Strategic Planning Tools and Tips

Ross Chaney is a seasoned nonprofit and business consultant who specializes in strategic planning, writing, executive coaching, and applications of AI for nonprofits and small organizations. He has 20 years of experience in northern New Mexico nonprofit and public service, working across different leadership roles and diverse sectors. Ross’ experience includes:

1. Coaching for ED’s and program staff for leadership development
2. Governance, organizational development, operations and strategy
3. Policy issues, program/operations expansion or reduction
4. Budgeting and finance coaching
5. Reviewing grant proposals, reports, and other documents
6. Exploring the potential of AI for your organization
7. Extensive knowledge of Native American and NM culture

Marsie Silvestro brings four decades of expertise to her roles as an intuitive and dynamic Executive Director, Board and Staff Trainer, Group Retreat Facilitator and Mentor. Her leadership experience spans work on both the local and national levels. She is proficient in the Appreciative Inquiry Strategic Model which focuses on identifying an organization's strengths through individual and group interviewing progresses that honors what has been done, creates transformative collective dreaming and creating effective solution based and accomplishable work plans that will move an agency toward growth and a new pathways toward a successful mission.

Marsie believes that no matter what someone’s position is in an agency or the community, all are needed to steer towards a future that elevates the voices and needs of those they serve, as well as ensures that staff and board members feel heard, listened to, included, and appreciated as a thread in the web of service and safety.

Horacio R. Trujillo regularly advises senior leadership of philanthropies, businesses, governments, intergovernmental organizations and social purpose agencies worldwide on strategy, long-range planning and learning practices to improve humanitarian, development and environmental efforts, and has taught at universities on leadership, humanitarian action, economics and political economy, socioeconomic development, global security, public policy and policy analysis. His published research covers governance, counterterrorism, disaster response, prevention of election-related violence, large-scale violence and mass atrocity prevention, and civic leadership. He has advised the Ford, Gates, MacArthur, Packard, MasterCard and Nike Foundations; the World Bank, UNDP, USAID and DFID; the US Institute of Peace; Oxfam, Mercy Corps, Norwegian Refugee Council and Technoserve; C40, RMI and Clean Air Task Force; and business–social purpose initiatives such as the UN Global Compact and EDF’s Corporate Partnerships Program. He helped launch Humanity United from the Omidyar Network, served as senior advisor to the Metanoia Fund, and for over a decade was a featured speaker for The Philanthropy Workshop (now Forward Global).

He has co-founded, served on or advised boards including Soliya (fostering understanding between Western and Arabic/Islamic youth post-9/11), the Harry S Truman Foundation (promoting lifelong public service), People For the American Way (defending inclusive American democracy), the Youth and Philanthropy Initiative, Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, A Place Called Home, Agahozo Shalom Youth Village, and the New Mexico Climate Investment Center. Before advising leaders, he worked on US foreign and economic policy in the House and Senate. His university teaching includes creating Occidental College’s international political economy, development and human security studies and courses at Stanford, Pepperdine and the University of Kabul. He has been a fellow or scholar with Stanford’s SCCN, George Mason’s ICAR, Columbia’s Saltzman Institute, the Santa Fe Institute and the University of Jakarta’s Institute for Social and Economic Research. He holds degrees from Georgetown SFS (international political economy and development), Oxford’s International Development Centre, Stanford GSB and the RAND Corporation, where his doctoral work combined qualitative and quantitative methods to guide governments, businesses and social purpose organizations on complex issues in economics and international security.