Relationship Building and Why Honesty Matters in Fundraising.
Chapter Leadership Brief 9.6.24
by Dee Dee Mozeleski
Senior Vice President of the Office of Institutional Advancement, Communications and External Relations, & Executive Director of the Foundation for City College
I am definitely one of the luckiest people I know. I say that with all of the humility that kind of opening sentence deserves. I moved to New York City in 1992 and the only people I knew were my then-husband, his family, and my soon-to-be best friend, my daughter who would arrive a few months after I did. I started working right away and was positive that I wanted to become a social worker. I spent my first four years working at a drug and alcohol treatment center and one day, a board member asked me to lunch to share with me that she thought I was missing out on testing out working in New York City. I’d spent my first few years living in The Bronx and commuting to Queens and hadn’t learned much in between. She offered to set me up on two interviews and if luck plays any role in life (and I think it does), I was about to get the luckiest break of all.
I interviewed at The American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science (ACWIS). The woman who interviewed me, Dr. Tova Friedler, was wonderful. I left her office, ran to my second interview and by the time I got home I learned that both companies wanted to make me an offer. I’d never felt happier to be in New York. I thought for about two minutes and accepted the offer with ACWIS and began working there two weeks later. Over the course of six years, Tova taught me everything. She, like many of her closest colleagues, hadn’t set out to become fundraisers, they’d had successful careers in a variety of fields, but a few things connected them: They were tremendous at relationship building. They were honest, they told hard truths and they built solid reputations for knowing how things worked and, even more important, how to get things done successfully. I wanted to learn everything Tova would teach me and to this day, almost 30 years later, I can tell you exactly what days were my bad ones and how often they were outweighed by my good days. We worked together on important projects that continue to have a positive impact on the health of millions around the world, and she trusted me. As I developed more confidence to enter rooms and be taken seriously, she gave me more responsibility. When she moved to a new organization, she asked if I wanted to join her. I don’t think I even gave that two minutes of thinking before accepting.
That move allowed me to learn more over the next six years than I could have if I’d gone anywhere else. When Tova retired from that position, I stayed on for another two years and that’s when everything she taught me: The importance of making connections, the importance of belonging to affinity groups like AFP and not just committing your professional time to your office, and the reason why it always matters that you are truthful, all hit me at the same time. I was asked my opinion about a new gift, one that was deep into the millions. I thought that accepting that gift would be contrary to both our mission and to our individual integrity as members of the team. When my boss asked me to explain my thinking, I had the benefit of having learned that sometimes, you will have to say no to your team or your boss and it will be both hard, but also important to be completely transparent. We turned down the gift and a decade later, when the news broke of how the donor came into such a large amount of money, it reaffirmed that not every gift is going to be a good one for your organization or for you.
I’ve now moved into a position where I have a team of tremendously talented and professional colleagues and we’ve also had to reject gifts. We’ve steered away from some donor conversations because they would not be aligned with the values of our college and we’ve helped even more donors through the tough conversations about why their intentions may not match with the shared goals we’re trying to achieve. And the truth is that we’ve often ended up with far better gifts, one that fit the donor’s goals, matched the college’s needs and impacted the most number of students, faculty and staff.
In more than 30 years of this work I have continued to be moved by what inspires people to give. To see yourself in someone else and to be able to create a change they may not have realized was possible is truly one of the gifts that keeps me in love with my career. Having a tremendous boss who encourages my honesty and respects that we will not always align on a topic matters, and having a team that feels comfortable showing their concerns about something matters just as much. If you’d asked the young girl who came here if she’d have stayed in the advancement field this long, she would have said no. But if you ask me if learning from one of the most thoughtful and smart women I’ve ever met made me confident I could stay in this field and thrive, I’d answer with a resounding ‘yes.’
Dee Dee Mozeleski is the Senior Vice President of the Office of Institutional Advancement, Communications and External Relations, and, as such, also serves as the Executive Director of the Foundation for City College. In 2016, she was asked to serve in the additional capacity of Senior Advisor to the President of City College, Dr. Vince Boudreau. Ms. Mozeleski has spent more than thirty years working in service to public higher education institutions, cultural programs, international agencies and government organizations. During her time at City, she led the consolidation of the College's two fundraising organizations and oversaw the fundraising campaign which launched the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership in 2013 and, more recently, oversaw the launch of the College's new "Doing Remarkable Things Together" Campaign to bring the Foundation's endowment to $1 billion dollars.