Services
When the work is hard, the room matters.
Nonprofit organizations right now are navigating compounding pressure from every direction — surging service demand, shrinking and unstable funding, staff exhaustion, legal and political threats to their missions, and the emotional weight of leading through it all. Most consultants can help you write a grant or build a communications plan.
MPI works in the hard places: the rooms where organizations need to figure out what they actually know about their impact, make difficult decisions under uncertainty, hold together across difference, or find a way forward through fear. This work requires both rigor and care — and that is what MPI brings.
Organizational Climate
& Staff Wellbeing
For organizations managing burnout, fear, and eroding morale and needing to function anyway.
When half your leadership team is running on empty, when staff are scared, and when the communities you serve are in crisis, strategic planning can feel beside the point. But organizations still need to make decisions, retain people, and stay coherent in their culture and purpose.
MPI facilitates the internal processes that help organizations metabolize what they're going through — not just plan around it. This includes structured team processes that name what's hard, restore a sense of shared purpose, and build the psychological safety needed for people to keep showing up. It also includes coaching organizational leaders through the specific challenge of carrying their teams through sustained difficulty.
This work is right for you if:
Staff morale has visibly declined and you don't know how to address it without losing people
Your team is experiencing fear, grief, or conflict related to the current environment
Leadership is burned out and needs a thought partner to process and plan
You want to invest in your team's resilience without bypassing the real difficulty they're facing
Formats: Facilitated team sessions, leadership coaching, organizational listening processes, retreat design and facilitation
High-Stakes & Governance Facilitation
For organizations navigating board tension, mergers, restructuring, or partnership formation.
Some of the most consequential conversations a nonprofit can have — about whether to merge, how to restructure a board, whether to pursue a new kind of partnership, how to respond to a mission threat — are also the most emotionally loaded. Not every facilitator is equipped for rooms where power, grief, and competing loyalties are part of the conversation. MPI is.
Drawing on expertise in trauma-informed practice, power-aware facilitation, and complex social dynamics, MPI designs and guides high-stakes processes where the outcome matters and the interpersonal dynamics are real. This includes multi-session engagements that build trust before moving to decision-making, as well as one-time facilitation for boards or leadership teams facing a specific crossroads.
This work is right for you if:
Your board is in tension, losing members, or facing a values conflict
Your organization is exploring a merger, fiscal sponsorship, or shared operations arrangement
A significant funder relationship or partnership has fractured or needs repair
Your leadership team is divided on a strategic direction and needs a structured process to work through it
Formats: Board facilitation, merger and partnership process design, multi-session decision-making facilitation, conflict navigation
Learning Projects & Partnership Design
For organizations building new collaborations, documenting emerging practice, or making sense of a strategy together.
Half of nonprofit organizations have initiated new partnerships or collaborations in the past year and a half — sharing services, co-locating, pursuing joint funding, working across sectors. These aren't just logistical arrangements. They require organizations to build trust across difference, negotiate shared meaning, and often confront difficult histories and power imbalances along the way.
MPI facilitates the learning and relationship-building processes that make partnerships durable rather than fragile. This includes action research that helps organizations document and engage in inquiry centering partners with lived-experience, collaborative sensemaking across partner organizations, and structured processes that surface community knowledge as the foundation for shared strategy.
This work is right for you if:
You're forming a new partnership or collaborative and want to start it right
You're experimenting with a new approach and want to capture what you're learning
You want to involve community members in generating and validating knowledge, not just receiving programs
You need to make sense of a shared challenge across multiple organizations or stakeholders
Formats: Action research design and facilitation, participatory learning processes, community knowledge projects, partnership launch and design facilitation, assets and needs assessments
Fractal Evaluation,
Data System &
Narrative Resilience
For organizations that need to know and be able to say what their work is worth.
Nearly half of nonprofit organizations are currently under pressure to reframe how they publicly describe their work. At the same time, funders are demanding more evidence of impact even as they reduce unrestricted support. This is a moment when evaluation isn't a compliance exercise, it's how organizations protect and clarify their value.
MPI's evaluation practice is grounded in the belief that the people closest to the work hold essential knowledge about what's working. Evaluation done well doesn't extract data from communities, it builds organizations' capacity to understand, articulate, and act on what they know. This is especially critical for organizations whose missions are under scrutiny or whose language needs to evolve without compromising their integrity.
This work is right for you if:
You need to demonstrate impact to funders in a tighter, more competitive funding environment
You're under pressure to reframe your work and need evidence that holds up
Your organization collects data but doesn't know how to turn it into a usable story
You want evaluation that communities experience as meaningful rather than extractive
MPI offers fractal evaluation support at three levels:
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Essentials
Evaluator services for a specific program or small organization. This is ideal for providing ongoing review and oversight of data, database quality checks, producing quarterly reports, or ad-hoc evaluation questions for up to 10 hours a month.
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Standard
Evaluator services for small to medium organizations. Support can be used to design and implement simple evaluation plans, undertake data collection and analysis, provide feedback loops, reports, and present findings for up to 20 hours a month.
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Partnership
Evaluation services for designing or implementing more complex program evaluation to determine organizational impact or multiple programs. This level of support allows for more robust data collection including rich qualitative data, data management, and incorporating relationship-centered evaluation methodologies into data collection and analysis for up to 30 hours a month.
