Conference

Breakfast Keynote

Speaker: Penelope Burk

Penelope Burk understands donors and what they want more deeply than just about anyone in the business. In the last fifteen years, she and her innovative firm, Cygnus Applied Research, Inc., have conducted surveys and research studies with more than a quarter million American donors. She has reached back into their lives to find out about the first time they gave, what motivates their philanthropy now, what their greatest and most frustrating experiences in giving are, and what their dreams are for their philanthropic future.

Penelope's contributions to the fundraising industry can be best summed up as a long list of "firsts":
* She was the first fundraising author to back up her ideas and solutions with evidence from donors
* The first to bring the problem of Donor Attrition to the attention of the fundraising industry, pointing out how much money not-for-profits were losing by failing to hold onto their donors
* The first to offer an evidence-based formula for keeping donors giving longer and inspiring them to make more generous contributions
* The first to document what leadership volunteers do best and how they can raise more money for their organizations by saying thank you the donor-centered way
* The first to document the real impact of the high rate of turnover among professional fundraisers and the first to bring innovative solutions to the table to keep fundraisers loyal, raising more money, and still leaving the office at 5 o'clock!

Penelope is the author of the fundraising classic, Donor-Centered Fundraising and she has just published a completely updated and substantially expanded second edition containing all-new research with donors. She has also written two other books as well as more than fifty seminars and dramatic plays.

Lunch Keynote

Speaker: Father Gregory Boyle

Gregory Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, Calif., the largest gang intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world.

A Jesuit priest, from 1986 to 1992 Father Boyle served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church, then the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles that also had the highest concentration of gang activity in the city.

Father Boyle witnessed the devastating impact of gang violence on his community during the so-called "decade of death" that began in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and peaked at 1,000 gang-related killings in 1992.  In the face of law enforcement tactics and criminal justice policies of suppression and mass incarceration as the means to end gang violence, Father Boyle and parish and community members adopted what was a radical approach at the time: treat gang members as human beings.

In 1988 they started what would eventually become Homeboy Industries, which employs and trains former gang members in a range of social enterprises, as well as provides critical services to thousands of men and women who walk through its doors every year seeking a better life.

Father Boyle is the author of the 2010 New York Times-bestseller Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion.  His 2017 book is the Los Angeles Times-bestseller Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship.

He has received the California Peace Prize and been inducted into the California Hall of Fame.  In 2014, the White House named Father Boyle a Champion of Change.  He received the University of Notre Dame's 2017 Laetare Medal, the oldest honor given to American Catholics.