My approach to consulting is to serve as a partner and guide to you and your organization, in a manner that best serves your specific needs and goals.

This role often includes supporting the identification of the vision and values that will guide your organizational culture and belonging work, facilitating the collaborative work of moving toward that shared vision, and navigating discomfort and disagreement in the process.

Via phone or Zoom conversation with one or more representatives of your organization, we can identify your specific goals and the services I can provide that might best fit your immediate and/or longer-term organizational needs and culture. Services could range in size and scope from a series of support meetings around a specific topic, to workshop facilitation with your Board/Artists/Staff, to the creation of a strategic plan over a sustained period. To best support client efforts, I have completed the following training:

  • Associate Certified Coach via the International Coaching Federation

  • Trained mediator, having completed forty-hours of mediation training in 2020 in accordance with M.G.L. ch.233 § 23C with MWI in Boston

  • Qualified Administrator of the Intercultural Developmental Inventory

Areas of practice include but are not limited to:

  • Internal communication and collaboration

  • Learning design and delivery for groups of all sizes

  • Meeting design and facilitation

  • Strategic planning

  • Conflict exploration (including mediation), navigation and transformation

  • Organizational behavior

  • Organizational change

  • Leadership development and coaching (including Executive Directors, Music Directors, Board Chairs)

Examples of client partnership include, but are not limited to:

  • Implementing a culture audit/building institutional readiness for culture change and inclusion work- what are your organizational values and how do you know they are your values? Does your organization have the essential pieces in place to begin and sustain meaningful inclusion and culture work? How can your organization prepare the communications practices and growth mindset that is necessary to a healthy workplace culture?

  • Strategic planning- partnership in building a truly meaningful strategic plan for your organization. This could include but is not limited to: building customized tools and implementing quantitative data collection (existing data review and study, survey creation and dissemination- internal and external, etc), building customized tools and implementing qualitative data collection (stakeholder interviews, focus groups, etc.), designing and facilitating shared ideation and feedback sessions, designing and facilitating customized retreats for cross-functional teams, synthesizing data into easily digestible summary documents, co-creation and roll-out support of strategic plan materials

  • Advising the work of committees- supporting committees/task forces/workgroups as an external partner: co-planning meeting agendas that support a long-term path of work, suggesting shared learning resources, and facilitating meetings via Zoom if/as desired

  • Creating an organizational definition of inclusion, fairness and belonging- what are the elements that comprise your organization's view of inclusion, fairness and belonging? Why? Is the definition shared among internal stakeholders? What will be your organization's focus within this definition and how will the voices and experiences of marginalized individuals be centered? How might alignment around this definition be achieved?

  • Defining inclusion and belonging goals- how might successful fairness and belonging work at your organization look and feel?

  • Offering learning and development/training opportunities- building and presenting customized workshop experiences around essential topics such as implicit bias, power dynamics and conflict navigation-- all through the lens of the performing arts world

  • Creating a customized short or long-term inclusion, fairness and belonging strategic plan with associated action steps for your organization

  • Developing metrics that will allow you to measure and clearly communicate your organization's progress in the areas that matter to you

  • Advising the creation of structures within your organization that will support plan implementation and sustainability

    • Including but not limited to: exploration of current practices in fundraising, marketing, artistic planning and decision-making, education and community engagement programming and practice, ongoing professional development for internal stakeholders (including design of customized learning curricula), organizational policies and practices (including recruitment and hiring practices for musicians, staff and board)

  • Advising and facilitating long-term culture, inclusion and belonging work and conversations as a third-party partner

To address inclusion, belonging and organizational culture in a sustainable way, a performing arts organization must care for and invest in these areas of work as it does an artistic schedule or endowment campaign— with intentionality, dedicated human and financial resources, and cross-functional stakeholder involvement. In the words of adrienne marie brown, “what you pay attention to, grows.”

Whether you need short-term support or long-term guidance, a consultant by the hour, or a longer-term partnership by project, we can work together to customize an arrangement for your organization that is a fit for your needs and available resources.