Services
We work in two core areas, planning and evaluation, and build learning and capacity into both. Engagements range from discrete, time-bound projects to longer-term advisory partnerships, shaped around your context, constraints, and communities.
Planning
Strategic advising. Support for organizations navigating complexity, transition, or moments when existing approaches are no longer working. Planning supports clarity around direction, priorities, systems change, and tradeoffs in contexts shaped by uncertainty. The result is not just a plan, but the clarity and alignment to act on it.
Program design. Designing programs that are tailored to real organizational conditions, constraints, and the communities they serve.
Strategic planning. Strategic advising and facilitation for direction, priorities, and alignment.
Community asset mapping. Identifying the people, networks, and resources already present in a community, so plans build on what is there.
Sample work: strategic planning for an immigrant services nonprofit, organizational strategy for an immigrant rights legal organization, and early childhood stakeholder facilitation.
Evaluation
Equity-centered evaluation that shifts how organizations understand themselves and make decisions. We draw on participatory action research, grounded theory, and arts-based approaches including narrative methods, visual mapping, and participatory storytelling.
Program evaluation. Qualitative and mixed-methods evaluation, implementation learning, and theory of change development.
Participatory action research. Research designed with the people most affected by the work, from design through interpretation.
Sample work: municipal public safety fund evaluation, and a theory of change framework for a youth engagement nonprofit.
Learning and capacity building
Built into both planning and evaluation, so every engagement leaves your team with skills and practices it can keep using. Our learning work uses arts-informed methods, including image theatre, frozen scenes, hot seating, role play, moving to music, and the Rainbow of Desire, to help teams become more honest, more connected, and more capable of navigating hard work.
Capacity needs assessment. A relational, partner-centered process. We synthesize findings into a strategic capacity map rather than a list of deficits, drawing on community asset mapping.
Organizational strengthening. Capacity building and strategic planning support matched to each organization's context and priorities.
Learning in practice. We surface common needs, emerging themes, and gaps across partners, facilitate periodic reflection conversations, and produce syntheses with actionable recommendations.
Sample work: capacity-building curriculum design for a county human services agency, and participatory action research training for youth groups.
How we work
We keep the work joyful, rigorous, and grounded in relationship. Every engagement starts with discovery: listening to the people who run the work and the people it serves before proposing anything. We then align on values and outcomes, so the work is clear about what success means to you and to your community.
From there, the work is participatory and community-oriented. We lift up stakeholder voices throughout, not only at the end, and we use rigorous methods so the findings hold up to scrutiny.
Who we work with
Nonprofits and coalitions, philanthropic institutions, public-sector agencies, educational institutions, and community-based and movement-aligned organizations.
Not sure where to start? Send us a message and we will reply to schedule a free, 20-minute conversation.
Discuss your needs