CACLV appoints next leader
Godshall to take over as executive director after Jennings retires
The Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley, one of the region’s largest nonprofits, has chosen its next leader.
Dawn Godshall, the organization’s deputy executive director for operations, will take the helm as executive director when Alan Jennings retires at the end of May.
“I’m honored. I do see it as a huge responsibility,” she said Wednesday. “I do hope that all of the people that have supported Alan over the years will continue to support Community Action under my leadership. We haven’t stopped needing help with the issues that we face, the issues that we attack.”
Jennings will leave after more than 40 years with the agency, 31 of them as executive director. His life’s work was to build the once-struggling agency into a vast umbrella of services that help people secure sustainable housing, revitalize neighborhoods, start businesses and improve their quality of life.
Godshall used some of those services, many years before she would be picked to oversee them and the rest of the organization’s $30 million annual budget.
“She’s got life experiences that play an important role at how she looks at the world — not that different from those of the people we serve,” Jennings said.
About 20 years ago, Godshall met Jennings while sharing a car ride to a conference in Washington. Today, she can’t remember what the conference was about — instead she remembers the car ride.
After hearing about CACLV’s mission
and work, she remembers telling Jennings, “I think I’m supposed to work with you some day.”
At the time, Godshall was helping parents get car loans so they could find ways to get to work and support their families, through the Ways to Work Family Loan Program at Family Answers Inc. in Allentown. It would be another decade or so before her prediction came to fruition.
Godshall, who lives in Allen Township, grew up in Buffalo, New York, for a time in a single-parent household and, later, in the foster care system. Her mother died when she was 5, and her father instilled in her and her two sisters the importance of education, until he died when she was 12.
Her career began in journalism, working briefly for the Buffalo News newspaper and for a decade with ABC.
In the early 2000s, after a divorce and a reevaluation of her life, she started on a path of community and anti-poverty work by volunteering for the Children’s Home of Easton. That turned into a job managing the volunteers. She then worked at Family Answers for about a decade before managing fundraising and communications at the Allentown Rescue Mission.
In 2014, she joined CACLV as director of the Sixth Street Shelter in Allentown, then moved up to associate executive director for community services. She has been deputy executive director of the organization for the past two years.
The organization’s board of directors had been preparing for Jennings’ exit for about three years, as his Parkinson’s disease started to worsen. Jennings announced his retirement in October, after which the formal search for his replacement commenced.
“Her comprehensive knowledge of our agency, her first-person understanding of the causes and effects of poverty, and her unflappable presence draw people in,” board President Wayne Barz said in a news release. “Given the year we’ve just been through as a nation and community, we think everyone who meets her will feel inspired by the future of what this agency and community can accomplish.”
Godshall will have several pressing tasks when she takes over June 1: hiring her replacement, overseeing the construction of a multimillion dollar youth center in Allentown, and making sure all the nonprofit’s programs are on stable ground as the pandemic eases.
But one of her other priorities out of the gate is to have personal conversations with leaders in law enforcement to build relationships and trust. CACLV’s Color Outside the Lines initiative will soon unveil a strategic plan for the region, of which she’ll oversee the implementation.
“We all need to be able to have conversations about race in a calm, intelligent way that gets us to understand each other’s perspectives,” she said.
Leaders in the region’s nonprofit community see Godshall’s leadership as the beginning of a new era for the agency, both because of the long and storied career of her predecessor and because of her identity and life experience as a woman of color.
“I’m excited that they chose to bring on someone that is reflective of the communities that they serve,” said Hasshan Batts, director of Promise Neighborhoods of the Lehigh Valley. “We need more female leadership to be lifted up across the area.”
Jennings is known as a legacy leader, said Marci Lesko, executive vice president of the United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley.
“And it’s time for a new chapter,” she said.
Lesko described Godshall’s approach as thoughtful and engaging, with a calming presence. Batts said he hopes to see an agenda driven by the needs of people on the ground.
Godshall, when looking to get on her feet and buy her own home years ago, used CACLV programs to educate herself. She believes in, and wants to continue and strengthen, the approach of these programs: teaching people how to help themselves.
“We want to empower people,” she said. “We want people to have the tools that they need to better their lives.”
She’s cognizant of the ground being broken through her identity and the example it sets, but is focused on the job ahead.
“As a woman of color, I’m honored, I’m proud,” she said. “I’m excited about the potential.”