September 30, 2026 | Davis Conference Center
Thank You to Our Premier Sponsor:
2026 Conference Keynote:
Reviving Ourselves
In a moment where we feel battered down, squeezed, and exhausted, how can we still believe in the long-tail of impact and lead towards a better future?
People always remember that Fred Rogers said “Look for the helpers.” But he was quoting his mother, who said it to comfort him as a child. Today, as leaders, I believe our call is to “Be the helpers,” visibly and proudly, so there will always be helpers for children to find.
About the Speaker: Nicholas Ma
Nicholas Ma is an award-winning director, writer, and producer based in Brooklyn, whose film work spans an eclectic array of topics: from botany to basketball to WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?, on the life of Fred Rogers.
Most recently he wrote and directed MABEL (SFIFF, 2024) and directed LEAP OF FAITH (Picturehouse, 2024). His films have premiered at Sundance, New York Film Festival, and Tribeca.
He is also the founder and principal of Ernest Lyford, a boutique consulting firm that unites the creative and the strategic to transform the way we see the world.
2026 Conference Breakout Sessions
Breakout Session 1
Small and midsize nonprofits often know they need to increase fundraising capacity but struggle with when to hire, what to systematize, and how to prepare for growth without burning out staff. This practical session will help you build a development function that can scale intentionally. You will learn when strategic planning and systems development should come before hiring, which fundraising responsibilities should remain with senior leadership, and which can be delegated or systematized. You will also explore a practical framework for building strong systems before adding staff, improving onboarding, performance, and retention. Finally, you'll discover how consultants, interim support, and targeted professional development can sometimes accelerate growth more effectively than a permanent hire, helping your organization grow fundraising capacity with greater confidence and sustainability.
Category: Fundraising and Development
Audience Level: Everyone
Speaker: Mary T. Calhoon, Development Director - First Step House
Audience Level: Advanced
Speaker: Kari Anderson, Principal - Incite! Consulting
Technology decisions land on your desk constantly—new software, system upgrades, platforms recommended by staff or board members, and competing priorities that all seem urgent. The challenge is knowing how to make smart technology decisions when you're not a technologist, every dollar must support the mission, and the wrong choice can be costly to undo. In this interactive workshop, you will bring a real technology decision your organization is facing and work through a simple, repeatable framework that can be applied to any software, system, tool, or budget. You will learn how to evaluate options, ask the right questions, assess risks and benefits, and make confident decisions that align with your organization’s goals and resources. By the end of the session, you will leave with a practical decision-making guide you can use for years to come, greater confidence leading technology conversations, and meaningful progress on a real decision that matters to your organization today.
Category: Operations
Audience Level: Everyone
Speaker: Mel Tingey - STG Consulting
Many nonprofit organizations measure success only at the end of a program, missing valuable opportunities to learn, adapt, and strengthen impact along the way. In this interactive workshop, you will explore how to use a theory of change and logic model to guide program design, implementation, and evaluation from start to finish. You will examine the critical connection between effective program implementation and achieving desired outcomes, while learning practical strategies for collecting and using feedback and data before, during, and after a program. By embracing a continuous learning approach, you can stay responsive to community needs, make informed adjustments in real time, and increase your organization’s ability to create meaningful, lasting change for the people you serve.
Category: Outcomes and Evaluations
Audience Level: Everyone
Speaker: Karen Drill, Principal Consultant - The Drill Consulting Group, LLC
As a nonprofit leader or board member, your organization faces growing scrutiny from regulators, funders, donors, the media, and the public. This session will help you strengthen your governance, compliance, and legal readiness with practical, actionable strategies. You'll learn how to enhance board oversight, identify and address waste, fraud, and abuse, respond effectively to investigations or allegations, and foster a culture of transparency and accountability. You'll also gain a clearer understanding of the legal tools available to protect your organization, helping you minimize legal and reputational risk while leading with confidence in an increasingly complex environment.
Category: Finance and Legal
Audience Level: Intermediate/Advanced
Speakers: Brent Andrewsen - Holland & Hart LLP; John C. Nash - Holland & Hart LLP
Nonprofit teams are constantly balancing strategy and execution while working to grow awareness, increase revenue, and expand impact—but it can be difficult to know which efforts are actually driving results. Corporate marketing teams may have bigger budgets, but their real advantage is structure: clear systems for identifying what works, what doesn’t, and where to focus next. In this practical, hands-on session, you’ll learn how to apply those same principles in a nonprofit setting by identifying key moments in your audience’s journey, tracking meaningful engagement signals, and using a simple framework to improve communications, campaigns, and outreach. Through real-world examples and actionable strategies, you’ll leave with a clear, low-cost approach for making data-informed decisions, improving engagement and retention, and driving stronger results with the resources you already have.
Category: Marketing and Communications
Audience Level: Intermediate
Speaker: Brielle Stevens, Marketing and Communications Director - YMCA of Northern Utah
When a volunteer is no longer the right fit, having that conversation can feel uncomfortable, personal, and easy to put off. But as a volunteer leader, your role is to support both the individual and the mission. This session will help you understand why volunteer transitions are sometimes necessary and give you the confidence to handle them with clarity, empathy, and professionalism. You'll learn how to recognize when it's time to have a tough conversation, set healthy boundaries, communicate expectations clearly, and navigate volunteer departures in a way that preserves dignity and respect. Leave with practical strategies and a framework you can use to approach difficult conversations with confidence and care.
Category: Volunteer Management
Audience Level: Everyone
Speaker: Melissa Robison, Front of House Director and Accessibility Coordinator - Utah Syphony Utah Opera
Breakout Session 2
Category: Fundraising and Development
Audience Level: Everyone
Speaker: Dan Prater, Senior Manager - Forvis Mazars
We are living in a chaotic and rapidly changing time, making strategic foresight an essential leadership skill for nonprofit leaders who want to prepare their organizations for whatever the future may bring. In this session, you will learn how to identify the forces and drivers shaping the future, recognize early signals of change that suggest emerging trends and disruptions, and develop plausible, creative scenarios that help your organization anticipate challenges and opportunities before they emerge. Through hands-on practice and guided discussion, you will build the skills to spot trends likely to impact the nonprofit sector over the next five to ten years, connect signals and drivers into meaningful future scenarios, and apply strategic foresight tools to strengthen planning, decision-making, and organizational strategy. By the end of the session, you will have practical methods for helping your organization adapt, innovate, and thrive in an uncertain future.
Category: Organizational Culture
Audience Level: Everyone
Speakers: Peggy Cain, Professor and Graduate Program Director - Westminster University; Stephanie Rokich, Grants Manager - Utah Division of Arts and Museums
Nonprofits are built for impact, but impact can be hard to sustain when critical knowledge lives only in individual staff members’ heads. High turnover, inconsistent workflows, and undocumented systems can lead to operational slippage: the gradual loss of follow-through, consistency, accountability, and quality. This session will explore how strong systems and processes can help nonprofits create greater stability through change. We will look at practical ways to reduce person-dependent operations, strengthen documentation, clarify roles, and support more consistent mission-critical work over time.
Category: Operations
Audience Level: Everyone
Speakers: Nora Trinidad-Scholle, Chief Operating Officer - Girl Scouts of Utah; Adrienne Babbitt, Development Director - Girl Scouts of Utah
Financial uncertainty doesn’t have to mean mission uncertainty. In this interactive session, you will learn how to use scenario planning to prepare for change, navigate risk, and make confident decisions that keep your organization focused on its mission. We’ll explore practical strategies for building scenario plans, identify revenue diversification opportunities that can strengthen long-term financial sustainability, and discuss key questions and best practices that help organizations anticipate challenges before they become crises. You will leave with a clearer understanding of how to plan for multiple futures, reduce financial vulnerability, and create a more resilient organization that is prepared to adapt and thrive in an ever-changing funding environment.
Category: Finance and Legal
Audience Level: Intermediate
Speaker: Daniel Tritch, Director - Your Part-Time Controller
Category: Board Governance
Audience Level: Everyone
Speaker: Melanie Gaebe, Lead Consultant - Shift Happens Consulting, LLC
We know why a trauma-informed framework matters for clients but creating a truly trauma-informed organization begins with leadership. In this interactive session, you will explore how to apply Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) six key principles of a trauma-informed approach—safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration and mutuality, empowerment, voice and choice, and cultural, historical, and gender responsiveness—to your leadership practices and organizational culture. Through guided discussion and reflection, you’ll assess how these principles show up in your own leadership, examine their connection to effective team engagement and organizational health, and identify practical strategies for reinforcing a trauma-informed and responsive workplace. You will leave with greater self-awareness, actionable tools to support your team, and concrete ways to build a culture where both staff and those you serve can thrive.
Category: Organizational Culture
Audience Level: Intermediate
Speaker: Keri Jones-Fonnesbeck, Executive Director - Trauma-Informed Utah
Strong relationships with elected officials can help nonprofits elevate community needs, inform policy decisions, and advance their mission more effectively. Understanding how to engage policymakers in a credible, constructive, and nonpartisan way is an essential skill for nonprofit leaders and advocates.
This panel of experienced nonprofit advocacy and public policy professionals will share practical insights and real-world lessons from working with elected officials. The discussion will focus on building relationships, communicating community priorities, and navigating advocacy opportunities that create meaningful impact.
Panel participant and facilitator information to come.
Breakout Session 3
Human-Centered Fundraising in an AI World will help nonprofit leaders integrate AI without losing the relational connection of fundraising. Fundraising should always be relational, not transactional. In this session, you will learn how to use AI as a support tool for repetitive and scalable tasks in order to invest more time in personal and meaningful donor relationships. The session will emphasize that trust, transparency, and human connection must remain the primary focus of fundraising. You will also leave with practical workflow efficiency examples that combine AI efficiency with human personalization, along with clear examples of tasks AI can take off your plate immediately. You’ll also gain a simple ethical framework for evaluating when and how to use AI in donor engagement, ensuring your approach stays mission-aligned and people-centered.
Category: Fundraising and Development
Audience Level: Everyone
Speaker: Rob Harter, Nonprofit Consultant and Executive Coach - Rob Harter Consulting and Coaching
If everything feels important, it is nearly impossible to focus on what actually creates impact. In this interactive session, you will learn how to cut through competing demands, reduce overwhelm, and make more intentional decisions about where to invest your time, energy, and attention. Using the practical Ask, Assess, Align, All In framework, you’ll identify where your current efforts may be misaligned with mission-critical work, distinguish between activity and impact, and develop strategies for managing competing priorities without losing focus on what matters most. You will leave with immediately applicable tools to make clearer decisions, reduce low-value distractions, and implement one or more concrete changes that help you lead with greater clarity, effectiveness, and purpose.
Category: Organizational Culture
Audience Level: Everyone
Speaker: April James, Executive Director - Hearts Knit Together
Too often, Community Needs Assessments (CNAs) are treated as compliance exercises—or the final report is viewed as the finish line. In reality, a well-designed CNA can be one of the most powerful tools a nonprofit has to engage stakeholders, inform strategy, and strengthen advocacy. This session walks through how to design, execute, and leverage a Community Needs Assessment so it becomes a living asset—one that builds credibility, elevates lived experience, and guides real decision-making. You will learn how to use CNA data to engage boards, funders, elected officials, and community partners long after the report is complete and will leave with practical frameworks, messaging strategies, and engagement techniques they can immediately apply to upcoming or ongoing Community Needs Assessments.
Category: Outcomes and Evaluations
Audience Level: Advanced
Speakers: Mackey Smith, City Councilmember - Bluffdale City; Sahil Oberoi, COO - Utah Community Action; Victoria Petro, City Councilmember - Salt Lake City
A single nonprofit can accomplish a lot—but a coalition of aligned, informed, and activated partners can multiply that impact. In this interactive session, you’ll learn practical strategies for building and sustaining advocacy coalitions that engage members, strengthen relationships, expand your reach, and inspire collective action. Drawing on real Utah examples like the Reproductive Roundtable and the Let Utah Vote Coalition, you’ll explore how effective communication, strong branding, valuable content, and intentional community-building can turn a group of organizations into a powerful force for change. Through a guided brainstorming exercise and worksheet, you’ll identify opportunities to create or strengthen your own coalition, uncover who may be missing from the table, and leave with practical, replicable techniques for increasing partner engagement, building trust, and amplifying your organization’s impact through collaboration.
Category: Advocacy and Civic Engagement
Audience Level: Intermediate
Speakers: Jason Stevenson, Senior Director of Public Policy - Planned Parenthood Association of Utah; Montsie Garrido, Policy and Advocacy Associate - Planned Parenthood Association of Utah
Public speaking can feel intimidating, awkward, or downright terrifying but whether you’re talking with a donor, introducing yourself at a community event, presenting to your board, or advocating for your mission, your voice is one of your organization’s most important tools. In this interactive, supportive session, you will learn practical techniques to manage nerves, communicate with greater confidence, and deliver clear, compelling messages that resonate with different audiences. Through guided practice and real-world application, you’ll discover how confidence is built through preparation and experience, not perfection, and leave with actionable strategies to strengthen your public speaking skills, tell your organization’s story more effectively, and speak up with greater impact in any setting.
Category: Marketing and Communications
Audience Level: Everyone
Speaker: Josie White, Philanthropic Officer - Shelter the Homeless
Too often, boards are caught off guard by leadership change. This session will help you proactively prepare your board for executive transition—even when no departure is planned—by showing you how to communicate the value of transition planning, sustain organizational impact, and reduce risk during periods of change. You will gain practical tools for leading board conversations about succession and executive transition, learn how to use interim leadership strategically to maintain momentum and advance organizational priorities, and leave with a practical transition-planning framework you can adapt and implement within your own organization. Even if you are not planning to step away anytime soon, you will walk away with actionable steps to help ensure your organization is prepared for an inevitable future transition and positioned for long-term success.
Category: Board Governance
Audience Level: Advanced
Speaker: Joelle Kanshepolsky, Partner - Pathway Group
In this interactive session, you will explore practical, research-backed strategies for supporting brain health and cognitive wellness through everyday habits. Presented by the Alzheimer’s Association, the session highlights the latest brain health research, including recommendations from the U.S. POINTER study, and introduces you to the 10 Healthy Habits for Your Brain. You will discover approachable ways to improve sleep, increase physical activity, manage stress, strengthen social connections, and build sustainable wellness practices that fit into your daily life. You will also develop a personalized action plan with realistic, achievable steps that can be implemented within your workplace, nonprofit, or community setting. By the end of the session, you will leave with actionable tools, conversation starters, and community-based strategies to support healthy aging, cognitive wellness, and brain health for yourself and those you serve.
Category: Human Resources
Audience Level: Everyone
Speaker: Lupe Gaitan, Program Manager - Alzheimer's Association
Thank You to Our Conference Sponsors!
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