Evan Green:

Welcome back to Whitley Penn Talks. My name is Evan Green. I’m an audit partner in Whitley Penn’s Midland and Odessa offices. And I have joined forces with Emily Landry out of our Fort Worth office to continue our Whitley Penn Cares podcast series and expand to the Permian Basin. So we’re here today with Autumn Vest, who is the executive director at Midland Shared Spaces. And we’re excited to have a conversation about MSS with her today.

Welcome Autumn.

Autumn Vest: 
I’m super excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Evan Green:
Yeah, me as well. So Autumn, I’d just like to get it kicked off with just a little bit of your background and how you got into kind of the nonprofit space because I know I did not grow up wanting to be an accountant and it just kind of happened on me. And the nonprofit area and organization that you’re with is kind of a unique space. So could you just give us some background on how you might have gotten interested in the path that led you to being the executive director at Midland Shared Spaces?

Autumn Vest:
Yeah, absolutely. I like to tell my story because I’m a little bit of a unique bird. I actually landed in nonprofits with intention and it started all the way back when I was a kid. moved to Midland, I was four years old, so I am almost native Midlander, almost. But I am a native West Texan. And when I was a kid, my mom would volunteer with the Midland Memorial Hospital Auxiliary and she would take me with her.

Whenever she was volunteering throughout my elementary school years, I was often in the gift shop, often helping with flower arrangements and baby pictures and those things in the hospital. That by the time I was in junior high, I became a candy striper and I spent six years through junior high and high school volunteering with regularity and consistency. I was a Girl Scout early on and so I was very exposed to being as a part of the nonprofit community. I was very exposed to volunteerism.

And when I graduated from high school here in Midland and went to Texas Tech for my undergraduate, I just kind of continued that work through internships. And I was one of the ones that took the unpaid internships. And I had the joy of working with the Children’s Miracle Network at the University Medical Center. And that was the first time for me that the pieces started to click, that there was an opportunity in that kind of work that I could actually make a career of making an impact to my community. And so it really started in that moment. I continued volunteering through internships there and then later with the Texas Tech Health Science Center in Odessa. And as I came back to Midland after graduation from tech, I began to pursue my master’s at University of Texas Permian Basin in Odessa and actually graduated with a master’s degree in public administration with a focus in both economic development and nonprofit management.

And so I just continued and started working in nonprofits in Midland and now 21 years later I’m still in the sector and I could not imagine my life any different. Before coming to MSS I was the executive director of Sibley Nature Center which is a phenomenal nonprofit here and as I was working there, know, my predecessor is actually the founder. I’m the second executive director here at MSS and I had actually known my predecessor since I was about five years old.

And I had a conversation with my mother one day when I was at a meeting here at MSS and said, know, someday, someday she’s going to retire. And I think I really liked to work there. And I kid you not, within 30 days, she announced that she was leaving MSS. And so my mom called me up and said, are you going to do something about it? And I did. And I put in my application. And just a few months later, I became the executive director. And I’ve been honored now to be here for seven years.

Evan Green:
Yeah, that’s awesome. It sounds like it was kind of meant to be from a very young age, which is it’s pretty kind of rare, especially in the nonprofit space. That’s great. So it sounds like you’re really familiar with the organization before becoming the executive director. Do you have a lot of the background on, you know, why MSS was formed in the first place and the goal, you know, forming in the background for the organization?

Autumn Vest:
Yeah, absolutely. So we actually began as a project of the funders round table, which here in the Permian basin, we have a very extensive philanthropic community that has made up a lot of local foundations, family and community foundations. And we are so very blessed with the philanthropic spirit here in West Texas.

And so those funders come together at what they call the funders round table, often once a month to have conversations about what the challenges are in the community, what requests they’re seeing from local nonprofits, and how they can better engage and support those efforts to address our community needs. so, way back 2009, 2010, this conversation started to happen around the number of capital campaigns that were being put in place by nonprofits. There were a lot of requests coming to foundations and community funders and individual donors asking for money specific to space, that was administrative space, program space, meeting space, building something new or improving something existing. There was just a lot of need around that. And then the cost of construction then, in the 2010 time, it was pretty high. mean, our costs are still high now.

But thinking about, how could those foundations and those community funders come together to better address that issue in a way that was really impactful without building 12 different nonprofit facilities? And so they did some research. They brought in a group out of, at the time, Denver, Colorado. It is now called the Nonprofit Centers Network. Actually, it was called the Nonprofit Centers Network. It’s now the Community Spaces Network, CSN.

And they came in and did a feasibility study in our community on behalf of the funders and found out that there was a need for space like a shared space, that there was a donor base that would support something like that. And from that became Midland Shared Spaces. And so the building that we reside in was actually, it’s an existing building that’s part of Clay Dust Day here in Midland, which is a well-known kind of business area. And the facility at the time was up for sale.

I had another nonprofit that had been occupying it. And so it was just a perfect timing, sort of perfect storm. And the facility was purchased, totally renovated and opened the doors in January of 2014. So we are just finishing the celebration year in 2024 of our 10th anniversary. We’re in our 11th year. And we now house at least 12 nonprofits.

So when you think about how those funders made that impact, instead of building 12 individual buildings, they’ve now brought 12 nonprofits together to be able to access phenomenal office space, shared resources, economic efficiencies in a way that is really beneficial to them and helps them and allows them to focus on their mission and delivery of programs.

Evan Green:
Yeah, that is awesome. It’s a really unique kind of thought process. First, forming a nonprofit to specifically, for the purpose of specifically helping other nonprofits, but just seeing that there’s a need for these spaces across the board for the other nonprofit organizations. And like you mentioned, I mean, we probably are taking 12 different buildings that would have had to be built, cutting the cost in one twelfth and helping all these nonprofits at once, under one kind of roof and at a fraction of the cost of what it would have cost all these other nonprofits to form and build a space for themselves. So it’s a really unique idea and I love that we’re celebrating 10 years. So congratulations on 10 successful years and hopefully for many, many more. the facility, yeah, right.

So the facility that we’ve built now and assisting here for 12 nonprofits local to Midland Odessa, what kind of, I guess, spaces and rooms and facilities are available to these nonprofits? What do we have there to help them out?

Autumn Vest:
Yeah, so each of the nonprofits have dedicated office space or administrative space. Our primary focus here at MSS is really to support their administrative needs. So many of our tenants actually do their programming in partnership with other entities, whether that’s churches or schools or even the city of Midland using their parks and rec department and things like that. And so they really needed a place where they can do the business of the nonprofit. And that’s what our focus is.

So each of the nonprofits have their dedicated fully furnished office spaces so they can walk in the doors with nothing but their data and be ready to work here at MSS. And that’s really the biggest part of what we try to accomplish. And when I say nothing but their data, we’ll talk about it a little bit later, but that’s one of the things that we also help manage by providing IT services and the IT equipment that they need at their desktop. And so we have those dedicated office spaces. We’ve also got two work rooms that are high capacity.

You know, big printers are there for them to do all of their mail outs and the things that our donors are so used to getting from us, whether that’s newsletters or end of year giving letters, things like that. We also have seven different meeting spaces. You know, everybody has to have board meetings, committee meetings, program meetings, all of those kinds of activities. And so there’s room here at MSS for our tenants to be able to access those with regularity. And we’ve also got some larger program space that allows them to have something like a small dinner event or a luncheon or things of that nature. And so we call that our community room that brings in up to about 75 people to be able to enjoy connecting with nonprofits. And it’s really centered on a situation where all of our tenant spaces are on the outer perimeter of the building and all of our shared spaces, all of our meeting rooms are in the interior. And our goal is to get people out of their offices into the interior interacting with one another interacting with people in the shared walkways so that they start to build community and network.

Evan Green:
Yeah, that’s great. it’s a great the layout sounds really, you know, conducive to to like you mentioned, a community environment and helping some interaction here and there. Whereas, you know, if they had their own spaces that wouldn’t, you know, that wouldn’t exist and that wouldn’t happen if they had 12 different facilities. So that’s that’s awesome. And it’s cool that we’re not just talking about a shell of a building that they’re allowed to come use and then, you know, they’re on their own for IT infrastructure and try to figure all that out.

So we’re helping them out with a venue, but we’re also helping them out with some of those crucial and core services that they’re going to need to be able to operate. And I know that’s got to be really beneficial to these organizations. I’m also told that there’s a podcast studio at MSS. And so before we even brought you on, I didn’t realize we were hiring and bringing in an expert in podcasting. So we really appreciate that as well.

Autumn Vest:
Yeah, no, actually the podcast studio is part of a dedicated tenant space. We house the recording library of West Texas that provides programming for the visually impaired. And so they record here. They also have a podcast studio that’s available for other nonprofits to come in and participate with. And we ourselves at MSS host a podcast to, so listeners, here’s my plug. It’s called State of the Nonprofits. And I welcome you to tune in if you like this voice, keep coming back.

Evan Green:

Awesome. Yeah, perfect. Well, that’s great. it’s just a lot of benefit to nonprofits that are already typically lacking in resources and to be able to provide that for multiple at once. It’s very impactful for all the nonprofits in the area. So we already talked about this a little bit. We’re fostering kind of collaborative spaces for these nonprofits and bringing a lot of different organizations under one roof and there’s interaction and stuff. So can you speak a little bit more to like how we foster a little bit more collaboration and some maybe speak to some successful partnerships that might have come out from bringing these organizations all under one roof?

Autumn Vest:
Absolutely. Collaboration is one of our core values. It’s such an important piece of what we do because it’s so important. We are better together. And so working together and understanding each other, we have an opportunity to really impact our community. And so here at MSS, inside of our walls is what we call just the tenant facility.

We really focus on trying to bring nonprofits together by having intentional community opportunities. Everything from a tenant, we start actually we really start with a tenant social. And in that tenant social, it’s about building relationships. We get together, we have a good time, we play games. The people in this building are very competitive, but it’s a lot of fun. And often that happens with a plate of food. And you’re sitting next to someone in another agency that you may not know, and you’re having an opportunity to kind of hear where they’re coming from and who they are as a person. One of my favorite quotes is that collaboration moves at the speed of trust.

You can’t trust someone that you don’t know. And so where do we start? We start with getting to know someone and building that trust. And so from those tenant socials, then we move into activities like what we call coffee talk, which are an intentional opportunity to come together. It’s more work focused and less relationship building and more work focused of, know, I have this really great suggestion. I want to share with everybody in the building, whether that’s a vendor or a volunteer recruitment idea and sharing those concepts that help each other learn to work better. So many of us struggle in the same areas. We face the same challenges and learning what works for other agencies often can help us overcome some of those same obstacles. And that’s what those kind of interactions are for. And then we go to the next level where we bring our tenant leadership together with regularity and we encourage them to really dig into what are some of the challenges in the community?

What are some of the challenges in nonprofits and how can we work better together to address those things. And then we reach outside of the tenant community as well. We’re available to help facilitate collaboration across Midland and West Texas. We actually have a community social that we host in July for nonprofits to encourage them to come and experience the same kind of camaraderie and relationship building that we do inside of the facility. So we’re not solely focused in this small 12 nonprofit group.

We really work to interact with nonprofits across West Texas in order to encourage those kinds of relationships and trust building.

Evan Green:
Yeah, that’s really great. And I think we keep coming back to this word, but I mean, it’s so impactful. You mentioned we have the 12 and that’s impactful enough. And then you’re talking about what’s not just the 12. We are impacting all nonprofits almost in the area. And we have the resources to help out outside of just this shared space that we have for these 12 organizations. And that reach is really, really cool. That’s what we really like to see in the nonprofit organization, in our community, and it helps us all grow. And you mentioned socials over lunch. You’re speaking my language. I would love to be included in a lunch social and then coffee talks and stuff like that. That’s very similar to a lot of the stuff that we do on the for-profit side and the business side as well. And then you mentioned a lot about the challenges.

And I think that it would be really good to hear about some of those challenges because people who aren’t as familiar or entrenched in the nonprofit side, working for nonprofit organizations might not know what specific and unique challenges that you do face. So could you speak a little bit more to just some of the challenges that are unique to the nonprofit space and how you’ve worked with the organizations that you’re working with to kind of overcome those challenges?

Autumn Vest:
Sure, you know, we all face challenges and it’s interesting that you say coffee talk and luncheons that those things resonate with with the for profit side. And that’s one of the things that we really promote here at MSS is that we are a business and we should do business as business does in the nonprofit sector. And so that’s one of the biggest things that we see in challenges that we at MSS directly try to address.

We’re such small organizations and often we have limited funding opportunities. so allowing our tenants and those that we provide IT services to, to really focus forward into their mission is a big opportunity where they aren’t having to worry about if the roof is leaking or the lights are coming on that day. Taking that overhead responsibility off of those tenants and those other agencies and allowing them to really focus into how they’re creating impact in the community is one of our primary focuses.

You know, we have come together collectively to try to address a number of challenges. I work really closely with an agency called the Nonprofit Management Center here in West Texas in Permian Basin. And, you know, collaboratively we work together to help nonprofits overcome different activities. They focus more in education and learning, where we focus more in the back office and collaboration building. And so it’s a really great dynamic. You know, for us, what we see a lot in challenges is access to volunteers and donor resources and other back office services. And so that’s really been our primary focus. Bringing nonprofits together to better impact the community. One of my favorite collaborations that’s happened here in the facility, and I actually remember the exact day that it happened. Two of our tenants are Midland Soccer Association and SHARE. Midland Soccer Association, it’s a little obvious it’s a soccer agency that does soccer for children.

SHARE is a respite experience and support group for families with special needs and disabled children. And so these two agencies, their executive directors and their leaders were sitting in one of our tenant leadership meetings and we were talking about what is it that we want to achieve in the community and the office manager for Midland Soccer Association said, you know, I really want to start a soccer association or soccer program for special needs children, but I don’t know where to start. And SHARE’s executive director at the time immediately said, let’s make it happen. I have contacts, we’re in this field. And they came together and created Top Soccer. And Top Soccer is a program that’s actually happening in other areas of the country. But Midland Soccer Association has been here in West Texas since I think 1982-ish. And in 2020 was the very first time that we have ever had a special needs soccer program for children.

Everybody from ages three to age 18 now can access soccer. And that was such a huge, huge opportunity that happened because we had two people in the room at the right moment to make that come together. And that is the power of what we do here at MSS is to bring those connections together.

Evan Green:
Yeah, yeah, that is that’s a great story and a perfect example, I think of, you know, kind of, you know, collaboration and impact that you can make just by putting two similarly like people with similar experiences and thought processes in one room, people who want to give back to the community. And that’s I think what you mentioned about some of the challenges. It kind of resonates with me as well, because we have all these people who want to they want to give back to the community.

They want to be out there, you know, forming these organizations that help with, you know, the special needs, putting the soccer together. And if their time is spent on the back office stuff, they’re not going to have time to actually put anything into, you know, the whole goal of forming that organization, which is to, you know, form that, allow the, you know, the children or the kids who wanted to be part of that organization. Like you would have no time juggling the back office stuff and actually pursuing the mission of the organization.

And I think that’s really, really great is you’re helping take some of that pressure off from the back office side to let them pursue what means a lot to them, what’s going to make an impact in the community and make help those organizations thrive and survive and really meet their goals and missions and stuff like that. So, you know, that’s just a all around, you know, feeling I think it has to be for you to say, you we brought these organizations together. We helped them. We helped them meet. We helped, you know, take some of the work off on the back office side and look what came out of it. This is really awesome to see that come to fruition. And like you said, the impact that it’s making and what it’s allowed for our folks in our community there. So we were excited for the work that you’re doing and have done.

But I’d love to hear, I guess, where we hope to go now. So we’ve gone we’ve gone 10 years. What’s next on the horizon for MSS and where do we hope to take this thing?

Autumn Vest:
Well, we’re in the middle of a very exciting program development right now. We are creating a, it’s called a multi-employer welfare association for nonprofits specifically in our community. It’s called the West Texas Nonprofit Benefits Trust. We are working to create an association that will allow our nonprofit sector to come together to purchase employee benefits through.

You know, as one singular large employee or employer instead of having to go through the affordable care market as so many of our small business nonprofits have to by coming together. Now we are well over 500 employees strong in our first cohort and look to be launching benefits later this summer. It’s a great, great development. We’re so excited. Something we’ve been working on since 2017.

So again, with the shared resources, being able to allow the nonprofits to purchase employee benefits at a lower cost. It’s more in line with large business. They’re able to focus those dollars that are saved into their program, but they’re also able to care for their employees, which makes nonprofits more competitive in the employee market.

Here in West Texas there’s a lot of big business a lot of big oil companies that we’re competing against for some really high quality employees and so this gives us you know another step up and being able to do that and we’re really excited to launch that program. Also we’re really excited and looking forward to in the coming and hopefully in 26 looking into 27 we’ll be looking to launch additional back office services we’re currently exploring what exactly that looks like.

But we really are looking again to take off that overhead that back office by having one shared, know, department of employees that can focus on things like accounting services or IT services. Then not every single nonprofit is having to hire an IT or hire an accountant. And so by sharing that person, sharing that responsibility, we’re able to take again some of those costs off of our nonprofits.

And we also work to make that very affordable so that we’re not, you know, asking to get compensated in market prices. We keep those things below market, affordable to nonprofits to make sure that they can access the services that are meaningful to them, that again help them to just focus their impact on the community.

Evan Green:
Yeah, yeah, I think it just keeps coming back to that. The more we can take off of them as far as back office workload, the more time and effort they can put into doing what really means a lot to them and achieving their mission, being out in the community and giving back, which is, I think that’s great for everyone involved and everyone who lives in the Permian-based community. We’re all benefiting from that.

So for someone like myself who was kind of unfamiliar with what MSS was doing in the community and giving back, and now I’d love to be involved, how could I help your mission and your organization? What can I do to be involved with MSS?

Autumn Vest:
Absolutely. And you know, the first thing I would say to do is if you are in the Midland area, come and visit our building. Come and see what the facility looks like. I know you guys will put a way to contact us. We are located in Odessa. We welcome visitors at all times. Not only will you get to see MSS and the work that we do, you’ll get to see the nonprofits that are here and tenant in our building. And that’s just a great way to get started.

There’s also opportunities to volunteer with us through committee work and support there. But if you’re just interested in supporting the work that we do, we have a couple of events coming up. We have what we call R&B is actually in September. It is a dueling pianos event that’s in the third Thursday of September. It’s a great time. You get to come to MSS, enjoy some entertainment, learn a little bit about us and tour the facility while you’re here.

And we also collaborate in the community. We have a partnership with two local community arts organizations and we have local artists that actually hang their art here in the facility. And so anybody can stop by and see that, but we have some intentional meet and greet opportunities with those artists in August and again in December is our open house. And so I just encourage you to check out our website. It’s midlands.org. You’ll find my contact information. I love a phone call. I love an email.

Come and visit us and check it out. We would love to have you learn more and be a part of the work that we do to serve nonprofits.

Evan Green:
Yeah, that’s great information. You can definitely find me at the dueling pianos event. That sounds awesome. And then, you know, coming to visit the art gallery seems like a great use of time as well. Well, thank you, Autumn. This has been a pleasure just getting to know you, getting to know MSS and their mission and more about the organization. It’s been a great time talking to you and we appreciate you coming on the podcast. For our listeners, if you enjoyed the episode, please like and subscribe on your favorite streaming platform.

Autumn Vest:
Wonderful.

Evan Green:
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