People in Fundraising, Season 2, Ep. 25: Kelli North, University of Michigan

Recorded in fall 2023: Halloween is the favorite holiday for my next “People in Fundraising” awesome guest Kelli North, MSW. In honor of this, her conversation is going live today! She is also the first guest to represent Michigan in this program.

Kelli’s current role was years in the making. She has a foot in prospect development and analytics and also attends meetings of the DEI team, whose initiatives Kelli supports and assists to bridge DEI theory and reality.

A first-gen college student – where she was a member of the university’s Native American Student Association – Kelli talks about her lifelong passion for social work and advocacy, and how her desire to work in those spaces led to her nonprofit career. Part of Kelli’s role focuses on identifying donors for the very same scholarship she received that enabled her to attend the University of Michigan.

Kelli also discusses:
* How her current role developed, with help from Kat Walsh, Heather McPhail, and Craig Leonard, among others;
* The University of Michigan’s campus-wide focus on DEI (in strategic planning, KPI’s for DEI activities);
* Efforts to diversify the University’s Campaign Council and other campus-wide committees;
* Efforts to diversity the University’s donor pipeline, looking at wealth more holistically and discussing indicators that may be introducing biases into their prospect identification and larger donor life cycle program;
* Michigan’s DEI Data Policy; demographic data erasure; and white-passing identities and privileges;