Deborah Nankivell

A local nonprofit is all in on its mission to foster inclusive prosperity and overall wellbeing in the San Joaquin Valley with goals that extends to future generations.

Led by CEO Deborah Nankivell, the goal of the Fresno Stewardship Foundation is to teach that practical solutions advance the common good.

Nankivell, CEO of the Fresno Business Council from 1993 to 2024, said our community needs more people with a practical-solutions mindset regardless of their expertise or specific interests.

As a philosophy major and attorney, Nankivell said it may be a surprise to some how much she respects private sector leaders as champions of the common good.

“It’s because the people that are really good at visionary, entrepreneurial, strategic leadership — and then translate it into a path forward to get it done and adjust if it’s not working — the private sector is rewarded for that,” Nankivell said.

The challenge is helping them understand the essential role only they can play, she added.

She said people with those skill sets realize that everyone wins if they step up to help the common good.

If they don’t, and people are left behind, Nankivell said, we all have to pay for it through funding for criminal justice, public benefits and more.

“It’s a matter of pausing and thinking deeply about issues and using the talents of business applied to the business of community,” she said.

Business owners are ever vocal on how regulations can stifle businesses, and California truly is an outlier with the amount of control exerted without thought to cost, Nankivell said.

Nankivell said the state needs to figure out how to support businesses while saving the “guard rails” and regulations that really do matter.

Nankivell said every area has a different business and economic fabric, and a lot it depends on the type of industries present.

“One of the challenges that this region has had is that when you have a low-cost, dominant industry [agriculture], it can have an outside influence on policies and people don’t have a lot of choices,” she said.

She said programs such as the Fresno Regional Jobs Initiative launched in 2004 were about diversifying the industrial mix, strengthening career technical education and supporting small businesses for a balanced economy.

The Fresno Regional Jobs Initiative was established to generate long-term, sustainable economic development in the region through partnerships among local governments, state and federal agencies, as well as public and private entities.

The challenge we are facing now, Nankivell said, is designing an economy that serves a whole community and is customized by region.

California’s tendency to have a “one size fits all” strategy is not a path forward, she said, and the state need’s flexibility and adaptability informed by what works on the ground.

Nankivell said she was instilled with the view that everyone should go to college, but now she has a passion for alternatives such as CTE, the Center for Advanced Research and Technology (CART) in Clovis and Career Technical Education Charter (CTEC) High School in Fresno, which offer a variety of opportunities to build life skills in a project-based, practical environment. That adds value to the community, she said.

“Lots of people don’t want to be in an office all day, they don’t want to push paper around and go to a whole bunch of meetings,” Nankivell said. “They want to build something.”

In regard to education, Nankivell said the most important step is to transfer the responsibility to the student as soon as possible.

If students really understood that the path to freedom and a quality life is learning, and find out what they’re passionate about and learn the basic skills, they can create their life Nankivell said.

A business owner might not always be able to give money to a cause or organization they care about, but they can still help, Nankivell said.

Employers can encourage their workers to volunteer, they could welcome interns, work with curriculum teams to make sure students learn about what they’ll actually be doing in the workplace, and provide resources for worker health and well-being.

“There’s so many things they can do without giving money — give who they are,” Nankivell said. “They could make their work place a community.”