The name of the game is flexibility. Long-distance collaboration between colleagues is easier than ever. But workdays are ever longer for most people and responsibilities more intense. What if we could keep the whole picture in better perspective, doing our jobs better and -- at the same time -- infusing our lives with balance?

A non-profit with a mission no less daunting than to reverse the downward spiral of troubled teenage girls is giving its dedicated team all the balance it needs -- and reversing a number of long-standing trends in non-profit work in the process. Traditionally, non-profit employees have been woefully under-compensated for the amount of responsibility they're expected to shoulder. Further, many non-profits struggle from a staggering turnover rate, making progress difficult. What's more, most non-profits can't afford to offer the kinds of benefits that make it easy for employees to have lives outside of work. From its humble beginnings five years ago, Seattle-based Powerful Voices had a different plan.

Powerful Voices began with a grant to establish a pilot program to help provide educational, vocational, and mentoring services for girls in juvenile detention, but struggled early on from attrition as employees left for better paying jobs. The group became convinced that a part-time strategy might be able to stem the tide. If they could keep people around longer, they could channel the significant resources they were expending on training every year to help make salaries among the most attractive of comparable organizations. With its board of directors and funders in agreement, PV took the leap and has never looked back.

How has part-time worked for employees? It's freed up employee time for other part-time jobs, volunteer opportunities, continuing education, and extracurriculars. But it's also required executive director Julie Edsforth -- herself a part-timer, distinguishing her in a crucial way from the heads of similar organizations -- to lead by example. She continually reiterates that employees, despite normal human tendencies to take work home (especially when the futures of struggling youth are at stake), need to set real limits. Even so, she says, it's often easier said than done: "You can't just be a prima donna and blindly say you believe in this kind of workplace philosophy. It's difficult."

How does Powerful Voices guarantee its work gets done? After all, the staff of eight women has served 1200 girls in the past three years. PV runs an After-School Girls Leadership program for 11 - 14 year olds, where they mentor and teach self-awareness and self-sufficiency to 100 at-risk girls twice a week for an entire school year. It manages MAPS (Making A Positive Step), a peer education program for 13 - 18 year olds. It spearheads the Young Women's Support Project for 12 - 18 year olds in juvenile detention, with a goal of meeting with as many as 450 girls at least once. Efficiency is the key, and given the organization's investment in its employees, expectations are high. Edsforth says her team is made up of pacesetters convinced anything is possible and that solutions to problems are many: "Everyone feels so good about the organization. We're all set up to get 90% of our work done in a couple of days each week."

While we're talking flexibility, it's important to note that Edsforth is also a mom, having just had a child and beginning a three-month leave. But the teenage girls Powerful Voices is committed to helping will still have their mentors. Edsforth, who's filled in for colleagues in similar circumstances, says keeping the show going in her absence will be simple: "I'm asking everyone to step up."

Wood Turner
Editor/Publisher, GoodThings, Inc.

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