Client Work
This is just a brief sampling of the range of projects in fundraising, philanthropy and communications I’ve been fortunate to work on over the years:
Our House NYC. This start-up nonprofit, a grief support center based on a successful 30-year nonprofit in Los Angeles, had secured impressive major donor support, but its leaders felt unprepared to develop an institutional giving program. Working with OH-NYC full-time over eight months, I gave overarching counsel on corporate and foundation strategy and provided a detailed landscape analysis. I conducted extensive prospect research, introduced the organization’s leaders to funders in my professional network, and secured meetings with key foundation leaders. I wrote over a dozen LOIs and full proposals and secured new funding for OH-NYC. I developed communications materials framed specifically for funders. I created a funder tracking/reporting system and helped the organization choose a CRM, along with a plan for data migration.
Leading for Children. The branding and communications firm Brand Justice brought me in to advise this client on how its messaging, materials and funding proposals might be interpreted by institutional funders. I worked with Brand Justice and Leading for Children on all aspects of this national organization’s funder communications. Over time, we increased my contract involvement and I helped them with prospect research and coached their development staff through a particularly important proposal development process.
Inside Philanthropy. Before taking on the role of Editorial Director for the State of American Philanthropy project, I produced several profile pieces on leading foundations for Inside Philanthropy’s daily news publication, including one looking at Brooklyn Community Foundation as a model for racial equity work. I also worked on a long-range writing series for Inside Philanthropy called the “Pass the Mic Project” examining white privilege in philanthropy. As an advisor to the publisher, I also provide planning services for new initiatives, including its new Donor Advisor Initiative.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. I was a consultant to RWJF’s health equity grantees through Community Catalyst. Working in partnership with the fundraising firm Klein & Roth, I presented educational programming on “Raising Money from Foundations” and one-on-one fundraising consulting to a small portfolio of community-based organizations, including the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network.
New York Community Trust Census Equity Fund. The New York State Census Equity Fund was established in 2018 to ensure coverage of the State’s hard-to-count communities in the 2020 Census and made grants to support complete census count efforts in neighborhoods, towns, rural and isolated areas across the State with large populations of low-income people, people of color, immigrants, non-English speaking individuals, migrant workers, ex-offenders, children under five, older adults, people with disabilities, the homeless, and other groups that are at risk of being undercounted. I supported the core group of funders leading this multi-year initiative, providing strategy and planning assistance, fundraising proposal writing, communications, programming development and coordination of grantee trainings. I also led its grantmaking for redistricting through 2021.
J.M. Kaplan Fund Innovation Prize. The JMKIP was launched in 2015 and had its second cycle in 2017. In previous years, it allocated its communications resources primarily on announcing the prize. In 2019, J.M. Kaplan Fund engaged me to advise on disseminating information about the prize to previously low-application states in order to hear more innovative ideas from every corner of the nation. I helped develop a comprehensive dissemination plan; wrote articles and placed them in key publications; researched and conducted outreach to connector organizations in targeted states; and provided counsel to potential applicants in more than a dozen states.
Support Center for Nonprofits. The Support Center engaged me to work with them in the lead-up to a crucial convening of a subset of its clients in January 2019, attend the convening and write and design a report examining six main issue areas. The report, “Stronger Together: A Discussion of Nonprofit Capacity & Our Collective Needs,” examines issues such as program measurement, governance, financial management, fundraising, diversity, equity and inclusion work and leadership development through the lens of current bright spots, existing resources, major challenges and the main things nonprofit leaders feel they need to improve those factors for their own organizations.
Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation. This labor of love is a public charity founded in 2018 by a dozen leaders in the restaurant industry. I worked with them from the concept phase to obtain their 501(c)(3) status; establish its organizational structure and board committees; flesh out programmatic guidelines; develop communications programming; fundraise; and plan events. RWCF was focused on wage fairness and career ladders; gender equity and sexual violence; racial justice and support for the immigrant community; and mental health and substance abuse in the industry, and advanced its mission through grantmaking, advocacy and impact investing. RWCF quickly grew to national prominence in 2020 and was a stable, multimillion dollar grantmaker nurturing dozens of organizations across the country up until I left the board in 2022. After functioning as the primary administrator for its first four years, I am especially proud to say that it was able to hire an amazing executive director and a director of finance and operations during my tenure.
Public Agenda. Returning to work with Public Agenda was a wonderful homecoming for me, especially getting to work on exciting new projects like the Yankelovich Democracy Monitor – a multi-year survey initiative tracking Americans’ evolving views on democracy and how to strengthen it–and helping disseminate its inaugural report “Strengthening Democracy: What Do Americans Think?” For this project, I created a comprehensive communications strategy, and then engaged in writing press releases, advising junior staff on social media strategy, writing opinion pieces for senior advisors on the project and creating a variety of collateral materials from data-focused one-pagers to Instagrammable infographics.