Consulting Services

The Innovation Center offers an array of consulting services, including in-depth organizational development, meeting facilitation, program development, and project planning and implementation services. Recent clients include: Ford Foundation, Time Warner Foundation, and Roca, Inc., a community organization in Chelsea, MA.

• We help foundations to review proposals, conduct feasibility studies, manage initiatives and work successfully with young people and communities.
• We help organizations to identify new needs, develop proposals, manage projects and work successfully with young people and communities.

Our partnerships with local organizations make our consulting services unique. We don’t sit in our offices writing plans and reports; we work closely with local communities to explore best practices, develop new strategies and evaluate their impact. These experiences build our knowledge and add invaluable perspective to every assignment. We also partner with local leaders—youth and adult—to put together teams of consultants for each project. For example, we engaged young people as consultants to help Time Warner Foundation develop a youth advisory board.

Areas of expertise include:

• Youth governance and involvement,
• Community-building processes with youth as partners,
• Development of youth-adult partnerships,
• Staff and organizational development,
• Evaluation and research.

Consulting programs can be customized for each client. For more information, contact Hartley Hobson Wensing at hwensing@theinnovationcenter.org or 301-270-1700 x 107.