Who We Are
Open Seat partners with donors to make grantmaking smarter, smoother, and more accountable to those it's meant to serve and with organizations to be more agile–creating spaces that foster growth and creative change, to allow your organization to challenge how you’ve worked before–and each other.
Be A Better Ally
Create or bolster grantee or coalition capacity building resources. Support leadership continuity or other all-hands moments for grantees as a coach, advisor, or interim staffer.
Works With Donors To
Reach Out
Create community outreach and input processes that provide invaluable information for effective grantmaking, allowing you to build grantmaking strategies that are stronger, nimble, visionary, and directly responsive to real community needs.
Make Room For Grantee Success
Examine how your support impacts culture at grantee organizations, and what role or responsibility you wish to take on around this so that funding requirements (applications, reporting, spending flexibility, and more) do not create unnecessary burden for effective leaders and organizers.
Strategize
Build grantmaking strategies that are smart, goal-oriented, and responsive to how advocates, leaders, and other stakeholders move and make change together in real life. We’ll focus on relationships over process, thinking expansively and planning with change as a constant variable, building leaderful processes, and measuring outcomes beyond numbers and statistics.
Be A Better Ally
Create or bolster grantee or coalition resources. Support leadership continuity or other all-hands moments for grantees as a coach, advisor, or interim staffer.
Works With Organizations To
Focus On Culture
Understand how culture–how you work, how you treat each other, the extent to which you’re able to imagine another way of being together and reaching your goals–may or may not be tied to funding streams, the stability of that funding, and how you can set a longer term plan for your relationship to the funding for your work that is true to your values and your role in your community.
Make Room For Many Leaders
Build leaderful teams built on a foundation of effective communication, smart and clear delegation, and purposeful space to plan and re-plan together. Design clear, informed conversations and tools to transparently execute leadership transitions, strategy development and rollout, and other opportunities to align your values with how you do the work.
Stabilize & Invest
Assess your funding streams for diversity, stability, and more. Some questions we’ll tackle together include: Do you have one funder you’ve always relied on? Do you have one team with consistent time and space for creativity, and another that never gets to stop running long enough to reflect at all?
Get Creative About How You Get Things Done
Continue to navigate hybrid or fully remote work models, including sustaining relationships with your community, redesigning complex staff benefits, and more.
Hi! I'm Kate,
& I lead
Open Seat.
Photo credit: Les Talusan
Over the last 14 years, I’ve led teams, both within organizations and as a consultant, to set inclusive, equitable long-term strategy, design teams and stand up new organizations, and strengthen grassroots actions so that those most impacted are continually centered. I’ve sought partnership and impact as an advocate, communicator, grantmaker, and strategist interested in shifting power and resources to where they can have the highest impact–in the hands of folks directly impacted.
In my consulting work, I’ve done everything from supporting ambitious organization start up efforts, to designing and executing communications strategies for high profile opportunity campaigns, to running accountability agendas, and ghost-writing for former heads of state. In prior leadership roles, I built cohesive, powerful new teams (20+ people strong), served in executive leadership roles (ranging from supporting orgs building political power of young folks to supporting harm reduction providers and movement groups), led organizational advocacy agendas, led teams to build strong partnerships and robust coalitions, and managed ambitious research agendas matched up with long-term coalition and campaign strategy. I remain firmly committed to social and economic inclusion, equity and equality, and anti-poverty organizing.
I love a big challenge and firmly believe that with the right folks around the table, very little is out of reach. The trick is in setting the table. For a free intro chat, and to get started -
I'VE CONSULTED WITH SOME PRETTY COOL FOLKS.
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