Nancy Phelps, Director of Community Impact at JE Dunn Construction, shared with LaVon Colhour, Director of Corporate Services, how the construction company’s corporate giving program has fostered a culture of generosity throughout the business.
Below you’ll find the conversation.
Authored by: Ashley Hawkins, Content Specialist
Interview HighlightsThe following exchange has been edited for length and clarity.
LaVon Colhour:Joining me today is Nancy Phelps. Nancy promotes corporate and employee engagement across 20 markets as the Director of Community Impact at JE Dunn Construction. Nancy and her company oversee the Dunn Family Foundation and JE Dunn’s corporate giving efforts, as well as volunteer involvement and a new employee matching gift program. Nancy is a spring 2021 member of the Centurions Leadership Program, and she recently completed her second term as president of the Marlborough Community Coalition serving the historic Marlborough neighborhood, located east of Troost in South Kansas City.
LaVon Colhour:Nancy recently served as a panelist at our Corporate Giving Network, where we discussed corporate response to COVID-19. She had a wealth of information to share about JE Dunn and its community initiatives. So, to start, Nancy, could you give an overview of your background and role at JE Dunn?
Nancy Phelps:Yeah, you bet. I joined JE Dunn in December 2019, which was definitely not the start of the new journey I had anticipated. No one can predict a pandemic, but here we are, and it’s just been such a great transition. I talk about this position as my dream job at my dream company. Just thrilled to be part of the team. My background is actually entirely in nonprofits, with nearly two decades of experience spanning from the largest to the smallest organizations.
Nancy Phelps:My husband and I spent four years living and working in urban St. Louis, serving alongside a national nonprofit, The Urban Core. Most recently, I served as president of the Marlborough Community Coalition. I’m telling you, best neighborhood in Kansas City. It’s a testament to what happens when a passionate group of residents comes together, links arms, and advocates for their neighborhood and community. Amazing things going on there.
Nancy Phelps:Then, most recently, I worked professionally at the Greater Kansas City Chamber, our regional chamber of commerce here in metro Kansas City, where I handled major investor relations, local affinity programs for our members, and even some national programs that allowed other chambers across the country to partner with us.
Nancy Phelps:Along the way, it’s been a whole lot of different roles and responsibilities, as happens for any nonprofit veteran. We’ve done all the things from marketing to events to fundraising, investor relations, all the things, but all of those have brought me to where I am today. At JE Dunn, my approach to philanthropy has absolutely been shaped by each of those nonprofit experiences. I’m thrilled to be using that background and knowledge, along with our experience, to now shape our community impact approach and strategy here at JE Dunn.
LaVon Colhour:Wow. What an asset! I mean, just your experience, your background. That’s amazing to take that nonprofit background into a corporation to help mold what they already have going. You bring so much experience to the table. Can you tell us about JE Dunn’s philanthropic and community impact efforts?
Nancy Phelps:Yeah, absolutely, and that’s part of the reason why I say that this is kind of my dream company. Being here in Kansas City, at the metropolitan chamber and the regional chamber, I saw JE Dunn everywhere, getting involved in all of our community efforts, and I gained such a deep respect for JE Dunn as an organization and the people I met along the way. There is such a deep culture of generosity ingrained at JE Dunn. We’re in 21 different markets across the country. Here in Kansas City, our hometown, we are deeply ingrained in the community, with people serving on boards, volunteering, and giving back, whether through the Dunn Family Foundation or our JE Dunn corporate giving.
Nancy Phelps:Actually, just this spring, right before the world was hit with a pandemic, we had completed crafting a new strategic plan for all our community impact efforts. We have a great team that’s really working to continue the legacy of generosity and connect the dots even more to build out our community efforts, both locally here and across the country.
Nancy Phelps:Our employees have literally served on thousands of boards across the country. We typically average around 51,000 volunteer hours annually across our employee base. We have all of this employee involvement happening. Our employees are so generous themselves.
Nancy Phelps:We’re thrilled to see our employees giving their time and resources. Then we combine that with the Dunn Family Foundation. So, tying all these dots together is our data and corporate giving. That has been a philosophy at JE Dunn since the beginning, when we started giving back 10% of our pre-tax net revenue. The strategic plan we launched just before the pandemic hit, and which we’re now focusing on implementing over the years to come, is enriching lives through corporate and employee engagement in all the communities where we live, work and build.
LaVon Colhour:That’s awesome. We love seeing how generous employees are and companies that offer these programs for employees, which brings me to the culture. You touched on the culture of giving back at JE Dunn. Could you elaborate a bit more on what that culture looks like?
Nancy Phelps:Absolutely. It is deeply ingrained throughout the organization at all levels. It started really with our family founders. In December, Mr. William Dunn Senior, Bill Dunn Senior, retired officially after 96 years, which is just incredible. He was still coming into the office one or two days a week after I started in December, so I got to spend some really good time with him and really hear, from his perspective, the roots of that generosity and his philosophy about treating people well, giving back to your community, serving others. I see that resonating with all of our employees today. It’s part of our culture.
LaVon Colhour:How has JE Dunn responded to the COVID-19 pandemic?
Nancy Phelps:We have taken a three-pronged approach to responding to the COVID-19 pandemic here at JE Dunn. This approach consists of an immediate response, which we initiated this spring as things began to change rapidly, an interim response, where we are currently, and a long-term perspective. I’m going to start long-term and work my way back because that’s been our focus. Our focus has been on ensuring that we have funding available when the repercussions of being shut down for months, as well as the cancellation of events and fundraising, hit our nonprofit partners.
Nancy Phelps:We see serious fallout for them coming in the future, and knowing the vital services they provide to our community, to our people in Kansas City and in all of our markets, we want to ensure that we’re able and ready to lend support when needed. That’s essentially our long-term vision, and we’re working through how we would evaluate such requests and funding responses later this year. In the interim, which is kind of where we are now, we’re prioritizing our legacy relationships with nonprofits, those that we’ve funded historically, that we have strong relationships with, deprioritizing event support, knowing that it’s a constantly changing event landscape and really focusing on programmatic support for those legacy partners.
Nancy Phelps:Looking back to March, when the pandemic really hit in Kansas City and in most of our markets around the country, we had an immediate response. I must give credit to our leadership, particularly to Bob Dunn, Gordon Lansford, and Paul Neidlein, as well as all our leaders across the country, for stepping up and responding immediately. We were a founding funder of the Kansas City Response and Recovery Fund, that regional effort that took place through the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation. It’s incredible to see the level of support and the impact that the fund is already having.
Nancy Phelps:We were so thrilled to be an immediate founding funder of that. We actually really prioritized a lot of our immediate COVID funding response there. We, along with our nonprofit partners, as I’m sure many organizations have experienced, have sponsored a number of events that were immediately canceled. We reached out to our partners as things began to change and encouraged them to retain those sponsorship dollars to use them for programming or in the area of greatest need. That way, we could support them immediately as they were responding to such an unusual and unprecedented circumstance.
Nancy Phelps:I started having employees reach out and talk about a food bank that they’re extremely passionate about or a homeless shelter where they had volunteered for years. We started capturing this information and telling these stories internally. We called it our Inspiration Feed, a little bit of light in the midst of chaos. We started posting these stories.
Nancy Phelps:We had a dozen stories about how a construction company can respond during a pandemic. It was amazing. We have people delivering hundreds of meals, cups of coffee, signs, and cards to our healthcare providers and our frontline workers. We’re builders, we’re makers, we’re creators. Our people are so incredibly talented. They go to work sewing, and now they sew thousands of masks for various people around the country, including friends, coworkers, ambulance drivers, and nursing home attendants. It has been amazing to see how they have used their skills to create and make things to serve others.
Nancy Phelps:We built emergency testing and treatment facilities for our healthcare partners in a matter of weeks. We donated thousands of N95 masks from our own storehouse shelves that we typically would use for construction projects. It’s even something as simple as providing fencing, which would typically be used around a construction site, to local nonprofits, creating a safe outdoor space for testing and treatment for our homeless in downtown Kansas City. Those are the ways that a construction company can fight a pandemic. We can’t find the cure, but we are here, and we are ready to serve alongside others. We are ready to give back. We are ready to do the right thing and make a positive impact in our communities. I feel that for any of us in corporate social responsibility or philanthropy roles, the sweet spot is finding the place where the unique resources, skills, and abilities of a company and its people can really impact and connect with the needs in a community.
LaVon Colhour:That’s incredible. I’m just honored to be able to work with you and to work with JE Dunn, just on a very small piece of what you’re doing. I mean, it’s just amazing everything that JE Dunn is doing, the community outreach. We had no idea about the fences and the N95 masks. I mean, that’s just a great story that you can tell forever. It’s amazing. JE Dunn has really stepped up to the plate. So, thank you for everything.
