—Hello Peter! I am extremely appreciative of you taking time in your busy work schedule to talk to me today. My first traditional question is about your family roots. Your name is English-sounding, while your last name is Hispanic. Could you please dwell more on your family roots?

—Hi Olena! As you have pointed out, my name is Peter Gonzales. I am not sure what made my parents call me Peter. I suspect there was a friend of my parents at the time, whom they liked as a person, and his name was Peter. It’s my guess. I think I heard a story about that. But l do know where my last name came from. Gonzales is my father’s and my grandfather’s last name. My grandfather Celestino Gonzales was from the northwest province of Spain, just across the Portuguese border. He was born in a small farming village inGalicia. He came to the United States about one hundred years ago. I know a great family story about his experience here. Celestino came with a couple of friends. They were all teenagers aged 17, and I think my grandfather must have gotten sick on the boat on the way over here. So he was put into quarantine. His friends went ahead without him. They ended up in New York. And my grandfather ended up inConnecticut. After his quarantine was over he took a job in the factory in the town that manufactured hardware. He had a room in a house, it was like a rooming house. Grandfather Gonzales lived with a lot of other people. And when he wasn’t working, he tried to learn English. He tried reading a newspaper, listening to the radio. He would practice talking with the people living in the house with him. And it’s important to note that my grandfather was not educated. He only had a couple of years of school. He was a farmer in Spain. He was very proud when he saved up enough money to go down to New York City to catch up with his friends. And when he got there, he was extremely proud to showcase his English. He started talking, but no one seemed to understand what he was saying. And it turned out that the reason for that was the fact that he lived in a town in Connecticut populated mainly by the Polish people. All the newspapers he read and people he practiced English with were Polish. That was his first introduction to learning English in the United States. Nevertheless, he became a restaurant worker. He ended up moving [ to another place] and working as a dishwasher, and he spent the next several years working his way up in the restaurant business. Eventually, he and my grandmother met in Philadelphia, and ran a restaurant for fifty years.

—What a successful immigration story! It’s so powerful when people are capable of achieving so much starting from scratch! I always feel inspired by life stories like that.

—Yes! This is a powerful family heritage I grew up with, and I got to meet a lot of other immigrants, mostly from Spain and Italy ( my grandmother was fromRome) that came to work from the villages and towns. The majority went to work in the restaurants. They were like a Welcoming Center, they helped people get started in the United States. 

—You mean, they were volunteers helping new immigrants?

—Yeah, they were very focused on helping other immigrants.

—What role do volunteers play in any nonprofit, and specifically, in the Welcoming Center?

 —Volunteers play a critical role! As you probably know, nonprofit organizations come in all the different sizes— from large universities and hospitals to small organizations with one or two people working in them.The Welcoming Center is one [ nonprofit] on the smaller side, believe it or not, relatively to some of the large organizations likeJEVS—a large nonprofit organization in Philadelphia. It has many more employees, programs and services. Welcoming Center relies on volunteers to do critical work that we can’t afford to pay staff to do, but we know that the work needs to be done. So they help with delivering services and programs. That’s one way. Sometimes volunteers help with fundraising, opening their own networks, introducing people to the Welcoming Center. There are volunteers that help us improve our systems for Human Resources and Administrative Services. We have volunteers all overour Board Members. They all play a very critical role overseeing the financial health of the organization and helping us make sure that we are living up to our mission. But then, you have also probably met volunteers who do coaching, resume review and mock interviews. We have volunteers who teach classes: whether it’s an English class, or aSmall Business class. There are volunteers who help with promoting social media accounts or improve bookkeeping. Volunteers help in all different ways.

—Since you are a lawyer, I would like to ask you one question regarding my personal experience with a certain nonprofit. A few months ago I came across a remote volunteer opportunity for a nonprofit. I was about to offer my services, but changed my mind when I discovered that that nonprofit organization had no employees, only volunteers. Basically, the only person who got paid was its CEO. Can a nonprofit be legitimate if it’s built on volunteer work exclusively?

—It’s not that uncommon to have an organization that relies so heavily on volunteers, but one thing you could be looking at with any nonprofit is their 990 Form, which is a form filed each year with the State. It captures the financial income, all the various income strains and the expenses. It documents how much a nonprofit spends, what they spend their money on in broad terms. It may be that the organization has very little finances, just enough to hire one person. But it would require a dipper dive into the way the nonprofit functions.

—That’s surprising...I honestly thought it was illegal. 

—No, it’s not illegal. That’s not necessarily shady at all! It’s just a different structure.

—Okay. Thank you for clarifying that to me. Is it true that a good grant writer is like a prospector, a gold digger for any nonprofit?

—It depends. There are different roles in Development. We have a Grants Administrator, who does more than a Grant Writer. In some cases, the Grant Writer does not have to do the prospecting. Sometimes the CEO cultivates the relationship, does the prospecting by identifying grant opportunities. And then [he] asks the Grant Writer to put the grant proposal together. In other cases, like in our case with the Grants Administrator, the person has skills and experience to do more than that. They can actually look for grant opportunities to get to know the programs well. And they have gotten a sense of what we want to do in the future. And they also have a responsibility of helping us make sure that we are reporting the milestones, the work and the product we are delivering with the grant support. They help us answer the question: “Are we actually identifying the targets we would simply miss and reporting it back to the funder?”. So it’s more of a Grant Reporter.

—That’s not the way I thought of this position. Thank you for pouring more light on the Grant Writer role. Now I wonder, do you agree with a statement that  “ a nonprofit is a business with a mission”?

—It has revenue and expense, like any kind of business. You are trying to raise money to operate. The primary difference is not that you have a mission. As there are for-profit properties that also have a mission statement. It’s that the bottom line is measured differently. The bottom line is not measured in profit, it is measured in impact: are you delivering and fulfilling the mission, and how well are you doing that? So the money goes back into the organization to achieve the mission, to achieve the bottom line as opposed to sharing the profits with shareholders or investors, or owners every year. Whatever revenue is generated, it is put into fulfilling the mission.

—I have noticed that the Welcoming Center has recently gone through rebranding. You shortened your name from “ The Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians” to “ The Welcoming Center”. What was the intention of these changes?

—If you asked the founder about the name itself, why the organization was called “ The Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians” when it was founded, you would hear a story that involves a nonprofit organization based in Philadelphia going toHarrisburg to raise money from the state government. The people that oversee the state spending in the General Assembly, the elected officials from across Pennsylvania, would not be likely to support an organization that was called “ The Welcoming Center for New Philadelphians”, or was specific to Philadelphia, something that had to do with when we had our original name—“ The Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians”. But what became clear over the course of the past 18 years was that what we were doing in Philadelphia was attracting a lot of attention from the Midwest, in cities acrossOhio,Michigan,Missouri, and other places where populations were declining, because cities were aging, and industry was leaving, that they were trying to attract the population growth, and immigrants were seen as primary population to attract in order to help cities grow again. They were looking at the Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians as a model that they could replicate in some places. And over the course of the past 10-15 years it occurred that the number of nonprofit organizations that do similar work has popped up around the country. And so we started thinking that we used the name “ The Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians” in a way that restricts us to serving people who live in Pennsylvania. And when we got calls from people inErie orPittsburgh, or even Harrisburg, or Lancaster, asking us for help, and we knew that we couldn’t serve them or support them in a concrete way. But then somebody fromCamden, New Jersey, or just across the river, fromDelaware, who is much closer to us wouldn’t think of us as a resource. Even though we are part of the same metropolitan area. So the name was limiting us. And then the last thing is influenced our decision to shorten the name was the fact that people called us “ The Welcoming Center” naturally. So we wanted to simplify our name.

—Do you currently help immigrants from other states as well?

—Sure. As an organization we have limited capacity based on resources that we have, but during the past year of pandemic there were people living in another state or even outside of the United States, who were still connected to the Welcoming Center. They still find connections in Philadelphia. Their home is here even though they may not be living here at the moment. Most of them would like to come back here. They participate in our programs and events. Although at the moment we do not offer programs designed to serve people who don’t live in our immediate area.

—That makes a lot of sense. The very last question I have for you today: please finish the phrase: “ Dear immigrants, the Welcoming Center is...”

—“ The Welcoming Center is eager to meet you! And at the end of the day, Olena, the work that we do is about understanding each other, finding connections in places that are not so obvious. For example, you come from Ukraine, right?

—Right!

—A lot of people would say: “Okay, you are Ukrainian, go to the Ukrainian community”. That’s what usually happens at the beginning [ to an immigrant]. But what we have found is that when we connect you with me, with somebody from Kenya or Cambodia, and someone from Colombia, then we find something in common— a connection. It accelerates our growth, we develop by helping each other and helping ourselves. And the Welcoming Center is not just a place where you come and learn English, or find a job, or you start a business—it’s a place where you recognize that you have something of a real value to offer and, at the same time, you are able to gain something from that exchange.