Consulting
Since 1994, Karen Eber Davis Consulting has helped leaders improve their services, organizations and bottom lines. We help people turn good ideas into exceptional funded ventures. The firm serves large multi-service nonprofits, including Catholic Charities, Meals on Wheels Plus of Manatee, United Cerebral Palsy and the Senior Friendship Center. Public sector clients include the Englewood Water District, the Sarasota County Health Department and DeSoto Memorial Hospital. In the specialty nonprofit area, we’ve worked with entrepreneurial leaders from such groups as the Animal Rescue Coalition, the Sarasota Film Festival, Ringling College of Art and Design and St Leo’s University Center for Jewish and Catholic Studies. Our consulting services foster organizational excellence and promote the transfer of skills so that your leaders grow in skills and competence.
Philosophy
Our philosophy is simple: We help individuals with a vision for bettering people’s lives realize them. It is our belief that visionary leaders, and those who help them, are the impetus for innovation, organizational renewal and, in every community, improved quality of life.
Our success rests on helping leaders develop the skills and resources they need to make their vision a reality. Finding ways to increase funding is among our most popular tasks, but visionaries require more than money for success. Visionary leaders need knowledge, skills and tangible plans in which to invest their scarce supplies to create their vision. Having the right competencies makes the difference between creating a coloring-book picture and a masterpiece.
What We Do
Below we list several activities from client files. These projects provide an overview of custom interventions and convey real-world glimpses of our services.
- Create world class programs
- Develop execution plans that take you from here to your vision
For the Manasota Industry Council, now the Suncoast Workforce Development Board, we designed a school-to-work program for use inside local high schools. In its first year, Sarasota County Government funded the Career Express program for $100,000. One year later, the program won a competitive federal award of more than one million dollars. Career Express was modeled after a successful national program, which we customized to advantage local strengths and assets.
- Find and exploit new opportunities
- Map out effective income strategies
Faced with the last phase of state funding for a long-running program, the staff of the Women’s Resource Center in Sarasota needed new resources to continue their activity. Staff members became intrigued by the opportunity new funding sources might offer to women who hadn’t previously qualified for the program. We worked with the Women’s Resource Center to create a more inclusive and updated program based on their existing successful activities. Our help also brought in new funds from a grant donor who “never funded operating costs” – but consented to do so on the merits of the group’s challenge grant proposal.
- Winning strategies and effective tactics
For the Senior Friendship Centers, which specialize in helping older adults volunteer to help other older adults, we provided an idea that allowed them to continue their well-received, but expensive, health education courses. In the past, similar classes led by a licensed practical nurse resulted in whole-hearted participant response and healthier behaviors. While these outcomes confirmed both the need for the education and its success, the cost of replicating the classes agency-wide was prohibitive. We helped the organization get a grant to fund an LPN lead program that provided trained, qualified, retired volunteers as teachers, thus creating an affordable, replicable program.