Meet Naomi Baer, Activate’s New Chief Operating Officer
We are thrilled to introduce Naomi Baer, who joined the Activate team in June as chief operating officer—a new and vital role on our executive team.
We sought a seasoned operational leader with a track record in scaling non-profits through systems and practices. We needed someone focused on building and refining the business operations critical to scaling Activate. And we needed someone that will allow us to serve an increasing number of fellows and communities while maintaining our culture and vision.
Naomi has deep expertise in entrepreneurship, operations, and leadership development. From being an early employee at international financial inclusion non-profit Kiva to COO at leadership development non-profit Net Impact to practitioner-in-residence at Stanford’s Center for Social Innovation for the past six years, Naomi has been laser-focused on designing and delivering programs that enhance organizational effectiveness and develop next-gen leaders. At Activate, she will bring that expertise to bear with a particular focus on fellowship operations, human resources, and information technology.
Activate board member, Todd Johnson, knows Naomi from her time at Stanford. “Activate is lucky to have her,” he said. “It’s not just that Naomi is a deeply experienced and capable executive, but the mission-driven passion she brings to operations makes her special.”
We sat down with her to learn more about her rich experiences and vision for Activate.
Why Activate?
There are so many reasons! First, the opportunity to contribute to an organization tackling climate change is compelling. Second, from my first introduction to Activate, its focus and philosophy on developing leaders resonated strongly with me. I’ve spent much of my career supporting young leaders, and there is nothing more energizing and satisfying. To have the opportunity to help an organization like Activate, with such a strong program and amazing team, expand on its strong foundation and amplify its mission on a bigger scale…I couldn’t pass it up.
“[to help Activate] expand on its strong foundation and amplify its mission on a bigger scale…I couldn’t pass it up.”
How does your personal and/or professional experience prepare you well for this role?
I’ve been immersed in social entrepreneurship in one form or another since 2006, when I got involved with a then-tiny non-profit called Kiva, ultimately leading operations in a global context across 70+ countries. Activate reminds me in many ways of Kiva’s early team - always problem solving and innovating, deeply engaged, and running hard to keep up with the organization’s success. With my team at Kiva, we were able to design practices that scaled across many local contexts, and without squashing the entrepreneurial spirit that fed everyone’s energy. I’m excited to bring that mindset to Activate and work with the team to expand efficiently while protecting its drive to adapt and innovate.
From 2016 until joining Activate, I served as practitioner-in-residence at Stanford’s Center for Social Innovation. In that role, I advised emerging social entrepreneurs and led the social entrepreneurship program for Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Our program was very philosophically aligned with Activate’s, in focusing on leadership development and the broad skill set of an entrepreneur. My hands-on work with our students to develop entrepreneurial mindsets and skills, and in contributing to the design of our fellowship program selection process, will serve me well in supporting Activate’s programmatic work.
Activate team members attending the 2022 Activate Summit.
What are you most excited about working on at Activate?
More than any system or process that we will build at Activate, I am excited about the opportunity to build on Activate’s people first culture internally. Activate has a wealth of talent and energy, starting with our most junior staff members, who joined looking for early career opportunities to tackle interesting and meaningful problems. While our programmatic focus is on Activate Fellows, we have the opportunity for this next stage of growth to invest in how we work together as a team. We’ve doubled in the last two years, growing to over 40 staff, and we’re looking to hire even more outstanding team members.
“Figuring out how to fully unlock our team’s potential is what excites me.”
This next level of investment in Activate’s own people means continuing to recognize each person’s talents, and it also means building highly effective teams in an era of distributed work, implementing streamlined decision-making structures, and balancing the urgency of our mission with the need to sustain a team’s joy in working together to achieve it. While most people think immediately of better tools and processes when they think of operations, I see my role as guiding that development in service of how we work as people. Figuring out how to fully unlock our team’s potential is what excites me.
Activate’s strongest core value is “people first.” Based on your early impressions, what does that mean and how do you think it will manifest in building operations?
Activate takes this value very seriously, and it shows up strongly in our culture. In a recent employee survey, 93 percent of staff said that they “relish being a member” of their team, and that their team provides “support at work whenever needed.” There is always room for improvement, of course, and one area I’d like to bolster is professional development opportunities for staff.
In terms of the fellow community, Activate Fellows report a fellowship experience satisfaction rating of 98 percent. The opportunity before us will be to maintain these connections and quality of experience as we scale. We need to fiercely protect what makes the Activate Fellowship such a transformative and special experience: strong community with high-touch mentorship and the customized support needed for the challenging work of building a hard-tech company. At an operations level, this means designing systems and practices for efficiency and adaptability simultaneously. We need to propagate our learnings and best practices across the organization while allowing room for responding to the extraordinary human beings who we work with in our fellowship program.