Executive Director, Resilience Center of Franklin County
She Combines Innovation with Compassion, Authenticity
Amanda Sanderson says she owes a lot of who she is, what she does, and what drives her personally and professionally to her family, especially her mother.
“She’s a survivor of sexual and domestic violence,” Sanderson explained. “And each time she was in a situation that was unsafe, and her children’s safety was threatened, she had to find this store of extreme resilience to leave, support her children, rebuild her life, and make sure we were all safe.”
Elaborating, Sanderson said she grew up in a blended family with siblings and stepsiblings who had different needs, and she watched as her parents fought for their rights and the various forms of support they needed.
Such experiences — and the desire to help others find within them that same level of resilience her mother and stepfather exhibited — have taken Sanderson to career stops at nonprofits in Birmingham, Ala., Boston, and now Greenfield, where she serves as executive director of the Resilience Center of Franklin County (RCFC), formerly known as the New England Learning Center for Women in Transition (NELCWIT).
That’s a mouthful, and a name that needed to be changed, she said, to reflect that the organization serves survivors of all gender identities and sexual orientation and puts an emphasis on resilience.
And rebranding has been just one of many items on a large to-do list since she arrived nearly two and a half years ago.
Indeed, she has guided the agency — funded through the Department of Public Health and the Massachusetts Office of Victim Assistance — through might be called a period of renewal and transformation, handing internal challenges, enhancing its physical space, and expanding client services (including access to food, emergency assistance funds, and a welcoming visitation center), while also overseeing record-breaking fundraising and increased grant support.
Lainie DeCoursy, a board member with the RCFC who nominated Sanderson to be a Woman of Impact, described her as a “visionary nonprofit leader,” convener, collaborator, and a clear, strong voice when it comes to raising awareness about domestic and sexual violence.
“Amanda has been a key driver of regional coalitions of more than 40 nonprofits, amplifying the collective voice for health and human services across Franklin County and North Quabbin,” she wrote. “She is a strong advocate for the role of community-based organizations in fostering resilience, often emphasizing the ripple effect of nonprofit work — that thriving individuals and families are the foundation of strong communities.
“She combines bold innovation with compassion and authenticity,” DeCoursy went on, crediting Sanderson with providing strong leadership at a time of funding challenges and policy shifts and expanding holistic services to survivors and families by growing access to a basic needs and food pantry, introducing client transportation through a new agency van (helping meet a critical void in the county), and launching several innovative support groups. “A champion of equity, sustainability, and survivor-centered care, she has made services more holistic and more accessible, while engaging hundreds of community supporters.”
“A champion of equity, sustainability, and survivor-centered care, she has made services more holistic and more accessible, while engaging hundreds of community supporters.”
While Sanderson said much has been accomplished over the past few years, she’s looking ahead to the next challenges, both short-term — managing through serious threats to funding at the state and national levels — and long-term, including the need for different types of housing to effectively serve those in transition.
Amanda Sanderson has expanded access to a basic needs and food pantry, as well as other holistic services, at a challenging time for nonprofits.
Photo by Bob Zemba, Simple Truth Imaging
“I think of it as a three-phase problem — we need emergency short-term housing for people who need two, three, four days for the plan that they have to come to fruition; we need transitional housing, which is one to two years, for people who have left the situation they were in and now need a place where they can rebuild; and we need long-term permanent housing options,” she explained, adding that solutions will not come easily and will require collaboration among the region’s nonprofits.
This drive to keep looking ahead at the next challenges and finding needed solutions helps explain why she is a Woman of Impact.
Lessons from a Tiny Town
When Sanderson says she grew up in a small town in Northern Vermont, she puts extra emphasis on small.
“The town I grew up in was technically a town only because it had a post office,” she explained. “There were no schools, no general stores … we had to go down the mountain to get to the next town, which had a general store, but no gas station; it was 25 or 30 minutes to the nearest gas station, so you had to plan accordingly.
“And it’s still like that, although we now have a stoplight for the first time; we went from a four-way stop sign to a stoplight in 2019,” she went on, adding that, while such small towns have unique challenges, they share problems with communities of all sizes, and it was this knowledge, coupled with what she saw and experienced growing up, that inspired the career path she chose.
“All of those things that I witnessed or experienced instilled a lot of compassion — and a belief that, with the right support, people can accomplish the things they want to accomplish,” she noted. “And I think nonprofits are the glue, a bridge between what the government should be doing for people and what people want and need.”
After earning a bachelor’s degree in arts, peace, and justice studies at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, she left the Northeast for Birmingham, serving as a AmeriCorps state volunteer for Impact America, working as a middle school debate coach, providing free vision screenings to children enrolled in daycare across 20 Alabama counties, and serving in the IRS’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program as a tax preparer and volunteer tax site manager in Selma and Montgomery.
“Through my studies, it became clear that the best way to learn about the world was to see a little bit of it,” she said. “And Birmingham is an excellent place to go if you’re curious about different parts of the country. And what I learned is that the problems are similar pretty much everywhere, and people are the same pretty much everywhere.”
“Everything we do has to be grounded in serving the survivors of sexual and domestic violence, building awareness in the community, and strengthening the quality of the culture here so people can do trauma work and be OK.”
Sanderson would spend four years in the Deep South, eventually serving as program manager for Impact America’s SpeakFirst program, supervising 17 middle and high school debate coaches while directly coaching 24 high school debaters and also expanding college readiness efforts through innovative programming and support initiatives.
In 2018, she joined City Year Inc., a Boston-based nonprofit focused on helping young people stay on track academically and graduate from high school ready for college. There, she managed and coached teams of six to eight AmeriCorps members who work with Greater Boston high school students.
While earning a master’s degree in higher education administration at Boston College, she served as a graduate resident director and also served as a sexual assault network advocate at the Boston College Women’s Center, working on call for its confidential hotline supporting survivors of sexual assault.
After earning that degree, she saw an opening for the co-executive director’s position at NELCWIT and decided this should be her next challenge. The job opportunity was part of it, and being just a few miles from Vermont and her family was another part.
She applied, got the job, and moved to Greenfield the same day she graduated, and was at work the following day.
Almost immediately, there were challenges that needed to be addressed internally, while also focusing on the mission and creating ways to better carry it out.
Indeed, the person hired to be the other co-executive director did not work out, she noted, and within a few weeks of being hired, Sanderson was named acting executive director, while soon also serving as acting program manager as well.
Amanda Sanderson, center, with Joan Featherman, left, one of the founders of the Resilience Center of Franklin County, and Pam Brown, a long-time director, as the agency recently celebrated its 50th anniversary.
“In the first few months, I was just working on understanding what the staff needs were and understanding what our community relations were, where our priorities lay, and what we were doing to serve survivors,” she explained. “After I got that information, I really started to understand where our areas of improvement were.
“I was lucky enough to have someone on the staff I thought would be an incredible program director,” she went on. “I encouraged her to apply, and I started building a team of people that has the same priorities as I do.”
Building Resilience
When asked about those priorities, she said it comes down to meeting needs within the community, helping survivors tap that reservoir of resilience she believes is in everyone, and supporting staff members, most of whom are survivors of abuse themselves, in every way possible.
“Everything we do has to be grounded in serving the survivors of sexual and domestic violence, building awareness in the community, and strengthening the quality of the culture here so people can do trauma work and be OK,” she explained. “There was a lot of turnover when I started because people were getting burned out from hearing really difficult things and not having the support they needed.”
Elaborating, she said the agency became more thoughtful about pay, time off, and “making sure, if you come to do this work, that we’re being as supportive a workplace as we possibly can be.”
While doing that, Sanderson has been working to strengthen coalitions and collaborative efforts, knowing that, in rural areas, persistent problems cannot be solved by one agency.
In Franklin County, there are many such problems, including transportation, (or a lack thereof), substance abuse, a shortage of jobs and career opportunities, and, in many cases, a lack of understanding of the problems unique to rural areas on the part of many of the judges who come to serve in the county (most are from the Boston area) and even the state police that provide much of the public safety.
“The size of the communities can create more support for people, but it also makes it harder to fly under the radar and operate with anonymity,” she explained, adding that those who file restraining orders are far more likely to run into their abuser in a town with one grocery store than in a big city. “There are safety concerns that people do not consider if they’re not from a rural area.”
And then, there’s the housing issue.
“We need housing options that suit the area, and I’m looking into how nonprofits can work together to create supportive housing to answer some of that need and demand,” Sanderson told BusinessWest. “I’m not seeing any traditional solutions that meet our pipeline issue, and although there’s some backlash against housing-first policies, we’ve seen a lot of success once someone is rooted to a place — they have a place where they can give an address so they can get a job and enroll their children in school; DCF won’t be involved if they have a home. Those are just some of the aspects to the whole healing process.”
She noted that her mother recently earned a bachelor’s degree through Southern New Hampshire University.
“It’s something she always wanted to do,” Sanderson told BusinessWest, adding that her mother was one of the few in her own family to graduate from high school. “She wants to work with homeless youth because she was, at one time, a homeless youth.”
This new chapter in that story adds more emphasis to Sanderson’s comments earlier about how, if given the right support, people can accomplish what they need to accomplish.
It also helps explain why, when Sanderson thinks about the path she didn’t choose — a career in business, probably in a large urban center like Boston — she doesn’t think about it for long.
She’s quite content with the path she did choose, and what she’s done on that path — become a Woman of Impact.
