PANO’s 40th Anniversary: An Interview with PANO’s First ED Joe Geiger

2024 marks 40 years since PANO’s founding as the Delaware Valley Council of Agencies in 1984. Throughout the year, PANO staff will interview key individuals from PANO’s history, including this conversation between PANO’s current Assistant Director, Christina Spadaro, and PANO’s first Executive Director, Joe Geiger, all about PANO’s second decade (1994-2004).

Check out a clip from the interview here and read on for the full transcript.

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Interview Transcript – August 20, 2024

Christina: All right. Well, as you know, Joe, 2024 marks 40 years since PANO was founded as the Delaware Valley Council of Agencies back in 1984. And as part of our 40th anniversary celebrations, we are revisiting some key figures from each decade of PANO’s past. We started with Don Kramer, who was one of PANO’s founding board members representing those first 10 years from 1984 to 1994.

And we thought who better than PANO’s first executive director to represent that next decade, ‘84 to ‘94. And so it is an honor for me to be in conversation today with you, Joe. For everyone who doesn’t know, this is Joe Geiger, one of only two people who have held the position of executive director here at PANO. And I am very much looking forward to learning about some of those early days. And then, of course, having the opportunity to share some of your experiences with all of the people who engage with PANO today. So shall we jump right in?

Joe: Sure.

Christina: Excellent. All right, the first thing we would like to know is, we’re kind of curious, what drew you to the work at PANO in the first place?

Joe: Actually, I feel like my whole career built up to that point because I was in education for eight years and I loved the classroom, but I didn’t care for the politics of education. And at the time, the YMCA in Bloomsburg was looking for an executive director, which is where I was living.

And it was a non-facility Y, it would be their first executive director. And I thought, how hard can this be? Hire a fitness instructor and buy some volleyballs and you’re good to go. But while I was in that position, I got exposed to some really good nonprofit leadership training and fell in love with the sector. From there, I came to the YMCA in Harrisburg. And from there, I went to the YMCA in New York City, very large YMCA over on the East side. And again, through that opportunity, I got through Columbia University’s certification program in not-for-profit management where, as much as I thought I knew about nonprofits, that kind of blew me out of the water and just challenged me to the point where I really want to invest in my future in this sector.

So I got married, my wife lived in Harrisburg. I loved New York, she hated New York, so I hated New York. And I took a job with the State Head Injury Foundation in Pennsylvania. Again, another organization that was starting from scratch, just so much satisfaction in working with the population and did that for five years.

And then the position with PANO came along and I thought with my training, my experience, and my passion for the sector, what could be a better organization than the Pennsylvania Association of Nonprofit Organizations. And when I interviewed for the position, I got just more and more stoked. It was Don Kramer, it was Skip Houston. I believe there may have been one other person at the interview table, but I walked away from that interview thinking, in a very humble way, I would love to do this. And they offered it. You don’t know what all the right questions are to ask when you’re at that stage, but position kind of under fire so you learn very quickly and you do what you have to do to get it going.

At that point, Don Kramer shared with you that we had a previous experience with the grantmakers of Western PA and the Delaware Valley grantmakers, the grantmakers in Philadelphia had some of the assets – the desk, some file cabinets and that kind of stuff.

But there was also an urgency in the nonprofit sector at the time because it was under assault from the legislature on property tax exemption issues. And they were kind of going with the flow of “how can you require or request property tax exemption when you’re a medical system with a million dollar sign up on your roof and all these assets?” and so on and so forth. And we had to educate the legislature on, “it’s not the assets, it’s not the sign on the roof, it’s what’s the service?”. Because to get property tax exemption in some way, you have to relieve the responsibility of government to do what it otherwise would have to do if there was no nonprofit doing the work.

So at the same time, we were building an identity, a new logo for our letterhead, establishing relationships with accountants to do our audits, to establish relationships with consultants.

And Pennsylvania’s an interesting state. It’s a large state and there are two geocentric locations that are huge in this state. You have Pittsburgh and you have Philadelphia. And at the time, neither one of them really liked each other much. I’m not sure it was much of a group hug kind of thing, but Pittsburgh had such a wealth of foundation presence and you know, all the money in the world is not gonna fix things, but it helps.

Philadelphia kind of had a position of we know how to do it better than anybody else. And here’s PANO with a $75,000 budget in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, saying, we need to lead you to do better and more important things than what you’re currently doing. So it was a challenge. It was very interesting and it was very appealing to what I had done in my background.

Christina: It’s very cool to hear about how so many of the experiences that you had before the position opened up at PANO, you know, were with organizations that were building from the ground up. And that’s essentially what the position at PANO ended up being as well. And thinking back to our interview with Don Kramer discussing the fact that no one really saw the nonprofit sector as a sector. So that was even part of the early work of PANO – introducing this idea of the nonprofit collective as a whole in Pennsylvania and what power there was in trying to unite all nonprofits around the state and educate legislators about the presence of and what nonprofits were bringing – the value that nonprofits were bringing – in doing the work that really maybe should have been done by the government. And that’s essentially what non-governmental organizations do. So it’s very cool to hear about how that all came to be.

Joe: We don’t look at it this way, but there’s a lot of competition in our sector. Competition for money, there’s competition for talent, there’s competition for positive press. And so we’re asking nonprofits to trust each other that we’ll be much stronger if we come together. And so at the time, what we were trying to think about was, “So what is it that all nonprofits have in common with each other?”. And you look at, well, you’ve got a food bank over here, you have the medical service and medical provider over there, and you’ve got a homeless mission here, and they’re all different. At the time, I believe there were 30,000 charitable nonprofits on all the websites tracking activity in Pennsylvania. And I used to say in my training, if you’ve seen one nonprofit, you’ve seen one nonprofit. So not only did we have to do that for the legislature, but we had to do it for the sector. And, and then when you look at the sector and you look at what you’re doing there at PANO, there’s a lot of work to be done and you’re doing a lot of great training and honing the skills of the sector, but they still got to do the fundraising, you still got to do the bookkeeping, still have to do all those things to be successful and to become legitimate and credible. So we were right at the “let’s start up and do it all, all at once”.

But with people like Don Kramer and Skip Houston, Skip Houston provided the funding to get us off the ground. Skip was a unique individual. He is a unique individual, big guy, big presence, but lovable teddy bear kind of guy in person. And they both provided so much encouragement. And through them, we started to doing our introduction – Skip was in Philadelphia, Don was in Philadelphia. We had to search a little bit for an ally out in Pittsburgh. But it started to come together.

When I was hired, the legislation that was going along was the priority that was handed to me, which was a piece of legislation called Act 55. The legislature was challenging tax-exempt status of the medical community, saying, you know, you don’t look so much like a nonprofit. Why should there be tax exemption? And the reality was they were paying a lot of funds into the local governments and the bureaucracies that were outside their window. But the legislature was looking at anything that moves, we got to figure out a way to get money out of them.

So here’s PANO with an 80-some-thousand-dollar budget talking to the CEOs of huge medical systems in Pennsylvania, which they’re starting staff made more money than that and had more resources, saying, “you’ve got to jump on the wagon and help present a uniform message to the legislature of the community benefit that we provide to your community, whether it be in Philadelphia or in Pittsburgh”.

So it was a little challenging and we were dismissed pretty easily by them. And then you look at Harrisburg itself and the culture that’s on the Hill and you’ve got the Republicans and you’ve got the Democrats and they don’t like each other much. And no matter what your political affiliation is, even back then, there was a sense of, “well, this sector has to be more favorable to the nonprofit sector because of its cultural approach to things”. We found it was just the opposite. We found that when we got up on the Hill, that the sector that we thought would be more giving to the nonprofit sector were very tight. They just didn’t want to open the door to the notion that you deserve the property tax exemption and the sector that you would assume, well, this is the money sector, these are the conservative sector, they’re the ones that want the money and the taxes, they were more easy to talk to. And I didn’t know much about advocacy at the time, but my master’s degree is in education, comprehensive social studies. I loved following politics and understanding the dynamics. And what I learned very quickly is that there’s good guys on both sides of the aisle, and there are knuckleheads on both sides of the aisle. And we were lucky enough to get…to have penetration to the good guys on both sides of the aisle, which gave us access to the different committees and the different people that we had to talk with.

The outcome was after about a year and a half of lobbying for it, which that was also a bad word to nonprofits. The bill passed to provide the tax-exempt status, which gave PANO a little bit more credibility when we were working with the giants in the sector.

Christina: That’s great and it’s very cool to hear about some of these advocacy wins that PANO had in the early days, which have really made a lasting impact on nonprofits today. So you’ve already sort of started to answer what our next question was going to be, but when you took the job, what were you hoping to achieve? And then thinking about what changed over the years that you were PANO’s first executive director – so you served from 1998 to 2013 – what changed in that time? I’m sure many, many things. And then there are things that stayed the same (like how you described politics).

Joe: And I may have a different opinion than some of the ex-board members and so on and so forth because there was a bit of diversity in thinking about the one challenge that you have as a nonprofit organization staff like PANO is you bring good talent onto your board. And in some cases they think we know how to do it better and you should be doing it like we would do it. And when you’ve got 10 different people thinking you ought to be doing it like we’re doing it, you can become very schizophrenic very quickly. So I think the way that the board was recruited and the way it was managed, it wasn’t a honeymoon all the way through, but it was a strong collection of good thinkers and, for the most part, they let me do my thing. They knew what my thing was and they let me do it. So it was establishing, again, not only the credibility of the sector itself, but establishing my credibility so that we didn’t spend a lot of time challenging everything.

But as far as what changed in the first 10 years with a couple of advocacy victories, we got the credibility as great advocates. So part of our training package was lobbying. As a nonprofit sector, you’re not doing your job if you’re not also doing some lobbying. “No, we’re not allowed to do lobbying” – well, that’s the big myth. You’re allowed to do lobbying, but there are some restrictions and expectations, regulations on how you do it.

And I think they were good regulations. We weren’t supposed to go and tell the legislator, “don’t you vote for this bill, we will hate you”. You have to go in and say, “if you were to support this bill, these are what some of the unintended consequences might be”, that made them think about, well, maybe I’ve got to restudy this and get through it. So we were doing workshops all over Pennsylvania on lobbying, and we were getting some nice audience, but probably like now when you do programs, it’s not enough to live on, as an organization. But again, there was that credibility that came along with it. And then we were also, we brought the standards for excellence program in, that would have been when Tish Mogan started.

Tish had a tremendous background for that program and a passion for it. But the Excellence for Program talks about how do you do record-keeping? How do you recruit board members? How do you run a board meeting and all those kinds of things? So it was a lot.

I think over the first 10 years was a time that PANO shrugged the reputation that we were gypsies going from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and we didn’t have an anchor anywhere. And I think that probably rightfully so. And we didn’t really have a good idea of what our identity was supposed to be. So that all kind of formed in the beginning as we moved along.

Christina: That’s really interesting. And I think that’s something that has continued to evolve, obviously, as it does with any organization as an organization grows into what it needs to be. So when you think about where PANO is at today, and for anybody who doesn’t know, Joe continues to be involved in various ways – Joe is a member of our advisory committee, our advisory board – so when you think about where PANO is at today, what do you hope for PANO in the next 40 years?

Joe: Well, I would hope that – this is a long range goal – that PANO could lead the movement that says to the nonprofit sector, you don’t have to be competitors with each other. There’s enough to do and enough work going around. And when you think about that, you gotta think about, “well, what does a pro-choice organization have in common with a food bank or an after-school program, I mean, it’s all over the board”. But to define that central identity of what’s in the DNA of everything that we all do is the thing that I would hope that we would keep pursuing and help organizations understand that.

I mean, there are a lot of times where there are so many public community benefit organizations out there that. If you pool your resources together, you’d be a lot more effective and you’d be a lot more efficient. It’s tough to do. I mean, you’re the executive director, your board’s paying you to raise money for you. So what are you raising money for this other organization and all that kind of thing. It’s a leap of trust. So maybe to help build the trust in each other in the sector would be a wonderful goal to continue to pursue and to help people understand that.

Christina: I love that you said that as kind of something on the horizon for us to keep aiming towards and that’s really that that has informed a lot of how PANO does continue to approach our work today is through this lens of we are really going to be stronger together, so what is it that we can do as a whole sector? Getting back to that idea of thinking about nonprofits as a group rather than the individual missions that each organization is trying to advance out in their communities.

Joe: I think it’s a matter of staying focused and being intentional. When you put a conference together, make sure that you’re always including some kind of activity or education program that continues to move people towards that central thought of We are, we, what was…there was a football team playing that went down, Matthew McConaughey played the coach and, but I forget the school, but we are, oh, it was Marshall University. And the motto was we are Marshall.

And I saw in our local paper that 200 farmers in Lancaster County went to an auction of a farm that the farmer just lost all capacity to pay the taxes and everything. And 200 farmers went to this auction and remained silent to allow this guy to get his farm back. And it gave me the chills a little bit. You know, this is America. Yeah, this goes back a long way.

Alex de Tocqueville back in the, I believe it was the early 1800s, toured our country. He was a French journeyman. And he said, you know, what’s different about the America is that when there’s a problem in the community in America, everybody rolls their sleeves up and comes together to help solve the problem.

When you think about the Amish community in Lancaster County, they wanna put a barn up – 250 of their peers come in a day, they have the supplies there, but they raise a barn in a day. And that doesn’t happen in other countries.

And I guess, going back to that illumination that we had at some point that there’s, there’s just a need for us to work together and to respect each other. I mean, if we’re fighting with each other when we go up on Capitol Hill, and that was easy back with Act 55 – the hospitals were saying, “this is our issue and we’re gonna step on anybody we have to get there”. I mean, if that’s how we’re gonna operate, we’re not gonna have credibility, we’re not going to have any enthusiasm for people to join the movement.

Christina: Yeah. I think that’s a great point. So with all of that in mind, what would you want nonprofits and others to know about PANO?

Joe: I think that PANO didn’t just put a sign out front and say, give us your membership dues because you should do that because we’re the organization that represents you. It’s just continuing to build a credibility and a welcoming attitude and that it’s okay to disagree within our movement. It’s okay to have those discussions. Sometimes we look like the political arena when we get selfish about what we want our case to be passed. And just to remember that if we’re going to be successful and have the longevity we really want – because 40 years is a great accomplishment, but it’s a blip in the radar over time – just stay with it. Like I said, 30,000 nonprofits, you’ve seen one, you’ve seen one. And that’s a lot of corralling, that’s a lot of bringing people in and saying let’s do this big group hug. But it isn’t just gonna be group hug. We’ve got some work to do. Let’s get at it.

Christina: Yeah, and that that 30,000 is just about doubled now, so…

Joe: Not surprised. Yeah, well, you know the nonprofits out there. They don’t understand that You know, you’re a nonprofit as a 501 C3, but there’s what about 20 different designations of nonprofits. When you say nonprofit, you’ve got to help people understand you’re a charitable nonprofit and what that means and that nobody can benefit from private inurement when you’re working in the nonprofit, when it’s charitable nonprofit sector. That’s why we went after the label community benefit organization. That’s what we all had in common. Even nonprofits – it was about the time when we came together where we started thinking more in terms of not for profit. And the term nonprofit can be confusing when you look at labor union over here and the workers union over here and that kind of stuff. They’re nonprofit, but they’re not charitable nonprofit.

Christina: It’s very cool to hear this idea of community benefit work coming full circle, that has shown backup in PANO’s mission statement, in our most recent iteration of our mission statement. We really were intentional about using that language in particular because that is the common denominator for so much of the work that’s being done, and not just by what you would traditionally consider nonprofit organizations, but by our partners in the for-profit sector. There are a lot of companies doing really great work that bring benefit to the community. So that’s been an important piece, I think, of PANO’s recent evolution as well, is getting outside of that narrow box of nonprofit and thinking in those broad terms of community benefit work.

Joe: But in reality, we’ve been a little slavish about it. There are a lot of organizations out there who benefit the community that our community benefit organizations. And a lot of people doing the charitable work without any kind of structure or corporate kind of design to it. And so there’s a lot of people who do community benefit work, but what differentiates us are the regulations that are attached for the purpose of not having to do things like pay certain taxes. I mean, we pay taxes, we pay payroll taxes and, depending on the sizes of the nonprofit, you’re paying sales tax and all those kinds of things.

But it’s a wonderful thing going back to de Tocqueville. What an observation to come away with of a country that just fought a revolutionary war to free yourself from Europe. And that was more from Britain than it was from France, but a Frenchman observing that, not that people were saying, this is what we do. This is what he observed when he came in.

Christina: Yeah, that is an interesting insight. Well, Joe, I know I have enjoyed this conversation today and I realized I didn’t introduce myself at the beginning. Joe and I got introduced before we started recording, but I’m Christina Spadaro. I am currently serving as PANO’s Assistant Director and have been on staff here since 2017. So as we wind this conversation down, I just wanted to know if there’s anything else that you would like to share with people today.

Joe: I think that, when you start feeling bad for yourself and sorry for yourself, look around. It doesn’t take long to find someone who’s not as well off as you are. I mean, there’s so much tragedy. There’s so little good news out there today. And politically, we’ve become so divided that this sector should be part of the initiative for people to come back and understand we’re all people, and that we’re all in this together.

Christina: Yeah. Well, I think that’s a great note to end on. We are all in this together. And that has kind of been a motto of PANO’s for a really long time now. So thank you, Joe, for all that you did to bring PANO along, and to lay that foundation for who we’ve become today. And thanks for your time today. Yeah. Sure.

Joe: So it looks like PANO made a great choice in hiring Anne, I hope she feels that way too. And you know, congratulations to all of you for doing the good work over there.

Christina: Thanks very much. And yeah, go ahead.

Joe: I was going to say, maybe you want to cut this interview off. I’ll ask you the question after.

Christina: That sounds great. Yes. Yes. So Joe is referencing Anne, who is our current executive director, the only other person who has held that title since 1998 when Joe was first hired. Yes, Anne has been on for our the last 10 years of PANO’s history here since 2014. And I know, Joe, you also mentioned Tish Mogan, who, for people who don’t know her, you will probably get to know her. Tish is on our short list to be one of our next interviews for this 40th anniversary series. And for people who do know her, she actually was part of 21 years of PANO’s history here. So many, many people have been introduced to PANO because of Tish and the work that she did with the Standards for Excellence program.

We’ll be glad to bring Tish back in front of folks when we do that interview. Hopefully, we’ll see you here. Yes. Yeah. So thanks for your time again today, Joe. It’s been really lovely getting to know you and catching up on some of those early years at Panel. Thank you so much.

Joe: Thanks, Christina. Thank you.