EP 96 Jeff Mazur | Executive Director, LaunchCode

The Charity Charge Show

In Episode 96 of the Charity Charge Show, Stephen talks to Jeff Mazur, Executive Director of LaunchCode, whose mission is offering free tech education and job placement opportunities to bring new people from all backgrounds into the tech field and reshape the way employers think about hiring. Stephen and Jeff Mazur talk about LaunchCode's impact on providing people with the skills to enter a career in tech, creating a sustainable revenue stream to facilitate growth within a nonprofit, and the importance of embracing a learning mindset.

Jeff Mazur is an experienced executive with a proven record of leading nonprofit organizations through growth and strategic change. Presently heading LaunchCode, a high-impact workforce and economic development organization with an acute focus on helping regions flourish via technology education, civic partnership and corporate engagement.

Jeff Mazur on embracing a learning mindset:

What I've learned is that the longer I do this work, the less and less I know, and that that's actually a good thing that I should want to be true. I want to be comfortable with not knowing as a leader, because as we do more, and as we grow, there are new things that I ultimately am responsible for making decisions about that are entirely unexplored in the prior history of the organization and my tenure with it. So I don't know the answers to those new things but that's okay. Learning the answers and coming up with what we think as a team would be the best solutions is the highest order work that I can do in the organization. That was honestly somewhat surprising to discover, because the assumption might be "Well, in the first year, you're going to find some things that you never did before. In the second year, you're going to kind of get it down. Then the third or fourth or fifth year it's all old hat" And But I've found that not to be true. If it were true, it would be a signal to me that I, and we as leaders, weren't pushing the organization to do enough new things or to change itself and evolve or figure out how to test the edges of the space that we work in.