ProInspire Fellow Featured by Boston University College of Communication

Ivellisse Morales, 2014 Bay Area Fellow

Ivi eloquently explains that it was through her participation in the ProInspire Fellowship that she was able to join Year Up Bay Area and redirect her career to the nonprofit sector.  She began her career as an account executive at a communications company and was able to rise up to Communications Manager while at Year Up.  Ivi mentions that she has enjoyed career acceleration working at a nonprofit in conjunction with her ProInspire training.  

We are proud that Ivi was able to achieve her career goals and contribute to an important mission at Year Up! The entire ProInspire team extends a hearty congratulations to Ivi Morales!

An excerpt of the article featuring Ivi is below. The full article is article is available here.

Ivellisse Morales, a nonprofit marketing and communications professional in the San Francisco Bay area, describes it this way: “I’m not going about it alone.”

Morales (’12) works for Year Up, an organization that prepares low-income young adults for professional careers. Its intensive one-year program combines training, college credits and internships at corporate partners.

Morales tries to “heavily engage our corporate partners” in promotions. When she shares the story of a successful program graduate, she can ask a partner like Bank of America to help popularize it, too. The story can be splashed on a heavily visited corporate website and the charity’s Twitter feed. The result: The nonprofit reaches potential new participants—perhaps even inspires some new donors—and a big bank burnishes its reputation.

Morales joined Year Up on a fellowship from ProInspire, a leadership development organization. The fellowship, which places young professionals in nonprofits, pairs them with a career coach and offers monthly trainings. Fellows also get a salary in the mid-to-high $40,000s. For some it’s a pay cut—the average salary for an account executive is $53,100, according to the Public Relations Society of America—but it’s still above the national average starting salary for a communications graduate reported by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. For Morales, working at a nonprofit has accelerated her career in a way that may not have been possible anywhere else.

“I went from [being] an account executive at an agency to the manager of marketing and communications,” says Morales, who started her career at Cone Communications in Boston. “For me to become an account director at an agency could’ve taken seven years.”

In his COM class, Downes tells students to beware common misconceptions about nonprofit work. First, he says, not all nonprofits are the same. The government lists some 30 types, from soup kitchens to colleges, for tax purposes. The second misconception—and perhaps most damaging—is that turning your back on profit-making enterprises will hurt you in the pocket.

“Talk to the executive director of the American Red Cross,” says Downes. “Look at that person’s salary and you’ll see there’s a lot of money being exchanged.” Schwartz notes that nonprofits had some of the larger PR budgets at his agency.

Not that everything is about the money. Downes recalls the words of one nonprofit stalwart who had no regrets about not joining the corporate world: “My life has been very good because I wasn’t promoting tin cans. I was promoting children’s health.”

That’s what Morales has found. She says that a lot of ProInspire Fellows stay with their nonprofits and that she’d strongly consider doing the same. “They get a taste of the work and the fulfillment it brings. It’s really a game changer. A lot of my friends come to me for advice; they’re two to three years into their careers, working in the cubicle in a big city, and they’re starting to not feel fulfilled.”