Pronouns
she/her/they
What do you do as a consultant/coach?
I am a generalist, with my starting point with clients being fund development, specifically grassroots and donor fundraising. This includes board participation, data management, donor research, fundraising strategic and annual planning, and individual donor engagement and peer to peer fundraising.
I also provide project management services and project-focused curriculum development.
What is your approach?
Fundraising is community organizing, whether your community is geographic, place-based, virtual or national. Success isn’t instantaneous.
It is incremental. It requires the willing participation of everyone in the organization at some level, with the ED/Co-Directors/Managers as champion and leader of the efforts to bring about the results you are seeking. I use a three year planning template that builds capacity, skills, and a fundraising culture respectful of the culture of your community.
How has your experience/background contributed to your work?
I learned grassroots and donor fundraising in my youth from the women of The Contact Center in Cincinnati OH. A new board of brilliant Black women who understood a central principle—if your community doesn’t support you then maybe you should evaluate your existence. They taught me how to run a thrift store, handle cash, identify fundraising events that would meet community needs, and the importance of keeping track of all our donors. They may have created one of the first grassroots recurring donor program.
I began my journey in this work with the Contact Center in the late 1970s.
Relevant certifications or trainings
I have carried what I learned from those good women and their principles into all fund development work I do, as an Executive Director, Board member and consultant.
It aligns with the Freirian/South African methodology, Training for Transformation that I learned and became a trainer for. The co-production of knowledge, the recognition that problem solving only occurs within an equitable distribution of power and that marginalized folx have the right to insist on power as they strive to create compassionate, humanistic change for themselves, their families, their communities.
- Master Composter
- Certified Urban Naturalist
- MS Community Economic Development, New Hampshire College
- MFA Nonfiction, Sarah Lawrence College
- Publications available upon request
Sample clients
Southern Echo, Jackson Mississippi; Healthy & Free Tennessee, Nashville, TN; A Wombman’s Way Warrior Midwife Training, NC & SC; Southern California Black Worker Hub for Regional Organizing, Los Angeles, CA