FTA
SERVICES |
Board & Leadership Benchmarking
Fund Development Capacity Building
Bilingual Spanish-English Project
SITUATION | Fundación Tierra Austral, one of the first land trusts in Chile (South America), was experiencing the challenges of rapid organizational growth and an influx of funding. MAYES | WILSON & ASSOCIATES, LLC, was brought in to assess the organization’s readiness to scale up and help prepare them for the next level in response to increased funding and demand for services.
TASKS | MWA implemented a bilingual organizational development project that included assessments of board performance, staff performance, executive leadership capacity, staffing structure, fundraising capacity and team functionality. All surveys and reports were provided in Spanish and English, and the client had access to the fluent Spanish speaker on the MWA team throughout the project.
ACTION | MWA provided recommendations to advance governance responsibilities and best practices in creating a diversified board to support organizational goals. Staffing structure was redesigned to support current and anticipated growth and work alignment. To support staff advancement and performance, MWA advised the executive in creating systems to acknowledge accomplishments and support accountability; the executive and staff co-created a process for employee goal setting, evaluation systems, and exit processes. MWA provided consultations to support fundraising including advising the executive on position job description and providing one-on-one fund development training, goal setting and fund development planning for the new fund development personnel. Throughout the project Sara provided strategy and leadership coaching to the executive.
RESULT | Through working with MWA, the board, executive and staff knew exactly what they needed to do to scale up to successfully navigate organizational growth. MWA provided guidance to the executive director to engage the staff in co-designing with the executive the first-ever staff goal-setting and evaluation procedures. Plans were created to expand the board to increase diversity and meet organizational growth and leadership succession goals.
“FTA has experienced significant growth and we needed to understand our leadership and team strengths and challenges so we could position ourselves for the greatest level of success for the future.,” said Executive Director Victoria Alonso. “Through MWA’s information gathering we identified areas needing attention and then they were a great partner to provide the ongoing consulting to help us determine an appropriate staff structure, design processes and provide coaching to select staff.”