I'm an independent consultant in the philanthropic sector, supporting private and public funders and donors to make good investment decisions, and also do strategic advising for multi-sector collaborations that are tackling some of today’s most challenging issues.
I offer a variety of services to funders and individual donors, including clarifying your giving priorities and the philanthropic approach that best fits your goals, design of giving strategies and identifying topical areas for investment, measuring and assessing impact of giving, and how to use non-monetary assets to increase impact. I can also provide deep subject matter expertise in the following giving areas: youth, education (secondary K12, postsecondary, afterschool), youth development, workforce, human services, arts, and advocacy/social movement building.
I have deep experience with and can support multi-sector collaborations to run effectively and achieve their goals. I've worked over the past decade with many collective impact, public/private partnerships, and other complex collaboration structures and can deliver insight, advising, and support about how to design and structure these initiatives.
Why do I do this work?
The philanthropic sector in total manages a large amount of resources - and these resources are a critically important part of a larger funding ecology because of their unique flexibility. But how can these resources best be used? I've experienced how modest amounts of philanthropic capital, when well designed and synchronized with the needs of the community being served, can make a real difference. The design of these granting (or re-granting) approaches matters a lot, however, in order to attain impact. Over my 20 years in philanthropy, I've designed and executed many different kinds of grantmaking strategies, and managed over $100M in foundation grants, and am pleased now to be able to offer my expertise as an independent consultant.
We are faced, as a society, with some serious problems to solve, and I believe philanthropy can play a major role supporting these changes. But I also believe we need new approaches to solving these problems. Philanthropy, and cross-sector collaborations, need to work differently to accelerate the pace of change, and we need to engage and support communities (of all kinds) to play an integrated role in solutions, so that our efforts are high impact AND are sustained over time.
While there is no single philanthropic approach that fits all scenarios, I'm pleased to now support funders and donors with strategy and planning services that develop options for investment approaches, and also to provide strategic advising for multi-sector collaborations that are tackling some of today’s most challenging issues. My approach is informed by my many years of work in private philanthropy and my engagement with community and corporate philanthropy and public sector funders over the past 20 years.
For more on my background and the kind of work I've done, see my LinkedIn profile.