Lauren Kaufman On Supporting Women Through Growing As Change Leaders
Lauren Kaufman previously served as President of the Young Women’s Alliance (YWA), an Austin-based nonprofit building a community that supports, empowers and connects the next generation of women leaders.
Through her work with YWA, Lauren not only ensures that the organisation is growing strategically and continuing on its legacy, but also that members are changing their lives and gaining a seat at the table in the Austin community and beyond. Through her role as President, Lauren oversaw 400 members, 16 Boards of Directors and 70+ chair positions.
As an entirely volunteer run organisation, Lauren ensures that YWA is meeting and exceeding all parts of its mission by developing KPI’s, strategically planning for the future of the organisation and ensuring that YWA continues to be an organisation that connects and supports women in Austin. Through Lauren’s leadership, YWA remains committed to being a diverse and inclusive organization where women in Austin feel welcomed and empowered. Most recently, Lauren added an additional role to the Board of Directors: VP of Diversity, Equity, and Belonging.
Lauren discusses empowering and supporting women to become future leaders of social change, and how entrepreneurs can modify traditional non-profit frameworks to inspire change.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off Lauren, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in non-profits?
[Lauren Kaufman] - Growing up, I was fortunate to be raised by a family that was always giving back to the community. It was really part of our DNA, and so I just knew that my life would probably be committed to doing the same thing. After I attended university, I went into the corporate world and just didn't feel like I was living out my passion of giving back to the community. I ended up moving to Austin, Texas about eight years ago and I not only didn't have any friends or community, but I wasn't connected to giving back in the community. I joined the Young Women's Alliance and became a general member. We're a membership-based organisation, and I joined it because they not only had community service opportunities, but they also had leadership development amongst a wide variety of other things for women. I eventually became a board member and then worked my way up to President. I often tell our members I never thought that would happen! I never thought I'd be President, but when you have a group of women that empower you and see something in you that maybe you don't see, things become limitless. I've been really lucky to serve in this position and help spearhead the organisation and keep it moving forward.
As past President of the Young Women's Alliance, can you share a bit more about the organisation itself, how it started and how it is creating these equitable outcomes for future female leaders?
YWA was started almost 30 years ago and was formed by a few women in Austin who really didn't see any organisations helping young businesswomen get together, learn from each other, grow their networks and skillsets. It is a completely volunteer run organisation, underneath me there were sixteen boards of directors and then underneath them there were about 80 chair members. Almost 100 of us were running this entire organisation, and it's truly a massive operation. As I mentioned, we're a membership organisation, we actually have almost 600 members at this point. We've doubled in size this past year, which has just been incredible to watch. The way I look at the impact YWA has on women's lives is twofold. One it's our members.
Our members tend to be in their twenties and thirties and career focused, but they're just looking for something more that’s a little deeper.
The majority of them moved to Austin in the past couple years, so they're looking for that friendship factor, but also want to build their skillset. What we do for them is provide a variety of different programs and workshops. We've done courses on everything from Excel 101, fertility workshop, asking for a raise and public speaking. These things you might not get from your full-time job. Because we have so many chair and board roles, we're getting these women real life leadership development opportunities in a very low-pressure environment. I always tell people my first leadership role was as the newsletter chair, and I had never in my life logged into mailchimp.com nor created a newsletter! But one of the women on the marketing team said, "you know what, we really need some help and I think you'd be great at it," so I did it and now have Mailchimp on my resume along with all these skills that truly I would have never gotten in my professional career and corporate job. It's amazing to see these women join and just blossom. That's the membership side of things. Then we are also really focused on our impact on women in the community. For instance, we just awarded scholarships to five women who are graduating high school and are seeking higher education. We have a mentorship program for (who I call) actual young women, because they're in elementary school. This is where our members mentor these elementary school women or girls, and we look at it as we’re trying to make an impact within the people who join our organisation, but we know the power of our volunteers is so much bigger. We're trying to stretch our impact financially in Austin and give our time and talent as well to women from underrepresented parts of Austin.
Where do opportunities exist for organisations to engage more effectively with empowering women in the workplace and then also integrating and helping them get those equitable outcomes in society?
YWA is a fully volunteer run organisation, so I do have a full-time job in a corporate company and feel that I can speak to some of this.
I think businesses, governments or any organisation you're in really have to understand that for women (especially women from diverse backgrounds), the path to leadership comes with a lot of barriers.
It's going to look very different than it is typically for a white male. One thing I feel a lot from our members that they're going through is they're in their thirties, so they're thinking about families and what does that look like in their careers? Can they work and be supported as a mother? One of the beautiful things about the pandemic (there's not many that occurred) is it opened this conversation for what women and mothers need in their careers.
Just as an employer being able to understand that women need to be supported in different ways is crucial, that's a great thing.
What advice would you give to an entrepreneur who's hoping to address social issues occurring on a global scale?
Any successful leader or organisation really tends to prioritise relationships first.
That is something that I tend to pride myself on being good at. I always tell new members that when I joined YWA I was really shy. I used to go to events and be so nervous, but I really started to harness the power of (I don't like the word networking because it has a bad professional connotation) relationship building.
I think in order to be successful in building any business, you really have to be open to learning from others, accepting that you don't know everything and thinking about how you can lean in and build a relationship with someone and have them help you.
I just don't think you can do it alone, and sometimes our ego gets in the way.
When you're able to build those relationships and make them so much deeper than just transactional, I think that's really where success happens.
We've seen this a lot within YWA, and I think that's a huge reason why we've doubled in size in the past year; we have these relationships within the Austin community. It's more now about just deepening them, making sure the roots are really firm and that we're helping them and they're helping us.
How can traditional non-profit and philanthropy frameworks be adapted to enhance the social impact that they're creating?
One of the reasons why I think YWA has been successful is we're an entirely volunteer run organisation, but when you really think about that, every single one of us has a full-time job. A lot of us have families, yet we're all so committed to this mission, and we've been incredibly successful. We've grown our net worth in five years by 400%. I feel like there's not a non-profit in this world that would not want to be able to say that!
A lot of our success is because most of us have for-profit backgrounds, and so we really run the organisation like a true for-profit business by thinking about different revenue streams, how we can leverage technology and by creating amazing brand awareness.
All these things are needed to run a very successful company, so we try to do it within YWA. I try to think about it as if we're running a for-profit company, even though we're a non-profit.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across that are creating a positive social change?
I have to brag about one of my board members, it wouldn't be right if I didn't brag about my amazing team! She's been fighting for access to menstrual products here in the Austin community, and listen, it's not a super sexy subject, but it's one that I don't think is even thought about personally. This just shows my privilege, but I've never thought, "oh my gosh, people can't get access to these things." Recently, this board member has been working with the city council, and they just passed for the first time ever free access to menstrual products in Austin public buildings. I just think that's incredible; she just started this on her own, fought really hard for it, and now it's being passed and is going to be life changing for women. It's called the Texas Menstrual Equity Coalition.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?
One book that really resonated with me is called Reality-Based Leadership, and it's by Cy Wakeman. It really takes a leadership approach of leading in reality. Oftentimes, not just when you're managing a team or a company (but with any relationship you have), it's so easy for us to make up these stories in our heads. The one example I always give is when my partner doesn't take out the trash the night before the dump truck comes. It's so easy in your head to create a big story about it. Maybe you have an employee who has been withdrawn or something, and so in your head (you're thinking), "maybe they don't like me, I'm a bad leader," when in fact they're actually going through something, but you've created this different perception of reality in your head.
Anyways, this book really walks you through the steps of living in the now and not creating these different realities, and so that way you can be a more present leader. That's one leadership book that really resonated with me, and then I'm a really big fan of websites like Coursera where you can take classes for fairly cheap. Anytime there's a skill that maybe I just feel like I don't know anything about, or I could brush up on, it's a great way to take a course. They tend to be pretty engaging, and you learn a lot. I think none of us know everything and we can just continue to learn and push ourselves in new directions.
