It’s 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday, and the executive director of a mid-size nonprofit is still at her desk. The building is empty. The program reports are done. The grant deadline was met three days ago. Nothing is broken, and yet everything feels broken.
She opens her email for the seventh time. Scrolls through the staff complaints. Reads the board chair’s message about the budget shortfall again, even though she’s already read it twice. Her phone lights up with a text from a colleague at another nonprofit, asking if she’s free for coffee tomorrow. She doesn’t respond yet. She doesn’t have the energy to be the person everyone thinks she is right now.
The thought arrives quietly: I am completely alone in this.
Not physically alone in the office. Alone in a way that matters more. The board expects her to be the visionary. The staff expects her to have answers. The donors expect her to be grateful and energized. The community expects her to solve problems that no single person, no single organization, can actually solve.
She knows what she is supposed to feel: inspired. Grateful. Privileged to do this work.
But at 11:47 p.m., in the quiet of her office, she feels something else entirely. She feels like she is drowning, and the only person who can see it is herself.
Meet Peggy Huppert
Peggy Huppert knows that feeling. She has sat across from dozens of executives in that exact moment. She has listened to their voices crack on Zoom calls. She has watched accomplished leaders admit, often for the first time, that they have no idea if they are doing this right.
For 43 years, Peggy led nonprofits. She raised millions of dollars. She passed landmark legislation. She built organizations from skeleton crews into powerful forces. She was the executive director that boards wanted and communities needed. But in the summer of 2023, a few months before her planned retirement from NAMI Iowa, she participated in a national call with 24 other state executive directors. The conversation went like this: What are you bragging about? What is keeping you up at night?
Usually, she says, the room was mostly positive. That day, it was overwhelmingly negative. Tears were shed. People said this was the only place they could be honest about what was actually happening to them.
Peggy listened. After the call ended, she did what she always does: she followed up. She reached out to several participants. She offered to help. She discovered something that would completely rewrite her plans for retirement.
The real crisis in nonprofit leadership is not funding. It is not metrics or impact measurement or board governance. The real crisis is that the people running these organizations are isolated, unsupported, and convinced that their struggles are personal failures rather than structural realities.
By January 2024, Peggy had launched Mentor Magic. She walked away from a secure position as an executive director to become what nonprofit leaders desperately need: someone who knows exactly what the weight of this work feels like, and who refuses to let anyone carry it alone.
From Playhouse Dreams to Nonprofit Leadership
Peggy grew up in Iowa. She studied journalism at Drake University in the late 1970s because she wanted to tell stories that mattered. She went to work at a community playhouse first, in a communications role, not because she had a master plan but because the work appealed to her. The playhouse was building something. People showed up. Art happened. That felt like enough.
In 1993, she led a campaign to raise $2.3 million for a new theater building. It was the first time she understood what she was actually capable of: connecting people, elevating ideas, making people believe in something bigger than themselves. Decades later, tens of thousands of people would walk through those doors.
She moved into development, then government relations. She worked for the American Cancer Society. She became the chief lobbyist for a state legislature. She helped pass the Iowa Smoke Free Air Act in 2008, legislation that she knows has saved lives. At 57, she was laid off, along with her husband, who lost his job a week later. Both of them unemployed. Both of them in their 50s. People told her to give up looking for nonprofit leadership and find something easier.
She did not give up. She kept applying. She kept networking. She took temporary jobs. Thanks to the support of her family, she survived that period. Five months later, she became executive director of NAMI Iowa.
From 2016 to 2023, she built that organization from 1.5 full-time employees and a $160,000 budget into a force with 10 staff members, a $1 million annual budget, and a board of 17 accomplished leaders from across the state. The organization reached tens of thousands of people. Legislation passed. Lives changed.
By her final year as executive director, Peggy had the credentials, the track record, and the security that most nonprofit leaders spend their entire careers chasing. She also had something else: clarity about what was actually missing.
What Nonprofit Leaders Actually Need
“I consider myself a servant leader,” Peggy says. “I always tried to be authentic, to inspire, and to be a trusted broker of information.” That phrase, “trusted broker,” appears throughout her career. It is not about being right. It is about being someone people can trust to understand, to listen, and to help them find their own answers.
When Peggy launched Mentor Magic, she knew exactly what nonprofit leaders needed, because she had needed it herself. They needed someone who had walked in their shoes. Someone who understood what it felt like to build something from nothing. Someone who had survived being pushed out, had rebuilt a career, had stared down age discrimination and refused to accept it. Someone who would not minimize their struggles or tell them to be grateful.
“I wanted to use my lived experience to be the person they could tell things that were keeping them up at night,” she explains. “And to combat the loneliness and isolation that is rampant among leaders.”
This is not a business idea. This is a response to a crisis that nobody else was addressing.
Her one-on-one mentoring work focuses on what keeps people awake. Leadership transitions. Board conflicts. Budget crises. Staff struggles. The weight of solving problems that are bigger than any one organization can solve. She also publishes a weekly Substack column called “Doing Better at Doing Good,” offering practical solutions to nonprofit challenges. She is not here to tell people they are doing great work and should feel proud. She is here to tell people that their struggles are real, they are not alone, and they can get through this.
The difference between advice and mentoring, she believes, is presence. Anyone can read a book about nonprofit management. What nonprofit leaders actually need is someone who will sit with them in the hard parts, who understands the specific weight of this work, and who has proven that the other side exists.
The Huppert Playbook: 5 Lessons for Nonprofit Leaders
Build with people, not around them. The organizations that last are the ones where leaders empower their staff and board members to challenge themselves, not the ones where the executive director is the only one who understands what is really happening.
Isolation is the real enemy, not competition. Nonprofit leaders need community, honest conversation, and permission to struggle. Finding or creating that community is not a luxury. It is survival.
Your lived experience is your greatest credential. The struggles you have survived, the failures you have recovered from, and the people who believed in you when things fell apart—these are what make you trustworthy to other leaders.
Authenticity creates trust faster than perfection ever will. Leaders who admit what they do not know, who ask for help, and who show up as whole humans rather than polished executives attract the best people and make the best decisions.
The second half can be bigger than the first. Age, setback, and forced transition are not the end of your career. They are often the beginning of your most important work.
The Other Side of Everything
It is now 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday again, somewhere in the nonprofit world. Another executive director is at her desk, carrying the weight of work that matters more than anything else she does. But this time, she has Peggy’s phone number. She knows she can send a message. She knows someone will respond.
That is not a small thing. In the isolation of nonprofit leadership, that is everything.
Peggy Huppert did not retire. She transformed. After 43 years of building organizations, she is now building the people who lead them. She looked at a system that was breaking brilliant leaders into pieces and decided that fixing the leader might be the only way to actually save the work.
In walking away from everything, she actually fixed what mattered most.
Peggy Huppert is the Owner of Mentor Magic, based in Johnston, Iowa. She mentors and coaches nonprofit leaders while publishing weekly columns on nonprofit management and leadership.
