Hildy Gottlieb and business partner Dimitri Petropolis founded the first diaper bank in Tucson, Arizona, and then went on to build their business, Help 4 Nonprofits & Tribes, working with Native American tribes and nonprofit organizations to make the world a better place.
They have now launched their new business, the Community Driven Institute, to give community organizations the principles and tools they need to have greater impact. Hildy received a Points of Light Citation from President Bill Clinton, and her writing appears in publications including the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Her workbooks are industry standards and she has just published the groundbreaking book The Pollyanna Principles: Reinventing "Nonprofit Organizations" to Create the Future of Our World.
How did you become an entrepreneur?
I don't think you become one, I think you just are one. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said that you don’t choose to be a writer, if you are so compulsive that you can’t not write, then you’re a writer. That’s how I feel about entrepreneurship. I don’t ever remember not pursuing interesting things that I was passionate about that somehow became my life. You’re born with something. There's a difference between being self-employed and being an entrepreneur.
I have the personality: fiercely independent, fiercely self-motivated, incredibly self-disciplined, and passionate about so many things. I haven't had a "real job" in years. I was a City Council aid to Tom Volgy after college. Being a legislative aide is very entrepreneurial, your hours are yours, you make it up as you go along. Then my (now ex-)husband was running a landscaping company, and I started working with him. I ran the retail nursery and managed some other areas. I enjoy running my own show, maybe it just means I’m unemployable at anything resembling real work.
What kind(s) of business do you own?
Our business name is Resolve Inc. We didn’t want to pigeonhole it into what it was going to be. It's been 4-6 things since we started at the end of 1993. When we bought it, we were doing commercial real estate and business turnaround. The latter is essentiallly being an entrepreneur for hire. When we bought the business, I was a single mom, and my partner Dimitri and his wife and I realized that we could make the business into anything we wanted it to be. So we made a list of five criteria, and made the agreement that whatever came in the door that looked like that, we would try and it would lead to what we should be doing. We began working with Native American tribes doing business development and sustainable non-gaming economic development in reservations around the southwest. We helped one tribe develop their tourism business.
I'm a serial entrepreneur. We're now on the third community organization we've founded. First was the Diaper Bank (here in Tucson), which was incredibly entrepreneurial because it was the first in the world. The second was the Phoenix area diaper bank. And, we've recently launched the Community Driven Institute to promulgate the ideas behind the Pollyanna Princples, which are the topic of the book I just published. (Resolve is now a small publishing firm, too.) I'm a heavy social entrepreneur rather than a financial entrepreneur, and it was my work with community organizations that led to the entrepreneurial epiphany that community organizations are not having the impact they could have, so we are setting the course for reinventing how organizations do their work to create more impact.
Continue on to page 2 for the remainder of Heidi's interview with Hildy Gottlieb.