Staff Spotlight

Staff Spotlight: Meet Bank Street’s Business Office

The Business Office at Bank Street College of Education serves an essential role within the Strategy & Operations division, helping ensure that the day-to-day work of faculty, staff, and students runs smoothly all year long. The busy team of 11 works “behind the scenes” to support the financial and essential services utilized across the College and, more recently, has been instrumental in helping leadership adapt quickly to a multitude of new organizational challenges in the face of COVID-19.

Charged with a number of responsibilities, including budgeting and financial planning, accounting, supervising banking and insurance needs, managing student-related financial services, and executing periodic operations such as bi-weekly and monthly payroll processing, quarterly budgets, annual audits, and tax reports, the Business Office sustains a consistent workflow that is crucial in helping Bank Street meet its goals and realize its overall mission to build a better world through education.

“We make sure we ‘keep the lights on’ for the organization by paying the bills, ensuring employees receive their salaries, making sure donors’ money is used carefully to the last penny, and verifying that tuition is recorded correctly to help all students get the high-quality education they need,” said Aparna Muralidharan, Chief Financial Officer, Bank Street College of Education. “We’re also the facilitators in how to make things happen. We convert strategy into action, and money is a big part of that.”

While the Business Office acts as an interdependent team, there are also specific roles and functions within the department that oversee various tasks. For example, Tim Meyer, who is celebrating 25 years at Bank Street this fall, is the Bursar and works with the School for Children, the Graduate School of Education, students, and other colleagues at the College. In his role, Meyer serves as a trusted finance professional, managing student accounts, tuition, financial aid, and more.

The Business Office also works closely with Human Resources to support the many financial components of their operations and regularly collaborates with the Development and Alumni Relations Office (DARO) on projects to support funding for the institution and its initiatives through grants and fundraising, among other means.

“We do a lot of external financial reporting for various third parties as well as for different people within Bank Street. We pull data together in all sorts of ways to distribute to groups depending on their needs. In DARO, for instance, they may need financial reports for specific programs to solicit donors,” said Erin Flansburg, Controller, Business Office, Bank Street College.

In addition to supporting project-specific requests, the office manages several important annual tasks as well, such as the College’s annual tax audit, which spans multiple months, and a federal funding audit that is completed each year to ensure Bank Street is in compliance with government spending guidelines for non-profit organizations. These annual audits engage the entire organization with input from several colleagues from across the College who manage budgets for various divisions and programs.

These key divisional contacts also play a valuable role in the College’s budgeting at the start of each new fiscal year as they provide up-to-date information about their respective programs to help map out the College’s financial planning. Throughout the year, the Business Office continues to work with community members to manage the budget and reforecast as necessary in order to reflect ongoing operational and financial changes.

“With COVID-19, for example, the budget process became even more complicated with the ever-changing nature of things and maintaining Bank Street’s commitment to safely reopening our children’s programs with multiple layers of protection for the community,” said Renee Greig, Deputy Chief Financial Officer for Budget, Business Office, Bank Street College. “Part of this work has involved working to secure federal financial aid, which helped make it possible for us to purchase face masks, thermometers, and other essential supplies as well as hire consultants to create a safe school environment for students, faculty, and staff to return to in September.”

The support of the Business Office during this challenging period has been indispensable—from creating financial strategies to applying for assistance like the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, also known as the CARES Act, to ensuring employees still received their paychecks.

Moving ahead, the team will be launching a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system during the first quarter of 2021, which will initiate changes to certain familiar processes such as check requests and expense reimbursements. Trainings for employees will be facilitated by the Business Office to help the community learn the new procedures.

“I am grateful for the Business Office’s diligence every day and for the team’s continued support in meeting the needs of the College,” said Justin Tyack, Chief Operating Officer, Bank Street College of Education. “Our educators and staff would not be able to work to fulfill Bank Street’s mission without their continued support and hard work.”

To learn more about the Business Office, visit their page in Faculty & Staff Resources.

Staff Spotlight: Meet the Institutional Giving Team

The Development and Alumni Relations Office’s Institutional Giving team works with grant-making organizations to generate funding and support of strategic initiatives, projects and programs, and scholarships across Bank Street College. We sat down with Maggie Cely, Senior Grants Development Officer, Kristin Conklin, Associate Vice President for Institutional Giving, and Antoinette Gregg, Grants Development Associate, to learn more about the team’s work.

1. Tell us about your fundraising responsibilities and how you work across the College.

Kristin: Our team is responsible for coordinating fundraising from foundations and government organizations. We support projects across the College to develop strategies for cultivating prospective funders and submitting grant proposals to them. We also help ensure that Bank Street reports on its progress and outcomes to its supporters.

This year, we instituted a portfolio system for our Institutional Giving group. Maggie, Antoinette, and I have a number of foundations in our portfolios, and our job is to get to know all we can about the funders and to connect Bank Street to them. By getting to know our funders, we can look at Bank Street programs through the unique lens that each institution is applying to the process and use that knowledge to help create and inform the proposals and projects we help develop. The end goal, of course, is to increase support for the amazing work that colleagues throughout the College do to improve access and quality education for all.

2. What is the process for securing partnerships and funding?

Antoinette: We meet with different teams from across the College at monthly meetings, where we bring new prospects to the group—or potential prospects from foundations they are already in touch with—and figure out a strategy to discuss what the partner might be interested in about Bank Street’s programs. We help start a conversation that will lead us to the next step.

Maggie: Occasionally, a new idea will be brought to us—like a novel survey—and in that case, we look at our portfolio of funders to see who might be interested, such as those that have previously funded something adjacent.

Kristin: We also collaborate with colleagues from across the College each month at our Institutional Giving Working Group. These meetings are evolving into dynamic conversations about the ways specific foundations might look at a Bank Street program or initiative and help us develop a strategy to gain their support. We examine our work using a foundation’s priorities as a lens for developing strategy.

For example, a foundation might focus on place-based giving. Place-based initiatives are very community-focused and partnership-based. With a funder that focuses on place-based giving, we would want our pitch to address how a program or initiative fits within the foundation’s larger strategy for supporting a specific community, and we would want to highlight any partnerships the program or initiative has, or could develop, to increase our impact in the focus community.

Antoinette: We also help with stewarding. For example, when there are reports or site visits that need to happen, we can help to coordinate those things too.

3. What are a few examples of recent work?

Maggie: There are a lot of exciting things happening across the College. Last year, the Center on Culture, Race & Equity secured a New York State Education Department grant through the Office of Special Education to both create and implement culturally and linguistically responsive professional development and technical assistance to support students across New York State.

Kristin: Another example of a project in development is the work we are doing to support the Graduate School’s math education programs. Robin Hummel, Director and Course Instructor, Leadership Programs, Graduate School of Education, and I recently met with a foundation that would be an incredible partner for a federal grant opportunity that would fund financial support and professional development for prospective math teachers.

4. What is an important attribute or skill for a member of an institutional giving team to cultivate?

Maggie: The ability to listen is really crucial because being able to hear the ideas and also extract them—being a good sounding board for somebody—is an important piece.

Antoinette: To add to that, we want people to know that they can reach out to us for direction and support whenever they need it, like with questions about where to go first to secure funding, for example.

Kristin: I think we all share a love for language and how we say things. Part of our job is being able to take these wonderful ideas and translate them into ways that connect to the hearts and minds of the people who have the resources to support the work.