Leading Beyond the Buzzwords:What Real Systems Change Looks Like 

Dr. Pierre Berastain, the incoming CEO of SAFE Alliance in Austin, TX, the largest organization in the South and third largest in the US working with survivors of domestic and sexual violence and sex trafficking. With over 15 years of experience at the intersection of public health, gender-based violence, and government innovation, Pierre has worked with state, local, and federal agencies as well as major philanthropic partners to help governments become more human-centered and responsive. A strategist by nature and systems thinker by training, he brings a deep understanding of how nonprofits can move from service delivery to structural influence while navigating politics, power, and complexity with nuance.

Message:

I want to invite nonprofit leaders and clergy to rethink what impact really means. Too often, we measure success by outputs, efficiency, or short-term wins. But real systems change asks something deeper of us: to shift power, to center dignity, and to challenge the very structures that create harm in the first place. My hope is that listeners walk away with both clarity and courage—clarity about how our organizations can be agents of structural transformation, and courage to lead with integrity even when it’s uncomfortable. I want them to see that strategy and soul don’t have to be in tension. In fact, the most enduring change happens when we bring both to the table.

More about Pierre Berastain – https://www.pierreberastain.com/

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou

Welcome to The Nonprofit Exchange. This is Hugh Ballou. I’m the founder and president of SynerVision Leadership Foundation, where leaders are clear with their vision and they build synergy around their action plans and their initiatives. I have a fascinating guest today. We’ve had a chance to visit a little bit. My guest today is Dr. Pierre Berestrain, the incoming CEO of Safe Alliance in Austin, Texas. The largest organization in the South and the third largest in the U.S., working with survivors of domestic and sexual violence, sex trafficking, a global nonprofit that works to reimagine So it works for everyone. Pierre holds a BA in Social Anthropology from Harvard College, a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, and a Doctor of Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Originally from Peru, Pierre immigrated to the United States in 1998. and lived undocumented for 14 years. This lived experience shaped his work. I’m gonna let him talk about how he co-founded this Latino organization for peace and equity and served in leadership roles focused on trauma justice and culturally specific approaches to community safety. In this conversation, we explore what real system change looks like beyond the buzzwords, and how leaders can meaningfully transform culture, policy, and community. So Pierre’s title this episode today, Leading Beyond the Buzzwords, What Real Systems Change Looks Like. Pierre, how has your personal journey from an undocumented immigrant from Peru to becoming the new CEO of this safe alliance organization, how has it shaped your understanding of systems, power, and community care? And by the way, welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange.

Pierre Berastain

Thank you, Hugh. It’s such a pleasure to be here in community and in dialogue with you and your listeners. But yeah, my story begins, as you mentioned, right in Peru during a time of real instability and internal warfare that was buffeting the country in the 80s and 90s. But to my surprise, and through a lot of therapy, I realized that it wasn’t really fear that shaped me. It really was about how my family ended up responding to that fear. to that instability, right? And at different points in our lives, when we didn’t have many resources, we had resourcefulness, right? We didn’t always have safety, but we had a community, we had solidarity. And that in itself taught me that people often navigate impossible circumstances through creativity, through community, through determination to care for one another, right? I remember that the first mattress that we slept on was donated by by our Catholic church in the United States. And so when we immigrated to the United States, I encountered a very different kind of scarcity, and it was the scarcity of belonging, which again, my parents helped fill through our church, through friends that we made, right? And being undocumented, a gay Latino immigrant, it teaches you how systems can make you feel invisible. and how communities can make you feel seen or unseen, right? So there is that tension between invisibility and belonging that really ended up shaping my understanding of power. Who and what decides what is visible? Who decides who belongs, right? Those are questions about power. And so later, working in shelters, in immigration advocacy, in government partnerships, I began to see a sort of a pattern, if you will. And that pattern is that the crises that we respond in social services, in public health, be it domestic violence, homelessness, poverty, family separation, you name it. Those are very predictable outcomes of policy choices, of cultural narratives, of institutional neglect. And as a leader, as a professional, once you see that, it’s almost impossible to unsee it. And so when I think about leadership today, it’s really shaped by that understanding, right? It’s not that people are failing in a vacuum, it’s that systems are failing. And in my mind, communities hold the wisdom that institutions oftentimes overlook. So as I step into this role of CEO at Safe Alliance, which, as you mentioned, is the largest in the South and one of the largest in the United States serving survivors of gender-based violence, my job is going to be honoring that wisdom in communities, shift the systems that are creating harm in the first place, build the conditions where people don’t have to rely on just ingenuity to survive, if you will. you know, where I would say where dignity is not an aspiration, it’s really at the baseline, where community collective care becomes part of the DNA of what we do. So for me, I’d say this role is not just professional. It’s really a full circle moment of a long immigration story. It’s a chance to help build the kind of community that my own family needed and that we relied on oftentimes when we arrived in the United States.

Hugh Ballou

Love it. Love it. So if you’re joining us on video right now, this is the Nonprofit Exchange. We’re having a really, really good conversation. And the topic is leading beyond the buzzwords. What real system change looks like. If you can’t gab all of these really great statements. Don’t fear. When you go to thenonprivateexchange.org, you’ll find a full transcript with all these wonderful words coming out of his mouth. You can write them down, copy them. So, Pierre, buzzwords. Let’s define what you mean by buzzwords, and then in a world full of jargon, what truly distinguishes systems change from incremental program improvement?

Pierre Berastain

No, I think that that’s a great question. I sometimes joke and I say that systems change has become the kombucha of the sector, right? Like everyone claims to be doing it, everyone claims to be drinking it, but very few people are actually fermenting anything real, anything transformative. So I would say that programs improve the symptoms of a problem, whereas the systems change mentality shifts the conditions that are creating that problem in the first place. So program improvement sounds like, hey, let’s add more beds, shelter beds. We’re going to increase the number of trainings that we do. It’s about adjusting the form of what we do. But systems change really asks the question of why are people entering shelter in the first place? Right? What policy environments, what economic drivers or conditions, what are the cultural narratives that are making violence so common in the first place? And who benefits from those patterns staying the same? And so one of the biggest misunderstandings I think in systems change is that thinking that systems change is fast or it’s flashy. And it’s actually usually quite slow. quiet, it’s relational, right? It’s behind the scenes. And I think that real systems change requires a degree of humility, it requires curiosity and tremendous amount of time, right? You have to listen to the people who have lived closest to the problem. You have to slow down enough to see the patterns that lie beneath the crisis. You have to have the courage to intervene upstream even when there are downstream fires, right, that are just yelling at you. And so I’d say that in gender-based violence work, systems change looks like integrating housing, for example. Like at Safe Alliance, we integrate housing and health prevention, right? So survivors don’t have to navigate this maze of services just to feel a little bit safer, right? It looks like investing in culturally specific programs, not just as nice-to-haves. But it looks like naming the truth that violence is not an individual failure. It’s a societal design flaw. But I wanna say one more quick thing, and that is that systems change, we always talk about this, those of us who are in systems work, it requires mindset change, a shift in the mindsets of people. So I’ll give you an example. Prevention work in gender-based violence, domestic sexual violence, is not only about raising awareness of the issue, It’s also about cultivating new habits in the way we relate. So I always give this example, right? So for example, we teach kids that the qualities of being persistent, right? We say, don’t give up, keep on trying, find another way, don’t take no for an answer, right? Those are beautiful qualities to teach our kids. But I always say, what happens when that lesson shows up in dating or in a relationship? What does never give up mean when someone is setting a boundary or saying no to you? And when I was at Harvard at the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, we borrowed this term that someone else in the field had come up with. It’s called rolling with rejection. And that also is a skill. It’s a skill that is grounded in consent, in emotional regulation, respect for the other person. That’s mindset work. That’s a skill set that we have to embed in prevention. So yes. I do think that program improvement is critical, but that restores or works within a current system. System change ends up redesigning that system, in my mind at least.

Hugh Ballou

I want to bring this home. We have synergy, that’s the word I like, center vision. My principles are what we teach here at your foundation. You’ve got to have where you’re going, your vision, center vision, in the skills to do it. Second one, you’ve got to surround yourself with the right people, so relationships is the second principle. Third one, surprise, systems. You have really good work, you have really good people, and you stop because you don’t have the systems to actually implement it. I mean, look at how many boards have really good people and they’re not really functioning. And then the fourth one is balance. How do you keep yourself balanced so you can do the other three? So for people, for our audience today, There’s a really big piece here. Now you’re going to take on a new organization. So I’m imagining systems improvement is high on your priorities because we tend to want to do work helping everybody else. But if we don’t raise the bar on our own performance and our own organization, it really limits our effectiveness. You want to talk about some of your vision for how you’re going to install systems in your new organization you’re going to lead. Sure, yeah.

Pierre Berastain

Well, we’ll do it collectively, right, with the leadership team, with the 300 staff who are part of the organization. Oh my goodness! It is quite huge, right? But these are the folks who are doing this work from a place of love, right? And I mention that because there is a system that we use in terms of, you know, software, the infrastructure, the operations. I’m really talking about systems in terms of the levers that we are pulling to make our work easier, more difficult, the societal conditions that give rise to violence, right, those pieces. I mentioned that our staff do this out of love because oftentimes systems external to the nonprofit, be it government partners, philanthropy, exploit that love. that people in charity work and nonprofits bring. We all come to this work from a place of generosity, of care, commitment, love in our communities. And systems oftentimes exploit that by giving people untenable workloads. Right? In the child support field, you have advocates, you have staff, caseworkers who have up to 500, six, seven, 800 cases at any given time. It’s impossible, right, to be able to really give the person the love that you went into the profession with when you have a system that is literally drowning you in cases. And so when you think about what systems change looks like, it’s not always just, it links a lot in relationships, yes, or it relies a lot on relationships, but it doesn’t always look very pretty. Sometimes the way that looks like is holding your partners, like government entities, philanthropy donors, accountable for the conditions that they’ve created through the requirements, through reporting, through demands that they’ve made, right, on your staff. So that’s one example of how we look at our work.

Hugh Ballou

I see a lot of frustration with leaders and the burnout’s huge because the demand is so huge. And so managing self, staying calm, and I mean, you’re so grounded and centered and focused. That is a huge leadership quality because leadership is fundamentally influenced. So you show up anxious, it’s gonna be contagious. You show up confident and clear. I’m admiring your persona, sir. So under the, Psalms talk a lot about God and judging people with equity, leadership and equity. You often speak about dignity-centered and collective leadership. What does that look like in practice, especially in the complex and high-stakes organizations like the Safe Alliance?

Pierre Berastain

Yeah. Let me start with compare and contrast, if you will, right? And by that, I mean, we’ve inherited leadership models that prize or value certainty, devalue charisma, and individual heroism. I mean, it’s a very individualistic society that we live in oftentimes. And yet, none of those qualities are what actually shift complex social problems. So dignity-centered leadership starts with a different kind of question. And to me, that starts the question of how do people experience themselves in our care as leaders, as service providers? That’s the question that Jesus asked how do people experience themselves in our community, in our presence? And this is where my Divinity School background I think comes in full force in what I say. So at SAFE, SAFE Alliance, where we house over a thousand people each night, and we serve thousands more, a thousand people each night, right? Dignity is not really just an aspiration. It has to be operational. It means designing services that are going to reduce the fragmentation and the re-traumatization for survivors, especially for survivors who are navigating complexity, right? Housing and healthcare, legal systems, child welfare, all at once. I mean, this is a gargantuan task that we ask people who are coming out of trauma to navigate. And so collective leadership here means something entirely different. Collective leadership acknowledges that not one person holds the full picture because of that complexity. And in my experience, the best ideas come from the people who are closest to the crisis. The frontline advocates, the forensic nurses, housing navigators, prevention educators, right? The people who touch the system every day. And so equity in leadership means looking at the unseen DNA. The fabric is what I call an organization, right? The case of expectations, the compensation, who gets to imagine, who gets stuck with execution, right? Imagination is a privilege. It’s that sometimes our own structures prevent people from being imaginative. It burns them out, as you mentioned, right? It means Equity means challenging the structural scarcity that keeps staff exhausted and then calling that exhaustion a personal failing. So my responsibility as CEO is to create the conditions, that structure, that clarity, the culture, the space, right, if you will, where staff can not only do their work, but they can truly thrive in what they’re doing. They can feel joy in what they’re doing. Because if the people who care for survivors feel depleted, then our entire mission and purpose is compromised. So I would say that leadership in this moment is less about being the loudest person in the room or the center of gravity, if you will. And it’s really more about being a steward, a custodian of the collective imagination for our communities. And I hope that I can be that.

Hugh Ballou

Oh, you will be that. I know you will be there. Very well stated. Folks, that last few minutes was profound, as you know. So you can find the full script, the transcript. So Pierre, under the topic of storytelling and narrative, you’ve written and spoken about how narratives shape a culture. And how do stories reinforce or disrupt the system surrounding gender-based violence, immigration, belonging? for a lot of other topics.

Pierre Berastain

Yeah, storytelling and stories, right? Stories, I think, are one of the deepest ways that human beings make meaning, right? Meaning-making happens through stories. And I think that’s because stories tell us who we are, who is worthy of our care, who society chooses to invest in or abandon, right? And because stories shape our moral imagination, they can either reinforce or disrupt the systems around us, right? And you see this clearly in immigration, right? The national rhetoric around criminal immigrants has done more to justify really harmful policies than any data ever could, right? In gender-based violence, there is a narrative, or there used to be a narrative, still is actually, right, that abuse is a private matter. And that narrative has kept survivors isolated and supported for generations. In the LGBTQ communities, stories about morality, about family, legitimacy, that’s shaped everything from safety to civil rights, to who we allow to demonstrate love or not. But I think that stories can be quite disruptive as well. I think that that single narrative, right, told with honesty, with love, can expand what a society believes is possible. It can expand what a community sees as possible. And so the work that we do at SAVE and across the movement of gender-based violence is quite a bit more than service delivery. It really is narrative work. It’s a work of storytelling. And I think that we are reshaping the cultural stories about what safety means, who deserves protection, what communities owe to one another, what we owe to each other as neighbors, right? And so I think that stories reflect systems, yes, but they can also create systems. And when survivors of violence speak from a place of truth and testimony, rather than shame or pathology, we can see that narrative shift from what did you do wrong, right? Why didn’t you leave the abuse? To a narrative of how did our systems fail you in the first place? Why did the abusive partner abuse in the first place? Where did our educational system fail that abusive partner, that he or she didn’t learn how to relate and treat other human beings, right? So when immigrant families tell their stories, we are forced to confront the gap between who we claim to be as a nation, as Christians, and who we actually are in our actions, right? When queer, LGBTQ, trans people share their stories publicly, I think they begin to widen our societal understanding of dignity, of family. So I think stories are critical for not just relating, but for also creating a different possibility of what our society can look like.

Hugh Ballou

I think bringing it into the realm of our audience, these things, same things we have in our own organizations that we’re not dealing with. We’re blind to them. So let’s talk about collaboration. It’s one of the most misunderstood and feared words with leaders in the nonprofit sector and government. So what enables, and they don’t really understand what it is, because we haven’t defined it. And it’s a big deal. It’s a good benefit. So you’re strong on that, which is great. What enables strong collaboration between nonprofits, government, and communities? And what commonly gets in the way? And could you add universities to that list?

Pierre Berastain

Sure, yeah. I think the best collaboration start with humility, truly, right? It’s that acknowledgement that none of us have the full solution, right? Non-profits bring proximity to lived experience, right? Governments bring scale, they bring policy levers that can be pulled. Communities bring wisdom that literally no institution can replicate. right? But collaboration breaks down when one single actor believes that they own the problem. When our hubris gets in the way in saying we know what the problem and solution is. And so what gets in the way, I think there are very concrete pieces that I’ll just mention here, right? So number one, I’d say different tempos of the work. Government work moves slowly, slowly, slowly, traditionally speaking. Non-profits move quite urgently, almost in a crisis-reactive manner oftentimes. And communities oftentimes move relationally, so you have different tempos. of work there. You also have mismatched incentives, right? Oftentimes funders want outcomes, right? Governments, for example, want compliance, communities want belonging, so you have different incentives that might not be matched, right? You also, another thing that gets in the way is fear of losing control. Right? Each system is trying to protect itself. It’s trying to protect its turf, if you will. And so what enables collaboration is trust built over time, not a memorandum of understanding, not a written agreement that says how we’re going to relate with each other. Those help, but really trust is built over time. It’s another thing that enables it, I think, is shared stewardship, right? Not handoffs, but shared stewardship. population-based specificity, what I call culturally specific works, the acknowledgement that not one size fits all, right? And then the other piece is honesty about constraints rather than performative partnership. Oftentimes, because we come with hubris and say we know the problem, we also are afraid to acknowledge the constraints that we have to our work. And so I’ll say a great example right now that is happening in Austin, Texas. with Safe Alliance, the city purchased a hotel and in partnership with the Safe Alliance is turning that hotel into an emergency shelter for survivors. And that to me is not just charity. I think that’s civic engagement and civic investment, right? It’s what it looks like when a city says, we share responsibility for our community’s safety, right? But what deepens that collaboration is understanding that this is not just some nice, feel-good, pat-on-the-back charity work, right? We’re talking about something equally important here, and that is economic stewardship. And I say that because gender-based violence and homelessness are extraordinarily expensive for cities, right? Emergency calls, ER visits, policing, engagement or involvement with the child welfare system or criminal justice system. Cities are spending thousands of dollars per family per year on all of these downstream crises. And so at SAVE, my preliminary estimate, if I’m being honest, is that our program saved the city of Austin anywhere from 60 to 90 million dollars annually. in avoided emergency health homelessness costs. So organizations like Safe Alliance, we’re not just moral actors, right? We are economic engines of our communities. And investing in safety and prevention is literally saving taxpayer money, full stop, that’s it, right? So when governments and nonprofits see themselves as stewards of of public well-being, of public dollars, that conversation changes. It becomes less about… Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Hugh Ballou

It’s a high-level partnership, and you talk about community responsibility and stewardship. Those are really strong words. We’re nearing the end of our time, so I want to go to your website. How can people find you? It’s your name. Could you spell it, please? Sure.

Pierre Berastain

P-I-E-R-R-E. And then my last name, B-E-R-A-S-T-A-I-N. So pierrebrastain.com. That’s my personal website. And there you’ll just find a little bit about me, my background, some of my publications. And then if you scroll down, you’ll see some of the some of the areas that I bring expertise in, so equity and LGBTQ rights, systems thinking, of course, and social change, gender-based violence, community violence. And I also have a podcast in Spanish called Lo Que No Me Dijeron. and which means that which I wasn’t told about, if you will. And the first season is out. And again, it’s in Spanish, but it looks at those pesky passages in the Bible that that seem to condemn LGBTQ rights. And I debunk every single one of them. And then I move on to a theological forceful theological argument that the Bible actually demands full inclusion and love and justice for LGBTQ people. So that’s the other podcast that I have in Spanish.

Hugh Ballou

So as we close this up, what’s your hope for the future, for what’s possible in the next few years?

Pierre Berastain

Hmm, what gives me hope right now is that we’re seeing quite a profound shift in how people think about safety, about belonging, about care, right? I think for a long time, our sector was focused exclusively on crisis response, on reaching out in the worst moments of a person’s lives. And that work is essential, but it’s also incomplete, right? Because increasingly, communities are asking a different kind of question. They’re asking, What would it take for people to live full, connected, flourishing lives? What would it look like to build a city where violence is not inevitable? So it’s that shift from reaction to imagination that gives me tremendous hope. And I’m also inspired by Austin, Texas itself, right? This is a community with deep desire to do more than just put out fires. People here understand that safety is not just the absence of violence, it’s the presence of stability, of housing, of connection, belonging, of joy, accountability, right? And it’s a whole ecosystem of conditions that allow people to feel rooted and valued. And so one of the things that excites me about leading Safe Alliance is that we’re not just addressing harm, right? We’re helping rebuild or build relations, cultural infrastructure, right, that makes that well-being possible. So when survivors have access to housing, to healthcare, legal supports, emotional care, right, in one integrated place like we do at Safe Alliance, something shifts. because they’re not experiencing service delivery, they’re experiencing coherence. And for me, that coherence is an aspect of healing. And so the deepest source of my hope is the community itself. People want to build something better. You can feel it. It’s the way that neighbors show up for one another. It’s the grassroots networks that care, the teachers and nurses, the advocates who give. who give us the hope that every person deserves safety and dignity, right? That community well-being depends on this.

Hugh Ballou

And to me, that’s critical. Pierre, thank you for being, for joining us today, sharing your wisdom and your insights. For the audience, we hope this discussion inspires leaders everywhere to engage deeply, listen intentionally, and lead with courage. Because this really fundamentally is transformation. We’re not changing, we’re transforming people’s lives. So Pierre, thank you for being my guest today on The Nonprofit Exchange. Thank you, Hugh.