Berde’s “encore career” as a consultant
Now that she has retired from The McKnight Foundation, Carol Berde has embarked on an encore career. For the last three years she has been a consultant to nonprofits and philanthropic organizations across the country.
“Most of my work is of a strategic nature,” she explains. “Sometimes that means strategic planning, sometimes it means strategic thinking in a variety of ways.”
She says she brings to her role as a consultant many of the elements she outlined in the accompanying article.
“Perhaps the most important attribute is to ask the 20,000-foot level questions that the people who are engaged with the organization every single day don’t have the mental space to think about,” she says.
“I’ve also been able to help a lot of organizations work through a great deal of material to make decisions,” she says. Berde offers an example of this, explaining how she “can take a lot of material, such as you might gather in a strategic planning exercise talking to stakeholders, and say, ‘Here are the three big messages.’ So now the challenge is to ask the question ‘What does this mean for the organization?’”
Most, though not all, of Berde’s consulting work has been in Minnesota, where The McKnight Foundation is also based. Nearly all of it has involved work related to children and families or related to community development, especially affordable housing.
