Nonprofit Services
Te Waipounamu (South Island), New Zealand; 2018; Misha Schmidt
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Is your nonprofit, or program, ready to deepen or expand its impact? Is your team in need of a common vision, clear roadmap, and shared understanding of how your day-to-day work adds up to more than the sum of its parts?
I partner with mission-driven organizations to research, co-develop, and articulate their impact strategy—so they can drive meaningful change with clarity and confidence.
How I Help:
📈 Strategic Plan I work with leadership and program teams to co-develop ambitious and actionable strategies that:
🔍 Understand the Need – Clearly define the problem you’re addressing and assess its scale to ensure your work is rooted in real community needs.
🎯 Clarify Your Purpose – Align your vision, mission, and values with a focused impact strategy that sets clear goals and outcomes.
📊 Strengthen Your Capabilities – Through a SWOT analysis and landscape review, define your organization’s unique value and role within the broader ecosystem.
🛤 Map Your Strategic Pathways – Chart how your organization will drive sustainable change, whether it be through direct service, replication, advocacy, or something else.
🧩 Develop Theory of Change – Build an impact hypothesis and learning agenda, ensuring your efforts are intentional and measurable.
💡 Position for Growth – While I don’t offer formal fundraising services, I coach leaders to leverage their strategic plan to attract funding and partnerships.
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Is your nonprofit tackling a complex challenge, while juggling limited capacity, stalled initiatives, and underutilized data and insights? Are you looking to shift everyone on your team into a learner, making smarter decisions more quickly?
I partner with mission-driven organizations to enhance team capacity, drive innovation, and launch initiatives that make a lasting difference.
How I Help:
🔍 MEL Plan – I work with leadership and programmatic teams to develop a clear impact hypothesis, learning agenda, data infrastructure, and culture of learning to ensure program(s) are aligned with your mission while adapting to real-world conditions.
🚀 New Initiative Development – Grounded in community-based learning, I help design and refine programs through focus groups, prototype development, real-world testing—ensuring initiatives are relevant, responsive, and impactful.
🤝 Collaborative Learning – Strengthen your sector’s collective impact through facilitated convenings and communities of practice that foster shared learning, innovation, and strategic alignment.
📊 Impact Assessments – Conduct formal evaluations and document lessons learned to inform future action, strategic decision-making, and continuous improvement.
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Are you a nonprofit leader being asked to do more with fewer resources? Do you need experienced and expert support to fill the gap or act as a thought-partner?
I partner with leaders of mission-driven organizations to build internal capacity.
How I Help
🌟 Coaching for BIPOC Leaders – Strong leadership drives strong organizations. I provide coaching and strategic support to BIPOC leaders, helping them navigate board engagement, strengthen governance, and invest in staff development—ensuring they have the tools to lead with confidence.
🚀 Fractional Roles for Innovation – Many organizations need dedicated capacity to launch new initiatives but lack the resources for a full-time hire. I serve as an embedded innovation lead, bringing fresh perspective, strategic problem-solving, and adaptive leadership to help organizations pilot, test, and scale new services efficiently.
Select Project Highlights
Innovation & Learning: Facilitating Stanford Impact Lab’s Evidence for Change Fellowship Program:
Co-leading a cohort-based program providing $50K in funding and technical assistance to eight California nonprofits, supporting them in leveraging data and evidence to enhance their impact. This includes collaborating with two other facilitators on cohort selection, curriculum design, and ongoing 1:1 coaching tailored to each organization's needs. Coachees include:
Innovation and Learning: Lean Testing for Racial Equity at Scale
Led the Groundwater Institute (US-based organization working towards racial equity by collaborating with Fortune 500 companies as well as local municipalities) to clarify aspects of its impact strategy as well as embed lean innovation practices to improve its ability to test and validate scalable offerings.
(Spring Impact Project)
Strategy: Scale Readiness Assessment and Scale Strategy for Informal Education Program
Supported Skoll Awardee, Tostan, to review its footprint across several West African countries (Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Senegal, The Gambia), and think through sustainability and scaled impact. This included a scale readiness assessment, thinking through how Tostan might train partners on the core tenets of its Community Empowerment Program while also leveraging research, movement building, and advocacy strategies. The process involved site visits, community and partner interviews, extensive research, and deep co-development with leadership and staff.
The Community Empowerment Program supports adults and adolescents with little or no experience with schooling learn about their human right to education. Empowered to develop a vision for their community’s development, dialogue is generated on the importance of education for women and girls and how their participation is integral to community success. Using this foundation, Tostan teaches community members skills in critical thinking, problem-solving, literacy, and numeracy. (Spring Impact Project)
Strategy: National Scale Planning for Education Solution
Supported Springboard Collaborative in planning for the national scale-up of their evidence-based after-school literacy program. This included designing training and certification models to upskill educators through district budgets and enhancing parental involvement. The process involved site visits, community and partner interviews, extensive research, and deep co-development with leadership and staff. To date, Springboard has impacted 314 Title I schools, trained over 2,700 educators, and served more than 26,500 students nationally. (Spring Impact Project)
Implementation: Scale Planning and Pilot Testing for Environmental Conservation Solution
Supported the pilot and implementation of direct engagement and collaboration models for the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), an India-based conservation organization and Skoll Awardee focused on improving livelihoods. This work included designing, systematizing, and piloting these models while also helping FES strategize government adoption and scale-up efforts. (Spring Impact Project)
Implementation: Leadership Coaching During COVID
Coached leadership of mobile food pantry, Mercy Brown Bag, during COVID to pivot its model and work. The model was staffed by seniors and also primarily served seniors, so during the early days of COVID the organization’s volunteer base and beneficiaries became the most vulnerable. Coaching supported leadership to navigate surge in demand and emergency funding opportunities with long-term sustainability in mind. (Spring Impact Project)
Why Me?
Bridging the Gap Between Communities, Nonprofits, and Philanthropy
With firsthand experience spanning the entire spectrum—from being a beneficiary of public assistance programs, to working on the ground in nonprofits, to advising nonprofits to scale, to overseeing multimillion-dollar grantmaking efforts— I help teams connect the dots and effectively drive meaningful change.
A Tailored, Collaborative Approach
As a relational change manager, I engage trustees, leadership, staff, and grantees to design processes, deliverables, and analyses that lead to the right solutions. More importantly, I ensure that all stakeholders are engaged and fully invested in the outcomes.
Data-Driven, Equity-Oriented Strategies
My approach to data collection leverages qualitative and quantitative data, recognizing how research and data can either reinforce inequities or help close disparities.
Bangladesh Tea Plantation; 2015; Misha Schmidt