Our Offerings
Strategic Planning
Our strategic planning services build your organization’s capacity to focus resources on what matters most, make clear strategic choices, and proactively navigate change. Partnering with you and your team, we help you develop a clear understanding of where you are today, envision where you want to go, and create a practical roadmap for how to get there.
Through organizational assessments and strategic analysis, we identify your organization’s strengths and core capabilities and uncover critical challenges and opportunities to help you build the insight you need to make informed choices. Drawing on principles of community organizing, we engage your board, staff, and other key constituents to surface diverse perspectives, build shared understanding, identify common ground, and cultivate collective ownership of your organization’s direction and priorities.
Our process provides the self-knowledge, alignment, and decision-making capacity you need to adapt and thrive in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and rapidly changing environment. We help you align your strategy, culture, capabilities, and resources so you can translate aspirations into meaningful impact.
Board Development
A diverse, skilled, and engaged board is a critical lever for organizational effectiveness and mission impact.
We provide training on board member roles and responsibilities and nonprofit governance best practices. Our governance capacity-building services include facilitating board self-assessments, developing board composition and recruitment strategies to build diversity and needed skills, designing governance structures and committee charters, establishing and implementing board member engagement agreements, designing effective board meetings, and providing board development coaching and consulting.
Facilitation
We facilitate interactive and engaging board and staff retreats, community meetings, and multi-stakeholder collaborations to support team-building, decision making, planning, and collective impact.
We foster alignment among teams of all sizes, including executive teams, boards, and staff teams.
Each facilitation is customized to fit your organization’s needs and is engaging, meaningful, and results-oriented.
Philanthropy and Grantmaking Strategy
Effective philanthropy requires clear strategy and processes that align funding decisions with organizational values, community needs, and intended impact.
We partner with foundations and grantmakers to support strategic planning, program strategy development, grantmaking program design, community investment initiatives, and network capacity building to help you make meaningful and sustainable impact.
Our Approach
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Research
Our research isn’t just a process; it’s a passion. We blend insights from our primary research with the latest local community studies, academic findings, and social sector best practices to craft strategies that are both innovative and deeply informed. By leveraging diverse data sources and thorough analysis, we provide insights that lead to informed decision-making.
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Collaboration
Our consultations are as much about the journey as they are about the destination. Embracing the principles of community organizing, we work alongside your team to foster constituent engagement, co-create solutions together, and build your organization’s capacities. By engaging your leadership team, staff, clients, board members, and other constituents, everyone’s voice is heard.
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Human-Centered Design
We believe in solutions that put people at the heart of the process. Through design thinking and experiential methods, we catalyze creativity and innovation tailored to your specific challenges. By focusing on the insights and experiences of our clients, we create solutions together that are effective, empathetic, and enduring.
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Customization
We know that each organization is unique, which is why we custom-tailor each project to your organization's particular strengths, culture, aspirations, and circumstances. Our processes and tools are flexible so that we can adapt them to best serve your organization. This ensures that every solution we create together is specific to your needs and goals.
“I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”
— Eduardo Hughes Galeano