A Heart for this Work

Billings Education Foundation’s Kelly McCandless fills the gaps

If she was frenzied, she didn’t show it. In less than a week’s time, Kelly McCandless was about to throw a huge party with an expected 10,000 guests. It was just days before Saturday Live, the major fundraiser for the Education Foundation for Billings Public Schools.

Instead of panic, Kelly radiated calm as she carved out time to talk about the forces that drive her. Forefront in her mind remains one constant goal: how best to support Billings students and teachers.

For the past three years, Kelly has served as executive director of the Education Foundation for Billings Public Schools. In that short time, she and her team have taken the foundation by the tail. When she started, there were two part-time staff. Now there are five. When she started, the foundation’s budget barely exceeded $700,000. Today it has topped $1.7 million. When she started, the foundation had no plan for feeding hungry students during the summer. This past summer, the foundation’s innovative “Munch Machine” provided nutritious meals for an average of 275 students every week.

Although Kelly prefers to talk about her team over herself, the work they do speaks volumes.

“Through Kelly’s leadership, our programs touch each of the 16,600 students multiple times,” says board member Shannon Christensen, who applauds Kelly and her team’s far-‘reaching impacts.

Kerra Olson, a teacher at Will James Middle School, describes Kelly as “the most incredible champion for education.” She describes the foundation’s grants as her “fuel to try new things.”

Shelley Pierce, who works with Kelly, is inspired by her leadership.

“She’s constantly striving to look for solutions, partnerships and new opportunities to help advance the mission of the organization,” Shelley says.

And that mission is based on identifying unmet needs of students and teachers and then offering ways to fill those gaps.

“You don’t have to think about it very long to see how important public education is,” Kelly says. “I came to this job with a heart for students, but it didn’t take me long to have a heart for teachers, too.”

That’s why she and her team work to provide students with the tools to reach their potential and to inspire in teachers the spark that will keep them motivated to teach. Those solutions can take many forms — from filling an ever-growing number of backpacks for students who lack food at home to funding creative grants that keep both students and teachers excited about school. The foundation also assists students with basic services such as transportation, school fees and even vision and dental needs.

“We want our organization to be seen as the resource for our district,” Kelly says. “If we can keep teachers wanting to teach and kids wanting to go to school, we’re doing our job.”

At the same time, Kelly knows this work is a job that’s never finished.

“If we didn’t innovate, we’re not serving our mission,” she says.

That innovation comes with creative thinking and the courage to push boundaries. When Kelly interviewed for the director position, she wasn’t shy about sharing her penchant for taking risks.

“I told them don’t offer me this job if you want someone to do what you’ve always been doing. I’m not that person’,” she says.

But they did and she jumped at the opportunity.

“Her leadership, work ethic, drive and compassion have been evident from the moment we hired her,” Shannon Christensen says. “Our growth with Kelly as our executive director has been exponential yet mission-focused, sustainable and keeping quality at the core.”

She also credits Kelly for recently securing one of the largest endowments the foundation has ever received.

As Kelly talks about the foundation, she projects a measured approach to her work. Though not an “energizer bunny” by nature, the self-described introvert accomplishes much by viewing the foundation’s mission as a puzzle that she and her co-workers are itching to solve.

“I really, really enjoyed coming into this organization and starting to figure out this puzzle —where do we start first?” she says. “I just look at it as ‘what can we do to make it better?’”

Kelly’s home base is a bare-bones space on the first floor of the Lincoln Center. There’s no fancy desk or corner office. But she’s within shouting distance of three members of her team: Shelley Pierce, Development and Community Relations manager; Leslie Clark, Programs and Event manager; and her newest hire, Jennifer Bennett, administrative assistant. Nikki Dolan, Food Insecurity Program manager, works remotely.

Kelly may be at the helm but she’s quick to credit each one of these women for just about everything the foundation takes on, from food insecurity to scholarships to their literacy program.

“It’s these ladies,” Kelly says. “None of this moves forward without them.”

Remarkably, the entire team is employed on a part-time basis.

“Most people are shocked to hear we’re not full-time employees,” Kelly says. “But they’re amazed by the amount of work we get done. Sometimes the best thing I can do is stay out of their way.”

People are also surprised that the foundation runs solely on generosity.

“We don’t receive any funds from the district,” she says. “We get no tax dollars. We’re the philanthropic arm for our schools.”

Instead, support comes from an ever-growing army of sponsors that is broad-based, big-hearted and generous. Most donations come in amounts of $25 and $50, bolstered by larger, consistent support from commercial donors and philanthropic individuals.

“We would be nowhere without our donors — all the people and businesses that believe in us,” Kelly says.

She also says the foundation has “wonderful partnerships” with other local nonprofits, such as Tumbleweed, Family Service and United Way — each of which focuses on complementary needs.

“We do everything we can to level the playing field for those kids that come with a disadvantage,” she says.

Perhaps Kelly’s drive is motivated by her own experiences. She grew up in Billings, attended public schools here and credits her two younger sisters — “We kind of raised each other,” she says — and the boundless support of their grandparents for where she is today. “They played a pivotal role,” she says of her grandparents. “They were our moral compass.”

Somewhere along the way, Kelly developed a strong sense of determination that only seems to grow stronger.

“I think I don’t take ‘no’ very well,” she says. “An obstacle is an obstacle, not a dead end.”

Besides her drive, Kelly harbors a passion for reading and writing, which she fosters through freelance and ghost writing on the side. That background impressed upon her the power of story-telling.

“Even when I fell into marketing, it’s really just storytelling,” she says. “That pushed me on this path, telling stories that touch me.”

And that path was paved through MSU-B, where she earned degrees in communication, and later through her work at Billings Chamber of Commerce, where her positions dealt mostly with marketing and communication.

The married mother of two — Kelly and husband, Ryan, are parents to Rylie, 13, and Lyla, 9 — was working on a chamber project focused on childcare and education when she heard about the foundation position. She wasn’t actively looking for a new job but she was lured by the opportunities she envisioned and was thrilled at the thought of building her own team.

“My heart has grown to being able to see the role of education beyond all these walls, that it provides so much more,” she says.

Kelly applauds the “tremendous work” accomplished by the director and staff who preceded her. She is also thankful she was given the chance to view the foundation with fresh eyes and from “30,000 feet up” — a perspective that allowed her to identify redundancies and maximize efficiencies and then reach for new horizons.

But Kelly came to the position with a distinct disadvantage. It was July 2021, in the depths of Covid.

“I was only six weeks in, and I had to cancel Saturday Live,” she says.

The family-oriented, volunteer-driven event, which draws in thousands of families, had long served as the foundation’s major fundraiser and typically brings in tens of thousands of dollars. So, with the event cancelled, Kelly and her team were forced to dig deep.

“We had to get creative to replace the lost fundraising opportunity, using connections and community support to share the foundation with anyone who would listen,” she says.

Her active approach continues to reap rewards. Early on, during speaking engagements, she would ask attendees how many were familiar with the foundation and its work. As the months and years passed, the number of hands shooting up keeps growing.

“As our profile has grown and the work we do becomes better understood, more people want to become a part of it,” she says. “There were more doors opening than we could answer, which is a wonderful problem to have.”

When Kelly speaks of her work, she frequently speaks of “heart” — a hard-to-quantify term that she can feel more than define. It’s that same sense of compassion that she prioritizes when hiring a new team member.

“I look way more for the heart of the person than their skills,” she says. “You can train skills but what I can’t train is someone who’s going to have a heart for this work.”

But those hearts also have limits. Kelly cautions her co-workers about the fine line between caring too much and growing a thick skin.

“We hear some hard stories here,” she says. “We have to be vulnerable to stay connected to our mission, but we can’t become jaded.”

They see and hear heart-wrenching stories. There’s the counselor who witnessed a child coming in from recess and squeezing his backpack to see if it had been loaded with food for his weekend. Or the young girl who had been ostracized by her peers for the shabby clothes — her only clothes — that she wore to school. In that case, the solution was simple and personal. The foundation funded a few basic outfits for this child, the school washes them daily and then exchanges them, providing the girl with a clean change of clothes every day.

“These are the things people don’t realize need to be done to keep children in a more equitable environment,” Kelly says.

Such stories fill Kelly’s soul. As does her team.

“I came into this role wanting to surround myself with people wanting to do great work,” she says. “I’m extremely lucky to have the team I have. None of this moves forward without them. They’re creative and good at trouble-shooting. And this group lifts each other up. It’s pretty empowering to have a team that’s moving the needle.”

Kelly and her team are constantly looking for gaps they might fill. Because they are a nonprofit, they have the flexibility to address some needs that the district might not. One of those needs came up as a frequent question during presentations: what happens to the children who depend on the backpack program during the summer?

“So many children come to school because that’s where they feel loved, safe and where they get something to eat,” Kelly says. “We don’t realize what we take away when we take away school (weekends and summers).”

The district’s summer Lunch in the Parks addressed that need in part, but the foundation’s team still sensed some kids were missing out.

“Our research told us there was a contingent of children not able to access those resources,” she says. “So, we dreamt up the Munch Machine.”

Kelly likens their mobile food program to “DoorDash,” as it travels from home to home delivering meals to children who otherwise would be lacking. Each day, the Munch Machine made 30 to 40 deliveries during its first summer in operation. To prepare for those deliveries, the foundation relied on an army of volunteers that packed nearly 300 bags — each containing six nutritious breakfasts and lunches and even more snacks — every week.

“The bags were pretty robust,” Kelly says.

Going into the summer, the foundation projected the Munch Machine would be feeding about 200 students. But that number quickly grew to 275. By the time the 2024 school year started, the foundation already had 86 percent more students on the backpack meal program than they had at the same time a year earlier.

“I keep hoping this is a program that will shrink,” Kelly says. “But I don’t see that happening.”

Reasons for the increased numbers are varied — among them inflation and more restrictive requirements for Medicaid and SNAP recipients.

“Our numbers spiked when the rules changed,” Kelly says. “But we firmly believe these are children. They don’t have a say in what happens to them. We will always do what we can to feed that child.”

While the foundation has its share of tough challenges, it also witnessed its share of victories.

The summer Reading Rocks program keeps kids reading with fun activities and, during the school year, the foundation awards scholarships and grants to inspire both teachers and students.

One such project trained kids to fly drones and then taught them how to download the videos they’d collected onto a computer. Another supported new technology to help non-verbal students communicate.

Kerra Olson has used the foundation’s classroom grants to fund projects ranging from Lego-robotics to the Tower Garden. For the latter, the students grew crops in the classroom, learned about crops grown in Montana and then snacked on their harvests.

“When I ask my students their favorite moments, lessons and days, they always feature Classroom Grant projects,” Kerra says. “I can’t thank the Education Foundation enough and the ‘Captain’ for all the sparkle they bring to our days!”

More recently, the foundation responded to the district’s goal to boost student literacy. Though the program is just in its infancy, the foundation hopes to install book vending machines at schools.

“They can be used to reward good behavior or whatever the school decides,” Kelly says.

Each new day seems to bring new ideas.

“I think we’re just getting started,” Kelly says. “This is the largest and longest-running education foundation in Montana and I think we’re just starting to scratch the surface. I don’t think there’s a ceiling to what we can do.”

Education Foundation of Billings Public Schools by the Numbers

10,000+ attendees showed up for fun and games during this year’s Saturday Live
$50,000+ raised during 2024’s Saturday Live
$128,000 has been awarded to classrooms in 2024
32 student and teacher scholarships awarded in 2024
5,000+ books distributed to kids each summer
1,000+ students provided food through the backpack meals, food pantries and Munch Machine