Ep. 063 | How a Nonprofit Scales Without Relying on Donations | Miriam Chickering

Miriam Chickering is a registered nurse with an MBA and the CEO of The Frank Foundation, the US charitable foundation whose platform NextGenU.org gives away free, competency-based health sciences education to anyone in any country. She founded Nurses International in 2013 to mobilize nursing expertise globally, she sits on the Forbes Business Council, and her teams build education for WHO, UNICEF and university partners, including in active conflict zones and outbreak areas. In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Miriam explains the framework she credits for the reach, Listen, Learn, Serve, Share, and walks through the Easter weekend in the first year of the pandemic when 49 volunteers built the first globally available online acute care COVID course because nothing existed for the providers they knew. She argues that a nonprofit is a nonprofit business, that the people it serves are the reason to raise the operating bar rather than lower it, and that the hybrid model behind her own organization, part endowment and part earned contracts, makes the mission work better because clients have to be served well enough to come back. On AI she is precise about the line she will not cross: restructure, format and make things beautiful, do not create content from scratch. The same tool, she says, is helpful in one context and harmful in another, so her teams test multiple models, blind the outputs, and have local reviewers grade them against a rubric before anything ships. Miriam is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. She treats a failure rate as a design defect rather than a talent shortage, and she treats a tool as safe only once the people on the ground have said so. That is how authority actually accumulates: by building things worth talking about and keeping an honest account of how they were built, which is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers. Learn more about NextGenU.org: https://nextgenu.org Miriam Chickering on LinkedIn:   / miriam-chickering-mba-rn-bsn-ne-bc-57152853   Nurses International: https://nursesinternational.org What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwV... Podcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com #nonprofitleadership #globalhealth #healthcareeducation #nursing #aiforgood #socialimpact #founders #podcast