Why Trust Matters in Nonprofit Finance

When people ask how I ended up in nonprofit finance, they’re often surprised that it wasn’t a straight line or some carefully mapped-out career plan. It was really a series of moments that gradually showed me what finance could be.

As an undergraduate, I studied Economics because I was fascinated by the way numbers could explain the world. I loved graphs, models, and data—not because they were abstract, but because they helped me believe something. For my senior honors thesis, I studied the impact of foreign investment on Brazil’s economic growth. It was my first experience using economic analysis to understand something tangible, something that affected real people.

That thesis was also my first look at how the global economy worked, and it stayed with me. As I moved from school into my career, it became clear that organizations would increasingly operate across borders, and I wanted to understand both the numbers and the global context behind them. That curiosity is what eventually made finance the lens through which I view almost every organizational decision.

Looking back, I can see how my early experiences prepared me for the work I do today. They also taught me something else that has shaped my career: don’t be afraid to say yes to opportunities that take you somewhere unexpected.

Every Dollar Represents Your Mission

When I worked in investment banking, I helped companies understand how corporate actions (acquisitions, divestitures, capital structure changes) would impact their credit ratings.

It was analytical work, but it taught me something that I still rely on today: every decision has a financial consequence, and you need to be able to trace that consequence before a decision is made, not after. At the same time, some of the experiences that influenced me most weren’t happening in corporate boardrooms.

When my children were young, I volunteered as treasurer for both their school and our local church. Those roles operated on a completely different scale than the organizations I’ve worked with professionally, but they mattered to me because they were about a mission, not just a set of accounts.

Whether it’s a school trying to fund a new playground or a congregation trying to support its community, the same principle applies. People are trusting you to manage their resources carefully, in service of something they care about.

It’s part of what eventually drew me toward nonprofit finance, and it’s something I still think about today at the Meliore Foundation. However large the organization gets, I try not to lose that same sense that every dollar represents trust, given in service of a mission people care about. It keeps the work grounded, even at a global scale.

Where Evidence Meets Impact

As someone who has spent her career grounded in numbers, Meliore’s commitment to science-based facts is what resonates most deeply with me. It’s simply how I think. I want to see the data, understand the mechanism, and trace the logic before I believe something.

Watching Meliore apply that same discipline to important topics that really impact people’s lives feels like an extension of my own worldview, just applied at a global, systemic scale.

When I joined Meliore as CFO in early 2024, my first priority was rethinking how the organization planned and allocated its money—moving us away from fixed annual budgeting cycles toward a more adaptive, rolling approach to resource allocation.

I split my time between two teams: finance, where I focused on smooth operations and informative reporting, and risk, where I managed the challenges of operating globally. My second priority was ensuring our financial and risk infrastructure kept pace with rising complexity, not letting it outpace our ability to manage it.

Whether we were considering a new program, expanding into another geography, or changing our funding mix, I wanted to make sure we identified the main things that mattered to our financial position, our reserves, and our risk profile before we committed. Financial strategy is never about uncertainty. It’s about understanding which levers move the outcome and roughly by how much.

That’s what kept our finance operations working for the mission, not against it.

Building a Foundation Worth Trusting

This principle showed up right away in our payments workflow.

When I joined Meliore, we were experiencing failed payments to smaller regional banks and cooperatives, creating uncertainty for a network that depended on funds arriving when and where they’re needed. When payments are unreliable, it creates friction across the organization, with program teams and partners wondering whether funding will arrive on time, and making it much harder for them to plan.

We solved this challenge with automation.

By adopting a global payments solution, overdue invoices dropped from 24% to 3%. But what mattered most to me wasn’t only the numeric improvement. Solving that challenge gave us a much more solid foundation to build from. Instead of spending time firefighting payment issues, we could focus our attention on strategic finance initiatives.

Today, AI raises a new foundational question for me: can the partners who rely on us trust what’s happening underneath it? We’re still early in that journey. We already have AI embedded into some of our systems: our payments solution, for example, uses it to improve invoice coding, which significantly reduces manual data entry. Like many organizations, we’re continuing to understand where AI can add real value across finance and risk.

My philosophy is that governance has to come first. Someone needs to be accountable for any decisions AI influences—every one carries a financial consequence, and we need to understand that before we commit, not after. It’s important to adopt AI with the same rigor as any major change: evidenced, risk-assessed, and governed—not adopted only because it’s trending.

That doesn’t mean the nonprofit industry should lag on AI—it’s exactly the kind of opportunity that could take us somewhere unexpected. We just can’t move faster than our governance can keep pace with. In a sector based on trust, getting that foundation right is what makes the opportunity worth taking.

Staying Open to Opportunity

When I look back, I can see that my career never followed a straight line, and I wouldn’t have wanted it to. Every role gave me a different perspective, from understanding how financial decisions shape business strategy to seeing how careful financial management helps organizations achieve a mission people care about.

I wouldn’t have ended up working in the UK, living in Azerbaijan, or taking on the roles I’ve had without being open to new opportunities. If I had to give one piece of advice, it would be this: say yes, even if it feels unfamiliar or outside your comfort zone. Careers in nonprofit finance rarely follow a straight line, and the people who do interesting and meaningful work are usually the ones who said yes to a move, a stretch role, or a sector switch—rather than waiting for the “perfect” next step.

That openness has shaped my own path, but it’s never meant lowering my standards for the work itself. I still want to see the data, understand the mechanism, and trace the logic before I believe something. In my life, I’ve learned to trust the data, trust the mission, and trust that the unexpected detours are usually worth taking.