VP of Marketing & Communications at CFMT Talks Nonprofits, Community Engagement
Kelly Walberg is a communications strategist whose leadership has influenced and guided Nashville’s philanthropic giving and the nonprofit sector for decades.
Walberg serves as the vice president of marketing & communications at the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee (CFMT) and her areas of expertise include building effective community partnerships, crisis management, stakeholder engagement, media relations and brand storytelling.
She is the recipient of the 2024 Women of Influence award by the Nashville Business Journal, a member of the Rotary Club of Nashville, has been actively engaged with Nashville’s VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster), Hands on Nashville, the Community Resource Center and other local community organizations.
You have been with the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee (CFMT) for more than 15 years. In a nutshell, what is CFMT?
CFMT is Middle Tennessee’s philanthropic home. We connect generosity with 35 years of community knowledge, relationships and resources to help people make a greater impact through their giving and to help build a stronger region. Essentially, we work alongside donors and nonprofits. But we also bring people together around opportunities and challenges that are bigger than any one organization can address on their own.
There is power in numbers, and with this building that we’ve been able to move into in the past three years, I’ve seen that work become more and more apparent as different organizations, community leaders, nonprofit organizations, and generous donors can sit in the same building together and address those issues.
CFMT moved to a new location and hired Hal Cato as the CEO four years ago. How did CFMT change under new leadership?
My answer to that will change day-to-day. At its core, we still have the foundation. We still have this place where those who have charitable dollars and want to give through us in order to support nonprofits in many different issue areas, that work is still happening.
We still have our own grant-making process. Some donors come to us and create funds and entrust the Community Foundation’s local expertise and diligence to identify which nonprofits are addressing particular issues and allow us to give their dollars away through an annual grant making cycle. The biggest change with our grant making is that in the past, we would have given perhaps 300 to 350 grants to individual nonprofits. But our grant-making team has adjusted the way they do grant making. So now it’s about 95 grants per year through that community impact grant making cycle. But these grants are for much larger dollars allowing for deeper impact.
Also, one of the biggest changes that I’ve seen is how we are showing up in the community and a lot has to do with this building. We now have space for 501(c)3 nonprofits to be able to use to facilitate board meetings or planning sessions or a lot of different types of important conversations to move the needle. That’s allowed us to also build more meaningful relationships with the nonprofit sector in Middle Tennessee.
Lastly, I would say the types of initiatives are just shifting toward what the needs are. We have focused on the early childhood education sector for a long time that has grown and expanded. Now we’re looking at the Unified Housing Strategy and partnership with the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce and seeing how we can better support the housing issue in Middle Tennessee alongside our Nashville Catalyst Fund that supports developers that are trying to maintain or support affordable housing opportunities.
We’re just doing a lot more table setting where we’re bringing community leaders around the table and trying to do cross-sector work, whether it’s through business or academia or nonprofit and our funder community. I see a lot of relationships becoming stronger and stronger because of the central location that our building has provided us to be able to have more of those conversations.
Talk a little about the Tennessee Nonprofit Network. What is it and what made you want to join as a board member in 2025?
The Tennessee Nonprofit Network is a statewide association, and it’s here to serve and strengthen the nonprofit sector across the state. So, I have gone from helping serve the Middle Tennessee region to now being able to learn from the entire state of Tennessee.
We know that across the state, the landscape changes, the needs change, and we can do so much when we learn from each other. The Tennessee Nonprofit Network connects these nonprofits with resources, it connects them with learning opportunities, advocacy, and also with one another to build relationships. It helps make the case for how essential nonprofits are to the health and strength of our communities.
I joined the board because I believe in the role nonprofits play here in Tennessee. We’re at this moment in time where there’s trust that’s beginning to erode, and we’re trying to rebuild that trust in what the nonprofit sector is. The fact of the matter is that nonprofits are part of the infrastructure of our communities. They feed families, they educate our children, and they care for our neighbors.
When you mention that trust is beginning to erode in nonprofits, can you elaborate on that?
I think that it came from the changing landscape in January of 2025 when nonprofits and foundations were put [increasingly] under a microscope. There was a narrative that changed around whether or not the sector’s dollars and the donor’s dollars were being put to the intended use.
There is still a perception with some that people who work for nonprofits should be volunteers and shouldn’t get paid. But some of the work that nonprofits do is some of the hardest work that we come across on a day-to-day basis.
What the Tennessee Nonprofit Network is hoping for is to be able to shift that perception.
What are the biggest challenges nonprofits face and what opportunities do nonprofits have to adapt to those challenges?
This question [encapsulates] much of what we talk about here at Community Foundation and the Tennessee Nonprofit Network. I think that first we have to start changing the way that we think about nonprofits because they are an essential community infrastructure. By that I mean they employ people that contribute significantly to our economy and provide services that Tennesseans rely on every day. I’m talking billions of dollars every year [to help with] food, housing, health care, education, the arts, etc.
So one question is, What happens if nonprofits aren’t here? The needs that they address would not disappear. Someone would still need to feed the family or help that child or care for a neighbor and that responsibility would fall somewhere else in the community. And that’s why the challenges facing our nonprofits now should concern all of us.
The second thing is workforce capacity and burnout. You see that everywhere and this feeling of burnout is a scary thing for those who work in the nonprofit sector.
We need to look at more competitive compensation, professional development and leadership. There are a lot of nonprofit leaders who have been doing this work for a long time, and they’re getting ready to retire. So we need to make sure that there’s a workforce in place that could fill those spaces and do it as well as they’ve been doing it, if not better.
Finally, the third challenge I would say is navigating an increasingly complex environment while also strengthening public understanding and trust in the sector. Nonprofits need to communicate more clearly about who they serve and about how they use their resources. It’s about transparency, and the more transparency we can give in the work that we’re doing, the more likely people are going to be generous with their hard-earned dollars.
We also need to know what impact nonprofits are creating and the role that they play in both the economy and our communities.
You are the founder and driving member of Press Forward Middle Tennessee. What is Press Forward, why did you decide to form a local chapter, and what are the main goals?
Press Forward is a national movement and also a network of local chapters. We’re working to strengthen local news and information, so communities have access to the trusted information they need to thrive. That’s it in a nutshell.
Now, Press Forward Middle Tennessee is our local chapter, and it’s housed here at the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee. It focuses on the specific and unique needs of the communities in our region.
The decision for me to form a chapter came out of the simple realization that local news touches almost every issue that we care about. Whether we’re talking education, public safety, health, housing, economic opportunity, local government or quality of life.
We need people to stay connected because reliable information of what’s happening around them helps them make informed decisions and participate in communities. But the infrastructure that allows us to do that has been shrinking dramatically.
We knew we couldn’t just assume that we understood what Middle Tennessee needed when it came to access to local news or even how they prefer to receive that critical information. And because our region includes rapidly growing cities, rural communities, longtime residents, newcomers and communities, that historically have not always seen themselves and their experiences reflected in local media, we decided that when we launched the Middle Tennessee chapter to help with the intersection of how philanthropy supports local independent news and information, we wanted to make sure we started by listening. Over the past year, we began building relationships with these independent newsrooms and providers. And we have started to conduct community research across the 40-county region that we serve at the Community Foundation.
I’m hoping to be able to bring new philanthropic investment into local journalism to make certain that the voices and the information needs of our communities help shape what can come next … because without trusted local information, it becomes much harder for communities to understand their challenges and identify solutions and work together to create change.
Lastly, we have seen that when people stay connected to what’s happening in their community, they’re more likely to be civically engaged and want to be a part of the system that makes our communities stronger.
Do you have any insights yet from the survey?
We have a few insights and right now our partner at the Sycamore Institute is going through what we have learned. We ended up having more than 1,400 individuals take the survey, we offered it multi-language, but there is going to be a second phase to cover some of the gaps we still see. We launched the survey in May, which was not good timing for when schools are in session. And so sometime later this fall, I’d really love to cover that 13- to 17-year-old and then 18- to 29-year-old [population] so we can have a better [view of that].
There’s still some more work to be done, but the deeper-dive details that are currently happening right now with the Sycamore Institute, and we hope to be able to put a full report out there in October.