What happens when two people who began their careers in social impact make a career pivot into technology and combine experiences to create something powerful? Kaldero co-founders Vanessa Lynskey and Heather Hendy did just that. They share how Kaldero, a new Independent Sector member, helps mission-driven organizations leverage technology to support their people and their purpose.
How do you know each other, and how did you make the decision to form an organization that helps nonprofits, funders, and other changemakers amplify their impact?
We met about four-and-a-half years ago while working at a startup. As product manager (Vanessa) and engineering manager (Heather), we teamed up to build a new product that helped companies analyze whether they were treating their employees fairly. That experience stuck with us. When we both decided to pivot our careers and launch our own organization a few years later, we knew exactly where we wanted to focus. Having both started our early careers in the nonprofit world, merging our tech expertise with the nonprofit sector was the natural next step in our shared commitment to mission-driven work.
You believe technology can be a valuable tool when used by organizations to solve problems that support their people and their purpose. Tell us more about that.
Technology can help organizations scale their work, free up staff time for higher-value activities, and be more iterative and responsive to the communities they serve, but only when it’s the right tool for the right problem. We’ve seen tech solutions create friction just as often as they resolve it, which is what makes thoughtful implementation so important.
Vanessa Lynskey and Heather Hendy at Independent Sector’s National Summit 2025.
In our experience, keeping the needs of your people and your mission front and center is what most reliably ensures that technology works for, rather than against, your organization. We love bringing what we’ve learned from working in both tech and nonprofits to help organizations navigate this process in a way that’s right for them.
Give us some examples of how you’ve engaged with organizations to help them enhance their impact.
Our work with clients ranges from providing training and coaching to actually leading the requirements-gathering and product-building processes. For example, we partner with a foundation to run workshops on how to make strategic, mission-aligned technology decisions for their organizations. The process we cover in the workshop is designed to help them gather evidence to support their grant request and be well-positioned to select the right technology vendor and support long-term adoption.
We’re also working with a team of academic researchers who have spent decades doing impactful community-based work and who are now looking to leverage technology to scale their reach and support more communities. As part of this work, we interviewed potential users to understand their pain points, built a prototype and refined it based on feedback from those potential users, and prepared storytelling materials for our clients to pursue funding to build the product.
How are the challenging times the nonprofit sector currently faces impacting the organizations you work with?
The nonprofit sector has always been challenged to do great work with limited resources. We’re seeing that amplified today as the funding environment evolves while the need for services continues to rise. One thing that has become clear over the past few years is that the external environment continues to change rapidly, which is forcing organizations to evolve and adapt at speeds they previously didn’t need to. While this can open up valuable opportunities to be responsive to the communities they serve, it often demands new skills from organizations and more flexibility from funders to iterate on previously defined plans.
What are you looking forward to most as a new Independent Sector member?
We found our way to Independent Sector through the 2025 National Summit and knew immediately it was a community we wanted to be part of. Staying close to the challenges organizations face daily is essential to our work, and Independent Sector’s resources help us do that. We’re looking forward to the policy updates, member huddles, and this year’s Summit — where Vanessa will be co-facilitating a strategy lab.
Vanessa Lynskey and Heather Hendy are co-founders of Kaldero, a new Independent Sector member.
Vanessa Lynskey, co-founder of Kaldero
Heather Hendy, co-founder of Kaldero
