The Purpose-Driven Board

Rethinking what effective governance looks like for small and mid-sized nonprofits.

Governance doesn't have to feel like a compliance exercise. This session challenges the conventional board-centric model and replaces it with a purpose-driven alternative, designed for the organization you actually are.

Adopting a Minimum Viable Board

Designing a more sustainable, engaging and effective board for your organization.

Bigger isn't always better when it comes to governance. This session helps boards and EDs identify the core functions that actually matter, scale their governance to fit their organization, and stop measuring themselves against a standard that was never designed for them.

Designing Enabling Governance

'Good governance' happens by design, not by accident.

Most governance structures are inherited, not chosen. That can leave organizations struggling with legacy approaches to governance that don't fit your organization's needs. Instead of spending your time trying to force your board to adapt to conventional 'best practices', this session helps you understand what governance design is, why it matters, and how you can use the principles of this approach to build a better governance system for your organization.

The Board Lifecycle: Recruitment, Orientation, Engagement, and Development A well-functioning board doesn't happen by accident — it's built, stage by stage, with intention. Every board moves through four stages, and what happens at each one shapes how well the board functions as a whole. This session breaks down the full lifecycle — how you recruit directors who are the right fit, not just the most available; how you onboard them so they actually hit the ground running; how you structure engagement so meetings are meaningful and directors show up fully; and how you develop your board over time so it keeps getting stronger. At each stage, we look at what good practice looks like — and the red flags that quietly undermine effectiveness when they get ignored.

Constructive & Collaborative Board/Staff Relations

Building the board/staff relationship your mission deserves.

A strong board/staff relationship is essential to your organization. This session gets practical about one of the most important dynamics in nonprofits, giving boards, EDs and nonprofit staff a shared understanding of everyone's roles in the organization, and a framework for working together with clarity, mutual respect, and real accountability.

Executive Performance Management for Nonprofits

A better way to support, evaluate, and strengthen executive leadership.

ED performance management is one of the most important governance responsibilities a board has - and it's a responsibility that is often overlooked and misunderstood. This session provides a comprehensive overview of the board's role in managing an executive (ED or CEO), offering a practical framework that will help strengthen the board/executive relationship in your organization.

The Board Lifecycle: Recruitment, Orientation, Engagement, and Development

Putting the Strategy Back Into Strategic Planning

Most nonprofits are great at making plans. Far fewer are great at making strategy.

Strategic planning is one of the most valuable things a nonprofit leadership team can do together, and also one of the most commonly misunderstood. The process gets treated as the goal: the consultations, the visioning sessions, the beautifully formatted document. But a plan isn't a strategy. And when organizations confuse the two, they end up with a document full of goals and no real framework for making the decisions that actually move the organization forward. This session untangles the two concepts, introduces a practical framework for building strategy that's anchored in purpose and built for real-world complexity, and helps boards and EDs understand what strategic readiness actually looks like before the planning process begins. You'll leave with a clearer sense of what strategy really is, and how to build a culture of strategic thinking that outlasts any single plan.

While we build a customized budget to match the specific scope and timeline for each training session, typically, the cost of a custom workshop or training session starts at $2100.00, plus any additional travel costs for in-person work. 

As a social enterprise, our goal is to bring transformative strategy, support to small and mid-sized nonprofits, regardless of cost or capacity barriers. If our quote isn’t a fit for your organization’s budget, please let us know. We would be happy to tailor our approach to better align with your resources, or offer a sliding scale approach to structurally underfunding organizations.

We are available for in-person governance training sessions. Additional costs for travel and accommodation may be required for in-person sessions. We travel from the Central-East region of Ontario, Canada.

Yes, we specialize in online governance training. We have developed highly effective tools and approaches that support online engagement to create a rich learning experience for participants.

We are experienced in applying anti-oppression and anti-racism frameworks to our work, and our processes are always designed and facilitated in a way that centres accessibility, inclusion and equity. 

Yes, every workshop in our catalogue can be adapted to your organization's context, goals, and audience. We can also design fully custom sessions or build a multi-session training plan from the ground up.

Yes. In addition to our live workshops and training sessions, we offer self-paced learning resources for board directors and Executive Directors who want to build their governance knowledge on their own schedule. Reach out to us at [email protected] for more info.