Interview with Zachary Wolfson, November 29, 2018

ï"¿Zachary Wolfson, interview transcript, November 29, 2018

Lovgren: Can you tell us your name and your position in your organization?

Wolfson: My name is Zachary Wolfson. I am currently a freshman at George Mason University and I am the founder and former Executive Director of Threads of Care. I currently serve as the Spokesperson for the organization.

Lovgren: Can you explain in a quick summary of what Threads of Care is?

Wolfson: Threads of Care is an entirely teen run nonprofit which was started in Middle Tennessee, originally in Williamson County at Franklin High School. What Threads of Care does, is it serves children and teens throughout the Middle Tennessee area and is looking to expand up the East coast. It serves these youth by providing them with warm clothing during the Winter and clothing for warm weather during the Spring and Summer, and also raises money for these children and teens. It advocates for them using blog posts, using social media, and engaging with the press including newspapers and, in some instances, interviews with certain news channels such as Channel 4 and Channel 2 in Nashville.

Lovgren: What part of your personal biography or background led you to this position?

Wolfson: Ever since I was a little boy, I have always wanted to help people. It is funny, my mom used to push me around in a stroller when I was one or two years old in TJ Maxx. I had always talked from a very young age. She would always give me this box of raisins mostly to keep me quiet because I talked a little too much. Whenever I would pass somebody in TJ Maxx I would go and I would offer them a raisin. It was kind of that attitude that I really have about everything; it is the need to constantly give that which I already had to other people. One of the things that I knew I had a lot of was I knew I had an abundance of clothing. I knew I had an abundance of family members to be with me. I knew I had an abundance of a lot of things and I felt like the only thing I really could do with that was to find other ways to serve people who are simply by the roll of a die, born in a bad situation. It is not the fault of the impoverished that they are impoverished. So, it is important to do anything you can to help serve them.

Lovgren: What cultural identities or experiences are most important for you?

Wolfson: Most importantly I would say is my family, my little sister Olivia, and my mother and father Gary and Michelle Wolfson. They are really incredible people and they are the people that helped me form who I am today. They taught me how to be a good person. Another really important identity to me is my Jewish identity. Both my ethnicity and my religion are something that I take very seriously. I am as observant as I possibly can be of Jewish law, and by observant, I mean that I follow it as much as possible. It is a really fulfilling experience and Hanukkah is coming up this Sunday, December 2nd, and it is so exciting to be able to celebrate that with other likeminded people and just be proud of who I am.

Lovgren: What experiences have most shaped you as a leader?

Wolfson: I would say that the experiences that have most shaped me are when I have had to make difficult decisions. Difficult decisions in the sense that, in starting up threads of care, I was unsure whether threads of care was going to be successful or not. So, I knew that the best thing I could do was, when recruiting people to join this organization, having a clear vision and just saying “You know what? We're going to do this and we're going to be successful.” And I feel like it was the best way to handle the situation because doing that instilled people with confidence and it created an organization that was successful. That was very important. Another hard decision I've had to make before is simply choosing when somebody is a good fit for Threads of Care or not. Ever since I was a young boy, I always wanted to include people in things. Whenever I would be doing a group project or group painting when I was in elementary school, I would always bring people together. But there were times even when I was running Threads of Care where I felt people just didn't have the time to commit to it or weren't able to do their jobs effectively because they had other things going on. I'd have to have tough conversations with them and even letting some certain groups of people go... That killed me to do that. It is decisions like that and it has helped me understand that being a leader is not rosy all the time. It is a major responsibility. It is not as glamorous as our current society likes to make it seem, so I think it is important to recognize the beauties of it but also the incredible challenges.

Lovgren: Were you called into leadership or did you seek it out because of held convictions?

Wolfson: I would like to say a little bit of both. Nobody specifically called me to do Threads of Care. It came more from my personal beliefs about how people should have a sense of dignity and people should have people care about them even if they don't directly know about it because at the end of the day I have a deep value for humanity, for the human condition, and I feel that if you don't show that in every way you possibly can in your own unique an individual way, then you are not really taking the most advantage out of what life has to offer you are not really getting the most out of it. It came from a deeply held conviction that every single human being is valuable and that you need to do whatever you can to help those people because if they can't help themselves in a certain period of time, help them so they can eventually they can get to a point to where they can.

Lovgren: How have you learned from obstacles and challenges faced?

Wolfson: I touched upon those a little bit but I guess to elaborate further, what I've learned is that nothing is perfect. Things go wrong, like leadership is messy, running an organization is messy, being a part of an organization is messy, life is messy. Things are never going to go the way you want them to. You will go and you will assign somebody a project and then, boom. This project goes two weeks late and that might be because the person simply had a lot of things going on, maybe there was a snow day, because we dealt with a lot of those when we were doing Threads of Care, But sometimes the situation doesn’t line up; sometimes I make a bad call. There are countless ways that everything just doesn't go as expected. You really learn that through all the mistakes, through all the challenges of running an organization like Threads of Care.

Lovgren: What does leadership mean to you?

Wolfson: I do not want to give any universal definition and I know you said what does leadership mean to me, so I know it is personal but, leadership is situational. In the sense that, depending on what you're good at, what you are a master at or in the process of mastering or depending on what you are passionate about or where your passions and skills lineup, I think that is where leadership comes about. In the sense that everybody is a leader in their own way, so I do not think that there is any one form of leadership or even form of leadership for me because there are many areas in which I am not a leader. For example, the Jewish Community... I may be a leader one day, but I am not right now because I need to learn. I have a lot to learn about. I am in the music fraternity on campus called by Mu Alpha Sinfonia. I am not a leader in the school of music. I cannot read sheet music. I am just there to appreciate it and sing with my fellow brothers but I am there for that purpose alone so there are many areas in which I am not a leader, so I guess this is a very common way of saying that to be a leader means to, in most other circumstances, be willing to be a follower.

Lovgren: How would you characterize your leadership style?

Wolfson: I like to delegate and trust people to do what they need to do. When I was running Threads of Care, the first year I did this, I did not do as good of a job of it... I definitely micromanaged a lot more. It was very stressful, but the second year I was I was a little concerned because I felt like I wasn't doing anything, but I looked at my results. I looked at what we had accomplished, who we had recruited, who we had helped, and I realized that it was more than the year beforehand and I had done 10 times less work. And that is kind of what leadership is. It is finding ways to efficiently delegate. From a practical sense, not from a philosophical sense, leadership practically is just finding ways to delegate the right tasks to the right people so that they enjoy what they are doing and so that they are able to get it done with the minimal amount of effort for achieving maximum results.

Lovgren: Do you feel it is super important to delegate and if so why?

Wolfson: I think it is very important to delegating leadership because no one person can do everything. Human beings are not built to take on the whole world. Human beings are built to take on a part of the world... join a bunch of other people in that process, and so delegation is essential.

Lovgren: How do you delegate in your organization?

Wolfson: I would say this is how I did delegate because now I am a spokesperson meaning that I have basically moved on and the executive director now Handles all of the delegation which is very interesting being a follower of the organization that I started. What I do to delegate is I reach out to the right people based off of the skills that I have observed that they have had in the past or the interest that they have had, and I say, “hey would you be interested in doing this?” To be very blunt with you, that is something that I still struggle with, so it is something that I do to the best of my ability, but it is still a challenge.

Lovgren: What are your professional strengths and weaknesses?

Wolfson: Professional strengths... I can give an incredible presentation, I know how to act in a meeting appropriately, I am able to be very honest but also very sensitive with the people that I speak with so I'm able to give valuable feedback. I am very good at listening and understanding where people are coming from and I am able to take different advice from individuals of whom I work with. On the same wavelength though, sometimes my honesty can be a little too much in the sense that there are many times where, instead of honesty, I should honestly shut up. This is because there are many instances where it just doesn't contribute to the conversation and it just hurts people and it leaves people feeling bad and everybody, as a whole, is more ineffective. There are also many instances where, again, as much as I believe delegation is important, I can have a habit of micromanaging so that is another thing that I need to work on. I have gotten better but I still have a lot further to go.

Lovgren: Yeah, I think everyone can always grow. What or who has been your greatest influence?

Wolfson: I would say Tom Ward who is the executive director of The Oasis Center. He inspired me a couple of years ago when I was in eighth grade because I dropped off some coats after a coat drive at my middle school. It was around 50 or 60 something coats, and Tom was really incredible because he basically talked to me about the beauty of doing community service and of being there for people who are very much similar to me and age and just trying to be of service to those people. So, it is people like Tom that help inspire young people in today's generation to go make the world a better place.

Lovgren: Leaders help to turn ideas into action and empower others. So how do you accomplish this?

Wolfson: To do that you just do it. Not to mention Nike too much and Nike is, of course, not a sponsor of this call but doing what you think of is the best way to put it into action. I know that seems silly but there comes a point where you have to make that decision. And to inspire others to do something about it I think it starts with being passionate about it yourself because people do not follow something if the person who is doing it is not passionate.

Lovgren: So how do you measure success and how do you learn from failure?

Wolfson: I measure success differently in every single leadership circumstance. In terms of Threads of Care, I measured success but the amount of clothing we had collected and distributed but even then, I know that there are some flaws in measuring success because, are we able to measure the happiness that a single coat brings to homeless child or a homeless teen? No, and that is a very hard to thing to do. So, we measure success in one way but there are many ways that we were limited in measuring our successes. That is something that you do lose when you run an organization that is slowly getting bigger. You lose some of the interpersonal understanding of success. I would like to get to a point where I can know each person that we serve but it has not been possible thus far so that is how I measured success... mostly by numbers and graphs. I think that makes sense, but the ideal way to measure success is just to understand where people are coming from and just to listen and being like, “Hey, did I help you?”

Lovgren: Definitely so how do you learn from failure?

Wolfson: You learn from failure simply by paying attention to what you did and saying, “Okay, I am going to make sure that I adjust in the future.”

Lovgren: What are two or three action steps you believe are essential to enable others to be successful?

Wolfson: I would say that the first step that one could take is just to have an open mind and understand that they are not going to know all the answers. Nobody does, I do not know all the answers. A very wise person actually at GMU, his name is Kendell Haywood... he is in the school of music, he told me that nobody here really knows what they are doing. Some of us are about to graduate and go into the workforce. It is a very sobering thought, but it is true. So, know that if you are about to take action, nobody really knows. Secondly, be willing to screw up.

Lovgren: What advice do you have for building relationships and Trust in an organization?

Wolfson: It is a funny thing, I think the best way to build trust and relationships with people is just to sit down And spend time with people. That is one of the reasons why, when I was the executive director, I tried to make sure that I personally went out to different schools and was just able to meet up with different Threads of Care ambassadors. Those were the student leaders we had at different schools. And the reason I did that was because even though I was not able to spend as much time as I would have liked with them, I was at least able to put a face to a name and create a better working relationship because if you do not spend time with each other, if you do not have proximity to one another, then you are not going to be able to build a relationship and work effectively.

Lovgren: What do you want your legacy to be?

Wolfson: I want my legacy to be I like to see where I am as an individual not really remembered. My goal is for Threads of Care to be its own organization, to be sustainable without some figurehead as the face of it. My goal was never to be the face. And I have been seeing it this year of the new class of threads of care, they don't know who I am. That's a good thing, I consider that a massive success because that means that Threads of Care is its own organization that people know it as Threads of Care, not as “Zach’s non-profit” and that feels really good  the fact that I was able to find a group of people that were willing to create a culture around helping people without focusing that much on themselves. It is a really beautiful thing.

Lovgren: What was the most rewarding part of all of it?

Wolfson: I would say the most rewarding part was just the few times that I was fortunate enough to get to see the smile on the people’s faces when they received a warm coat or when they got a nice pair of socks or even when they got a pair of underwear. Just being able to go and tour places like the Oasis Center, like the Room in the Inn, and just being around the people that I was serving. It felt humbling and it was incredible just to be able to spend time with these people because I think it really puts a face to the population that I don't think we tend to humanize very well in the United States, so it was really good.

Lovgren: Well, that is all the questions I have for you and I want to thank you for doing this interview with me! It has been awesome talking to you. So, that is it.

Wolfson: Great, thank you Emily.