Welcome to my Substack

I’m Nick Grono. I’ve been a nonprofit leader for over twenty years. I also have many years of experience working for business and government: I started my career as a corporate lawyer, then I worked at the investment bank Goldman Sachs and later was chief of staff to the Australian Attorney-General. I spent a number of years providing leadership training to young women and men on a sail-training ship. And I am increasingly asked to advise and coach other nonprofit leaders, and I’ve learned a lot from these rich discussions. 

For the last decade, I have led the Freedom Fund, one of the world’s leading organizations in the fight against modern slavery. Modern slavery is an umbrella term for horrendous crimes such as sex trafficking, forced labor, bonded labor, and forced marriage. It traps fifty million women, men, and children today into lives of violence and extreme exploitation and generates hundreds of billions of dollars in profit every year for its perpetrators. It’s also a crime that touches all of us, as countless everyday products—from mobile phones to cotton t-shirts to chocolate—are produced with forced labor.

Today the Freedom Fund works in twelve countries, including many of those with the highest burden of modern slavery, such as Brazil, Ethiopia, and Myanmar. We have a global team of eighty-five people. We have partnered with, and helped shift power and resources to, some 150 grassroots organizations. Working with those partners we have helped bring over thirty-one thousand people out of slavery.  Our programs have directly touched the lives of 1.5 million people in slavery or at high risk of it. And they have positively changed the systems affecting more than seven million vulnerable people, reducing their risk of being harmed.

All of this experience has shaped my thinking on what great nonprofit leadership is. The starting point is to identify what the most successful nonprofits have in common. Once we identify this, we can explore the leader’s role in building and sustaining these organizations. That’s what I hope to do in this blog - and I hope you’ll join me on the journey by subscribing (for free).