Recent Clients & Projects

Example projects from the last four years follow, broadly categorized — with a lot of overlap — as:

Government Strategy & Reinvention
Building Collaborative Innovation
Tribal Nations & Native Community Partnerships
Organizational Development & Transformation

Government Strategy & Reinvention

The boldest government leaders know that better plans aren't enough. An engaged process and an operating culture that turns plans into reality, together, ensures that plans come alive, even in our time of standard operating turbulence. That requires something most planning processes never build: genuine co-ownership across staff, leadership, community, and partners. It also requires meeting people where they are — especially the ones who have every reason not to trust or engage in the process.

Future Fortuna: A City's First Strategic Plan & Preparation for A General Plan Update The City of Fortuna didn't want another consultant-driven plan that would sit on a shelf. City Manager Amy Nilsen had the vision to approach city strategy differently — and the courage to back an open-ended, trust-heavy, deeply engaged process. This small city in northwestern California was at a ripe moment for reinvention as a former timber town that had not found its new identity or purpose.

What followed was nearly a year of genuine reinvention: a listening campaign that reached more than 60 community members and staff in real conversations — not surveys, not public comment periods — including immigrant families, teenagers, business owners, long-time residents, people who had never once attended a Council meeting, and staff of all departments and tenures. Staff and community volunteers were trained and supported to conduct interviews themselves. Focus groups reached populations the City had rarely heard from. Two packed community workshops brought 150+ participants together with 226 poll responses to test and refine listening results, then turn them into into shared guiding principles and strategic priorities.

The result was Fortuna's first Strategic Plan — designed to facilitate performance, not conformance, and to leverage an operational culture that learns faster than the challenges pile up — and a set of General Plan Update recommendations, built from the ground up by the people who will live with and be impacted by them.

I have participated over the years in strategic planning... This is an entirely different process. We felt heard... helping to address the 'us versus them' that exists in this world, with staff, in the community, and with our City government. This is extremely valuable.
— Fortuna Chief of Police Matt Eberhart, to the City Council

County Climate Resilience Coordination Twenty-nine interviews across County departments, tribal nations, and partner agencies revealed that technical climate solutions were within reach, but relationship and coordination gaps were making them impossible to act on. Co-creative design sessions with department heads produced a shared purpose of organization-wide climate resilience work, cross-functional working agreements, and new internal partnerships and projects now being operationalized across the County.

Statewide Wildfire & Watershed Resilience Practitioner Engagement Led a listening campaign with integrated watershed-fire-forest restoration leaders including Native practitioners, innovating water agencies, and financing and policy experts and workshops with these practitioners, regulators and funders for the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force — implementing innovative work on the ground across California. Surfaced frontline experience to craft state policy recommendations aimed at achieving a dramatically greater pace and scale of wildfire resilience statewide.

Great Redwood Trail: Rural Community Engagement in Strong Skeptic Territory When a state agency needed to engage remote canyon communities along a 320-mile future rail-to-trail corridor, the standard public workshop format wasn't just inadequate — it risked deepening what went beyond a lack of trust in the "Emerald Triangle" region. Many landowners were signed onto lawsuits. Others had never participated in a government planning process and had good reasons not to start. The community had real, legitimate concerns: public safety, emergency response, trespass, encroachment on their way of life in a rugged, remote region rarely visited or considered by any scale of government.

Careful advance work included one-on-one conversations with landowners, local elected officials, and community leaders before any public event and shaped a co-creative workshop design built around honest dialogue rather than agency presentations. The goal wasn't to sell the trail. It was to demonstrate that the agency genuinely wanted to understand what would make it work for the people who lived there. As the only co-creative part of the process, the most productive new partnerships in the entire master planning effort emerged from this work.

City of Arcata Leadership Strategy Update Interviewed leadership and management staff across all City departments, then convened them to surface shared strengths, tensions, and priorities, building a foundation of common ground to inform the City's strategic direction under new leadership.

Building Collaborative Innovation

The most pressing challenges facing our communities and watersheds can't be solved by any single organization, agency, or sector. But genuine collaboration — the kind that produces real results rather than simple coordination — requires deliberate investment in relationships, shared purpose, and the conditions for collective experimentation and learning. That investment is what most collaboratives skip, and why so many stall. The right question isn't "how do we get more people to the table?" It's "are the people at the table willing to do what it actually takes?"

Rural Restoration Partnership: Growing a Nine-Organization Collaborative Cutting-edge community-based and Native-led restoration and resilience organizations serving Humboldt, Siskiyou, Trinity, Mendocino, and Lake Counties in Northwestern California have been doing remarkable work in integrated forest health, salmonid recovery, and fire resilience, largely in isolation from each other. The Rural Restoration Partnership brings nine of them together to explore what greater regional collaboration could make possible, particularly in terms of achieving more landscape-scale resilience with a better prepared workforce from the region.

WRX Alliance: When Readiness Is the Discovery A motivated project sponsor convened a diverse network of forest products business interests, agencies and organizations to explore whether they could co-create a more integrated and effective regional system for generating economic opportunities from the drive for forest fuels reduction. The process was designed to build shared purpose, surface network-wide insights through structured one-to-one conversations, and prototype experimental pilots with a genuine shift in cross-sector relationships and how partners were already working.

What emerged was clarifying: most of the initial network wasn't ready to invest the time and relational work that genuine collaboration requires. That's not a failure — it's valuable intelligence. Knowing that a collaborative isn't ready to work differently is worth knowing before investing years in the attempt. For organizations and networks willing to honestly assess their readiness, that clarity is the first step toward something that could actually work.

Collaborative Innovation as an Element of Other Work Many of the projects described elsewhere on this page have collaborative innovation at their core — the County Climate Resilience work produced new cross-departmental partnerships where they barely existed; the Tribal Table in the Regional Economic Development Initiative created an ongoing dialogue structure driven by Native values rather than agency frameworks; the Fortuna process built co-ownership across a community that, like many, had largely disengaged from local government. Collaboration isn't a separate workstream in this practice — it's the mechanism by which everything else becomes durable.

Tribal Nations & Native Community Partnerships
Effective work with Native communities requires more than cultural sensitivity training and a land acknowledgment. It requires understanding that tribal sovereignty is not a compliance checkbox — it's a fundamentally different relationship to land, governance, and community than most government and nonprofit frameworks are built to accommodate. The most valuable thing an outside facilitator can offer is not expertise about tribes, but the ability to create conditions where Native wisdom, priorities, and leadership drive the process and own the results.

Regional Economic Development Initiative: Native-Led Frameworks for a Four-County Region Facilitated eight months of tribal representatives from nations across seven counties to gather as part of Redwood Region RISE, exploring something genuinely rare in regional economic development work: what would it look like to shift from frameworks designed by and for non-Native institutions toward economic resilience driven by Native values and systems?

Rather than extractive consultation — asking tribes what they think about someone else's plan — this process created an ongoing dialogue structure owned by tribal participants. It identified regional opportunities for supporting Native communities' economic resilience on their own terms. The work required holding space for a conversation that had no predetermined destination, and trusting that the right direction would emerge from the people in the room.

The tribal table discussion was so powerful and awesome. [The facilitator] did an outstanding job of creating a safe space for [discovery] discussions.
— Tribal work group participant

Hoopa Valley Tribe: First Strategic Plan Jen is co-creatively engaging tribal members to develop the Hoopa Valley Tribe's first strategic plan — of one of California's largest tribes. This plan will be a holistic tool to address a consistent, community-driven vision for the improved wellbeing of the Hupa people and their territory. The process is designed to surface what the community actually wants, not what outside funders, consultants, or planning frameworks assume they need.

Fort Humboldt: Exploring Reconciliation & Historic Truth-Telling A Historic State Park with a brutal settlement history — Fort Humboldt was a site of documented violence against the Wiyot and neighboring peoples. Jen is engaging tribal leaders to consider interests in healing historic trauma associated with the site's interpretive materials and programs will require holding difficult conversations about acknowledgment, responsibility, and what genuine reconciliation could look like in a place where the wounds are still present in living memory. The results will inform the overhaul interpretive materials and programming as well as site management. Reconciliation is not a project with a deliverable. It's a relationship that has to be built and rebuilt over time, and the willingness to begin that conversation openly and honestly is itself a form of progress.

O'Rew Site: Understanding Tribes' Interests in Native-Managed Public Access One of the first visitor-serving facilities in the U.S. being shifted from federal government to Indigenous management, the O'Rew site represented both an opportunity and a responsibility. Jen reached out to NW California tribes to identify their communications, access, and interpretation interests.
She convened tribal, state, federal, and NGO partners to integrate tribal feedback directly into site and interpretive plans — ensuring that the transition to Indigenous management was shaped by Indigenous priorities from the beginning, not retrofitted after the fact.

Organizational Development & Transformation

Every organization hits a point where the way it has always worked stops being enough — or never quite was. Sometimes the gap shows up as conflict, turnover, or strategies that never get implemented. Sometimes it's subtler: a sense that the organization's potential is larger than what it's currently achieving, or that growth is outpacing the culture and systems needed to sustain it. This work shows up across the government and collaborative projects described on this page — local government departments finding common ground, agencies developing shared purpose, collaborative partners building the individual and collective relational infrastructure required for joint action. It also shows up directly, as the primary focus of engagement, for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations navigating the full arc from startup to reinvention.

Humboldt County Resource Conservation District: Strategy Rooted in Listening The Humboldt County RCD is a local government agency that has grown from a $2M to a $12M organization in five years — doing remarkable, regionally distinctive work supporting private landowners and natural resource stewardship across the county. That growth brought both extraordinary momentum and the vulnerabilities that rapid scaling always produces.

A listening campaign with board, staff, landowners, and external partners surfaced a remarkably consistent picture: a culture worth protecting, a "radical middle" positioning that allowed the RCD to hold progressive ecology and conservative agriculture at the same table — something no other local organization was doing — and a set of structural and communication gaps that organizational complexity had outpaced.

The listening results became the foundation for a board-staff strategy retreat and a followup staff leadership strategy session co-designed to surface shared purpose, name tensions honestly, and develop strategic priorities that both groups could genuinely own. The goal wasn't a polished strategic plan — it was the kind of shared clarity that makes a plan worth having, and that protects what's exceptional about the organization as it continues to grow.

Environmental Culture Change: When An Organization Knows It Needs to Evolve A statewide environmental nonprofit was struggling with complaints about cultural responsiveness, ability to work well across the board with tribal partners, and significant staff turnover — and leadership knew that standard DEI training and reflection wasn't enough. A six-month organizational development process began with a small group of catalyst staff, expanded to include management, and eventually engaged the whole organization.

The process produced new hiring practices, community partnership protocols, decision-making structures, and organizational culture design criteria for a strategic plan update. Staff retention improved. Community partnerships expanded. The change was built from the inside out — not delivered from above.

From Startup to Reinvention: The Full Arc of Nonprofit Organizational Life No two organizations arrive at this work from the same place. Some are brand new, navigating the founding tensions that determine whether a promising idea becomes a durable organization. Others are decades old, facing the question of whether their current form still serves their original purpose — or whether genuine reinvention is required.

Sacred Groves is an emerging nonprofit establishing one of the first natural conservation burial grounds in the region — working through the foundational questions every startup must answer: what do we stand for, who do we serve, how do we make decisions, and what kind of organization do we want to be? A board strategy session surfaced shared purpose, decision-making criteria, and the design questions that will shape the organization's first years.

A 50-year-old nonprofit serving Northwestern California faced a different set of questions: with significant sector transformation and financial constraints reshaping what was possible, what was essential enough to protect, and what needed to be released? Over 16 months, board and staff reconnected with former participants and communities, co-designed an essentialized purpose and strategy, and implemented changes — adapting as they went rather than waiting for a perfect plan.

While these two organizations sit at opposite ends of the organizational lifecycle, what they share is a willingness to ask honest questions about who they are and what purpose they are actually serving — and to let the answers shape what comes next.