The Impact Consulting Podcast

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Impact Consulting Podcast, where we share insights that can help you to launch or accelerate your journey as an independent professional in the international development and social impact fields.

I’m your host, Loksan Harley from the Impact Consulting Hub, and today I interview Filippo Brasesco, the Co-Founder of Scio Network, an Advisory Hub and Solutions Lab for International Development Cooperation that works largely through its global network of independent professionals.

About Filippo 

Filippo is an entrepreneur and senior consultant with 15+ years of experience in international development cooperation. He is Partner (Co-Founder) and currently Managing Director at Scio Network, an advisory hub and solutions lab for international development cooperation. Since 2019, he is working as Senior Expert at Scio Network on development projects related to agriculture and food systems development. He is a member of an angel investor syndicate investing in early stage (post-MVP) startups in Eastern Europe. Also, he is a Mentor/Coach for startups and has supported over a dozen companies from Africa and Asia to reach investment readiness. Finally, he is passionate about agro-tech and currently engaged with vertical farming as well as use-cases on the utilization of blockchain technology for traceability in agricultural value chains."

What we talk about

In today’s episode, we talk about: 

Interested in joining Scio?

If you’re interested in joining Scio, we recommend checking out their website Scio.net. 

If you’re interested in launching or levelling-up your impact consulting journey, you can also find a whole host of resources at impactconsultinghub.com. 

Without further ado, thank you for tuning in and I hope you enjoy the show. 

Links

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Impact Consulting Podcast with me your host, Loksan Harley.

We're delighted to welcome Simone Anzböck to the show to share with us her impact consulting story.

About Simone

Simone coaches international professionals who navigate the trade-offs in pursuing a non-linear life and career in a cross-cultural context. Her gift is to help others trust and follow their convictions to navigate uncertainty. She coaches individuals to find clarity, professional alignment, and purpose via bespoke 1:1 coaching and corporate training. 

Simone has lived and worked in 15+ countries, including Myanmar, during the military coup. Before becoming a coach, she worked for a Fortune 500 company, leading social impact projects valued up to US$25m. Simone holds an MBA and is a qualified, accredited coach with the International Coaching Federation. To date, she has coached individuals from 25+ nationalities. You'll find her learning Spanish, writing stories, or walking the British countryside in her free time. 

What we talk about

In our wide-ranging conversation, Simone and I talk about both the ups and downs of her impact consulting journey, including how she launched her consulting business while navigating her move to Myanmar, how she experienced and dealt with mental health challenges, and how her experiences led her to pivot to coaching other international development professionals.

I appreciated Simone for coming onto the show to speak so candidly about some of the real challenges that we face when navigating big life changes, and there are fewer more disruptive changes than moving country and starting a consulting business.

This aligns with what we're all about at the IC-Hub, which is not only helping people grasp the incredible opportunities that independent consulting in the social impact space offers, but also discussing the very real challenges that we have to deal with, and how to navigate them. And if you need some coaching yourself, you can get in touch with Simone directly (see below).

Want to learn more about Simone's coaching?

Simone offers free 45-minute coaching discovery sessions. During your discovery session, you'll talk about your biggest challenge, what overcoming this might look like, and whether Simone's coaching is a good fit for you. Connect with Simone on LinkedIn to book a call or follow her work.

Hello, and welcome to a new episode of the Impact Consulting Podcast! Today, we're delighted to present Cyndi Mayer, a passionate consultant who supports nonprofits and social enterprises to strategically accelerate social impact, grantsmanship, and capacity building. Cyndi shares the story of her consulting journey, including the challenges, wins, and advice for other consultants.

What we talk about

Links

Today, we've got quite a unique but highly useful episode for you. Roland Pearson, a director at one of the world's top international development consulting firms, Palladium, is on the show to talk us through how you can access consulting opportunities working with Palladium and firms like Palladium on large projects funded by the US, UK, Australian aid systems, as well as the other clients that Palladium works with worldwide.

Introducing Roland

Roland is an internationally recognised senior executive, who over 30 years has built national and international, private and public institutions that deliver sustained social and economic impact and commercial value. He is the Director leading strategy, business development and business execution of the Finance and Investment portfolio at Palladium, which he joined in November 2018 with the merger of Palladium and Enclude.

What we talk about

Today's conversation is a little longer than the usual impact consulting journeys that we profile, but I highly recommend sticking with it because we cover so much ground. We start with a bit of an overview of Roland and Palladium's work and the types of donors and projects that they work with. We then move onto share Roland's insights into how Palladium works with consultants, including what types of skills they look for, how to apply, what kinds of fees they can expect working on USAID-funded projects, and what the whole process looks like.

We'd like to thank Roland for sharing his wisdom and our main call to action to you is to head on over to Palladium's website and submit your CV. And Roland even explains the type of CV that you should be submitting.

Links

Hello and welcome to the Impact Consulting Podcast! In this episode, Molly sits down with fellow fundraiser, Abena Lauber, who is the founder and director of A.CommUnity.

About Abena:

Abena has 20 years of professional experience and knowledge in fundraising, strategic partnerships and large-scale private events. For 6 years she worked for Human Rights Watch as Associate Director of Development and Outreach, organising their annual gala dinner which saw an impressive increase in funds raised over the years reaching CHF 2 million in 2014. She also managed donor relations, planned donor acquisition and implemented stewardship plans. Abena contributed to the creation of the Dr. Mukwege Foundation in Geneva and secured institutional funds for the foundation.  She also helped organise an event in Geneva for women survivors of rape as a weapon of war in June 2017.

Abena is a leader with proven experience in project and team management.  Her experience in fundraising with various types of donors: large and small, institutional donors, foundations and private companies gives her the ability to plan and implement diversified and sustainable fundraising actions. Based on this experience, Abena founded A.CommUnity in 2017 to offer services to non-profit organisations in Switzerland and abroad.

One of A.CommUnity's priorities is to build the fundraising capacity of non-profit organisations. In 2019, Abena co-created Fundraising Bootcamp, a series of innovative and practical workshops. The first edition took place in spring 2019 in Geneva and since then A.CommUnity was commissioned by the City of Geneva (2019 and 2020) and the Capas network. These modules have since been adapted and customised to build the capacity of various NGOs in Switzerland and around the world. In addition, Abena is a lecturer at the Haute Ecole de Gestion in Geneva in their CAS Fundraising programme since 2020.

In 2021, A.CommUnity and Alveo.design co-created a training course - Comm' To Fund - providing fundraising and communication skills for more efficient fundraising actions.

What we talk about:

Connect with Abena:

Welcome to another episode of the Impact Consulting Podcast! This time, Molly sits down with Rebekah, communications activist and founder of Right + Good and co-founder of The P2Club – two mission-driven organisations working to build authentic community between businesses and the people they serve.

About Rebekah:

Rebekah Grmela (she/her) is the founder of Right + Good Consulting, an agency focused on strategic communications for the ethical organization.  Rebekah is a communications activist supporting justice, equity and sustainability through access to excellent public participation strategies for womxn, queer and/or BIPOC founders and nonprofits.  She knows that impact-driven organizations and brands require dedicated relationship-building and compelling messages that drive people to action. As a community engagement expert with more than a decade of experience communicating value for government agencies and private companies alike, she lets data and outreach drive creative solutions.  Minding specific goals and budgets, Rebekah builds highly effective messages and campaigns that resonate in target communities and generate a tangible return on investment. Through partnerships, programming and a bulletproof communications strategy, Rebekah will curate an energized community and develop your mission so you can do more good in the world.

About Right + Good:

Right + Good's mission is to connect people with your cause through intentional and strategic communications. We focus on building authentic relationships while you're doing the work.   By laying a solid foundation and moving intentionally, we nurture the long-term partnerships, community and authentic engagement necessary to keep your mission-driven business going

What we talk about:

Useful links

Hello, and you're listening once again to the Impact Consulting Podcast, where we profile people - just like you - who are independent consultants in the international development and social impact spaces.

This week, we present to you a lovely conversation with the lovely Mara Tissera Luna about her lessons learned from her first year of consulting full-time.

About Mara

Mara is an Argentine and Italian child protection specialist with 10+ years of qualitative research, policy analysis, and programme evaluation experience, mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean region. Her research and policy analysis in Latin America, Europe, and Central Asia have produced 20+ publications. She has lived in Hungary since 2015, but she will soon move to California.

Mara has performed qualitative analysis on the protection of migrant and refugee children, institutional care, child suicide prevention, violence against children, and early childhood policies, among other child protection topics.

What we talk about

Mara has done so well to establish herself as an expert in child protection. I was therefore keen for her to share what she'd learned from her first year consulting full time. We touch on a number of great learnings in relation to both how to get clients and how to work with them once you've got them, including:

If you're interested in independent consulting in the child protection space, you may want to check out Mara's new International Child Protection Consultants Facebook Group.

Useful links

In this episode, I sit down with Adriana Leigh Greenblatt, who started her career as a human rights lawyer and has since leveraged her experience to create her own consulting firm that addresses sexual abuse and harassment in the workplace.

About Adriana:

Adriana Leigh is a self-described "recovering lawyer.” Passionate about gender equality, she is now a global gender consultant, facilitator and trainer, writer and speaker committed to building safer, gender-equitable, caring, and inclusive workplaces and organizations, free of sexual harassment and gender-based violence.

Adriana brings a much-needed human and heart-centred, rather than a merely compliance-centred approach to these issues, combined with her legal and subject matter expertise and background in human rights education.

Adriana delivers global workshops, sexual harassment and violence policy and reporting processes development, implementation coaching to managers and thought leadership.

Her work has been showcased by Charity Village, Medium, UN Women, Sexual Violence Research Initiative, Mtavari Channel and World Pulse, among others.

What we talk about:

Useful links

Today, we've got a good friend of the IC-Hub, Ann-Murray Brown, on the show to share with us how she became the go-to Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) consultant.

About Ann-Murray

Many of you will know (of) Ann already, but in case you don't, she is a proud ‘island girl’ who hails from the country of the world’s fastest sprinters - Jamaica.

Now based in the Netherlands, she is a seasoned M&E expert with nearly two decades of professional experience and is the holder of multiple advanced degrees from the University of the West Indies and Ewha Womans University.

Ann has been involved in consultancies funded and implemented by international organisations such as the United Nations and the European Commission. Her sectorial interests are Gender Equality, Poverty Reduction, Migration, Social Protection, Child Protection, Human Rights and Justice Reform.

Alongside her consultancy work, Ann has also created a suite of high-value products to help people learn about M&E, which you can find on her website annmurraybrown.com.

Adventures in M&E and building a 20k following

In today's interview, we start by talking through Ann's own impact consulting journey, which is truly an inspiring one about how a major life challenge forced her to develop her consulting business from the ground up.

We then talk about how Ann developed an incredible social media following (20k+ LinkedIn followers) by providing value to others. And we also touch on Ann's tips for how non-M&E consultants can develop M&E skills and build an M&E service offering from scratch.

We close with some of Ann's thoughts on how experienced M&E consultants can break through common plateaus, which really resonates with what we talk about at the IC-Hub Level-Up Accelerator Workshop.

We'd like to thank Ann for coming on the show and thank you for listening. And if you're interested in learning what it takes to build your own independent consulting business in the social impact or international development spaces, then head on over to impactconsultinghub.com to find a tonne of free resources.

Without further ado, please do enjoy the show.

Useful links

CLICK HERE TO PRE-REGISTER FOR OUR IC-HUB WORKSHOP WITH JENNY ON HOW TO GROW YOUR LINKEDIN FOLLOWING.

Hello and welcome to the Impact Consulting Podcast.

Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Jenny Wright, who in my view is a rock star consultant and LinkedInfluencer.

About Jenny

Jenny pivoted back into freelancing, philanthropy and international development after leaving behind a toxic corporate work environment. She has relied on her project management, research and communications roots to dedicate over a decade of her life to consulting for non-profits and international organisations worldwide.

When not running her own consulting firm (Nomad Consulting), Jenny has managed multiple projects for the United Nations and is currently consulting for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Tunisia.

Having globe-trotted around half the world (and now living in her ninth country), Jenny is used to thinking on her feet, eating questionable food and living out of a suitcase.

Chronicles in LinkedInfluencing & FORTHCOMING IC-Hub LinkedIn Workshop with Jenny

Directing her knack for writing to social media, Jenny has gained over 40K LinkedIn followers in a year and is in the process of launching her own blog (A Migrant’s Guide) to share her and other migrants’ experiences of moving and living abroad.

In our interview, Jenny shares:

IC-Hub LinkedIn Workshop with Jenny

Growing a LinkedIn following can really enable independent social impact professionals like us to generate more consulting clients and more influence in our fields of work.

Therefore, we are inviting you to a new IC-Hub premium workshop with Jenny, in which she will teach the steps she took to grow her LinkedIn following and how you can do it too.

Click this pre-registration link and we'll let you know when the workshop is scheduled and give you a 50% early-bird discount.

Useful links