Date/Time
Date(s) - May 21, 2024
10:00 am - 11:30 am
Fee: $35
Register at: Register Below (scroll down)
Overview: Consultants, trainers, and technical assistance providers can bring valuable skills and much-needed capacity to the social sector. Often, they are working as solo practitioners or in small teams, and are doing the client-facing work while also growing their business, building partnerships, and setting up key internal systems. This session will focus on areas key to growing a successful business, including:
- Defining and structuring your services
- Building a client pipeline through networking and marketing
- Building partnerships with other practitioners serving the social sector
- Developing key internal systems to help manage your time, capacity, and finances
Who this is for: People who are or want to become self-employed as consultants, trainers, and technical assistance providers serving mission driven organizations. We will also share content that may feel relevant for organizations that have consulting, training, or technical assistance programs serving social sector organizations.
Who we are: Structural Integrity is a nonprofit focused on strengthening the social sector by helping mission driven organizations build their foundational operations to generate capacity, enhance sustainability, and center impact. Structural Integrity’s co-founders, Dave Dore and Sage Ruth, bring a combined 30+ years of experience working in nonprofit finance and operations in organizations ranging in size and lifecycle stage.
If you have any questions, please reach out to [email protected].
Register Below
About the Trainers:
Sage Ruth has worked in nonprofit finance and operations since 2008. She fell into the work because it seemed like a good fit for her propensity to organize things and make lists, and she has made it her career because she discovered how much she enjoys helping organizations run behind the scenes and creating the conditions that let others feel supported, valued, and focus on what matters most in their work. Her experience spans facilities, technology, data systems, HR, people management and team building, cross-organizational planning and alignment, data privacy, strategic planning, financial management and reporting, and grant budgeting. She loves that finance and operations work lets her see every part of an organization, and in doing so to identify patterns, bring people together to solve difficult problems, and understand how the choices we’re making in one part of the organization impact the whole. She is most proud of the lasting personal connections she has built with people, and the ability to bring fun and humor to work that could otherwise feel technical and dry.
Sage has a Master in Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Arts in social studies degree from Wesleyan University. She is on the Board of Directors of Retreat Farm and Hatchspace, two nonprofits in my hometown of Brattleboro, VT. In her free time, she enjoys building things with wood, running, exploring all the swimming holes in Vermont with her family, and organizing files in Google Drive.
Dave Dore has dedicated his career to developing and leading Finance & Operations teams in the nonprofit sector. Financial management and operations work can be crucial to supporting key areas of a nonprofit business including strategic decision making, equitable and inclusive business practices, organizational planning, financial sustainability, staff morale, and the flexibility and responsiveness the sector demands. The gravity of this work excites him. One of his greatest professional joys is curating clear, accurate, timely and relevant financial information that brings numbers into nonprofit leaders’ comfort zones. Beyond demystifying the numbers, his experience includes fostering trusting, deep and transparent relationships with Executive Directors and Board and Finance Committee members, building budget plans that advance programming and fundraising goals and honor donor commitments, developing financials that enable full cost grant proposals, and establishing strong and collaborative relationships between development and finance teams.
His educational experience includes earning Master of Business Administration and Bachelor of Science in finance degrees from Boston College and a Graduate Diploma in Professional Accounting from Suffolk University. When not having fun strengthening the nonprofit sector, he enjoys stepping away from spreadsheets and into the outdoors. He is an avid downhill skier, mountain biker and paddler, energized by almost any pursuit that gets his wife, two daughters and himself into the mountains and lakes of his beautiful home state of Vermont.