Bringing Nonprofit Storytelling Back to the Campfire with Michael Kass
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In This Episode
What if storytelling returned back toward its oldest purpose: connection?
In this episode, I’m joined by Michael Kass, founder of Story & Spirit, to imagine what it would look like to flip the way we tell nonprofit stories, not as content, not as a tool, not as a mechanism, but as something living. Something that restores connection, belonging, and shared humanity.
And to do that, we must first explore the historical roots of nonprofit storytelling and how many of our inherited fundraising practices were shaped by systems of inequality. Together, we unpack how traditional deficit-based narratives can unintentionally strip agency from communities and reinforce an “us and them” dynamic.
We discuss anchoring asset framing as a practical shift, the difference between cultivating saviorism and cultivating connection, and the rise of artificial intelligence in storytelling and the opportunity it presents to return to something more relational and embodied.
If you have ever felt tension between urgency and integrity in your work, this conversation invites you to widen the frame and imagine storytelling that restores wholeness rather than extracting from it.
About Michael Kass
Michael Kass is the Founder of Story & Spirit where he specializes in facilitation and convening design that fosters transformation through bridging human connection and spiritual practice. Over the past 15 years, he has facilitated convenings and trainings for clients ranging from grassroots nonprofits to Fortune 100 companies, weaving together strategic frameworks with practices that honor the whole human and complex systems. Michael serves on the Advisory Council of the International Dignified Storytelling Project, facilitates breathwork and meditation on InsightTimer, and probably likes chocolate more than you do.
Connect with Michael Kass
Mini Nonprofit Storytelling Mini-Course | Nonprofit Storytelling:
Fundraising & Beyond Course | Ethical Storytelling Resources
Connect with Maria
Speaking & Training | LinkedIn | Email
Transcripts
Maria Bryan: Today we are peeling back the layers of ethical and trauma-informed storytelling, not just as a set of practices, but as a lineage. So much of our modern thinking around community-centered and trauma-informed storytelling is built on the foundation of reckoning with inequality, reckoning with who gets to tell stories, and reckoning with how our sector has often used stories as tools of extraction.
To help us step into that history and understand where the field is going, I’m joined by Michael Kass. Michael is the founder of Story and Spirit, where he creates spaces of transformation through human connection and spiritual practice for more than 15 years. He has designed convenings and trainings for organizations ranging from grassroots nonprofits to Fortune 100 companies, always with a commitment to honoring the whole human side of complex systems.
Michael has been a steady voice in the movement toward dignified and ethical storytelling, helping organizations move beyond extractive narratives and into story practices rooted in dignity, equity, and shared power. Today we explore the roots of ethical storytelling and the complicated truth that trauma has become woven into nonprofit storytelling in ways that need more awareness and care.
I was introduced to Michael Kass when we were on a panel together, which feels ages ago. And Michael, I was just so blown away by your wisdom, and it is truly an honor to have you on When Bearing Witness. So welcome to the show.
Michael Kass: Thank you so much for having me.
Maria Bryan: Yes. And now I consider you a friend. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey and your story through Story and Spirit, and what you’re up to these days?
Michael Kass: I will try to keep this super duper short because it’s a lot.
So Story and Spirit is essentially, think of it as a bucket into which I pour all of my curiosity and work. It came out of, I spent 20-ish years in the nonprofit sector doing fundraising of all kinds: grant writing, individual fundraising, director of development, board development, financial management consulting.
That’s one that broke me.
In like 2010, I left my full-time work and went on my own inner journey of figuring out who I am, what I’m here to do. And so, at the tail end of that journey, I was very spiritually aligned. I was like, I know who I am. I had no way of making money.
And I found myself at a dinner of these social impact entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders that an old coworker invited me to. Everybody’s going around and introducing themselves and they’re impressive people. They started a national food movement and were working with the White House (when the White House was a different thing) on social impact investing.
And it got to me, and I hadn’t said this out loud before, but I just looked at them and, as calmly as I could, I went: I help amazing people like you rediscover and harness the power of your stories to create change.
They went, “Wait, we need you here. Where’s your card?” Which didn’t exist, right? There was also no business.
So I went home, I made a website, and I started weaving together the worlds of storytelling (which I’d been doing since I was a kid, as a performer and a writer) and social impact (which had been the focus of most of my career).
Then, as I started to work with folks, and particularly leaders, on their story, what became really clear is that it’s not just communication. It’s about recovering wholeness.
That when we work the story in a conscious, balanced, good way, it’s about healing. And to really feel, notice, and see, and I’m just going to use the strong word for this: violent. A lot of nonprofit storytelling is against the communities that these organizations serve. And it’s not that the organizations are doing anything wrong. It’s like that violence is woven into the—
Maria Bryan: Yeah.
Michael Kass: And that’s where the ethical, trauma-informed, whatever we want to call it, storytelling work really came from. It was just running up against this wall where those established best practices not only weren’t working super well, but they were actually harmful. Not just to communities, but to organizations and to the sector as a whole.
Maria Bryan: Okay, let’s unpack that, because I firmly believe that stories help move missions. This is why we do storytelling. This is why you and I champion storytelling as well. But it has gone so awry. And I love when you’re able to so clearly articulate how this sector started, and how that brought us where we are today.
So can you bring us back to the beginning, to the history of the social sector, to help us understand why storytelling has become so violent?
Michael Kass: Yeah, let’s go all the way.
Maria Bryan: Yes. Way.
Michael Kass: First of all, the nonprofit sector and the social impact sector as we know it was never supposed to exist. The nonprofits and social impact organizations are now filling gaps that are gigantic, by deficiencies in what the market provides and what the government provides.
Originally, the nonprofit tax status was established by a whole bunch of tax codes from, I think, the late 1800s to the early 1900s. It allowed rich men whose wives were working in volunteer-based, hyper-local organizations to take some of their wealth and protect it from taxation by donating it to these volunteer-based efforts.
So woven into the inception of the sector was the implicit belief that the systemic inequities that were present then were a feature and not a flaw. It was designed to help wealthy people feel better about having all that money, having all those resources. And honestly, to give their wives something to do.
So the type of storytelling that evolved in that, as organizations started to professionalize even a little bit and say, “Oh, you know what? People are working really hard, and it’s no longer just wives or people of means. We’re actually employing humans who need to feed themselves and their families. We need to pay people salaries.” So now we need to raise money for that, because the people we serve, whether it’s kids, communities, whatever, they’re not going to pay for those services.
The people we need to raise money from are rich. They’re the wealthy people. We need to make them feel really good about themselves.
The type of storytelling that arises from that intention is storytelling that now we would call savior storytelling. Right? “Maria, your gift helped little Johnny get a meal. Without you, he would’ve been starving on the street,” right?
And so we, the conventional story, the old-school best practice, I’m just going to use your name because you’re here: “Maria wasn’t doing well. She was having a really rough time. She was just waiting to be seen by a helper. Thankfully, we spotted her. We were able to get Maria into our program, and she really did great with our support, and now she’s stable again. Please, won’t you contribute money so that we can help a hundred other women like Maria, who so deeply need our help.”
In that story, she has no agency. We take agency from someone. That is an act of violence, right? We might not think of it that way. We might roll our eyes and go, “That’s just fundraising.” But that fundraising exists in a context, right? To perpetuate a certain system and way of being.
So historically, the nonprofit sector was never meant to be professional. It was never meant to pay a livable wage.
Maria Bryan: Yes.
Michael Kass: So we’re in this weird situation where it’s the fourth biggest employer in the United States. It’s huge. Yet most people who work in the sector still work under that inherited belief that, “Oh, if I’m going to work in a mission-based way, then that means I’m going to have to struggle financially.” And that kind of unethical storytelling supports that system and those beliefs.
So one more thing and then I’ll stop. You get—
Maria Bryan: Don’t stop. Keep going.
Michael Kass: Well, is that when we talk about changing the way we tell stories, we’re actually also talking about bringing the system back into balance, or completely reorienting the system. Because it was never in balance. It’s not like it was great and then it suddenly went awry. It was always in the design of especially fundraising for grassroots organizations.
Which, I don’t think it’s a coincidence, is where so much of the ethical and trauma-informed storytelling work is taking root most quickly: those smaller grassroots organizations.
Maria Bryan: You’ve brought up a lot. You’re having my head spin.
This idea that the social sector was born from this idea of us and them, and inequality, and actually supporting the system of inequality. And nonprofits, you hope, want to put themselves out of business, right? They want to complete their mission. They want to solve these big problems. And I know it’s nuanced. I get that.
But storytelling is one of those places in the nonprofit space where we still perpetuate this us and them.
And I was actually thinking, and I don’t know what your thoughts are on StoryBrand, but where heroism comes in. And you brought up saviorism. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and we actually talked about it in the storytelling circle.
How, and are you familiar with John Miller’s StoryBrand?
Michael Kass: Yeah. And now StoryBrand 2.0.
Maria Bryan: Okay. I don’t dislike it as a business owner. The whole idea is you’re trying to have empathy with the person that you’re selling to, and you make them the hero of the story.
And how complicated that gets in the nonprofit sector when you take that. That’s what we’ve been doing from the beginning, where instead of selling a product directly to someone, what we’re selling is someone’s misfortune, someone’s poverty, whatever the problem that you’re solving.
And it’s just, the dots are complicated. Because you’re telling the donor, you’re not selling them empathy, right? You’re selling them saviorism.
And I do think that we can make it about empathy, or at least about the donor’s journey. I don’t know what’s percolating for you.
Michael Kass: There’s so much there.
One is, there’s a fundamental difference in running a for-profit business and a not-for-profit business, which is exactly what you said. In a for-profit business, I’m selling you a widget. So whatever: it could be a consulting hour, it could be a teddy bear. There’s a direct exchange.
In the nonprofit sector, you always need a subsidy business. Always. Which means you’re not selling a widget. What you’re doing, and the way it’s been done, just to amplify what you said, has been to sell saviorism.
And the way that we have been trained to cultivate empathy in the selling of that saviorism is to exploit trauma, to exploit difference.
There’s a whole other way of doing it, which is to cultivate belonging. Instead of “Please help us,” it’s “Join and support.” One way you can do that is financially. There are other ways.
This kind of tracks back to something that Edgar Villanueva, who wrote Decolonizing Wealth, talks about, which is the difference between the colonized mindset and the Indigenous mindset. The colonized mindset is predicated on separation and exploitation. If we want to really promote healing through story (in Edgar’s case, it’s money), but through story, then we want to promote connection and belonging.
That’s a fundamentally different type of storytelling that is now being called ethical storytelling. Trauma-informed storytelling is definitely part of it. But at a deeper level, what we’re doing is saying, “Hey, we’ve been doing a disservice to everyone. We’ve been doing it unintentionally.” Nobody’s set out to do this. But once we have awareness and we say, “Wait, I actually want to cultivate a greater sense of belonging and connection with my community,” now we have a choice. Because there are now vetted, researched ways of structuring and telling stories that advance those more healing-centered values.
And it’s really powerful. I think there was research that came out of the international aid sector that showed that storytelling that was participant-led was like 35% more effective than traditional fundraising. Meaning that people shared their own stories. They said, “This is what we would like to share with our community of support.” And it works better. It works better not for everyone. There are still some old-school people out there. But it generally works.
Maria Bryan: Oh, I have to find that research. People are asking me all the time for the receipts.
Michael Kass: I’ll send it.
Maria Bryan: Okay.
Michael Kass: It’s very—
Maria Bryan: All right, guys, hold on tight. I’ll get it for you.
Michael Kass: The other thing was StoryBrand. It was designed for a very specific thing, but it’s not really storytelling. It’s structuring information, which is different, right?
Some of it is more case study than story, because story actually asks for vulnerability. Story asks for a certain heart-centered approach. And when most people implement StoryBrand, at least from what I’ve seen, they don’t really do that. They’re structuring information in a way to trigger a certain set of reactions, which is really storytelling for sales, which is very different than what nonprofits are being asked to do.
Maria Bryan: It’s so wildly different. StoryBrand was very meaningful for my business, and then for a year I taught it. I integrated it into messaging retreats that I did.
So I am, and even that appeal example you gave, is exactly the appeals that I wrote the 10 years that I was working in-house.
And at first it was just like, “The problem is the pain points.” But it goes beyond the pain points. From a trauma-informed perspective, how we need to be cautious with folks’ pain points.
There’s so much about integrating StoryBrand into nonprofits that, again, just centers donors and their taking ownership of the transformation of the folks that we work with and serve, instead of speaking to their own transformation.
And even that makes me a little bit uncomfortable. Not that we can’t take pride and have a legacy, but I don’t know. I still struggle with it.
Like as a mother, it feels good to me to have us be involved in the community, and for my girls to understand inequalities in our community. That feels good to me as a parent. Also, being involved in nonprofits is a way that I was able to integrate into my little community in Tallahassee, having come from New York.
So there is a transformation that I’ve experienced being a donor. And I feel like that’s where we can use StoryBrand. Maybe. I don’t know what your thoughts are when we talk more about our own transformations, although it’s not nearly as exciting as some of these other stories that we can tell.
Michael Kass: Maybe not, but you have to consider the audience, right? If you’re speaking to an audience of people just like you who are prospective donors, and you tell them your story of why you became a donor, right? That is a very different thing.
I guess the question underneath that is: why are we always telling clients’ stories? There are other stories.
Maria Bryan: Why, exactly.
Michael Kass: Right? Our board members have stories. Our staff have stories.
Because the story arises from the interplay of the story itself, the storyteller, and the audience. And we’ve defaulted often in nonprofits to this kind of anonymous organization-voice storyteller, and our audience is “donor,” but we can subdivide that, right?
If my audience is a potential contributor who’s skeptical about our mission, the only person they’ll listen to is someone who was once skeptical of our mission and went on a journey of discovery. They’re not going to care about the client story because they’re already skeptical.
So there’s space in this conversation. And what I work with folks around in workshops a lot is expanding the universe of stories. Not just whose voice isn’t here, who isn’t at the table on the community side, but on your organization side.
Like I’ve done so many board retreats where there’s tension between the staff and the board because they don’t know each other. And as soon as they come together and share, “What’s a moment you felt the impact of our mission,” that sense of division goes away. Because now they really see each other.
And at a base level, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about taking a process that has unintentionally become very dehumanizing and bringing deep humanity and connection back into it.
Maria Bryan: I think about, I worked at a community health center in Chinatown, New York City for five years. And every year we had two huge health fairs, one in Chinatown, one in Flushing, Queens. And for some reason it never rained those days.
And for me, I always felt spiritual about it. Like I felt like it was the universe thanking us for what we do in our community. And that’s my story, and it’s powerful.
But I was so proud of that mission. I was so proud of that organization. I was the communications manager.
When we ask people, we ask, “Can you tell a story of the people that you directly work with?” But to ask a staff member, “What’s your emotional, spiritual relationship with this organization? What gives you goosebumps? What keeps you going when it’s just so hard and can feel so hopeless, but you get up and you still do it?”
So what’s that story?
Especially when I did a trauma-informed storytelling training for an organization that works with folks who are unhoused and have severe substance use and mental health challenges that they’re walking through.
And it was the very beginning of me teaching this. So I really was pressing into: find that hope. Don’t focus on the pain, focus on the hope and transformation.
He was like, “We do not have those stories. I don’t know what stories you want me to tell. We don’t have those stories.”
And it opened up a really interesting conversation of: then what’s your story? Why do you get up every day for the past decade as the CEO of this organization and keep doing it?
That in and of itself is so poignant and so important.
Michael Kass: Yes. Yeah. My brain went in five different directions.
Also, this element when I hear folks say, “We don’t have those stories of hope.” It’s not true. It just means that they’ve been focusing on the deficits, right?
So there’s this whole area of asset framing, where it’s not that you’re ignoring all of the terrible things that have happened. You’re simply starting with someone’s dreams, someone’s aspirations, someone’s strengths.
So instead of: “When we met Michael, he was addicted to drugs,” you would literally start with: “Michael dreams of being a cook. He’s like a wizard in the kitchen. Unfortunately, he got sidelined by involvement with drugs.”
There’s the thing, right? There’s a cognitive anchor that happens if the first thing you learn about someone is that they’re living on the streets, addicted. It doesn’t matter if they become like a Nobel laureate. You’re always going to see them as someone who experienced living on the streets.
But if you start with the Nobel laureate, or the aspiration to become a scientist, that changes everything.
And it really can be as simple as: start with assets.
I’d be curious if you’ve gotten this, but as we start to unpack this, often their eyes will widen and they’ll go, “Oh my God, where do I even start?” You can just start with asset framing. It’s such a small thing that nobody will notice, and yet because we know what brains do, we know that it’s having an impact on people’s assumptions and attitudes, whether it’s toward program participants, board members, staff members, or whoever the storyteller is.
Maria Bryan: And I do talk a lot about asset framing, but not anchoring the story in the asset framing.
And I love that idea of: we don’t have to start with the problem and then sneak asset framing in there. But what if we anchor the story in those dreams and aspirations and what’s possible? Where does that take the story? Inevitably from there—
Michael Kass: Yeah. And where does it take our positioning?
If we start with a problem, we’re already positioning the donor as the solution, which is saviorism. If we start with a dream or aspiration, we are positioning them as a co-conspirator, a helper, a collaborator in the service of dreams. In the service of strengths. And that alone is such a huge shift.
There’s another piece of this, which is: when we start to change the way we share stories, depending on the organization, it’s often really powerful to share with people why we’re doing that. Because they’ll miss, we get addicted to those savior stories.
It literally triggers a dopamine response that then gets relieved when we write a check. But if we say, “Hey, we’ve done a really bad job with our storytelling. We’ve done harm. Oops. We’re really sorry. Here’s how we’re going to do things going forward.”
Doctors Without Borders did this really well. And it really helps people build that awareness, and then they have a choice. Because without the awareness, it’s not really a choice.
Maria Bryan: I know exactly what you’re talking about, and I’ll link that YouTube video where this white woman actually says, “Here’s a picture of me in this appeal letter.” And what you don’t know is we cropped out the parents and the other doctors who were doctors of color that were local to this community.
It’s a very powerful video on their reckoning with how they do international storytelling.
So I’m feeling actually more encouraged than a pit in my stomach as we’re talking, because I think more and more folks are open to these conversations.
The fact that more people are asking me for research, I think is really promising, because they don’t want that research for themselves, right? They want that research for the board and the leadership, because they believe in it.
So I’m curious, Michael: what do you dream about for the next decade, storytelling? Not just nonprofit storytelling, but all storytelling. What do you hope to maybe be the new norm, or the direction where we are embracing, just like letting go of violent storytelling and embracing a new way?
Michael Kass: I can’t answer that question without talking a little bit about AI.
Maria Bryan: Okay.
Michael Kass: Recently, AI, when it first came out, I was like, “Whoa, this can change everything.” Nobody really knew about it yet. It was early 2023, and I just started teaching workshops to nonprofits on it.
And it’s a very good, bad storyteller.
What I mean is, with a very simple prompt, it can give you a beautifully structured, StoryBrand-type story that when you read it, you’re like, “That sounds great. Cut, print, let’s go.” But it doesn’t have any soul. It doesn’t have any connection.
It does all of those unethical storytelling practices that we’ve been talking about. Not because it’s evil, but because it’s been trained on unethical storytelling practices.
Which creates a huge opportunity for storytelling to rehumanize. To bring back that idea that even if I’m writing an appeal letter, I’m inviting you around a campfire with me. I’m sharing something that is deeply important to me.
That energy that I am transmitting through story, because at the end of the day, stories, and this is really old-school stuff, stories are spells. Stories are enchantments. Stories build worlds.
And we’ve flattened story to being about, “Oh, it’s a mechanism. It’s a tool.” Now we call it content. That’s horrible. Content is a widget. A story is a living, breathing, vital being.
So if I were to really lean into the opportunity that AI is opening up by being so good at bad storytelling and say that we can drop back into the real power of story, which is connection and belonging and transmission. Not just of information, but of emotion and history and values.
Throughout human history, this is the role that story has played. People’s culture, the DNA of their values, wasn’t transmitted through bullet lists or binders. It was around campfires. It was people singing their stories.
And we see that emerging, or reemerging, on the fringes of things.
So in my dream world, that’s the ethos that starts to arise around storytelling, not just generally but particularly in the nonprofit sector. That we’re inviting people to the campfire and saying, “Hey, times are hard. Things are really hard right now. There’s a lot going on. The systems that we’ve depended on for stability and reliability are crumbling. That’s real. What story do we want to build from that?”
So that would be the dream. And literally, I want it to look like campfires. I want, instead of big galas, there’s a room or a field full of little campfires, and people gather around them, share their stories, and then, if it’s fundraising, they write checks. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Because money is just energy. When we bring it back into relationships, suddenly the whole system changes. Because it’s like: everything’s in alignment. Great.
Right now everything’s sideways and weird, and there’s some misalignment, which is what we feel.
And to your point, I think people are so curious about ethical storytelling, and these conversations aren’t new. They’ve been going on for decades. They just haven’t had a framework or a space to have those conversations in a structured way. So it’s mostly led to frustration.
But now, there are so many people out there carrying this forward. And that brings me so much hope and so much joy, to see how it’s starting to really multiply.
Maria Bryan: Absolutely. I think this idea of moving storytelling into a space that looks more like sitting around a campfire would be so regulating for nervous systems, like for all the communicators and marketers and fundraisers out there.
You don’t have to be collecting a dozen stories a month, or even a year. Let’s just be together and share these really important stories.
And we don’t have to have them so structured.
What I’m gleaning from you is AI is getting us to the point where our communications are so standardized that we are going to revert back to what stories are meant to be.
And I love this idea of them being living, breathing things. I love that. And I hope for that. I’m here for that future.
Michael Kass: Yeah. Thank you for that.
It’s interesting. There’s something else in what you said, which is the addiction to new stories. That’s new.
Traditionally, we told the same stories over and over. I worked for an organization in Los Angeles where the founder, who wasn’t even associated with the organization anymore, every year would take the whole staff to breakfast and share the founding story of the organization. Because he knew the power of story around a campfire.
So this was around a diner table. But every year, even though people had heard that story, some of them 10, 20 times, would hear it and it would re-energize us and go, “Oh, that’s why I’m here.”
Maria Bryan: And it brings me back to the first nonprofit I worked at, Charles B. Wong Community Health Center, where everyone who was in leadership at the time founded that organization. When they were in their late teens and twenties, they were like hippies in the 70s and started this movement in Chinatown for equitable healthcare for Chinese immigrants.
And we had footage from that time and pictures. And it’s grounding. Those founding stories are so powerful.
Michael Kass: And those in particular have a ritual, right? That every time we tell them with intention, we’re weaving people into community.
Whereas with traditional fundraising letters or best-practice fundraising letters, the idea of violence comes up again because in the trainings I’ll say, “Okay, so here’s how you trigger this.” That’s a violent word.
Maria Bryan: It literally is a violent word.
Michael Kass: It’s a violent word. “We’re triggering…” We’ve got to, “Here’s where we go on the attack…”
I’m like, what are we—?
Maria Bryan: We’re an army.
Michael Kass: What are we fighting? Yeah. We’re a fundraising army.
Which, you know, yeah. I just got a vision of universities that have massive fundraising departments, and they’re all very fancy, or at least they used to all wear suits and stuff. It’s like regiments of fundraisers going out into the—
Maria Bryan: And I’d imagine when you talk about the beginnings of the social sector, a lot of them were tied to, I’m sure, Catholicism and Christianity, which is very religious military symbolism. Like, so heavy in military symbolism.
Michael Kass: Yes. Yes.
Maria Bryan: Yeah. These things stick.
Michael, this has been so enlightening, such a joy. And like I said, sometimes I have these conversations and I feel a lump, like, where do we go from here? But I actually feel really hopeful from this conversation.
Can you tell us a little bit about your storytelling course, which is evergreen and timeless, and how else others can connect with you, learn more from you, and work with you?
Michael Kass: Absolutely. Yeah.
So the course, we were talking about it before we started the recording, was really—I’ve moved away from doing one-on-one organizational work. It’s 15, almost 20 years of material and approaches and tools that I haven’t seen other people use.
And so the course was basically my capstone project for my nonprofit storytelling consulting, saying: “Here’s everything I’ve learned about audience analysis, about the history of story, and how we can bring it into not just fundraising, but the healing of our sector and into our leadership.”
So it’s got everything in there: from the science of storytelling, what’s happening in our brain and body when we’re around a campfire (to your point, it actually does regulate our nervous system), to different storytelling structures and techniques that go beyond the traditional challenge-solving story arc, to ethical storytelling and story as a wellbeing practice.
It’s really comprehensive. And that’s on my website, storyandspirit.org/nonprofitstorytelling.
And then the other thing I’ll share with you, and you can share with folks, I have a dedicated ethical storytelling page that’s available for free on my website that has so many of the resources we talked about: the video, the research, some white papers I wrote. And I’d love for everybody to just have access to that.
Maria Bryan: Michael, what a joy. Thank you so much for being on the show and for what you’ve done for the sector and for storytelling.
You’ve left an imprint, and I appreciate it.
Michael Kass: Oh, thank you. Now I feel emotions. That means a lot. Thank you. I’m having—I’m catching feelings, which I know is not the proper use of that phrase.
But no, I really appreciate it. I remember when we met on that panel, I was like, “Oh my God, there are really smart, cool people doing this work. This is awesome.”
Maria Bryan: Yeah, it feels good. Because it always feels isolating in the beginning, and then you’re like what you said before: no idea is a new idea. There are other people out there that care and are trying to pave the way.
All right. Thanks, Michael.