Consulting
How is Consulting Different from Coaching?
Unlike coaching, which strictly supports clients to uncover their own innate knowing, consulting may include practices such as training, recommending courses of action, developing resources and assets on behalf of clients, facilitating group conversations, and other forms of support that are more akin to advice-giving. If you represent an organization interested in hiring me as a consultant and you think members of your organization could benefit from coaching, I am happy to put together contract scopes that include elements of both coaching and consulting.
For the Sake of What?
The traditional nonprofit charity model, in which institutions amass resources to distribute out to “less-fortunate” community members, serves to uphold systems of oppression, domination, and control. And yet, the charity model has been so central to the development of most public and nonprofit agencies that leaders within those organizations often struggle to move away from it, though many genuinely want to. I specialize in working with organizations that want to transition away from traditional institutionalized power and charity models and toward collective power with those who they have historically considered clients. Our collective liberation relies on the realization that 99% of the U.S. population has more in common with one another than with the other 1%. To advance collective liberation, we must build cross-class solidarity and harness our collective power to create a world where all have equal opportunity for peace, joy, and well-being.
I long to work with your organization if:
You see the value in moving away from a charity model and toward a community organizing/community power-building model, but you need some help figuring out how to get there
You understand that your organization’s employees must be able to experience healing, joy, liberation, and rest in order for them to be their best, but you struggle to find ways to build healing practices of community care into your work
You want to explore governance and decision-making models that provide alternatives to traditional pyramidic and minority-rule models
Your employees, board members, and other leaders are exclusively or almost exclusively white and you want to figure out how to share resources, power, and leadership with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color
You want to explore ways to support systems change that is led or driven by those you have traditionally considered clients
You see a widespread culture of burnout, compassion fatigue, and emotional divestment among your staff and you want to make a plan to bring your staff into deeper alignment and connection with their work
You sense that your work is not lining up with the core values of your staff and you want to find the synergies between the needs of your staff and the needs of the communities you serve
My Consulting Skills and Areas of Expertise
Coalition building
Community engagement, community organizing, and community leadership development
Emergent strategy
Fat liberation
Food systems, food justice, and food policy networks
Grant writing
Meeting facilitation
Participatory evaluation and budgeting
Politicized healing frameworks
Project planning and management
People-centered strategic planning
Upstream policy, systems, and environmental health solutions
White organizational culture and white antiracist identity development