Social Impact Consulting
We combine 20+ years of consulting experience with a practitioner’s mindset that brings strategy to life.
Panorama Advisors launched in 2020 to make the world a more just place, especially for those furthest from power.
We help our clients to build stronger teams, strategies, and organizations. We support all social enterprises including nonprofits, K-12 schools and districts, multi-stakeholder collaboratives, government and philanthropies.Our ultimate goal is to move the measures that matter most for our clients, from K-12 student outcomes to environmental health indicators.
But we also believe how we do our work is just as important as what we do. For us, this means building trust based on mutual respect and accountability; having tough but necessary conversations; giving others grace, especially in tumultuous times; and leading with curiosity instead of judgment.
At the end of every client engagement, we hope to affirmatively say, in the words of Congressman John Lewis, that we got into “good trouble, necessary trouble” to make the world a more just place.
Strategy and Learning
We help clients develop clear and courageous strategies including meaningful visions, authentic values, focused goals and progress indicators, insightful landscape analyses, succinct theories of change and business plans, and ideas for adjusting as your context changes.
The Panorama Advisors approach strategy and learning is:
Examples of our impact include:
Designing an inspiring new strategic plan for a $15M early childhood education nonprofit with new leadership, leading to increased staff-board alignment.
Analyzing and making recommendations on a large professional service nonprofit's competitive positioning.
Creating a signature philanthropic strategy for a major automotive manufacturer that integrated disparate community investments under a common theme.
Creating a new strategy for place-based family foundation in Memphis with $250M in assets.
Designing and executing a community engagement process informing a large urban K-12 school district’s vision, values, and goals.
Facilitating learning retreats for a $7M place-based funder, leading to ongoing collaboration across program areas.
Team Development and Facilitation
We help clients by honestly assessing their team’s health, facilitating constructive team conversations that build trust and moves work forward, creating custom agreements and protocols for how team work together and hold each other accountable, and coaching individual team leaders and members.
Our approach to team building effective teams is based on four principles:
Examples of our impact include:
Mediating delicate conversations with municipal government leaders to create an emergency initiative that benefited more than 50,000 families.
Creating executive team protocols for a philanthropic foundation so that each person felt comfortable speaking their truth, leading to increased morale and better decisions.
Being trusted as the go-to facilitator for high-stakes discussions for a K-12 district board of education.
Facilitating a white racial affinity group for nonprofit board members during a tumultuous time, leading to repaired relationships and better communication.
Rebooting a significantly off-track initiative for a K-12 school district by clarifying goals, roles, and timeline.
Recruiting and facilitating a “community advisory council” for a new initiative, resulting in authentic community ownership and belonging.
Board Governance
We help nonprofit, K-12 school district, and charter school boards reach their full potential by clarifying what organizational outcomes matter most, facilitating meetings and retreats,clarifying board and staff roles, and building board capacity to make continued progress once we’re gone.
We also provide training on effective governance, guide boards through CEO leadership transitions, support board member recruitment and onboarding, and coach board chairs to lead with confidence.
Examples of our impact include:
Coaching the publicly-elected Board President and Vice President at a large urban K-12 school district using the Student Outcomes Focused Governance approach, leading to a remarkable turnaround.
Transitioning a K-12 charter school board from a "working board" to a "strategic board," resulting in clear board/staff roles and more efficient board meetings.
Facilitating courageous conversations between a board and senior leadership at a $1B organization about a topic that everyone had been avoiding, saving the organization from a major public failure that could have irreparably damaged its reputation.
Guiding a K-12 charter school board to take stock of their challenges, hire a new Executive Director, and create a new strategic plan.
Co-designing and co-facilitating a seven-month Equitable Governance Institute for charter school board members in California.
Overhauling governance policies after a merger of two nonprofits, leading to clarity of purpose and roles.
Multi-Stakeholder Collaboratives
We support multi-stakeholder collaboratives at every stage of development, with particular expertise in startup and place-based initiatives.
We help clients by conducting readiness assessments, recruiting participants, facilitating meetings, engaging the community authentically, creating a vision and shared goals, conducting landscape research, delivering training on systems change strategies, and coaching backbone leaders.
