"Megan's active listening skills combined with her unique ability to pull order out of chaos is what sets her apart." "Megan is a powerful facilitator with a light touch. She quickly synthesizes information, adeptly manages groups with varying personalities, and focuses your attention on what matters. I truly appreciated her work in the days following our retreat as I knew exactly where I needed to put my attention and focus my efforts." "As we experienced growth at Huron Pines, we wanted an independent voice with experience and expertise to help us work through questions around maximizing our impact and sustaining our work. Megan was that trusted voice for us. The help we have had from Parallel Solutions -- with staff training and organizational planning -- has helped fuel our success the last few years. Megan has a keen sense for drilling down into the root cause of any challenge and is always able to offer practical solutions for addressing those issues. She's great to work with!" "Megan was a great help in assisting us to determine our readiness to launch a capacity campaign and identifying the steps to initiating one. She really took on the role of senior staff level support, diving into our organizational data and operations to provide considered concrete direction for board and staff. She is concise, engaging, and committed and operates from a position of experience in the non-profit world of time and resource constraints." "Megan gave us a road map to the future. She was a guide that gave us invaluable tools along with an eagerness and optimism that will stay with us for a long time. She touched every member of the group in a meaningful, positive way. Everyone felt empowered." "Megan did a great job facilitating the discussions and helping us achieve our goal of finding common ground. We were three lake associations, with similar priorities, trying to find a way to work together on projects, leveraging financial as well as human resources, to produce more rapid and impactful outcomes. She managed us through trust issues, focus challenges and differing outlooks to come to agreement on when and how we could work together to help Torch Lake get healthy. Agreements were drafted, procedures outlined and friendships made. It was sometimes tiring, sometimes confusing, sometimes frustrating and so worth it in the end!" "Megan acted as the facilitator for a non-profit board and staff retreat. Through the first activity drafting our rules of engagement, Megan helped us foster our own atmosphere of trust and communication in a group that was meeting in person for the first time. She came prepared with different tools and approaches designed to get us from idea generation to action items. She promoted cross collaboration between board and staff through small group work and a mix of written and verbal exercises and reporting back which felt inclusive and engaging. Megan is skilled and experienced in non-profit and board work and is able to shift gears between facilitation and advising by clearly identifying when she is moving from role to role and why. As a Volunteer Board Member for an under-resourced non-profit, I appreciated the materials that Megan provided that helped us better identify our roles and responsibilities as board members and hone our action plan accordingly. I would highly recommend Megan and Parallel Solutions for advisory and facilitation work. I would look forward to working with Megan again in either capacity." "We’ve become wary, after working with too many consultants that let a particular process or model trump the legitimate needs of our small organization. Working with Megan as a planning partner and mentor has shown us how this business is supposed to work. Megan is foremostly a good human who understands that she is working in a community, bringing warmth and care to balance her incredible rigor, professionalism and drive. The combination is unbeatable and has helped us speed through the learning curves of exceptional non-profit management." |
Strategy
Organizational and Professional Development
Community DevelopmentNetworks and Partnerships
Community Engagement
|