FBW: Mazarine from Wild Woman Fundraising with a Message of Hope and Survival (Ms. June)

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I’m just gonna come out and say it. I had three years of abusive bosses. First, I worked at a women’s shelter.  I raised more money with appeals and grants and events than they had ever raised before. I came to work on time, every day with a smile, and my boss didn’t care about that. I did my job, but despite that, she just seemed to get people on her shit-list and then she decided it was time for them to go. She went through 30 people in a 20 person agency in 18 months. She was an abusive head of an anti-abuse agency. She refused to meet with me for 6 months. I kept trying to meet with her, and she just kept putting me off.  Then she decided I should leave. No warning, no performance review, no nothing. Just out the door. After I got fired, one of my co-workers got fired for absolutely no reason at all.

After that, she decided that she would take staff away from a shelter that needed 24-7 staffing. Women we were sheltering started prostituting themselves out of the shelter. She eventually found out, kicked the women out, but didn’t call the cops, because then it would have come out what a bad leader she was. She didn’t want to take responsibility for her actions. So she kept using the shelter, despite the fact that it was now known to pimps and johns all over the area, and was no longer a safe place for women in crisis. This is the kind of bad boss that I had. Thankfully she “resigned.”

The boss after her was even worse. He took the government grant-mandated cost of living raises for the social worker staff and put it into his own salary. He took donor-allocated funds of $50,000 from a woman who willed her savings to a program and put those into his own salary as well. He got paid $120,000 per year, and everyone else got paid $10-$14 per hour. He was never in the office, never did any fundraising, never supervised anyone, put one of his cronies into a program director position (a person who didn’t even know how to use email), took himself out to dinner with the nonprofit credit card, and got it taken away from him because of that, but he still didn’t get fired.

On top of that, I raised him $130,000 in grants, (up from $40,000 the year before I came on) and $100,000 more with an event and he didn’t care, he screamed at me anyway, whenever he felt like it, then he stopped meeting with me too, and then decided to fire me with absolutely no warning, no performance review, nothing. He was a horrible person. After him, I just didn’t trust bosses anymore. I didn’t trust any organization that had an “employment at-will” contract.

I got an up-close and personal look at workplace abuse. I even wrote extensively about workplace abuse in my book and on my blog, so that other people surviving in these situations could help themselves understand what was going on. I am telling you my story so that if you are in a bad situation, you can see that there is hope, there is life after your workplace abuse.

When I was fired in 2009, I was incredibly scared, yet exhilarated. I was stuck in the middle of the swiftest and most decimating downturn our country had ever seen. And worse, I was in one of the worst cities in America to be in, aside from maybe Detroit.  I was in Portland, Oregon, with a city motto of, “The City That Works.” This city had a 25% unofficial unemployment rate, and people I saw around town wryly joked that Portland was “The City That Doesn’t Work.” Thanks to excellent marketing, and a cheap cost of living, people moved there in droves from 1995 to 2009, which kept wages low, and unemployment high, making it the self-employment capital of America. Mostly in food carts, as far as I could see.

My low-paying nonprofit jobs and high county taxes had left me with no savings. Even though I was a very successful fundraiser, raising more with events and grants than had ever been received before, I had given all of my hard work to corporations that didn’t care about me anymore. Without my title, I was suddenly a nobody. I didn’t know what I was going to do. My family had never understood why I wanted to change the world, why I had to go off to the west coast and deny their continuous advice to become a dentist. They didn’t have much sympathy, and I knew I couldn’t go back.

So I fired off resumes every week, went to networking events, asked around in my social circles, and even with my interviewing skills, after seven or eight interviews over the course of four months, and hearing that they had decided not to hire anyone at all, or hire a consultant instead, I started to see the pattern.  Manufacturing had left Portland for cheaper shores, and with that, a lot of money. There were a lot of shops closing up. No one could afford to buy. Goodwill was bursting with newly desperate people clutching third-hand shoes. It became a low-paid service economy, like much of America. Nonprofits didn’t have money to hire because their own donors didn’t have as much money. I had to abandon this dying economy.

So I decided to vote with my feet and get out to Austin, Texas, which had a slightly better economy than much of the rest of America. As soon as I laid eyes on sunny Austin on October 5^th, 2009, I loved it.

But then the problem became, “How do I get started in a new city where I have no network at all?” I started to read about internet marketing. I bought a domain, created my first WordPress site, and started to blog professionally in November, 2009.  Since 1999 I had been writing on the internet in one form or another, and had a personal blog, but never thought of blogging as something that could support me.

Then I started to read. I realized that I had the tools and the time to create a reputation for myself that no one could take from me with the whims of the economy. I started to write. I started to blog about nonprofit management and fundraising 5 days a week in February 2010. My stats skyrocketed to 7,000 readers per month. In April 2010, I started my own newsletter. I got 100 subscribers quickly, and worked hard on my social media marketing, and when I published my first book in November, 2010, I sold copies quickly all over the world.

Suddenly, I was getting calls to speak, to get syndicated, to endorse products, and people were asking me to fundraise for them, and to teach them how to do what I was doing. It’s a far cry from being an unemployed nonprofit nobody living on spaghetti and scouring craigslist for free wood to heat the apartment.

In 2011 I’m speaking all over the country, my book was called one of the top 10 nonprofit books of 2010 by a famous blogger and activist named Beth Kanter with millions of followers, and I’ve been consulting with organizations to implement their digital media presences as well. It all could not have happened without blogging and the hard work of building a community.

This is my story of violence and survival. If you are in a bad situation, whether it’s domestic violence or sexual violence, whether it’s a workplace abuse situation or an elder abuse situation, just know that there is help, there is hope, and you can have a better life once you leave. My life is 100% better now. Your life can be too.

Mazarine Treyz is the author of The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising speaker, workshop presenter, social media expert, and encaustic art teacher. She’s passionate about teaching people how to change the world.