SERVICES |

• Organizational Excellence
• Teamwork Assessment
• 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. MAYES | WILSON & ASSOCIATES, LLC, was brought in to assess the organization’s readiness to scale up, and help them prepare to move to the next level in response to increased funding and demand for services.

TASKS | MWA assessed the organization’s readiness to scale up by measuring 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 the creation of systems to acknowledge accomplishments and support accountability. MWA helped develop a new fund development job description and provided one-on-one fund development training, goal setting, and planning for the staff person who accepted the position. Throughout the process, 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 and successfully navigate organizational growth. The board developed plans to expand, increase diversity, and address leadership succession. The staff and executive together developed their first-ever goal-setting and evaluation procedures. A redesigned staff structure and new staff positions strengthened an already high-functioning team, setting up FTA to meet ambitious organizational growth 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. 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.