MissionPlay Consulting

Mission Play Consulting works with coalitions and networks of sports-based youth development organizations — helping them build the structure and coordination to do collectively what none of them could do alone.Drawing on more than 30 years in the sector, Mission Play also partners with individual organizations on the full range of challenges that come with doing this work: strategic planning, facilitation, organizational development, and building the culture that keeps good people and sustains good programs.

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Work

The bulk of Mission Play's work — and an area of real unique expertise — is in coalition and network building: getting a group of organizations to work together in ways that demonstrate real collective impact. That means building the governance and communication structures that keep a coalition moving, facilitating the hard conversations that come with shared decision-making, and staying with the work long enough for trust to develop between organizations that are used to operating on their own.More than 30 years in the nonprofit sector also means deep experience in strategic planning, facilitation, organizational development, and culture — work that Mission Play brings to individual organizations and coalitions alike.

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About

I've spent more than 30 years working in the nonprofit sector — most of it in sports-based youth development, first doing the direct work, then running organizations, and now supporting the coalitions and networks that connect them.That background matters for the work I do now. I've been an ED. I've been a COO. I've managed boards, built staff teams, navigated funder relationships, and figured out how to take a program from one site to three. I know what these organizations are actually dealing with — not from the outside, but from having lived it.I also spent seven years running the Boston Youth Sports Initiative, a Barr Foundation-supported network of youth sports programs across Massachusetts. That's where I learned what coalition and network building actually requires in practice, as opposed to in theory.Thirty years in this sector — in Boston, in Lawrence, in gateway cities across Massachusetts, working alongside programs that use sports to open doors for young people who don't have the same options as kids in more resourced places — means I know these communities and the people in them. In this work, that matters.B.A., Bates College | M.Ed., Lesley University

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