Who I work with and why
More on who I help through my social impact consulting work in Europe and the U.S.
There is a moment I have noticed, usually somewhere in the middle of a first conversation with a new client, when the real problem surfaces. Not the problem they came with — the strategy document that needs restructuring, the donor report that isn’t landing, the grant application with one week left on the clock. Underneath that, almost always, is a quieter admission: we are doing serious work, and no one outside our walls seems to understand it the way we do.
That gap — between the quality of what an organization does and the legibility of how it appears to international funders, partners, and audiences — is where most of my work actually lives. And the people who find their way to me tend to fall into a few recognizable groups. I want to describe them honestly, because I think it matters more to be clear about who I genuinely serve than to be vague about it in a way that sounds broadly welcoming but means nothing to anyone specific.
My core clients are executives, senior leaders, and boards in established nonprofits, NGOs, social enterprises, and civil society organizations — mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, other parts of Europe, and U.S.-based organizations. They carry titles like Executive Director, Country Director, Development Director, or Program Director, but those titles only partly describe what their days actually look like.
What I notice about them is this: they are already doing meaningful, sophisticated work. They are not searching for direction or needing to be told what matters. What they are navigating is the exhausting gap between the operational reality of running a mission-driven organization and the very different demands of representing that organization clearly and credibly to people who are not inside it.
They are often managing this under real constraints — limited communications staff, overstretched bandwidth, and the persistent pressure of donor expectations that don’t always map neatly onto how complex social impact work actually unfolds. Many of them are also navigating an additional layer: operating in English as their primary language of international engagement, while trying not to lose their organization’s particular voice, context, or way of understanding the world.
My favorite days are when I get to work alongside someone like this — someone who knows exactly what they are doing and just needs a collaborator who can help the outside world see it clearly. Not a consultant who arrives with a framework to impose. A thinking partner who can translate without flattening.
Adjacent to that core group is a set of organizations I find myself genuinely excited about — not because they are polished, but because of the gap they are working to close.
My secondary audience is essentially mid-sized organizations in transition. They are moving from local operations into international funding ecosystems. Maybe it’s their first time receiving grants or donations outside their country base. Maybe They are applying for grants in English for the first time. Very often, these are founder-led teams, involving a board member, that are beginning to institutionalize— i.e. committing their systems and processes to actual mapping and documentation, or learning a new vocabulary to communicate their ways of working to new and/or larger audiences. Their internal culture hasn’t fully caught up to the external audiences they’re beginning to connect to. Their program work is often excellent. So how they show up in proposals, donor communications, and partnership conversations — begins to become a more important than before.
I am drawn to groups here, in large part because I’ve experience how much organizational shame and fear attaches itself all to easily. The worry that sounding “unprofessional” in English, or producing a reporting that doesn’t meet some invisible standard of international credibility, reflects on the value of the work itself. It doesn’t. But the concerns are real, especially the perceptions others may have about leaders and teams bringing their authentic voices and selves to challenging new spaces. It’s all worth taking seriously, but also worth identifying what’s real and what’s assumption.
What I try to offer these organizations is exactly what it sounds like: help representing serious work seriously, without pretending the gap doesn’t exist, and without making them feel inadequate for the fact that it does. Growing into international visibility is hard. Most of the organizations I respect most have been exactly where these teams are now.
There is a third group I want to name, even though they are harder to describe and are not usually my primary clients. They are the people who operate across the social impact sector in supporting, bridging, and connecting roles — fellow independent consultants/solopreneurs who move between organizations, the program coordinators who carry institutional knowledge from one ecosystem to another, the emerging founders who are still figuring out what shape their contribution will take. And increasingly more funders, donors, and impact investors who are keen to know more about what’s going on in the CEE/V4 region.
What defines them is not a job title but a function: they are the ones who hold knowledge in circulation. They introduce the right funder to the right organization, translate between donor culture and organizational reality, and carry hard-won practical wisdom across contexts that would otherwise never talk to each other. The sector depends on them in ways that are rarely acknowledged.
I think of this group as my North Star — not because they are always my clients, but because they are the people I most want my work to be useful to, in whatever form that takes. If I am doing this right, the ideas and frameworks I work through with individual organizations ripple outward through people like this. That is the kind of influence I find genuinely interesting.
I have been thinking lately about why it matters to describe all of this explicitly, rather than leaving it implicit in what I offer.
Part of the answer is simply honesty. I am not trying to help everyone. I am not a generalist who works across every sector and every context. The work I do best is with people inside or adjacent to mission-driven organizations who are navigating real institutional pressure and need support that respects both the complexity of their work and the constraints of their situation.
But the other part of the answer is something more like an invitation. When I write about the people I work with in this kind of detail, I am not doing business development. I am trying to make it easy for the right people to recognize themselves — and, just as importantly, to recognize that I already understand something about where they are. The trust that makes genuine collaboration possible doesn’t usually start with a pitch. It starts with the recognition that someone has been paying attention.
On BE4SI, we’re talking nonprofits/NGOs, social enterprise, philanthropy, civil society, and social impact— filtered through our dual American and European lenses. We’d be honored to have you as a free or paid subscriber today. 🗞️ 🌐
We’re a reader-supported publication. If you appreciate the social impact news and notes we bring you, consider a small donation. It’s an added boost that keeps things flowing. 🍵 🍃☕ 🍂
Word of mouth is essential to our growth. Please share our Substack with others you know. ⚡🫶🏾 💫