Ocean Side Chats: Lori Zook

I’ve been doing business administration since the mid-eighties, and nonprofit administration more specifically, since the early nineties. After many years in arts nonprofits, I joined OST part time as a grants manager – the other half I was the executive director of a chamber ensemble. About three months later, the then-executive-director said “Can you give us full time?” And I agreed. I love the environment, I love the team here at OST, and I had the opportunity to use that knowledge of the inner workings of a nonprofit. All that entails isn’t very visible externally, but that doesn’t make it less important. Maybe the opposite.

But going all the way back to when I was 19 – I was living in Berkeley, and someone brought home a job posting for a housecleaner at the Money household – and yes, that was their real last name. They were in their 80’s, and had a property management company as well as a bottling and warehousing company, and for whatever reason Ted Money started talking to me while I was cleaning the living room. He asked a million questions for about an hour and a half, and at the end of it said “How would you like to learn to be an office manager?” It sounded more interesting than cleaning so I said yes. But it was the early 80’s, and he had a whole old school double-entry bookkeeping and filing system he’d learned from his parents when they passed on the property management company. This was pre-PCs, and I just learned by doing. And then he actually moved to computers in 1984, maybe 85 – so we were on the really early versions of computers, with the dot prompts and DIR access. Now it seems archaic but it really did catapult me into learning how to do all of this. I worked for them for several years, and then for the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart, supporting album & book production, then for a graduate program at Holy Names College – between this company and that, I kind of backed into doing nonprofit business. It is very different from regular business. Managing fund sources means it’s not “money in, money out”. It’s much more specific, with all these different funders and which programs they go towards, and this additional layer of tracking.

The biggest difference is programs, and how they interact with funding streams. Our output here is reports, meetings, adopted policies, a symposium. Whereas the programmatic output of an arts nonprofit could be an opera, a film, a dance production. But what you need to do behind the scenes to track funds in all types of non-profits is similar; accounting for each and every grant separately.

The first thing that comes to mind is how much we’ve diversified. When I first started there was a huge reliance on two funders – all our funding was mostly from OPC and RLF. Back then, OPC was just transitioning from being part of the Coastal Conservancy to becoming its own entity under Natural Resources. While managing multiple contracts of state funding has its challenges, so does managing the array of reporting and invoicing requirements of a wide range of funders.. It also reflects how much our work has diversified – when I started so much was focused on MPAs, and all of the OA work was really just beginning. It’s interesting to see it come back a decade after we did some of the pioneering work, albeit on a very different scale. But I think the biggest change is really just how much we’ve broadened what we do – we’ve broadened the scope of what we can do with our team of people.

One thing that’s very different in the kind of work we do from most other things is when I’ve worked for, say, an opera company, we were only ever doing one opera at a time. There was no need for any tools to tell people how to track, and there were no staff that needed it. I was the only person managing the budget. So I think having a larger organization and lots of different grants and projects requires tools specific to those jobs – our tracking spreadsheets for the grants, with their totals and balances and staff time and such. It’s the time and energy to research, to create, to refine all of those tools, in addition to keeping them up-to-date every single month. I spend so much time researching other ways to get the same work done that aren’t absolutely ridiculous for an organization of our size. All of the legal compliance, which I know is probably very boring, but regulations change and we need to keep on top of them. So I spend a lot of time reading things that are, you know, not enthralling but help keep us on the right side of regulations. I think there’s so many things that people who don’t have an interest in the invisible admin side of keeping things running don’t necessarily recognize, especially when it comes to things like the audit process that takes up so much of my time. There’s really no way to make it sound compelling but I do find a certain zen and comfort in numbers and calculations, in a way that is fulfilling to me.