Who We Work With
 

I built this practice for a specific kind of organization, and I would rather be clear about that than be broadly appealing.

The sectors

Behavioral health and substance use treatment. Residential and outpatient providers, recovery organizations, and treatment centers. I spent seven years as the CEO of a residential treatment center. I know what a census-driven staffing model does to a clinical team, why counselors with lived experience leave for reasons that differ from those of clinically licensed staff, and how a single accreditation cycle can reorganize an entire year of an organization's attention.
 

Homeless services and housing. Interim housing, permanent supportive housing, outreach, and shelter operations. I currently direct human resources for a homeless services organization with roughly nine hundred employees across more than thirty sites. Multi-site climate variation is not an abstraction to me. The same policy produces different working conditions in different buildings, and the variance is usually larger than leadership expects.
 

Human services and community-based organizations. Case management, family services, youth development, reentry. Organizations where the work is relational, the caseloads are set by funders, and the staff absorb the difference between what the contract funds and what the client needs.

Foundations and intermediaries supporting the above, where the question is often about the health of a grantee portfolio rather than a single organization.
 

The profile
 

Between forty and fifteen hundred employees. Below forty, segmentation stops producing usable findings and you would do better with structured conversations than with an instrument. Above fifteen hundred, you need a phased approach and we should discuss scope before anything else.

Multi-site or multi-program. Single-site organizations are straightforward to assess. Multi-site organizations are where this work earns its cost, because site-level variation is where the surprises live.
 

Government or philanthropically funded, in whole or part. The funding structure is not incidental. Contract requirements shape caseloads, caseloads shape workload, and workload shapes climate. Diagnosing a supervision problem that is actually a county contract problem wastes a year.

Already carrying a retention problem, or anticipating one. Most organizations arrive here after turnover has become impossible to ignore. Arriving earlier is better and rarer.
 

What I ask of you
 

Three commitments before beginning.
 

Willingness to see something unwelcome. This assessment surfaces divergence between what leadership believes and what staff experience. If leadership is not prepared to encounter that, the engagement produces a report nobody acts on.
 

Willingness to share findings with staff. Asking people to be candid and then withholding the results does more damage than never asking. I ask for this commitment explicitly.
 

An executive sponsor with authority to act. Not a coordinator. Someone who can reassign a supervisor, change a workload standard, or restructure a reporting line.
 

Where I am not the right fit
 

Organizations under active litigation or investigation who need a neutral investigator. That is a different professional role and combining the two compromises both.
 

Organizations seeking documentation to support a decision already made. I have declined this work and will continue to.
 

Organizations wanting a values statement, a rebrand, or a culture day. There are good people who do that. It is not what this is.
 

Corporate employers outside the mission-driven sector. The framework would transfer. The pattern recognition would not, and the pattern recognition is most of what you are paying for.
 

What I bring that a generalist does not
 

Fifteen years inside these organizations rather than adjacent to them. I have run one, and I currently sit inside the HR function of another. I have written the job descriptions, conducted the investigations, built the wage ladders, and signed the separation paperwork. When staff describe a problem, I usually know what it looks like from the other side of the desk, which shortens the diagnostic considerably.
 

Academic grounding that is actually applied. An MS in Applied Psychology from USC, with thesis work on onboarding in behavioral healthcare. The framework draws on Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, Weick's work on sensemaking, and Boje's research on organizational storytelling. Those are not decorations on the proposal. They determine what gets measured and at what level intervention is aimed.
 

A practitioner's tolerance for constraint. I am not going to recommend a solution that requires funding you do not have or headcount you cannot justify to a funder. The recommendations have to survive contact with your actual budget.
 

Starting
 

The first conversation is a scoping call, at no cost. What has already been tried, what data exists, and whether this is the right instrument for what you are facing. If it is not, I will say so. 

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