Interview conducted by Jenny Wilson

The President’s Award recognizes a NAPO member who has made a significant contribution benefiting the NAPO membership.

This year’s award goes to the Co-chairs of the Education Advisory Committee, Dan Loya and Kristine Stables.

At the 2023 Summit our President, Amy Tokos, said, “I choose Dan and Kristine for this award because they deserve it. Continuous learning is one of NAPO Strategic Guiding Principles. This year, while NAPO was on their management change hike, these two helped the Education Advisory Committee and the Subject Matter Experts navigate everything thrown at them through their leadership. They did a lot of scrambling; they did a lot of wading through deep puddles and NAPO is better for it.  Thank you both for your time and dedication to NAPO Education.”

Q. How did you feel when you realized you won this award?

Dan: Shocked and honored because neither of us knew we had been eligible or were being considered for something like this so, you know, you have a certain image of the type of person you would think to be given this type of award and I had no idea. I was honored specially on behalf of if the members of the Education Advisory Committee (EAC) and everyone who’s helped us.

Kristine:  I nearly have that identical answer. I was surprised. I think the Service [to NAPO] Award was awarded first and I thought, “Oh it would be nice to be considered for that award because we did so much last year,” but the President’s Award, that was more surprising. I didn’t think we could be considered for that. I’m glad the Committee was honored. We’re representative of a very talented, significant village, and it’s not only our Committee members, it’s also the subject matter experts that contributed to the three certificates that were the vast amount of last year’s effort. 

Dan:  It’s a real honor to receive this for EAC. Especially to be acknowledged for what we have done because it’s not all immediately apparent. Some things are still being worked on. If people saw everything going on behind the scenes, all these people that have been working so hard. To get that acknowledgement of the team is really an honor. 

Kristine: Also, thank you to Amy for considering us. We have a fabulous [Board liaison] Karen, but we don’t have direct interaction a lot of the time with Amy and the Board. And through it all they entrusted us, and that says a lot. 

Q. What makes your Co-chair special?

Kristine: One of the things that I think about Dan is community. I think he is the definition of community and creates a community with our committee and with our partners. There are other committees and other folks within NAPO that he is connected to and he really draws in the larger NAPO community to the EAC. I always think there is a yin and yang to us that works. Dan has a long tenure. He’s got a long tenured, successful career and he has held many roles in NAPO. I was a new Professional Organizer and green to NAPO.I found out there was a volunteer position for Education. We have a lot of tenured people on the Committee, so I think that really builds our community through his experience and dedication. Oh, and resilience. 

Dan: That’s funny because I was going to say resilience too. That’s both of us. We balance each other out. What makes us work is synergy. I don’t normally use words like that, but we really have different talents. Some of them overlap, but Kristine, she has really strong knowledge base and it’s a totally different knowledge base that I don’t have. She works directly with corporate education companies, and she knows about the trends. I’m a former publicschool educator so I’ve never worked with any type of higher ed, recording sessions, educational anything like that. 

I think there’s two things that distinguish me from Kristine. She has extensive knowledge that I don’t know anyone else has in our group. She has that kind of all-around knowledge of education and how it works also within corporations. How companies work with corporations to create training programs and things like that, but also she has great passion and resilience that kept this going. So, there were a lot of obstacles which Amy mentioned. It’s passion that kept us going. The bottom line is that is what are we here for and helps to keep us going. 

Q.  What inspires you to volunteer with NAPO?

Kristine: The people, their talent, care, and kindness. We’re just so blessed. We have four members who fulfilled their term after dedicating two years of volunteering. We have another four member that stay for their second year, and we’re about to recruit for four more member. I don’t know if we could top the last 2-3 years. It’s insane talent, dedication to the learners, to the EAC mission. We laid out some challenges for them las Fall and they’ve far exceeded what they’ve done and the legacy that they have built for future certificate builds and other educational opportunity is this bar none. 

Dan: They’re all above-and-beyond personalities. It’s difficult for me to say why are you giving this (the award) to me as an individual, honestly. I didn’t believe it at first, but when I saw Kristine, I was like “get up and move!” I don’t know if it’s happened before where the President’s Award goes to multiple people, but it’s the two of us representing really the ten of us. We represent Ellen Delap who really laid the foundation for all of this. We had a wonderful education coordinator who’s no longer with us, and we have all of our members and subject matter experts. It’s really a whole village. We accepted for the village who are all above and beyond. They’ll take an initiative and go beyond what you asked them to do. They have their own lives, jobs and so it’s the culture. We don’t expect it, we don’t ask it of them, but that’s what’s happened. They’ve contributed so much. 

Kristine: And shout out to our board liaison Karen Baker as well!

Dan: There’s so many people on the team! I have volunteered with NAPO and the chapters nonstop since I joined. I haven’t started a new thing without giving up one or two of the other things I’m already doing first. 

Kristine: You hear that everybody? You can’t do everything!

Dan: My big thing is why do I volunteer with NAPO is to give back. You hear that all the time but and I feel like when you volunteer you receive more than you give. I’m always more enhanced than I am drained. You get so much back. Being willing to give a part of yourself, you get back 100%. 

Q. What’s your favorite memory working with NAPO?

Dan: The first thing that pops in my head is I love the interaction. So, Summit, that’s probably one of the top things in my head; just personally interacting with people. It’s the social interaction, exchange of ideas, the energy around the people. It feels like schoolteachers, all working together, meeting at lunch, talking about ideas, sharing their plans with each other. It’s kind of similar thing where there’s like this motivation you get. You get that in the chapters as well. 

So anytime we get to interact with people especially like in person. Zoom is fine. It’s one thing for us to work with members over Zoom but then when you get to the Summit and it’s like, “Oh my god, you’re a human being!” and it’s, “Can I give you a hug?” So I love that aspect. 

Kristine: I agree. My favorite memory is having the chance to be a liaison for one of the certificate teams. So, I was able to be there for Day One to day – it felt like a thousand. It’s a beautiful back story of this team because with any situation there’s folks who need time out from business, life, health, and this team really pulled together and supported each other all the way through. 

And after the learners tested the programs, I asked them, “Can you write your own testimonial, so we can use it as part of marketing?” And they said, “Absolutely.” That was the cherry on the on the ice cream sundae for me. Six different voices contributed to a blogarticle, but it resulted in a shared common experience, being on the team and collaborating with others. They could’ve have just been done when they received their CEUs, but they said, “Sure I’ll write a testimonial on this, we’ll share with others.” 

Dan: I might be speculating but I almost feel like personal organizers, we have above and beyond type personalities and we’re going to do always a little more. I know because I meet people in person, and I hear stories and you never hear, “Oh I worked there, and did what I was supposed to do.” There is always like something a little extra. It’s a business of caring about people. So, it flows over into the volunteer work. 

What advice would you give to a newer NAPO member?

Dan: Stick with this. I know that there’s a big percentage of people when they start the profession, they don’t stick with it. They think immediately they’re going to have 40 hours of work and it’s going to be similar to past jobs. I’ve had many different professions besides education-related, and what I would say is this is probably the most rewarding job that I’ve ever had. So, stick with it, push through, figure out how to make it work, don’t give up too easily because it’s an amazing profession and there’s a lot of opportunity. 

Kristine: I didn’t expect to discover the path I was going to continue on until I started NAPO. 

I retired from like a 25-year career in learning and development and I retired because I was burnt out. And for years I thought, “Oh I’ll start my own business,” and then I finally figured out oh that’s what I should be doing, organizing. All the signs were there since I was a little kid. So, I started a business, joined NAPOdutifully. I realized this is a great place to learn from others; there’s resources, training, it’s awesome. 

But I didn’t think I was going to find my next step in my career, which is the juxtaposition of organizing and learning. I volunteered and realized, wait a minute, these things were linked. Not only neuroscience-wise but there was an expansion I didn’t expect. And then when the pandemic hit, and I was new (to organizing), and I had two slow quarters I decided to go back to corporate and I had a client hire me because they needed an organizer for their learning curricula. And at this point I was already volunteering for the EAC and I’m like wait a minute, I found something I never expected to find. 

So, I would say to new people, you’re on a path but a lot of times you don’t know where that journey is going to take you. It takes you to a place that maybe you were meant to be all along. It could be just an expansion of what your original services were. Maybe your business in three years from now doesn’t look like your first three months. 

The team that I was working with included home staging and move management and I thought if I want to work with these like powerhouses, I better get certified in home staging. It was an interest of mine and so I completed the IAHSP certification and I think yeah, I can marry that whole thing together. And then sure enough, I was certified and then felt like OK I can be a maybe not be on an equal playing field, but enough to help advise this group of fantastic subject matter experts. Let that journey take you where it goes because you don’t plan for some of this. And I think NAPO provides a lot of opportunities. It may not actually be the volunteer role or the committee, but it may be the committee member next to you. It’s something in your life that you never expect that’s where you meant to go. 

Dan: Kristine’s background can maximize the modernization of the way that NAPO provides education. The principles and the movements, everything that we need to know about she’s already done. It’s a matter of using the knowledge base and, by the way, there are other very talented numbers of our team that also have amazing amount of knowledge. If we pool that knowledge, we could revamp the education we’re producing in the aftermath of the transition of moving to a new management company, which I’m very excited about. They’ve been great. 

Part of the ride through the storm Amy was talking about, was that with the transition there were times when the whole education coordinator project manager role was vacant, so we had to push things through, and we’re not project managers. We had to keep things going with three different certificate programs in process. Some people may not understand what’s so amazing is that we were producing things when this transition was going on, when we didn’t have anybody involved. We have Ewald there now and have their background, their marketing skills, Peter in place, people to coordinate and to project manage and it has been amazing. 

Kristine: They’re helping us advance innovation in learning. We deliver on demand 1-to-4-hour e-learnings which I think is good for folks who are able to take that kind of time in office and between clients, but what could we producing in the way of l in-workflow learning,master classes, or other opportunities similar to how people learn today? The speed of life is so fast and it’s going to get faster. Technology changes in a heartbeat. We have AI ahead of us in some capacity. we don’t want to be reactive; we want to be responsive. So today we have a whole generation of new organizers coming in demographically. What does NAPO look like near future? That’s something we can definitely consider in designing our learner experiences, whether you’re a productivity specialist, organizer, or photo manager. There’s a lot that we can do to both streamline and offer growth in areas that maybe we can’t necessarily do in more traditional learning. 

Dan: We were challenging ourselves. Even though we’re not charged with certain things, we are in the process of setting up, streamlining everything the way things are done in the background, and coming up with ideas for ways to implement more modern education with a real emphasis on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). 

Interviewer: Sounds like you’re being good elders and building a legacy.

Dan: We’re standing on the shoulders of so many good people. I look at the award on my desk and it reminds me we’re going in the right direction. 

Kristine: It is definitely a shared legacy. I would say to extend that legacy, come join us! We’re recruiting soon. If this sounds like the place for you, let us know! 

Profiles as written by Amy:

Dan Loya is founder of Spaces Transformed in New York City. His background in education, counseling, and training provided the foundation for his profession as an organizer.  After moving to Philadelphia in 2011, Dan became an entrepreneur and focused his talents into the art of professional organizing. In 2017, he fulfilled his lifelong dream of living and working in New York City and Spaces Transformed was relocated. He’s a former NAPO Ambassador, Membership Director for the New York Chapter of NAPO, and Marketing Director and Social Media Manager for the Greater Philadelphia Chapter.

Kristine Stables is the owner and principal consultant of Mermaid Consulting Services, also known as Mermaid Home and Mermaid Home Organization in Virginia. After 30+ years in corporate roles, Kristine is following her lifelong passion for house and home. In 2019, transitioned Mermaid from an occasion-only business communication business to providing home organization and room refresh services. Kristine’s 22-year career in Corporate Learning & Development included roles in business consulting, business development and sales enablement, project management, and instructional design.