Open Society Foundations

“In considering what theory of change could best serve the movements in Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican diaspora, PEG was critical in helping our team nail down what our short, mid and long term funding goals should be. We appreciated the team’s diversity and the different sets of experiences that they brought to the table. Grantees felt comfortable sharing information that they in turn delivered to us in a way that helped shape our conversation around goals and strategy, grounded in the needs of our movements/leaders.”

– Karina Claudio Betancourt, Project Director—Puerto Rico Project, Open Society Foundations

CFLeads

“We hired the Public Equity Group to help us refine and operationalize our strategic plan and guide our Community Foundation Equity Network. I've been extremely pleased with their work. They ask insightful questions, listen well, offer thoughtful advice and do an excellent job of navigating situations that lack clarity. Smart, sophisticated, and savvy, PEG has it all. We are a better organization because of our engagement with them.”

— Deborah Ellwood, President & CEO

New Profit (Boston)

“PEG did an outstanding job helping New Profit gather and make sense of important feedback from our portfolio organizations. PEG customized the tools and processes for our needs, and was incredibly responsive to adjustments as the work progressed. Their analysis and synthesis gave us the data we needed to make improvements to our investment and support processes, as well as our communications and feedback channels.”

–  Bob Searle, Managing Partner

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors

“We had a great journey with Public Equity Group over the past year. PEG co-led our strategic planning with RPA management and facilitated stakeholder meetings with staff and board. Through this process, we updated our mission and values and created a five-year strategic plan. PEG’s ability to connect with us at all levels of the organization created a truly inclusive process and a level of engagement and excitement that has been instrumental in launching our plan.”

— Melissa Berman, Founding President & CEO; Nick Hodges, Sr. Vice President & COO

New American Leaders

“We worked with PEG over a period of eight months, during which we benefited from their strategic thinking and practical approaches. The team is a great combination of tactical and big-picture, and adapted quickly to our changing needs… Working with them helped us to determine how to address small but time-consuming practices, as well as larger questions about growth and expansion with applications throughout the entire organization’s departments and programs… Warner and John are excellent listeners and balance being understanding about [an] organization’s challenges with being clear and firm about their recommendations for improvement… We whole-heartedly recommend PEG, especially to other [organizations] looking at strategic expansion.” 

– Sayu Bhojwani, Founder and President

Nurse-Family Partnership (California)

“The PEG team was a vital resource in developing our Bay Area strategic plan. The level of thoughtfulness and commitment to our work was impressive and reassuring. They really helped to broaden our perspectives and think outside the box. Thank you!”

–  Chris Krawczyk, State Director, and Maria Camargo, Business Development Manager

PBLWorks (Formerly Buck Institute for Education)

“Public Equity Group has been an outstanding partner for PBLWorks. Beginning and ending with our shared commitment to educational equity, we enjoy working with John, Kimberly and the entire PEG Team. PEG facilitated two processes that has led to expanded growth and deeper impact for the students in the schools and districts where we partner. The plans also assisted us in building new internal organizational capacities and raising millions of dollars to support our mission.”

–  Bob Lenz, CEO

PolicyLink

“As PolicyLink approaches its 20th year at this peak moment for the equity movement, we needed a rigorous, strategic, and honest assessment of how the organization could maximize its value. We needed a firm with an equity DNA, respected leadership, and the ability to interpret a highly nuanced and rapid changing ecosystem. Public Equity Group exceeded our expectations across the board. Thanks to the team’s thorough landscape review and intuitive analysis, PolicyLink is prepared to enter its third decade stronger than ever.”

– Angela Glover Blackwell, CEO

“To us, John Newsome and the PEG Team are much more than advisors or contractors. They really are a part of our organization, but not only because they've helped build it. It's something more. They "get" our thinking since the beginning, our conflicts, our contradictions and they follow our leads with a lot of trust and a capacity to listen, interpret and dissect that thinking. We love working with John, Aly, Nicolás and the PEG Team because, first, they literally speak our language (Spanish) and we can communicate so much better in our language, especially when talking about our work, the things that matter the most to us. These are issues that are very emotional, that we live, suffer and rejoice in in Spanish. Secondly, they "get" us, which means they truly understand and connect with our needs. They don't bring pre-made solutions or schemes or narratives or clicés, and we are so grateful for that. They listen, they connect and they create plans, strategies, solutions and interpretations that just fit us, our vision as well as cultural and political contexts. And last but not least, they do it without making you work a lot. Our plan took almost six months but all we had to do was put them in contact with some of our closest folks and commit to a weekly meeting. We did a lot of talking but we didn't have to write or do tasks. They just took what we already had in our minds and everything that was going on during  that time in our organization and they made something beautiful, understandable, something lucid and doable out of it. We love them and wish they lived closer to home. Thank you John, Ally, Nicolás and everyone at PEG!”

- María Mari-Narváez, Directora ejecutiva

MIT CoLab

“PEG completely redefined my expectations and… expanded them… The first thing PEG did… was help make visible the critical connection between vision, mission, and organizational infrastructure… PEG’s great strength is… their approach to organizational development…It’s right sized, staged, [and] accessible. Their stellar strength is not to deliver the report at the end; the strength and commitment is actually to stand up the organization in a new way.”

“[PEG’s] work style is just extremely collaborative and co-creative, really responsive to input, priorities, anxieties, and deep commitments. It’s really easy to trust PEG and to put your process in PEG’s hands and feel well supported.”

– Dayna Cunningham, Executive Director

Education Through Music

“Our leadership and Board were immediately impressed with PEG’s broad and deep knowledge, succinct and direct communication style, and pragmatic approach to planning. They tailored their analytical approach to our questions and capacity, and budgeted time and money efficiently towards helping us develop the answers we needed. We especially praise the lead consultants on our project, John Newsome and Warner Fite, for their acumen, integrity, enthusiasm, leadership, and outstanding project management skills. They were able to develop extremely strong rapport with Board and staff very quickly. They deftly managed the balancing act of becoming trusted extensions of our team while maintaining proper professional boundaries. The result was an efficient staff and board driven diagnostic and planning effort that boosted morale and cohesion in and of itself.”

– Katherine Damkohler, Executive Director

First And Always Melanin (FAAM)

“PEG helped us develop our first strategic plan; this process allowed us to develop a more cohesive vision for FAAM while aligning it with the needs of our community. They offered consultation and did the work and research necessary to understand the unique experience of our city [enabling] them to be effective allies that advocated not only for the advancement of FAAM but for the advancement of our community through FAAM programming. We are grateful for their hard work and guidance.”

– Faheemah Salahud-Din

Gay-Straight Alliance Network (GSA Network)

“With extraordinary guidance from Public Equity Group, GSA Network engaged in a participatory, rigorous and data-driven strategic planning process in order to detail the Safe and Healthy LGBT Youth Project’s five-year goals, programmatic priorities and sustainability plan. The strategic planning processes, plans and deliverables that John [Collins] and John [Newsome] provided us with were truly valuable and will allow us to positively impact the lives of tens of thousands of youth while also strengthening our internal operations. The team at Public Equity Group was knowledgeable, went above and beyond expectations and became like family to our staff during their time with us. It was truly a pleasure and we hope other colleagues will utilize their terrific services.”

– Carolyn Laub, Founder & Executive Director and Dave Reynolds, Project Director, Safe and Healthy LGBT Youth Project

Jewish Vocational Service

“PEG helped JVS develop a strategic plan that capitalized on our organizational strengths, the research about best practices in workforce development, and our experience getting job seekers toward economic self-sufficiency. John’s [Newsome] skills are many; we most appreciated how he helped us think clearly about our approach and impact and how he facilitated many rich discussions throughout the process. He is equal parts dedication, brilliance and compassion. JVS’s Board of Directors and staff are fully invested in executing this ambitious and exciting plan, and we have John and PEG to thank.”

– Abby Snay, Executive Director

Larkin Street Youth Services

“John Newsome was a game changer for Larkin Street. His leadership of our strategic planning process moved the agency forward in significant ways that will forever impact our work. He helped us through a very difficult process, and he did it with grace, humor, and intelligence. He connected authentically with our staff, board, and agency leadership, ensuring that we came out of the process stronger and with a unified vision. He and his team were diligent and met ambitious deliverables; on a personal level, he was an amazing coach and mentor. I am grateful to John for his guidance and support, and for the foundation he built for Larkin Street’s bright future.”

– Sherilyn Adams, Executive Director

Leadership Enterprise for African Development (LEAD)

“Public Equity Group consistently provided invaluable strategic advice and produced exceptional project-related materials, contributing critical counsel and rigorous research to our core team of advisors throughout key stages of our organizational development process.”

– M. Kamari Clarke, Founding member, Leadership Enterprise for African Development Initiative; Chair, Yale University Council on African Studies

Memphis Music Inititiative

“PEG worked with one of our partner organizations to build a youth development framework that sought to promote high-quality programming across a city-wide system. As a funder and capacity-builder within Memphis, we are grateful for the persistence and diligence that the PEG team modeled. We also are grateful for the level of transparency and vulnerability that they demonstrated while working with our partners and our internal staff team. Making space for us, as a funder, to be present during a pivotal reflection and assessment meeting, for example, exemplifies the level of candidness that PEG embodies and one which we admire and applaud. John Newsome’s and Jean Cooper’s leadership served as a powerful reminder that although meaningful change management can be a rigorous and unpredictable process, creative and collaborative responsiveness are effective tools through which to navigate the challenge.”

– Grants and Capacity Building Team (Memphis Music Initiative (MMI))

Nebraska Early Childhood Collaborative

“John was a confidential sounding board. He provided me with a safe space for exploration, a space where I could think through different ideas and concepts related to the organization. John provided me with very specific metrics that helped me manage the transition period and get the organization ready to bring on a new executive director. It was nice to have a third party who was connected enough to know what was going on, but not so engaged that they might color future relationships. There were times where I thought I’d come up against an area of concern, and he would help me understand that it was a symptom of culture, either regional or organizational. To me, this is the closest I’ve ever had to an external coach, which was another really positive opportunity. I’ve been doing nonprofit work for a long time, and he made it really valuable, even for me. John is absolutely trustworthy, knowledgeable, professional, and operates with a high level of integrity. John gets to know the organizations he’s working with deeply and isn’t afraid to be provocative – he encouraged me to explore and question my thinking in different directions all the time.”

–  Kathy Bell, Interim Executive Director

Peer Health Exchange

“John Newsome and PEG are a valuable resource to growing organizations, including helping them think about growth and impact and their relationship to each other. John helped us revise growth scenarios for an era focused on deepening impact on every teen we serve and brought clarity, openness, and collaboration to a critical series of conversations on our team. Our team loved working with him—he found a way to enroll as he worked with a diverse group of leaders—a hard but very important task!”

– Louise Langheier, CEO and Co-Founder, Peer Health Exchange

Children’s Council San Francisco

“At Children’s Council we embarked on a journey to improve our services—offering more touch points to low-income, high-need families—and we needed some external capacity to develop a game plan for change on an ambitious timeline. PEG impressed us with their expertise, thoughtfulness and involvement in the process. Their time management skills are exceptional!.”

–  Jennifer Brooks, Chief Program Officer

San Francisco AIDS Foundation

“Public Equity Group helped us to ask and answer the right strategic questions to address the problem of high HIV incidence among young Black gay men in San Francisco. Their thorough literature review of best practices, synthesis of extant data, and interviews with national leaders in the field were instrumental in the creation of a detailed, deeply informed, and readily implementable program design. That they did so with incisive professionalism, humor, and compassion for the human subjects was icing on the cake.”

– Kyriell Noon, Director of Prevention Services

Active Voice Lab

“John Newsome supported Active Voice with organizational planning and ongoing advice that ultimately has culminated in our exciting shift from film-based engagement campaigns to ‘big picture’ creative media strategy. As a seasoned management consultant and non-profit leader, John has walked the walk—and his energy and compassion were evident in every step we took together.”

– Ellen Schneider, Founder and Executive Director

Summer Search

“John Newsome’s support was invaluable to creating a clear, ambitious five-year strategy for our $15M youth development organization to nearly double in size. John helped guide planning at our national level and across multiple sites, bringing data and exceptional facilitation to bear, that allowed us to wrestle with and make several tough strategic decisions. Moreover, he and his team partnered seamlessly with us post strategy launch to execute initiatives to define governance and decision-making across our multi-site, multi-board network, and to identify programmatic innovation pilots. What John brings to the table is a whole package unlike anyone else I’ve worked with: a strategic mind, analytical chops, and exceptional people skills that I believe stem from his passion for social justice and natural empathy for others.”

– Amy Saxton, CEO, Summer Search (national)

Concourse Education

“Before we started Concourse Education, we needed to do a landscape analysis of the post-secondary education field. From my prior work with John Newsome at SummerSearch, I knew he would be the ideal partner. What we got was a crack PEG team that was thorough, timely, and more impactful on the shaping of our program than I could have imagined. I am extremely comfortable recommending PEG to others in the sector.”

– Ted Williams, Founder

Tipping Point Community

“PEG helped us develop our partnership strategy, a plan that allows us to connect the best of the business sector to our portfolio of the 40 most effective poverty-fighting nonprofits in the Bay Area. John Collins and John Newsome are sharp, diligent collaborators who bring a mix of big picture thinking and a real understanding of on-the-ground challenges. They continue to provide invaluable support and guidance to our team as we use the strategy to better serve the 1.3 million people who struggle to meet their basic needs in our community.”

– Daniel Lurie, Founder + CEO, Tipping Point Community