Alumni Spotlight: Sarah Krenicki on Finding Purpose in Nonprofit Data and Development
By Indiana Nash
ALBANY, N.Y. (Aug. 11, 2026) — Rockefeller College alum Sarah Krenicki never expected to find joy in data management.
“I have gotten so into it,” Krenicki said. “I never thought this would be me.”
After studying English literature at Green Mountain College in Vermont, she thought she’d spend her career poring over manuscripts. But she has instead found purpose and passion as the development operations manager at Camphill Village Copake and Camphill Ghent. Camphill Village provides a community for adults with developmental differences, and the sweeping campus includes housing, a farm, bakery, trails, and more. Its sister community, Camphill Ghent, provides integrated independent and assisted living for elders of all abilities.
A Connecticut native, Krenicki began working at Camphill Village Copake’s development office in Columbia County in 2017, overseeing a customer relationship management system and crafting appeal letters. Four years later, looking for another challenge, she applied to Rockefeller’s Nonprofit Management Certificate Program. After one semester, heeding the advice of Professor Susan Appe, she changed tracks to pursue a Master of Public Administration at Rockefeller.
Studying while working full-time was not without its difficulties, and Krenicki also spent much of her second year in the program pregnant with her and her husband's first child. Weeks before graduation, they faced the tragic loss of their daughter after a complicated birth. Partly to distract herself, Krenicki worked to finish her capstone project and was able to graduate in 2023.
She and her husband, who works for the USDA Farm Service Agency, live in Columbia County with their son, who they welcomed to the family in 2024.
We caught up with Krenicki about what got her into development work, how her experience at Rockefeller shaped her career, and her advice to MPA students.
What about the mission of Camphill Village Copake initially attracted you to it?
My mom worked in special education for the majority of my childhood. She was a stay-at-home mom until I was about 6 and then she got a job as a paraprofessional in the school system, and then she worked her way up to be the assistant to the speech and language pathologist.
I’d visit her at work. I knew a lot of her students. I even babysat for a couple of her students at one point. People with developmental disabilities were just a part of my life.
I remember my mom expressing concern about what would happen to some of her students after they graduated, or they were no longer covered by the school system. To see all these adults now flourishing at Copake really drew me to the nonprofit because it's such a true, supportive community.
Our campus is 720 acres, and 25 of that is multigenerational family housing, which includes what they call service volunteers. It's usually a married couple with their children and then there's three to five people with developmental differences and then there's one to two live-in service volunteers. They’re usually young people in a gap year and they all just live together in this house. They're just living their lives with these supports built in.
Our campus has a bakery and a coffee shop that are open to the public that our residents staff. We have a working dairy farm and vegetable farm. We have tours that are open to the public on Thursdays and Fridays, and our residents are tour guides. They have a woodworking shop and a candle shop. Everyone learns a trade.
It's such a safe place. Our residents can walk the entire campus; all the trails to all the workplaces are accessible, and there's lighting at night. The whole place is just built with people of all abilities in mind.
We have a lot of people who previously lived in independent housing, and they had their own apartment, and they had their job bagging groceries, but they didn't have a community. They come here and have this flourishing social life. You see them all in the cafe playing foosball and, it's like a college campus almost.
How did you get into the development side of nonprofits?
I honestly fell into nonprofit development work. Camphill Village Copake had a job opening and wanted someone who knew how to write. They told me it was going to be a writing and data entry intensive job because they needed someone to draft their appeal letters and thank you letters and also do all the gift entry in the database.
Within three months of starting that job, the database supervisor of the customer relationship management (CRM) program had retired, and no one else knew how to or had the time to really do it. Four months into my position as the associate in the department, they got me all the training on Raiser's Edge, a nonprofit donation software. I got certified in it, and they said, “Congrats, this is your database now,” which was wild. I loved it, honestly. That is probably the best thing that has ever happened to me. I go to the conferences now. I'm in all the online user groups. I take all the webinars, I'm constantly yelling at my team about data hygiene and dating your notes, I have dashboards and reports I run. I have gotten so into it.
How did your experience in the MPA program impact what you do?
It helped a lot, especially once I became the development operations manager, and I was getting invited to more things that didn't directly have to do with development. Now I'm on a few committees and I've been able to see how everything that I learned in the MPA program about how the different facets of a nonprofit work together, which is a perspective that I didn't have before. Now I understand more about how programming and finance and HR interconnect and what development’s role is in the larger picture.
Also, through the MPA program, I took a grant writing course, which was really helpful. I was then given small grants to write, and then over the years, I've been writing larger ones. As I've learned more and was able to apply it, I've also was able to apply a lot of the data analysis and analytic courses to what do I do in my database in Raiser's Edge.
Even things that I thought weren’t going to particularly apply to me, for example, memo writing, I thought “We're not that formal in our nonprofit. I won't have to write official memos.” But just the other week the head of the environmental committee came to me and said “Sarah, we have this big report that we had done on our carbon footprint. Before the next meeting, do you want to just read that and make a one pager with key takeaways on what's in the report to present to the committee?” That's a memo. So, something I would have struggled with, maybe I would have used AI for, I did not have to do that because I had the background.
In your role now, what does the average day look like?
Every day is different. The other day, I worked on a grant report, an update for a funder. I started writing a letter of inquiry for another grant, and then I tracked all that in Instrumentl, which we use for our grant tracking software, and I'm in that database all the time. I ran reports for the director of development.
I'm starting to write some of the first drafts for appeal letters. We do a bunch of those for different segments. So, the first one that goes out is for Turtle Tree Seed, which is a nonprofit seed company that uses our fiscal sponsorship. They sell seeds and then the majority of their workers are actually our residents – both with and without disabilities, anyone who wants to be there. So, I will write those.
Do you have any advice for MPA students?
Keep an open mind about what you want your career to look like. I thought I knew what I was doing so many times and then all of a sudden, I'm getting a master's degree when I thought I was getting a certification or all of a sudden, I'm doing development work and I'm a database person.
When I was an undergraduate, I thought I was going to be some sort of literary person. I was like, “Oh, I'll work in publishing. I’ll become an editor.” Then, after graduation, I thought “I'll be a communications person.” If I had been very rigid about where I wanted my career to go, I would not have ended up here.
Just say yes to things. When Susan said, “You should really do the MPA program.” I could have been like, “No, I'll just stick with my certification.” But I said, “'Sure, why not?” Say yes to wild ideas and know when to say no to things, like when I turned down a job because I just didn't feel like it was a place where I could fully be myself.