Often the channel for investment is through a collaborative body. Sutherland & Associates teaches the how-to of strategic investing and understanding impacts.

Services offered to Foundations and Collaboratives include:

• Strategy. Articulating the end game at formation, so that governance and data collection structures advance goals from the beginning.
• Design. Developing and evolving programs, and streamlining processes to ensure daily workflows are leading teams to organizational milestones.
• Facilitation. Designing and facilitating meetings around decision points while preserving the democratic nature of a collaborative and maintaining space for differing opinions.
• Routing. Managing collaborative efforts by being an expert and responsive accountability hub for technical assistance, grant agreements, timely execution of outputs, and outcome capture.
• Tracking. Evaluating impact at regular intervals for storytelling and evolutionary purposes.

Change is constant and complex. Sutherland & Associates defines and clarifies changing funding and partnership ecosystems. The team cultivates tenacious research skills and capacity to frame guiding questions, create and assess data sets, and analyze them for trends so that those working in service of communities can stay informed and effective.

Services offered to Nonprofits and Governments include:

• Testing. Going deeply into specific innovative concepts, testing them for equity, economic stability, and environmental impacts.
• Clarifying. Teasing out next steps and practical applications from big ideas.
• Simplifying. Smoothing communication across disciplines and sectors by breaking down highly technical concepts into clear policy and operational changes that can be implemented.
• Networking. Finding interested parties to host next steps, so that good ideas do not expire when initial funding sources are spent.

Sutherland & Associates facilitates cross-sector convenings and cohorts, advising them on ways to work together to unlock resources that can help them achieve shared goals. 

Services offered to Practitioners and Private Partners include:

• Barrier removal. Creatively considering contracting arrangements to allow for work to rise above cumbersome and restrictive organizational procurement processes. 
• Playing to strengths. Tapping private markets to influence customer behavior changes that governments are unable to motivate.
• Role identification. Teaching governments to see themselves as technical support for and conveners of community-based organizations, sharing power and responsibility in ways that advance climate progress locally.