Understanding what's really shaping outcomes
Many leadership and culture challenges persist because the underlying dynamics are hard to see clearly. We work on projects that help surface patterns, tensions, and lived realities that are often missed by traditional data or one-time engagement tools.
Our approach blends research-informed methods and narrative insights to clarify priorities and trade-offs — so leaders can make informed decisions about what to address and how.
While broadly outlined below, every engagement is customized to your needs.
Phase 1
Clarifying context
We work with you to understand the questions you are trying to answer and the clarity needed to move forward.
Phase 2
Deep Listening
We design safe spaces to to facilitate reflective dilaog and surface insights about your stakeholders’ lived experiences.
Phase 3
Sensemaking
We interpret patterns, risks, and implications based on the data gathered and best practices relevant to your organizational context.
Phase 4
Roadmap Planning
We co-design priorities and next steps that are realistic, grounded, and aligned with leadership commitments.
Engagements may include:
- 1-1 Office Hours
- Curriculum development and delivery
- Curated storytelling
- End-to-end project management
- Retainer-based support
These questions often arise when considering deeper work
Long-term advisory partnerships are most useful when organizations are navigating complex challenges that cannot be resolved through one-off engagements. This often includes situations where decisions unfold over time, involve multiple stakeholders, or multi-year research and evaluation projects.
In these contexts, partnerships allows for continuity, sustained attention to your organizational needs, and the ability to adapt as conditions change. In the past, this has taken the form of retainer-based engagements where Gayathri’s advisory support is embedded over an average of 2 years on a fractional basis.
We typically recommend starting with a scoped engagement or pilot to explore fit, clarify focus, and assess whether ongoing collaboration is appropriate.
We work with organizations of varying sizes and across different sectors and geographies. Fit is less about scale or location, and more about the nature of the challenge and the organization’s readiness to engage thoughtfully with it.
Our work has included nonprofits, foundations, educational institutions, and public and private organizations navigating complex leadership, culture, or change-related questions.
You can be both a client and a partner. The distinction typically lies in the depth and continuity of the collaboration.
While some organizations engage us for defined advisory or facilitation support, partnership emerges when the work extends beyond a single engagement and involves shared ownership of learning, outcomes, and direction over time.
In these cases, we work alongside organizations to co-design and adapt approaches as conditions evolve, rather than delivering a fixed set of services. This often results in longer-term relationships grounded in trust, shared accountability, and ongoing sensemaking.
Yes. In select cases, we partner with organizations to design and deliver applied research, which can include mixed-methods research, stakeholder engagement, narrative inquiry, and evaluation-informed learning — often in complex, multi-stakeholder contexts.
Research partnerships are scoped collaboratively and may be stand-alone or integrated with advisory work, depending on what the organization needs.
→ Explore our research work.
In 2023, we were selected for the reputed Investment Readiness Program (IRP) grant, funded by the Government of Canada’s Social Innovation strategy and delivered by Community Foundations of Canada. The program supported social-purpose organizations in piloting partnership-based approaches to addressing complex social, cultural, and environmental challenges.
Through IRP, we tested and refined partnership models that combined advisory work, applied research, and capacity-building. Examples include:
A federally funded research partnership with Lotus STEMM focused on advancing equity in technical fields
A Train the Trainer pilot program that certified new facilitators in the Campfire Kinship™ storytelling method.
- We were honored to receive the 2024 SAIA’s Outstanding Business Award in recognition of our collaborative approach to social innovation.
Engagements are led by Gayathri, working with a small, experienced team of facilitators, coaches, and creative partners. Team composition is shaped by the context, scope, and needs of each engagement.
