that I’m able to see things from a macro and micro level, which has helped me connect the dots between overarching themes in my work and myself, while also being capable of implementing changes because I can get down to the detailed steps and resources needed to bring them about.
Who is your ideal client or what sort of characteristics would make someone an ideal client for you?
An ideal client for me is someone who has some level of self-awareness but, above all, the deep desire to grow. We all have blind spots and challenges but not everyone is willing to really do the work to make changes needed for that goal they envision. An ideal client is honest about what they need from us but is also comfortable with us being honest with them in return, honest about what we can contribute to their goal and what they may need to do differently to achieve that goal. Our clients frequently point out how authentic we are, that they appreciate our honesty and the joy with which we do our work. A client that can have fun as we dig in together to help them strengthen their organization is a great fit!
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