As an executive search firm specializing in the nonprofit and social impact space, DRiWaterstone supports a diverse roster of purpose and mission-driven clients as they work to fill roles that are integral to delivering on their purpose and their strategic goals.
One such client is the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta. We recently sat down with their Vice President of People, Novella Noble, to talk about the incredible work being done at that organization, her experience working with DRiWaterstone, and more.
—
DRiWaterstone (DRiW): Tell us about the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta.
Novella Noble (NN): Our north star is equity. We are committed to driving equity across the region of Atlanta, ensuring that we partner with other community foundations and other donors to inspire our region towards equity and shared prosperity.
We have a strategic plan that we started in 2021, and we have core areas of focus:
- our co-investment work, to more effectively and intentionally connect donor contributions with community assets to advance neighborhood interests;
- our place-based work, to improve the life outcomes of legacy residents in our partner communities;
- systems change, to transform systems to bring about more equitable outcomes for all residents of our region;
- our donor-advised fund (DAF) business, the financial engine for us to be able to do the work so that we can continue to invest in those critical areas that we want to be able to partner on with our communities.
We also support initiatives that align with our mission and philanthropic vision. This includes organizations that are not big enough to be a 5013C nonprofit, so we sponsor them as an initiative. Additionally, we incubate micro 5013Cs – they don’t have either the financial capacity or enough structure to go out on their own and be a fully-fledged financially sustainable non-profit, so we do all their HR back office as well as well as the finance back-office work for them.
DRiW: What’s your role with the foundation?
NN: I started with the foundation in April 2021, and am Vice President, People. The role was designed to build out the entire HR function – people strategy, people, operations, our succession plan, our all our talent acquisition, building our compensation framework, workforce planning, HR technology operations, talent management planning, compliance and training.
DRiW: What was the project that you worked on with DRiWaterstone?
NN: We partnered with DRiWaterstone to be able to bring on board a Director, Philanthropic and General Counsel – he’s now our organization’s Chief Counsel, but really when the position started out, he was going to come in and help us with our DAF business. Since his time with us, we have expanded that role and now he is really teeing up and managing all things legal for us.
DRiW: Talk a bit about the impact this hire has had on the foundation.
NN: So, there’s a partnership with him and myself from an HR standpoint, making sure that there is that legal governance and that we’re holding the guard rails for all things HR.
He is also supporting the philanthropy business with some of the contracts that are going out and partnering with donors or staff that we are engaging in that work. And he’s engaging in providing legal guidance on our impact investment work, which is the housing work that is pretty complicated. So, he is helping provide legal guidance and consultation to us in that framework.
He’s also helping us with our contract management initiatives. He is standing up our grants and contract management processes across the organization so that there can be standardization, consistency, compliance, all those things.
DRiW: What was it like to work with the team at DRiWaterstone?
NN: I will certainly say it was a very pleasant experience.
There was a lot of collaboration – from the initial assessment call to the vetting questions and the early assessment of our needs, to collaborating with our CEO. [They were hands-on] with building out the profile of the candidate, doing an assessment of each of the candidates, doing a bi-weekly cadence call with us in terms of the status update of candidate interviews and debriefs, and they were very open to hearing our thoughts, concerns, suggestions, and recommendations.
We engaged in the pre and post interview process, which was very systematic, very organized, and extremely tangible in terms of the substance. And I think in the process we felt heard. It was really about a client service relationship – ensuring that we got exactly what was communicated to us in terms of the partnership and the promise they made of hiring the right candidate.
I will say that the team totally knocked it out of the park.
DRiW: Was there anything that stood out about the DRiWaterstone process?
NN: We were hiring, in parallel, a Vice President of Philanthropy … and the team did everything possible to help us to align both roles, even though there were two very different search firms that were working on the hires. We were able to match both interviews together. We had [the finalist candidates] meet, and all of that was done in in collaboration and partnership with the DRiWaterstone team. It was a unique way that we were bringing in two critical candidates at the same time, and there was so much synergy and collaboration. Ultimately, we scored twice – one excellent VP of Philanthropy and one excellent legal counsel.
DRiW: Why did you choose to work with a search firm for this role?
NN: One was my capacity; also wanting to be very intentional and do justice to the position. Going with the search firm, it gave me some runway time – to let them do the groundwork, to be expansive and search and look in places that I might not have thought about looking. More importantly, knowing the impact the position needed to have and how essential it was for what we’re doing and how we’re scaling as an organization really contributed to the decision to say let us invest financially in into this role. I knew that we needed to be able to also have the right person in the position, and so it was not about putting a butt in a seat, but it was about hiring the right person to be able to fill the seat so that we can have success.
DRiW: What’s next for the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta?
NN: We have a five-year strategic plan and now it’s a midpoint for us to be able to take a step back, reflect, and really internalize and interrogate where have we had successes and what are some of the challenges and some of the pain points. So that’s our biggest focus.
The other big focus is really making sure that we have the right talent, we have the right infrastructure, as well as the technology that can help us to get there. The community foundation had been, I would say, very nimble for the last 70-plus years and we ran an operation that was intimate and small. Then, when you’re scaling a business or you’re scaling operations, you’ve got to really take a deep look at what are those areas that we need to hone in on. With our talent, do we have the right people to be able to evolve what we’re trying to do? How do we maintain and retain our best talent so that they can take us into 2026 and so that we can collectively have a success story of a strategic plan that was well executed and had some wins not only for the organization but more importantly for our community.
—
At DRiWaterstone, we have the pleasure to work with some of the best purpose and mission-driven clients and candidates in the nonprofit and social impact space. To learn more about how we can help you build your high-performance teams and drive growth, email us – we’d love to talk!
