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Heather Hooper Consulting, LLC

Nonprofit consultant. Strategy. Operations. Leadership Transition.

I work with nonprofit Executive Directors on two things nobody hands you a playbook for: making the strategy actually move, and leaving without breaking what you built. Twenty years in the sector, including time as an ED. One piece a month, from the work.

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Featured Post

I got teary over a tomato

Hey Reader, When I left my last organization, a teammate handed me a stuffed tomato. I laughed, and then I got a little teary. At that org, a tomato emoji next to your name in Slack meant heads-down, please don't interrupt. No explanation required. No guilt. It started after a workshop with Emily Parks from Organize for Success, who taught us about the Pomodoro method. The use of the tomato was inspired by the name... but the decision around adopting an emoji didn't really all come from the...

21 days ago • 2 min read

Hello Reader, When I was ready to leave my last ED position, I looked for a roadmap. Not the organization's succession plan. That existed. It named how we would find the next leader, explained how the search would run, told the board what to do. Useful, as far as it went. What I was looking for was a roadmap on how to transfer my work. The documentation nobody had asked me to write. The years of institutional context that would walk out the door the day I did if I didn't build a structure for...

about 2 hours ago • 1 min read

Hey Reader, We have a fireplace in our bedroom, and a few weeks ago something moved into the chimney. For four nights it scratched and nested, and I lay there in the dark building a whole creature out of the noise. A squirrel, at least. Maybe an opossum. Something big and furry and clearly plotting against me. By the third night I was running on no sleep and sure we had a real problem. So that Sunday we called a wildlife guy. He listened to our video of the racket, said he was ninety percent...

2 months ago • 2 min read