The Center for Justice’s new development director has Northwest roots, a sterling resumé, and a passion for what it is we do.
Nine weeks ago, sitting in her office at Cleveland’s ParkWorks organization, Heather A. Beebe-Stevens, decided to make one more pass for the day at a Spokane website with non-profit organization job postings.
“And there it was,” she remembers, the first notice that an organization called the Center for Justice, in Spokane, was looking for a new development director.
To say it caught her eye would be an understatement. She had known for months that she, her husband, Christopher, and their two year old daughter, Isabelle, would be moving to Spokane where Chris had been recruited to teach in the Gonzaga University business school.
So, Beebe-Stevens knew she was coming to the end of an enormously successful run at ParkWorks, a public space revitalization program that has been one of the cogs in Cleveland’s nationally acclaimed urban renaissance. Might there be a non-profit organization in Spokane that would offer a similar challenge?
“And so I went to the [Center for Justice] website,” she recalls. “I was at work, it was my lunch hour. And I spent a little bit too long reading. I watched the video on the front [page] and then I read, I think, every single page on the website, because it was just interesting. I mean the various issues the Center takes on, the social justice format and the passion of the people just really came through on the website. I sent my husband the link to it because he was still at work. And I said, ‘I’m going to apply for this place tonight, and you have to help me write my cover letter.’ Then I went home that night, wrote the letter, and sent it off the next morning.”
With that Beebe-Stevens had tossed her resumé into as thorough a hiring process as the Center has undertaken since it hired Breean Beggs in early 2004 to be its executive director, a job Beggs whimsically tags as Chief Catalyst.
What turned out to be a surprisingly long list of well-qualified candidates for the job was handed to Spokane development consultant John Hancock who conducted screening interviews.
“I think he and I ended up talking for like 45 minutes,” she says of the call she got from Hancock. What she found unusual and “refreshing” about Hancock’s call, she said, is that much of the discussion dealt with her personal motivations for her work in general and for wanting to work for the Center for Justice in particular.
“So it was interesting to talk to John Hancock about the reasons I was interested in the Center for Justice. Then when I talked to Breean, he and I talked for probably an hour. And, again, it was refreshing because it wasn’t like a traditional job interview where he was asking me, ‘how would you do this?’ and ‘how would you handle that?’ It was a conversation about why would you do things and what are we about and what are you about.”
Beggs did get some important things out of the interview. One was a sense of relief. Perhaps more than anyone else he knew how important the position is for an organization that has grown rapidly under his leadership. Beebe-Stevens was the first candidate he talked to, and he came away confident that, if nothing else, the message in the bottle of the job announcement had been plucked out of the ocean by at least one candidate with the training, experience, and attitude he thought was vital in whomever got the position. There would soon be other impressive candidates on the list, but now at least Beggs was assured that whoever got the job would be remarkably well-qualified.
Beebe-Stevens was born in Portland, Oregon and grew up Albany in the Willamette River valley about an hour south of Portland down Interstate 5. She graduated with a degree in International Studies from Willamette University in 1996. After working at a homeless shelter for teens, and then briefly at the Humane Society in Salem, Oregon, she packed up her cat and hamster and went to Cleveland to get her MBA in Non-Profit Management. It was in Cleveland that she met her husband, a native Louisianan who was then a student at Case Western Reserve University.
The couple lived for a while in Scranton, Pennsylvania where Beebe-Stevens did outreach work for the Girl Scouts. When her husband returned to Cleveland to get his doctorate in business in 2003, Beebe-Stevens was hired to be the assistant development director at Cleveland’s Center for Families and Children. Three years later, she got the development director’s job at ParkWorks, and performed, by all accounts, brilliantly.
“It was hard to leave ParkWorks,” she says. “When I told Ann [Zoller, the ParkWorks executive director] we were leaving, I cried. It was not that I was sad about coming back to the Northwest, it was saying goodbye to what I’d helped create and build in Cleveland and the friendships I’d made.”
She got something important out of the phone call with Beggs as well.
“My husband had shut himself in Isabelle’s room with her because it was like seven o’clock at night for us, and he was getting her ready for bed and trying to keep her very quiet in our little condo. And then when I hung up the phone, I walked into the room and he asked, ‘how’d it go?’ And I said, ‘I want this job. I want this job.’
“He said, ‘you haven’t said that in a long time.’”
“And I said, ‘I know. I want this job. I don’t know what it pays, I have no idea. But I want to do the work that they’re doing there.”
Beggs called her with the good news last Thursday. She starts June 30th.
Posted June 23rd
