CONSULTING

TRANSFORMING Organizations

Jess Letaw, FutureRoot

Leaders at the forefront of social change must be intentional about the way they approach, manage and respond to challenges. NEW’s consultants can help focus your efforts and engage your team more effectively.

Whether we collaborate one-to-one, with your board or staff, we can deepen the impact of your work.

LET'S TRANSFORM THE FUTURE, TOGETHER

“There are always bumps in the road and lots going on, but we are now in a stable enough place to plan for the future in intelligent ways. NEW’s work helped us get over a very rough patch in our history so that it didn’t become the end of our story.”

Ang Adamiak, Executive Director
Arts & Scraps

SERVICES

Strategic Planning & Alignment

We partner with organizations to clarify strategic direction and create shared alignment around where you’re headed and why.

Too often, strategic planning becomes an exercise in producing a document rather than building collective clarity. Our approach treats strategy as a living practice: one that connects mission, vision, values, and priorities in ways that guide real decisions and daily work.

This work often includes:

Clarifying or refining mission, vision, and values as a foundation for strategy
Identifying a clear strategic direction and priority focus areas
Designing strategic plans that are adaptable, grounded in reality, and informed by lived experience
Supporting sense-making across staff, board, and community voices
Translating strategy into practical next steps, learning questions, and accountability structures

The result isn’t just a plan, it’s shared understanding and momentum.

Board Development & Governance

We support boards and leadership teams in strengthening how governance and decision-making happen, not just what roles exist on paper.

Many boards are navigating questions of purpose, power, and partnership; often within governance models they inherited rather than designed. We work alongside boards to explore approaches to governance that are more participatory, values-aligned, and responsive to today’s realities.

This work often includes:

Clarifying roles, responsibilities, and boundaries between and amongst board and staff
Exploring decision-making approaches that balance accountability, shared power, and effectiveness
Strengthening board culture, trust, and generative engagement
Supporting board recruitment, orientation, and ongoing development
Designing meeting structures, agreements, and processes that support meaningful participation

Our goal is governance that supports leadership in ways that are responsive to, accountable to, and shaped by the people most impacted by the organization’s work.

Organizational Design & Culture

We partner with organizations to align structures, systems, and ways of working with the values they hold and the care they want people to experience.

Organizational culture lives in everyday practices; how meetings are run, how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, and how people experience belonging, accountability, and support. Too often, culture work is treated as secondary to “real work”, when in reality it shapes whether work is sustainable and impactful at all.

This work often includes:

Facilitating values identification or refinement, and translating values into lived practice
Exploring organizational culture to understand what’s supporting people and where strain or misalignment is showing up.
Designing shared agreements and ways of working that foster trust, care, and accountability
Supporting leaders in building relational, emotionally intelligent practices that keep people whole while work gets done
Examining how systems, policies, and structures shape power, belonging, and participation across roles

This work helps organizations create environments where people can do work that is values-aligned, sustainable, and rooted in care.