Thoughts on Mother’s Day

By Schonfield Consulting | May 17, 2021 |

As we celebrate Mother’s Day and hopefully the end of a very difficult year, I’m reminded of so many things. As the mom of two young adults (Theo age 19 and Rebecca age 22!) I think often about what we can do to mentor and support powerful new leaders — especially women — to “come into their own” and start to address all our damn problems!

At the same time, we are slowly emerging from Covid and many other challenges. What a relief that 2020 is behind us! But not everyone will emerge from this super challenging year equally and there is still so much work to be done.

With that in mind, Schonfield Consulting is working closely with Hidden Villa and other clients on some exciting projects. See details below.

Strategic Planning with
Hidden Villa

Since January, we’ve worked with Hidden Villa (an environmental education center and working farm in in Los Altos Hills, CA) to help implement their 3-year strategic plan. We’re supporting initiative leads across the organization to develop detailed work plans and timelines, we’re creating a dashboard to monitor progress and are working closely with Board and staff to bring an ambitious strategic plan to life. A highlight was a socially-distant site visit to Hidden Villa in March, complete with pygmy goats, new-born lambs and a tour of this bustling farm and education center.

"Anne is the quintessential consultant — she listens well, asks good questions, is easy to work with, and a great "thought partner." She is the person you want on your team if you want to get s**t done and not waste time. I will work with Anne anytime."

“Anne and her team bring a wealth of experience in process design, community investment best practices, and clarity of objectives and program metrics. I would definitely recommend Schonfield Consulting for their rigor and drive to achieve results.”

“Anne and her team played an integral role in designing and implementing Well Being Trust's grant making. Anne is extremely efficient and good at moving things forward. I value Anne’s input tremendously and appreciate her warm and positive manner.”

“Anne and Amy did a marvelous job with our strategic plan -- sensitive to the needs of staff, leadership and Board; focused and efficient; encouraging and relentless. Hidden Villa made an excellent choice to work with Schonfield Consulting.”

“Anne is brilliant at strategic planning. She worked with the NRDC India team to chart our vision and plan for two plans spanning 10 years. She guided a tough task to successful completion by keeping us on target. I highly recommend Anne!”

"Anne is a pleasure to work with and guides you through the difficult strategic planning process with thoughtfulness, passion, and a great work ethic!”

"The ABPAS business plan that Schonfield Consulting helped us develop clearly explains our mission to investors and donors. The research Eva did was comprehensive and well-presented. The services provided by Anne and Eva can definitely help propel many other agencies like ours.”

"We needed someone who was independent, highly focused and knowledgable about capturing data from nonprofits. The final report was excellent. Thanks for taking on Fresno!"

"Anne is a valued colleague and I highly recommend her to anyone needing a top notch consultant... The quality of her work is excellent and her ability to turn it around quickly was very impressive."

"Thank you for carrying us through this process. The end result is pretty dramatic, thanks to your careful eye, your methodical work, and your creative suggestions. You’re a superstar!"

"From her insights into fundraising, to her pointed questions on strategy and her well-organized agendas -- Anne's support has been invaluable. Anne has great energy and is an important member of the TAHMO team."

"Anne has done excellent consultancy work. Her research and review of grant materials produced high quality outputs—she asked tough questions and delivered on time. I would highly recommend Anne."

"That was a great event. Thanks so much for a fantastic facilitation – you know your job and you do it very well! I'm already looking forward to next year’s meeting."

"Working with Anne was extremely excellent! We were very happy with the board retreat and initial strategic planning. The summary report from the retreat is great and goes a long ways to setting a future agenda for CCS."

"Thanks for the excellent job on the case studies. I presented your work at the convening and it garnered a lot of attention. I’m excited to see how things move forward!"

"It was a pleasure working with Schonfield Consulting on our health program evaluation. Anne was super thoughtful and organized, and helped us translate lots of data into a very useful product for our Board."

“Anne provides us with excellent fundraising advice. She put a lot of time and thinking into an excellent fundraising retreat with Board and staff. We did some darn good work and had a good time doing it!”

Strategic Planning withHidden Villa