Work With Me
Non-profit leaders across the country are increasingly asked to do more with less as they serve communities where the stakes are highest and the margin for error is slim. The pressure is real and mounting and when it goes unaddressed, it slowly erodes the culture, strategy, and trust that makes delivering on a mission possible.
I work with organizations that are looking to meet that pressure, and the future, head on, with clarity and creativity. I support non-profit leaders and their teams as they use their internal knowledge and experience to shape innovative strategies and programs, learn from and with their communities and co-design their own culture to foster the connection, collaboration and resilience needed to continue creating real impact for the people they serve.
The Approach
My approach is grounded in more than a decade of experience across the private, public, and non-profit sectors, and in academic research on creativity and resilience. I bring an outside perspective that sees your organization for its strengths, respects its institutional knowledge, and translates that power through a lens of human-centred design, systems thinking, and venture-building experience, providing insights and guidance often reserved for those with corporate budgets and profit motives.
Whether the work is strategy, culture or community engagement, I respect your team, your community and your mission. I work with your team, amplifying their their strengths as the true experts in the room. Every engagement is designed to meet you where you’re at, responding to your immediate challenges, and building the capacity, creativity, trust, and shared direction that will endure long after we've finished our work together.
How we can work together
Innovation and Strategy
Non-profit organizations are today’s greatest innovators. In my experience, they have innate understanding of how to balance risks against the benefits of new programs and strategies as they continually centre the needs of the communities they serve and the partners they collaborate with. Non-profit teams often have a clear sense of their mission and a strong drive to create impact but can struggle to translate that clarity into the strategies, new programs, or social enterprises that deliver stability while making use of their deep sector knowledge, especially with staff that are spread thin and a pace of change that feels relentless.
Innovation and Strategy engagements bring human-centred design, systems thinking, strategic foresight, and venture-building experience to mission-driven organizations ready to move from intention to action. The work is grounded in the lived experience of your community and staff and is designed to create lasting organizational change without diluting the drive, commitment and focus what makes you who you are.
What this could look like:
Strategic planning: Values-driven, community-informed and human-centred, Strategic Planning engagements help organizations evaluate their unique strengths and place in their ecosystem while guiding them through processes that define their direction, make sense of change, and design the purposeful paths that will move them toward the futures they aspire to.
New model and program design: These engagements see innovative organizations develop new offerings or models that take advantage of their existing strengths, institutional knowledge and service offerings to establish fresh income streams that are grounded in proven community needs, existing processes and programs, and organizational strengths
Innovation training and coaching: These practical, customized workshops and coaching sessions equip non-profit teams with the knowledge and implementation experience needed to bring innovation methodologies into their day to day work, empowering them to drive meaningful change and create impact within and without their organization. Training options include Human-Centred Design, Opportunity Identification, and Venture Validation.
Process and service redesign: Front line needs, client insights, and organizational priorities are brought together in these projects to understand the current state of an organization’s service delivery and create experiences that are intentional, accessible, and human-centred for both staff and clients while pursuing the organization’s mandate, mission and strategic goals.
Community Engagement and Co-Design
Most consultation processes ask communities for input. Few create genuine conditions for shared power, deep listening, and co-creation that results in strategies and services that communities actually need and believe in.
Community Engagement and Co-Design work is grounded in equity-led, participatory approaches that amplify community voices and build with them, not for them, from the start. The result is experiences that garner genuine buy in from both communities and partners and solutions that are more legitimate, more durable, and more human. These sessions empower and the communities you serve to build your shared futures together.
What this could look like:
Community engagement: Grounded in equity-led processes that go beyond consultation, these engagement sessions are not about paying lip service or checking boxes but are aim to foster trust, listen deeply, and genuinely learn from the lived experiences of the people most affected by the issues at hand.
Co-design workshops: These collaborative sessions centre the perspectives of those with lived experience and translate their needs, knowledge and principles into meaningful programs, strategies, services, and systems.
Engagement with Relevant Parties: (Stakeholder Engagement) These conversations are inclusive and active, bringing the diverse voices of partners, funding providers and organizational peers together to learn from deep sector knowledge and experiences and inform the shared goals, advocacy positions and strategic initiatives that affect both communities and clients.
Team Culture and Resilience
Team retreats and one-off workshops rarely stick. Without an ongoing structure for rebuilding trust, co-designing culture, and developing new ways of working, even motivated teams slide back under pressure, especially in non-profit organizations where staff are managing burnout, hybrid work, generational change, and constant uncertainty in a context where the stakes are high and time and resources are limited.
Team Culture and Resilience sessions offer non-profit leaders a creative, structured path to creating lasting culture change. These sessions move beyond the typical retreat experience to build the shared commitments, resilience, and belonging needed to sustain high-performing teams as they adapt to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future.
What this could look like:
Try it out: Let’s test the waters and see if it’s a good fit with a 90-minute or half-day session. These focused sessions provide a starting point for you and your team to experience the approach and allow me to surface where your team most needs support.
Creative Reset Retreat: Do the deeper work with a 2-day immersive experience that surfaces tensions, builds trust, and gives your team the time and space to co-design a shared language and direction. Informed by the specifics gleaned from our Culture, Creativity, and Context sensemaking tool, you’ll come away with renewed ways of working, tools to support healthy conflict and collaboration and some rituals for your team to use as they integrate these new cultural ideas into their existing processes and projects.
Creative Recalibration: This is our core ongoing engagement. It’s a multi-part, strategic investment that teams come together over time for coaching and connection as they co-design their own culture and implement it at your organization. Together the team works to align on their shared goals and the meaning they derive from their work together, building shared commitments, sustained trust, cultivating collaborative strength and adaptability and the cultivating the resilience needed to face whatever comes next.
Have something else in mind?
I’d love to hear what’s on your mind, let’s book a call and discuss how we might work together to move your mission forward.
Testimonials