We are adding to our team!
We are looking for candidates who will bring diversity to our team…
along with solid professional skills, passion, and a positive outlook.
Consultant – The Consultant plays a key role on the Solid Ground Consulting team, providing organizational development and strategic counsel to clients in all service areas. In addition, the Consultant plays a role in the marketing and business development activities of the firm.
- At least five years background in organizational development and strategy
- Strong preference for direct professional experience with nonprofit and public agencies, especially in positions of leadership
- Consulting experience preferred
- Demonstrated excellence in communication and writing
Senior Consultant – The senior consultant needs deep experience in organizational development consulting. We are looking for a seasoned consultant with an established client base.
- Bachelor’s degree in Organizational Development, or related field; Master’s degree preferred
- Advanced proficiency in organizational development and/or strategic planning
- Consulting experience
Contact us at Contact for more information.
Lowcountry: Vision without Hallucination
There is a difference between vision and hallucination.
Many groups talk about vision and consider what they’d like to influence in the future. But few groups really make their vision the centerpiece of their work today.
Authentic Conversations
Perhaps you need to meet one of our favorite clients: the Lowcountry Open Land Trust. This group has been working to protect the beauty of the Lowcountry of South Carolina for several decades. And Solid Ground worked with them over the last year as the group took that commitment to a new level.
As part of their strategic planning process, the group engaged community members in an authentic conversation about what they want to see for their Lowcountry home. To do this, the land trust:
- Held listening sessions with key supporters and community leaders to get their suggestions.
- Hosted a dedicated Business Leader Breakfast to specifically engage those focused on key business and economic development issues.
- Converted their annual meeting from a passive program to an active conversation, with more than 100 supporters describing what they want for the future of their community.
- Invited the community to an open forum at the local library that attracted more than 120 community members who care about the special places of the region but who had not yet had a voice in what should happen. The meeting was distinctive because it brought in a mix of ages and interests, and wasn’t limited to hearing from or speaking to “the choir.”
Hearing Voices
In addition, the land trust sat down with people throughout the community to hear the voices that care about the places the trust is working to protect. A wide variety of caring people – old and young, school children and farmers and business leaders and parents – all shared their vision of the Lowcountry. On tape.
The results of this investment, made over most of a year, are extraordinary. The land trust invested in capturing this vision in both a brochure and a video called the “Soul of the Lowcountry”. These results are wonderful examples of taking an idea and making the most of it.
The land trust used this information to shape their strategic plan, and now have a plan that is both aspirational and realistic. It conveys what the community wants and what the land trust believes it can do. This is planning at its finest.
Lessons Learned
Some of the great lessons that emerged from this project:
- Make your engagement authentic. If you want people’s opinion, ask them. And then listen. Don’t spend most of your time talking to them.
- Use the conversations you already have to make the most of them. Annual meetings are notoriously boring. Think about what else you’re already doing that can become opportunities to listen. If we take the time to engage those who show up – whenever or wherever that may be – everybody gets more out of it. Our supporters deserve to have input and to be heard. And our organizations are the richer for it.
- Reach beyond your base. Every group needs to prove their relevance to the broader community. Take the time to reach out to those who could care if you engage them in a true exchange of ideas and opinions. Don’t be afraid to hear difficult things. Clearer levels of disagreement may appear – and so will greater degrees of respect, even supp
ort.
Share your results. Hearing what people have to say is the first step. Sharing what you’ve heard is the next. People want to know that you’ve heard what they’ve said. They also want to know what others have said. And by the way, this can be extremely useful information to support your fundraising efforts.
New name, offices and website – oh my!
Decisions Decisions is now Solid Ground Consulting
Solid Ground Consulting has been the name we’ve long used for our national conservation team and land trust practice area. We’ve always received great response to it. As we started to rethink our firm’s identity, it just felt right to call the whole of our business “Solid Ground.” So we bid a warm farewell to our business name of many years, Decisions Decisions, and embrace our new identity: Solid Ground Consulting.
We’ve retooled, redesigned and reconfigured. With our new identity comes a deepened commitment to organizations that operate with a triple bottom line – people and profit and planet. And you may notice our new logo and website (yes, you’re on it now!).
If that weren’t enough, after Oct. 6, 2012 we’ll be in new offices. We outgrew our old space, so you’ll find us now on the Fourth Floor of the historic Weatherly Building at 516 SE Morrison, Portland, Ore. Stop by and check out our great downtown views. And yes, Shayna, the Office Dog, will still be there to greet you. Some things you just don’t change.
Solid Ground team active at Rally 2012
Big topics: easement revitalization and mergers
Solid Ground team members are presenting several interactive sessions at Rally 2012, the National Land Conservation Conference in Salt Lake City Sept. 29-Oct. 2. Attendees will learn the latest on how to deal with problem easements during our 90-minute workshop, “Why Wait for a Problem to Show Up? Easement Revitalization 101.” We go deeper into the issues during our half-day seminar on the Easement Revitalization Initiative. And we’ll be providing resources on collaborations and mergers in the session, “The M-word: Merger.”
Conference goers will also find us hanging at Table 19 in the Exhibitor Hall or wandering around with a banjo looking for a jam session. (Well, one of us will have a banjo.)
Strategies for easement revitalization
‘Easement Revitalization Guidebook’ now available
With the sponsorship of the Open Space Institute, Solid Ground Consulting has researched, developed and tested strategies and tools that land trusts can use to “revitalize” their easements and make them suitable for prime time.
We’re happy to report the “Easement Revitalization Guidebook” is now available. Get in touch and we’ll make sure you get a copy.
Problem easements – those with questionable conservation value, vague or conflicting language in the easement document, or transactional problems – lurk in the portfolios of nearly all land trusts. They’re difficult to monitor and enforce, and sometimes the conservation benefit doesn’t seem worth the effort.
Many groups have chosen to ignore potential problems posed by these easements until some event – such as a high-profile violation, a proposed merger with another land trust or an accreditation application – brings them to the fore. Then the land trust is forced to decide what to do with them.
How land trusts handle early cases of problem easements may set precedents that ripple through all of the land trusts in the country. If the conservation community allows these easements to be inappropriately extinguished or ignored, they risk losing the confidence of the general public, legislators and the IRS. On the other hand, trying to steward bad easements may drain resources without serving any significant conservation value.
The “Easement Revitalization Guidebook” helps land trusts successfully manage problem easements.
Shine A Light: transforming the lives of street kids
Brazil-based nonprofit turns to Decisions Decisions
D2 helped Brazil-based, Shine A Light, evaluate their work teaching digital media to marginalized children. When the leaders of the nonprofit Shine A Light wanted to evaluate their work over the past 10 years, Decisions Decisions helped them design an evaluation process and present their findings.
Shine A Light has created a network of more than 300 nonprofits in 49 cities in 16 countries throughout Central and South America that work with street kids. Through the network, groups collaborate and share knowledge with their peers. Shine A Light has conducted 19 major projects with some of the best of these organizations over the past decade. Its digital media programs – film, music, design, and literature – have made it possible for street kids to share their knowledge and inspiration with other organizations and activists. Shine A Light wanted to more deeply understand its impact on these kids.
During its evaluation, Shine A Light learned that its programs have had transformational impacts on the children who participated. Many of them are now making a living as artists or serving as arts educators. Two-thirds became leaders in their communities. Thirty-eight percent have gone on to college – a higher percentage than their peers in the United States. A Bolivian leader described it this way: “Poor kids have to face a million brutal hierarchies. So when they get a real chance to practice democracy, they shine.”
A surprising – and unintended – result of Shine A Light’s work is the impact that the organization has had on the nonprofits in the collaborative network. Because of Shine A Light, significant percentages of collaborating nonprofits received new funding, expanded their services, and changed public policy.
A Brazilian program director said it well: “You catch these kids at their best, as they show what they want to be. And then years later, at a tough time, they look at these films, or hear the music, and it reminds them. Film is like a commitment to yourself, and when there are so many temptations of drugs and gangs all around, that’s important.”
We were excited to partner with Shine A Light and to support their incredibly important work. Want to learn more? Check out www.shinealight.org. You can read their evaluation at http://www.shinealight.org/Texts/Evaluation2011.pdf
The Retirement Bomb
How to plan for the exodus
The Retirement Boom. The impact of an aging workforce is being felt throughout the country in all sectors. The exodus of the baby boomer generation from the nonprofit sector will have a dramatic impact on many organizations at both the board and staff level. Leadership transitions occur for any number of reasons, planned and unplanned. This time can be a powerful opportunity to strengthen the organization if a thoughtful plan is in place. Executive transitions are transformational, but when poorly managed, they often bring on a crisis leading to decreased effectiveness and sometimes even organizational failure. Jim Morris, our Manager for the Sustainable Leadership Practice, was recently interviewed by Saving Land Magazine in an article titled “The Retirement Bomb.” In the article, Jim outlines a strategy for not only dealing with these transitions, but how to plan for them as well.
Building board leadership
A special presentation by Marc Smiley
Building Board Leadership: A Special Presentation by Marc Smiley. What happens when two great organizations like Decisions Decisions and the Nonprofit Association of Oregon (formerly TACS) collaborate? A whole lot actually. Beginning this October, D2’s Marc Smiley and others within our firm will be sharing our breadth and depth of knowledge about building effective organizations through a series of five lectures offered through the Nonprofit Association of Oregon (NAO). Marc has already completed the first two, but there is still time to sign up for the next lecture on November 3rd when he will present on “Building Board Leadership.” Not sure whether you should sign up? Click here to see a full description of the lecture and here to download a copy of the training packet from the first session entitled “Board Orientation: What You Need to Know to Serve on a Nonprofit Board.” Not located in Portland? No problem – in addition to Portland, the lecture series will take us to Salem and Bend over the next 6 months. As many of you in the nonprofit field know, building an effective board is critical to creating a sustainable organization – this is a great opportunity to come and learn more about how to draw out the leaders on your board. We hope to see you soon in a city near you!
Lecture Dates and Times:
Nonprofit Board Network
Board Orientation: What You Need to Know to Serve on a Nonprofit Board
October 12, 2010 – 5:30 to 7:00 pm
Ecotrust Conference Center, Portland
Rogue Valley Nonprofit Training Series
Sustainable Nonprofit Business Models
October 20, 2010, noon to 1:30 pm
Red Lion Hotel, Medford
Executive Directors Network
Building Board Leadership
November 3, 2010, 8:00 am to 9:30 am
Ecotrust Conference Center, Portland
Mid-Valley Executive Directors Network
Board Fundraising: Lessons from the Field
January 25, 2011 – 8:00 am to 9:30 am
Mission Mill Museum, Salem
Nonprofit Network of Central Oregon
Building Board Leadership
April 27, 2011
St Charles Medical Center, Bend
Land Trust Alliance’s 2010 Rally
Fun and inspiration in Connecticut
Land Trust Alliance’s 2010 Rally in Connecticut. Energizing, exciting, inspirational, and a whole lot of fun! That is how Solid Ground team members Allison Handler, Jim Morris and Marc Smiley described their experience at Rally 2010 in Hartford, Connecticut. Rally, sponsored by the Land Trust Alliance, has been dubbed the “premier training event for land conservation” and this year brought together close to 2,000 people from all walks of the land conservation field. Whether they were taking hikes on beautiful trails that had been collaboratively conserved, playing music alongside the Travellin’ Trout Trunk Band during Rallypalooza, getting into the nitty gritty legal details of writing conservation easements, or getting certified in order to conduct assessments, those with a passion for green came and Rally delivered.
At a glance, Rally is really an opportunity for people interested in land conservation to combine classroom instruction, peer learning, networking, and some good old fashioned fun in one non-stop, information-packed, action-inspiring week. Marc made an especially significant contribution to the week by teaching and debuting Solid Ground Consulting Group alongside Barb Welch and with ongoing support from Allison and Jim. Click here to access the course packet! The event also highlighted several timely, critical issues, such as climate change, and surfaced how these issues intersect with farmland conservation and large landscape protection. In the end, participants came, learned, and were inspired…and as Allison put it, “It was incredible to be surrounded by so many people working so hard to protect so many significant, special places.”
Adding value through vacation
The pursuit of balance and fun
Most of our time here at D2 is spent working hard for our clients by acting with intention, responding to requests with authenticity, producing quality work, making sure we speak with integrity, and taking any and every given opportunity to learn in order to conduct good business. But once a year, usually in August, we tackle the other two values that, amid impossibly packed schedules, seem to get quietly swept under the rug. These two values, of course, are balance and fun.
This August we are taking these two values extremely seriously as we anticipate a busy and full fall quarter. The reason that values like “balance” and “fun” are included as part of the D2 philosophy is because we are firm believers that our work is only as good as the energy we put into it. And that energy is directly connected to how much time and importance we place on work/life balance.
Fun, of course, is an integral part of that balance because it speaks to the part of us that we too often forget exists – the inner child that calls to us to skip down the hall at work or take a break to walk down the street just to buy an ice cream cone. Whether we admit it or not, these values tend to fall to the wayside when it comes time to crack the whip and get work done. So this month, we are taking a moment to appreciate our staff for taking care of themselves by remembering that balance and fun are equally important to conducting good business and producing quality work, in fact, they are essential to it.
D2 newlywed Allison Handler (right) taking on both balance and fun with husband John Miller (left) by appreciating the beauty of the wilderness that we strive to protect through our work with land trust conservations. Photo taken at Victoria, Canada, on the way to Salt Spring Island.
Follow Us!
